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• The changing structure of households in Africa is challenging the design of micro-level pro-poor policies. • Divorce/separation and widowhood have increased compared to data from 1987/88. • Lower incomes in female-headed households do not lower children's educational investment. • The gender mix of children plays a key role in aggregate household investments for male-headed households, with the financial inclusion of female household heads under 40 years being important for investments in children's education. • Structural changes in female leadership in communities interact with structural changes at the household level. Female headship of households has increased significantly around the world. This paper establishes a link between gender, income, and children's educational investments in an imperfect credit market. We show using a representative household survey from Ghana that, even though there is a positive correlation between income and educational investments, there are expected and unexpected heterogeneities in income and children's educational investments. We find that, whereas income levels for male-headed households with children 6 to 18 years are over 20% higher, female-headed households tend to invest 31% to 38% more on children's education than male-headed households. In imperfect credit markets, higher educational investments could be taking place at the expense of other household outcomes such as food/leisure. Our empirical results show the need for different interventions for different households. We also show how institutional changes that recognize affirmative action can interact with household-level structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we reexamine the determinants of nonperforming loans through the impact of supervisory devices in credit risk management in Africa. The paper employs bank-specific, macroeconomic and institutional data for a panel of 14 universal banks over the period 2009 to 2020. We develop models that capture the role of regulatory supervision on credit risk. Findings from the Panels Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) and the system GMM shows that previous year's NPL and inflation significantly affect NPLs in the banking space of Gana. Bank size and financial development are inversely associated with NPLs. The interactive term of regulatory quality and government effectiveness on NPLs has net negative effect. This suggest that regulatory quality enhances the reductive effects of government effectiveness on NPLs. Our findings in general lends credence to the financial instability theory as NPLs in the Ghanaian context has been the outcome of activities of speculative borrowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choosing the most effective language is critical when advertising to multilingual audiences as the success of any advertising campaign depends on whether the audience "gets" the message. This paper argues that in Africa, "getting the message" is partly dependent on language given that indigenous languages, colonial legacy languages and blends between them compete for audience attention. Using Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) arguments, the study examines this possibility among a 1000 multilingual audience members in five cosmopolitan cities in Ghana. Findings show that advertisements are not consumed in a language vacuum and that language blends are the most appealing to the multilingual audience. The study also finds that attention to, and belief in advertisements are partly shaped by language preference. Besides these empirical contributions, the study positions the ELM as a viable theoretical lens for analyzing the implications of advertising language. Its use of an African sample to test the ELM's assumptions also introduces novel evidence to the theory's body of scholarship. Recommendations are made on how advertising practitioners and brand communicators may take advantage of language as an important segmentation criterion in advertising strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, Parliaments are democratic representation institutions responsible for law making, oversight over the executive, financial controls, and representation. There is ample evidence that Members of Parliament (MPs) in Africa are providing clientelistic services to constituents. This paper seeks to unearth the implications of the involvement of MPs in the provision of clientelistic goods and services on the effective performance of the MP's traditional functions. The paper used data collected from 80 Members of the 6th Parliament of Ghana, in 2016 to draw its conclusions. The incidence of Political clientelism among MPs manifest in two dimensions: Providing individual constituent's particular services and providing constituency-wide services. Political Clientelism prevents MPs from effectively performing their traditional roles. Educating the electorate on the traditional role of the MP, and improving the policy making capacity of political parties to engage citizens on policy issues, can help change the culture of political clientelism among MPs and citizens in Ghana and Africa as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was commissioned to investigate the level of risk and Barriers associated with mobile money transactions in Ghana. It seeked to assess the level of risk perception among mobile money users and merchants. In addition to the above, the paper examined behaviour and attitudes exhibited by customers and merchants during mobile money transactions. This was to help in ascertaining whether or not both parties are being susceptible to high risk or not. The empirical evidence showed that, mobile money transactions have become the most popular and preferred method of sending and receiving payments in Africa since the vast majority of the Continent’s population are rural dwellers with Ghana not being an exception. The population for the study was customers and merchants of the MTN brand of mobile money from which five hundred and fifty (550) respondents were sampled for the study. The methodology used was quantitative where primary data was sort through administration of questionnaire within the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis. The paper discovered a higher-level patronage of mobile money among respondents. It emerged that, there were eminent risks associated with mobile money operations although the growth prospects appeared to be greater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to the indigenisation discourse by illustrating how dominant discourses and cultural practices explain and perpetuate social problems. We argue that focussing on the fundamental issue of a cultural conceptualisation of social problems will contribute positively to the development of the indigenous social work practice framework. As social work education forms an important foundation for how future social work practices will be performed, we interviewed 15 social work practicum students in Ghana about the cultural underpinnings of social problems. Themes developed from the interview data suggest that culture plays a key role in conceptualising social problems in Ghana. Although not often, culture tends to underpin and perpetuate social problems, such as streetism, child marriage and child neglect. Social work practice within the indigenous framework should aim at addressing the negative impacts of the cultural undertones of social problems. Social work practitioners should increase advocacy and knowledge sharing on the cultural explanations of social problems and collaborate with community leaders to change cultural values and norms that have negative ripple effects on children, young people and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the generous legislative environments that protects children from sexual abuse, the magnitude of child sexual abuse has not changed much in most societies across the globe, especially in Africa. This has been attributed to the limited studies on the subject due to its sensitive and complex nature. Where studies are done, researchers have had to negotiate carefully through the matrix of gaining access and consent, through to ensuring that victims are not further victimized in the process of research. This paper discusses some practical and ethical challenges inherent in researching the phenomenon of child sexual abuse in Ghana. The paper outlines and discusses the undergirding principles and strategies for conducting child-sensitive research to serve as a framework for researches who want to conduct studies on child sexual abuse and other sensitive topics in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ghana's petroleum industry is located several nautical miles offshore in the Western Region of the country. Yet, the mechanisms and processes of production and transportation of crude petroleum are accompanied by the dispossessing of the adjoining coastal communities of their means of (re)production both on the ocean and on land. Although the insights of agrarian political economy have been deployed fruitfully to analyse land grabs in Africa, similar efforts are rare when it comes to ocean grabs. With reference to the new development thinking on the ocean economy—or 'blue economy'—as the new frontier of resource‐based industrialization in Africa, we re‐frame the agrarian question and apply it to the offshore petroleum industry, expanding agrarian political‐economic theory of industrialization beyond its traditional confines of land and agriculture. Our paper makes two main theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to efforts in agrarian political economy to incorporate the ocean and fisheries. Second, we contribute a fresh theoretical framework for analysing offshore petroleum industries and their potential to contribute to industrialization in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capacity building programmes for African regulators should link education, training and research with career development in an approach that combines an academic base and experiential learning aligned within a competency framework. A regulatory ecosystem that engages with a broad range of stakeholders will mean that expertise in the ever‐expanding field of regulatory science filters into teaching and research in a symbiotic way. In this way capacity development interventions will be a collaborative approach between the learning context (academic and training institutions) and the performance context (regulatory agencies and industry), which will ultimately best serve the patients. Monitoring and evaluation of capacity development interventions will be essential to show value of investments and ultimately guide continued funding and sustainability. This paper reviews the skills and human capacity gaps, reports on regulatory assessment pathways used in Ghana, South Africa and Zimbabwe and outlines a staged tactical approach for Africa that builds on previous efforts to strengthen African regulatory ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LIS education is more concerned with training in librarianship. LIS education aimed at producing competent librarians to manage all types of libraries in the countries of the world for sustainability. Other information related disciplines such as documentation, archives and records management were relatively unknown when they started existing, thus, they were not accorded prominence. However, librarianship in Africa owes its origin to colonialism. Colonialism introduced reading and writing among the indigenous people. Until then, the two activities were alien. Colonial governments introduced Western education which entailed among others, reading and writing. In an attempt to boost the two activities, a need was felt to provide the new literates with information materials, basically books, to further their reading and writing skills which brought about the establishment of Library Schools in Africa. Thus, UNESCO played a leading role in the establishment of LIS education programmes in Africa and in particular Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa. The pressure emanated from public libraries. UNESCO was convinced that illiteracy in sub-Saharan Africa could only be eradicated with the support of libraries. A number of regional seminars were held between 1953 and 1963 on the African continent to sensitize colonial governments on the need to establish public libraries in their colonies to speed up socio-economic development, thus, library schools were established in Africa to sustain library practices The history of Library Education was traced in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. The paper concluded that the existing ICT laboratories in all library schools in Africa should be well equipped, while the library schools without laboratories should be encouraged to establish one by training efficient manpower to manage and coordinate the established libraries in Africa and the yet-to-be established ones in order to sustain library practices. Adequate laboratories would enhance the provision of adequate and efficient practical and the acquisition of IT skills. Above all, the parent institutions in Africa (universities, polytechnics, monotechnics and colleges of education) running LIS programme should provide adequate funding for the procurement of facilities in the ICT laboratories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development projects play a crucial role in kickstarting and promoting women's empowerment in agriculture. This paper is a conversation starter on how women can be included in the agenda to mechanise agriculture in Africa. It investigates the potential of empowering women as vital actors in the mechanisation value chain, by analysing the perceptions and experiences of the trained women tractor operators. The findings showed that the involvement of women in mechanisation pushed them beyond their comfort zones and offered them a new self-identity with new opportunities previously reserved for men. It also broadened their social capital through the formation of an association for women operators which ensured their representation at a local and national level. For young women, being an operator is the only alternative they have to one day owning a tractor-for-hiring service business because they do not own land or have capital, which is often a precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most countries in Africa have revised the planning laws they inherited from their colonial experience, research shows that the attitudes and practices of politicians and planning professionals still reflect and are deeply embedded in colonial logic and rationalities of urban spatial organization and management. However, we do not yet fully understand how post-colonial African leaders justify and elicit public support for their continued utilization of colonial approaches in their contemporary engagements with their own people. This paper contributes to the limited research on the processes and politics of legitimizing colonial urban spatial organization and management in post-colonial African cities. The paper draws on Van Leeuwen's (2007) symbolic legitimation framework to explore and critique the parallels between how colonial and post-colonial authorities weaponize aesthetic, hygienic, and morality concerns to give false clarity to evictions as inevitable or natural solutions to the congestion, crime, filth, and other socio-environmental problems they associate with the activities of lower-class urban dwellers (particularly those living in informal settlements). A key finding of this paper that bears watching is the phenomenon of 'voluntary demolition'– an emerging approach to containing lower-class urbanites where state officials violently displace notable informal settlements or activities, without any prior warnings, to set as a precedent and invoke fear, intimidate, and force the residents of other informal communities to 'self-evict'. The paper offers lessons for moving research, policy, action, and investment toward building just, equitable, and sustainable cities in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Africa, the effects of informal e-waste recycling on the environment are escalating. It is regularly transported from developed to developing nations, where it is disassembled informally in search of precious metals, thus increasing human exposure to harmful compounds. Africa has a serious problem with e-waste, as there are significant facilities in Ghana and Nigeria where imported e-waste is unsafely dismantled. however, because they are in high demand and less expensive than new ones, old electronic and electrical items are imported in large quantities, just like in many developing nations. After that, these objects are frequently scavenged to recover important metals through heating, burning, incubation in acids, and other techniques. Serious health hazards are associated with these activities for workers and individuals close to recycling plants. At e-waste sites in Africa, there have been documented instances of elevated concentrations of hazardous elements, persistent organic pollutants, and heavy metals in dust, soils, and vegetation, including plants consumed as food. Individuals who handle and dispose of e-waste are exposed to highly hazardous chemical substances. This paper examines heavy metal risks around e-waste sites and comparable municipal dumpsites in major African cities. Elevated concentrations of these heavy metals metal in downstream aquatic and marine habitats have resulted in additional environmental impacts. These effects have been associated with unfavourable outcomes in marine ecosystems, such as reduced fish stocks characterized by smaller sizes, increased susceptibility to illness, and decreased population densities. The evidence from the examined studies shows how much e-waste affects human health and the environment in Africa. Sub-Saharan African nations require a regulatory framework that includes specialized laws, facilities, and procedures for the safe recycling and disposal of e-waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]