Nwokeji Paul Anulika, Enodiana Osamiabe Ignatius, Ezenweani Sunday Raymond, Osaro-Itota Osasere, Akatah Hilda Abiola

Natural products are those chemical compounds or substances that are isolated from living organism. It can be in form of primary or secondary metabolites. Plant secondary metabolites are organic compounds or phytochemicals that are not directly involved in the normal growth, development or reproduction of the plant. These secondary metabolites are classified into three namely; Terpenes, Phenolic compounds and Nitrogen-containing compounds. Their biosyntheses are derived from primary metabolism pathways, which include tricarboxylic acid cycle (TCA), methylerithrotol phosphate (MEP) pathway, mevalonic and shikimic acid pathway. They can be extracted from plants using organic solvents and modern separation techniques to get the analyte of interest. Their economic importance include their role in antimicrobial, pharmaceuticals, plant defence against herbivory, fragrance, stimulants, toxicity, attractant, plant breeding, physiological stress response, and allelopathtic effect.

Matthew Asare FCCA, Susie Naa Odarchoe Lamptey

Microfinance is the provision of financial services in the form of savings, loans and credit to the rural urban poor. Over the last few decades Microfinance has been used as a developmental tool in developing economies. It is aimed at helping to reduce or eliminate poverty by bringing financial services delivery to the door step of the rural urban poor who hitherto could not access financial services through the traditional financial sub-sector. Microfinance has been an age old concept in Ghana in the context of self- help where people save or take small loans or credit from individuals and groups. In recent years Microfinance has been operated in Ghana in many different forms. Microfinance schemes in Ghana have been categorized into formal, semi-formal and informal. For the purpose of regulation the Bank of Ghana (BOG) has adopted a tiered system thereby creating four tiers in the Microfinance landscape. Microfinance schemes in Ghana have been regulated in an uncoordinated manner thereby leading to duplications and non-standardization of products and services. In recent time depositors in Ghana have lost millions of Ghana cedis to unscrupulous Microfinance institutions and this has been attributed largely to the lack of proper regulation and supervision. The study was conducted to examine Microfinance regulation system in Ghana, assess the progress made and identify ways by which Microfinance regulation can be harmonized to make it effective and efficient. The research collected data through the administration of open and closed ended questionnaires distributed among 100 respondents. A total of 90 respondents were drawn from Microfinance practitioners and customers; 10 respondents from regulatory bodies like the BOG and Ghana Microfinance Institutions Network (GHAMFIN). The western regional staff of the BOG and GHAMFIN participated in the study. A simple purposive sampling technique was used to select the Microfinance practitioners, customers and the staff who participated in the study. Descriptive statistics, percentages and frequencies were used to analyze the data. The research found out that the absence of a single regulatory body and an apex body to monitor and supervise the activities of Microfinance institutions has led to duplication, uncoordinated and unauthorized Microfinance activities.

Tania Sultana, Md. Dulal Hossain, Md. Karam Newaz

Image fusion is just the combination of two or several images into single one that has more information than the source images. There are various types of image fusion techniques such as principle component analysis (PCA), Intensity-hue-saturation (IHS), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) etc. In this paper, we discuss four method of image fusion using stationary wavelet transform (SWT) with the help of intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) operations. It has membership and non-membership values. In IFS, less number of parameters is very useful for calculating membership value. On the other hand, SWT has shift invariance capacity over the DWT. For this reason, this paper discusses SWT based image fusion techniques with various IFS operation for different data set and compared the results with each other.