Impact of Microfinance Advisory Services on the Performance of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Yemen

Purpose: This study examined the Impact of Microfinance Advisory Services on the Performance of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Yemen. Approach/Methodology/Design: The study focused on micro and small business owners in Yemen who have access to microfinance services. To accomplish this goal, descriptive and analytical research methods are adopted for this study. The number of their active clients was 90,946 active clients, and the sample size was 398. Data are examined using the SPSS to provide quantitative descriptive statistics measures. To evaluate the theoretical model of this research, PLS-SEM route modelling using Smart PLS 3.2.9 software was employed. Because it replicates the standard regression approach, PLS path modelling was judged the most acceptable technique in this study. Findings: Microfinance institutions' (MFIs') advising services for MSEs were found to have a highly significant correlation with the performance of MSEs. This study's findings add to the growing body of evidence demonstrating the importance of MFIs' advisory services to the development and success of their client businesses. Implications: As previously stated in the present literature, further research into the significance of advisory services in the performance of Micro and Small Enterprises is required. This study aimed to determine the effect of microfinance institutions' advising services on the performance of micro and small firms in Yemen

Factors influencing branchless banking for microfinance in Sudan: Theoretical perspectives and future directions

In Sudan more than 40% live below the poverty line and getting basic financial service poses a challenge to financial institutions. Most of these unserved populations live in far-flung areas that make it difficult for microfinance institutions to reach them. But the enormous growth of mobile technology industry has created new opportunity to expand financial services to this unserved population. Branchless banking is one of the latest technologies that have been employed in different developing countries to expand financial services to the unbanked poor. Despite the potential benefits and relevance of Branchless banking to Sudan, there are still very few studies on Branchless banking in Sudan. To address this gap in the literature, this study aims to investigate the factors that are essential to the development of branchless banking in Sudan using mobile technology. This is a research-in-progress paper, the critical review of the literature so far revealed that there are essential factors for the success of branchless banking in Sudan e.g. the identification of the industry key players and their roles, the enabling regulatory environment, the infrastructure readiness and Sudanese cultural values. The paper will provide regulators and policy makers in Sudan a way forward to expedite the development of suitable Branchless banking for microfinance in Sudan

Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (3/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 3 of

SMART-KG: Hybrid Shipping for SPARQL Querying on the Web

While Linked Data (LD) provides standards for publishing (RDF) and (SPARQL) querying Knowledge Graphs (KGs) on the Web, serving, accessing and processing such open, decentralized KGs is often practically impossible, as query timeouts on publicly available SPARQL endpoints show. Alternative solutions such as Triple Pattern Fragments (TPF) attempt to tackle the problem of availability by pushing query processing workload to the client side, but suffer from unnecessary transfer of irrelevant data on complex queries with large intermediate results. In this paper we present smart-KG, a novel approach to share the load between servers and clients, while significantly reducing data transfer volume, by combining TPF with shipping compressed KG partitions. Our evaluations show that outperforms state-of-the-art client-side solutions and increases server-side availability towards more cost-effective and balanced hosting of open and decentralized KGs.Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation

A Mediation Framework for Mobile Web Service Provisioning

Web Services and mobile data services are the newest trends in information systems engineering in wired and wireless domains, respectively. Web Services have a broad range of service distributions while mobile phones have large and expanding user base. To address the confluence of Web Services and pervasive mobile devices and communication environments, a basic mobile Web Service provider was developed for smart phones. The performance of this Mobile Host was also analyzed in detail. Further analysis of the Mobile Host to provide proper QoS and to check Mobile Host's feasibility in the P2P networks, identified the necessity of a mediation framework. The paper describes the research conducted with the Mobile Host, identifies the tasks of the mediation framework and then discusses the feasible realization details of such a mobile Web Services mediation framework.Comment: Proceedings of 2006 Middleware for Web Services (MWS 2006) Workshop @ 10th International IEEE EDOC Conference "The Enterprise Computing Conference", October 16, 2006, pp. 14-17. IEEE Computer Societ

Single-Board-Computer Clusters for Cloudlet Computing in Internet of Things

The number of connected sensors and devices is expected to increase to billions in the near future. However, centralised cloud-computing data centres present various challenges to meet the requirements inherent to Internet of Things (IoT) workloads, such as low latency, high throughput and bandwidth constraints. Edge computing is becoming the standard computing paradigm for latency-sensitive real-time IoT workloads, since it addresses the aforementioned limitations related to centralised cloud-computing models. Such a paradigm relies on bringing computation close to the source of data, which presents serious operational challenges for large-scale cloud-computing providers. In this work, we present an architecture composed of low-cost Single-Board-Computer clusters near to data sources, and centralised cloud-computing data centres. The proposed cost-efficient model may be employed as an alternative to fog computing to meet real-time IoT workload requirements while keeping scalability. We include an extensive empirical analysis to assess the suitability of single-board-computer clusters as cost-effective edge-computing micro data centres. Additionally, we compare the proposed architecture with traditional cloudlet and cloud architectures, and evaluate them through extensive simulation. We finally show that acquisition costs can be drastically reduced while keeping performance levels in data-intensive IoT use cases.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2017-82113-C2-1-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad RTI2018-098062-A-I00European Union’s Horizon 2020 No. 754489Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/209

Circular business strategies and supply chain finance in the Aruba waste sector : a case study of a small island jurisdiction

This paper focuses on possibilities and obstacles for a circular economy in the waste management sector in Aruba. The authors describe the Aruban economy and the consequences of its SIDS characteristics. The article defines concepts in the field of circular economy and presents a conceptual model for research in this area. Based on multimethod research, the paper argues that small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in the waste sector in Aruba determine their financial needs partly on the opportunities offered by the international market and price developments. Financing often takes place from own resources or via a local bank. No examples of circular chain financing were identified. Chain cooperation takes place with partners within the existing holding or with international partners, whereby performance and hedging contracts are concluded to guarantee quality and delivery and to mitigate business risks such as price fluctuations on the world market. During the research, it became obvious that limitations resulting from Aruba’s small scale and ‘islandness’ – such as the limited goods flow, limited quantities of feed waste materials and financing facilities offered by the local banking sector, as well as insufficiently stimulating legislation and regulations, coupled with faltering knowledge circulation and social awareness – seriously hamper the development of circular entrepreneurism in Aruba. The article offers policy recommendations to mitigate the bottlenecks for sustainable development in Aruba.peer-reviewe