Factors influencing women’s acceptance of palm weevil larvae for consumption in peri-urban communities in the Ashanti region, Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For Ghanaian women of reproductive age (WRA), anemia remains a pressing issue. Currently, at the global level, anemia affects 35% of this population according to the most recent “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” report. In Ghana, anemia is mostly associated with iron deficiency and, if left untreated, could result in several adverse outcomes including severe fatigue and exhaustion resulting in decreased work productivity, neurocognitive impairment, and complications with chronic kidney disease. Various strategies can effectively reduce iron-deficiency anemia at the population level, including food fortification, supplementation, and dietary improvement. Unfortunately, these have failed to reach Ghanaian women adequately and equitably, resulting in many not meeting their nutritional needs. As an alternative strategy to curtail iron deficiency, edible insects, such as palm weevil larvae, have been suggested for their nutritional benefits, cost-effective rearing, and yearly availability. As such, popularizing their consumption could present an opportunity to improve WRA’s iron status in Ghana. To assess the feasibility of this strategy, formative research is needed to examine local attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs associated with the consumption of palm weevil larvae. Formative research was conducted in five peri-urban communities in the Ashanti region of Ghana that were purposefully selected for the study. These communities were separated into two clusters based on their access to palm trees. The analysis was based on 12 focus group discussions conducted with 121 female respondents, at which point data saturation was reached. Thematic analysis was used to examine the facilitators and barriers to palm weevil larvae consumption as well as WRA’s general knowledge of nutrition and anemia. Women generally had favorable perceptions of palm weevil larvae as a nutritious food in its raw, frozen, and processed forms, and were eager to be involved in its value chain. The factors positively influencing the acceptance of palm weevil larvae were its perceived nutritional and health benefits, and its taste. The main barriers to its consumption in all communities were its scarcity, difficult and inconsistent access, and fear of unauthenticity and unsafety. Finally, despite women’s general awareness of the importance of iron, persistent misinformation by health-professionals undermined their perceived seriousness of iron-deficiency anemia. Women’s clear interest in palm weevil larvae is encouraging for the community-based domestication of palm weevil larvae. Future studies should examine the feasibility and logistical requirements of such a strategy and its impact on increasing the consumption of palm weevil larvae. Key words: formative research, palm weevil larvae, edible insects, food fortification, anemia
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".