Developing strategic learning alliances: partnerships for the provision of global education and training solutions

The paper describes a comprehensive model for the development of strategic alliances between education and corporate sectors, which is required to ensure effective provision of education and training programmes for a global market. Global economic forces, combined with recent advances in information and communication technologies, have provided unprecedented opportunities for education providers to broaden the provision of their programmes both on an international scale and across new sectors. Lifelong learning strategies are becoming increasingly recognized as an essential characteristic of a successful organization and therefore large organizations have shown a preparedness to invest in staff training and development. The demands for lifelong learning span a wide range of training and educational levels from school-level and vocational courses to graduate-level training for senior executive

Agricultural information dissemination using ICTs: a review and analysis of information dissemination models in China

Open Access funded by China Agricultural UniversityOver the last three decades, China’s agriculture sector has been transformed from the traditional to modern practice through the effective deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Information processing and dissemination have played a critical role in this transformation process. Many studies in relation to agriculture information services have been conducted in China, but few of them have attempted to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of different information dissemination models and their applications. This paper aims to review and identify the ICT based information dissemination models in China and to share the knowledge and experience in applying emerging ICTs in disseminating agriculture information to farmers and farm communities to improve productivity and economic, social and environmental sustainability. The paper reviews and analyzes the development stages of China’s agricultural information dissemination systems and different mechanisms for agricultural information service development and operations. Seven ICT-based information dissemination models are identified and discussed. Success cases are presented. The findings provide a useful direction for researchers and practitioners in developing future ICT based information dissemination systems. It is hoped that this paper will also help other developing countries to learn from China’s experience and best practice in their endeavor of applying emerging ICTs in agriculture information dissemination and knowledge transfer

New Trends in Development of Services in the Modern Economy

The services sector strategic development unites a multitude of economic and managerial aspects and is one of the most important problems of economic management. Many researches devoted to this industry study are available. Most of them are performed in the traditional aspect of the voluminous calendar approach to strategic management, characteristic of the national scientific school. Such an approach seems archaic, forming false strategic benchmarks. The services sector is of special scientific interest in this context due to the fact that the social production structure to the services development model attraction in many countries suggests transition to postindustrial economy type where the services sector is a system-supporting sector of the economy. Actively influencing the economy, the services sector in the developed countries dominates in the GDP formation, primary capital accumulation, labor, households final consumption and, finally, citizens comfort of living. However, a clear understanding of the services sector as a hyper-sector permeating all spheres of human activity has not yet been fully developed, although interest in this issue continues to grow among many authors. Target of strategic management of the industry development setting requires substantive content and the services sector target value assessment

Beyond technology and finance: pay-as-you-go sustainable energy access and theories of social change

Two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, a precursor of poverty reduction and development. The international community has ambitious commitments in this regard, e.g. the UN's Sustainable Energy for All by 2030. But scholarship has not kept up with policy ambitions. This paper operationalises a sociotechnical transitions perspective to analyse for the first time the potential of new, mobileenabled, pay-as-you-go approaches to financing sustainable energy access, focussing on a case study of pay-as-you-go approaches to financing solar home systems in Kenya. The analysis calls into question the adequacy of the dominant, two-dimensional treatment of sustainable energy access in the literature as a purely financial/technology, economics/ engineering problem (which ignores sociocultural and political considerations) and demonstrates the value of a new research agenda that explicitly attends to theories of social change – even when, as in this paper, the focus is purely on finance. The paper demonstrates that sociocultural considerations cut across the literature's traditional two-dimensional analytic categories (technology and finance) and are material to the likely success of any technological or financial intervention. It also demonstrates that the alignment of new payas- you-go finance approaches with existing sociocultural practices of paying for energy can explain their early success and likely longevity relative to traditional finance approaches

Towards the Private Provision of a Public Good: Exploring the role of Higher Education as an instrument of European cultural and science diplomacy with reference to Africa. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/17 • May 2018

The European Union’s (EU) universities and their provision of higher education (HE) to international students remains one of its most powerful, global cultural assets. They play an important and growing role in EU cultural and science diplomacy. This is due not only to the quality of EU HE but also to its role as a generator of export income and as a provider of a global public good—both of which are powerful indicators of prestige and international influence. Until now, the World Bank has been the leading supporter of HE in Africa, closely followed by the EU. The EU has developed a sophisticated and wide-ranging set of strategies to assist Africa in enhancing the quality and quantity of provision of its HE. These strategies are discussed in this study. The EU and its member states, through their interactions with Africa, have an established track record of supporting advancements in education. The 10th European Development Fund allocated €45 million to support the Nyerere African Union Scholarship Scheme for some 250 individuals per year and, since 2009, students and higher education institutions across the continent have benefited from the Erasmus Mundus Program. African higher education (HE) has recorded the highest growth rates of all the regions of the world since 2000. Universities in many African countries are experiencing a surge in their enrolments. Between 2000 and 2010, higher education enrolments more than doubled, increasing from 2.3 million to 5.2 million”1. But an 8% average enrolment rate (2014) across all sub-Saharan African nations is still much lower than the average of 20-40% for all other developing regions, including North Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, an ongoing brain drain and reduction in public financing for HE institutions in Africa continues to adversely impact quality. Resources have failed to match higher enrolment figures and public universities are under increasing pressure to deliver more with less. Currently, only one percent of total African GDP is spent on higher education

Financing sustainable energy for all: pay-as-you-go vs. traditional solar finance approaches in Kenya

This paper focuses on finance for Solar Home Systems (SHSs) in Kenya and asks to what extent emerging new finance approaches are likely to address the shortcomings of past approaches. Drawing on the STEPS Pathways Approach we adopt a framing that understands finance within a broader socio-technical context as a necessary but not sufficient component of achieving alternative pathways to sustainable energy access. The paper contributes in four ways. Firstly, it presents a comprehensive overview of past and new emerging approaches to financing SHSs in Kenya and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, it represents one of the first attempts in the literature to analyse the potential of new, real time monitoring technologies and pay as you go finance models to overcome the barriers faced by conventional consumer finance models for off-grid renewable energy technologies (RETs). Thirdly, by applying for the first time we are aware of a socio-technical approach, via the application of Strategic Niche Management (SNM) theory, to analyse the finance of RETs in developing countries, the analysis considers finance in the context of the social practices poor people seek to fulfil via access to the energy services that off-grid RETs provide, and the ways in which people previously paid for these services (e.g. via kerosene for lighting). This also situates the analysis within the understanding of SHSs as a niche that has to compete with the established regime of energy service provision and its attendant social and political institutional support. The paper therefore also contributes to the small but expanding body of literature that seeks to operationalise socio-technical transitions thinking and SNM within a developing country context

The future of corporate reporting: a review article

Significant changes in the corporate external reporting environment have led to proposals for fundamental changes in corporate reporting practices. Recent influential reports by major organisations have suggested that a variety of new information types be reported, in particular forward-looking, non-financial and soft information. This paper presents a review and synthesis of these reports and provides a framework for classifying and describing suggested information types. The existence of academic antecedents for certain current proposals are identified and the ambiguous relationship between research and practice is explored. The implications for future academic research are discussed and a research agenda is introduced