The absence of well-developed agricultural information systems (AGRIS) has continued to hinder agricultural development in Africa. Efforts designed to modernize agriculture through AGRIS by the public and private sectors have been hindered by administrative bottlenecks, weak political will from governments, display of ineptitude by farmers/associations, and institutional corruption. In view of the foregoing, this chapter discusses AGRIS as a catalyst for SDGs in Africa. An effective AGRIS will strengthen decisions on the general management of the agricultural sector. Deploying the AGRIS for the management of agriculture will boost food production, increase the GDPs and directly strengthen the actualization of SDG 1, SDG 2, SDG 3, SDG 8, SDG 9, SDG 10, SDG 11, SDG 12, SDG 14, SDG 15, SDG 17, and indirectly impact other SDGs. Ultimately, this chapter suggests leveraging AGRIS for mitigating all the identified challenges to agricultural development in the continent.

The absence of well-developed agricultural information systems (AGRIS) has continued to hinder agricultural development in Africa. Efforts designed to modernize agriculture through AGRIS by the public and private sectors have been hindered by administrative bottlenecks, weak political will from governments, display of ineptitude by farmers/associations, and institutional corruption. In view of the foregoing, this chapter discusses AGRIS as a catalyst for SDGs in Africa. An effective AGRIS will strengthen decisions on the general management of the agricultural sector. Deploying the AGRIS for the management of agriculture will boost food production, increase the GDPs and directly strengthen the actualization of SDG 1, SDG 2, SDG 3, SDG 8, SDG 9, SDG 10, SDG 11, SDG 12, SDG 14, SDG 15, SDG 17, and indirectly impact other SDGs. Ultimately, this chapter suggests leveraging AGRIS for mitigating all the identified challenges to agricultural development in the continent.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a statistical approach designed to capture the semantic content of a document which form the basis for its application in electronic assessment of free-text document in an examination context. The students submitted answers are transformed into a Document Term Matrix (DTM) and approximated using SVD-LSA for noise reduction. However, it has been shown that LSA still has remnant of noise in its semantic representation which ultimately affects the assessment result accuracy when compared to human grading. In this work, the LSA Model is formulated as an optimization problem using Non-negative Matrix Factorization(NMF)-Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The factors of LSA are used to initialize NMF factors for quick convergence. ACO iteratively searches for the value of the decision variables in NMF that minimizes the objective function and use these values to construct a reduced DTM. The results obtained shows a better approximation of the DTM representation and improved assessment result of 91.35% accuracy, mean divergence of 0.0865 from human grading and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.632 which proved to be a better result than the existing ones.

This chapter discusses fortification of policing in Nigeria leveraging information communication and technology (ICT) backbone for strategic competitive advantage. The need to embrace ICT-enhanced policing in Nigeria becomes imperative because insecurity, robbery, kidnapping, terrorism, and insurgency have taken a new dimension and have gone sophisticated as criminal elements have deployed high-tech approach such as mobile technology and internet technology for exploiting and unleashing criminal activities on the society. To reduce incessant and unpleasant proliferation of modern crime, the situation calls for the fortification of existing policing approach in Nigeria using information communication technologies. This exploratory study is an attempt at strengthening the traditional policing approach to be able to meet the insecurity challenges currently being faced and facing the society. The implication of the study is that the incidences of insecurity, terrorism, and insurgency can effectively be rendered prostrate and managed in effectively through the use and application of ICT. Notably among the proposal for an ICT-enhanced policing is the concept of virtual community policing that explores the availability of mobile devices for easy and effective crime reporting and crime control in Nigeria.