Groundnut rosette disease management

Groundnuts are a key crop in eastern Uganda, grown for both food and income. The major factor limiting production is groundnut rosette disease, a virus disease transmitted by aphids. This project built on previous CPP epidemiological research in Malawi which identified new sources of resistance to aphids and to rosette disease. Screening methodologies were developed to enhance the efficiency of groundnut improvement programmes. Working closely with researchers, agricultural extension agents, NGOs and farmers, the project’s ultimate aim was to to develop sustainable management strategies for groundnut rosette disease, based primarily on the use of improved groundnut varieties with durable resistance to pests and diseases. The availability of new, short-duration, disease-resistant groundnut varieties will assist a substantial number of smallholder farmers to increase their incom

L\u2019Aquila, 6 aprile 2009: la gestione dell\u2019emergenza, la promozione della coesione e della salute sociale

Il presente lavoro nasce nell\u2019ambito del Progetto Vela, che si pone come obiettivo generale "la promozione della salute\u201d in comunit\ue0 colpite da emergenza sia naturale che umanitaria. Il Progetto \ue8 un\u2019iniziativa elaborata da un gruppo di ricercato- ri afferenti all\u2019Universit\ue0 degli Studi di Padova (dipartimento FISPPA \u2013 Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata), nato nell\u2019ottobre 2011 con l\u2019obietti- vo di indagare quali siano state le ricadute negli assetti interattivi della comunit\ue0 aquilana, ossia come essa configuri la propria realt\ue0 sociale, in seguito al sisma del 6 aprile 2009. L\u2019incipit dell\u2019articolo consiste in una riflessione teorico-conoscitiva sulla relazione tra \u201ccatastrofe\u201d, \u201csalute\u201d ed \u201cemergenza\u201d, che ha porta-to ad assumere la rilevanza di indagarli per come sono configurati dai membri della comunit\ue0, anzich\ue9 considerarli entit\ue0 statiche di per s\ue9. Coerentemente con questi assunti, attraverso appositi protocolli di indagine, sono state indagate le modalit\ue0 discorsive che configurano la "salute" del territorio aquilano prima del sisma, nelle ore di urgenza del post-sisma, allo stato attuale e in proiezione futura. I protocolli sono stati somministrati a diversi ruoli (cittadini, commercianti, insegnanti, forze dell\u2019ordine, operatori della protezione civile, medici e psicologi), in modo da raccogliere il testo di tutte le voci della comunit\ue0 aquilana. Quanto emerso ha mostrato che gli aquilani tuttora configurano la loro comunit\ue0 come "catastrofica" e dunque associata all\u2019evento sismico; dunque quest\u2019ultimo ha pervaso, e pervade, la biografia della comunit\ue0 aquilana (sia in prospettiva passata, che presente, che futura) con alto tasso di potenziale disgregazione sociale

Representations of Ethnicised Violence in Kenya: The Case of Kinyanjui Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo

This paper examines the twin notion of amnesia and complicity as evidenced in literary representations of ethnic violence in post colonial Africa. Starting from the premise that the relatively large body of writing based on the occurrence of this type of violence is by itself an affirmation of the way literature as a cultural product is tied to the social circumstance within which it is created, we look at how the literary works reconstruct narrative structures and characters to represent the traumatic experiences of the recent past. In dealing with the violent encounters the acts of perpetration and victimhood form an axis upon which the writing negotiates or mediates the post traumatic memory. The paper focuses primarily on Kinyanjui Kombani’s “The Last Villains of Molo”, a 2004 novel based on the 1991 ethnic violence in Kenya but which in a sense predicates the subsequent and even more violent encounters of 1997 and 2008 which took Kenya to the brink of a failed state. “The Last Villains of Molo” bears a similar burden as that of works such as Gatore’s “The Past Ahead”, Ndwaniye’s “The Promise I made my Sister”, Courtemanche’s “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali”, Combre’s “Broken Memory” and Kyomuhendo’s “Secrets No More”, among others. In all these works which deal with the violence and genocide that has been a resident evil in Eastern Africa for the last two decades, often the problem has been how to present or bear witness to the entrapment of the society in some terrible and haunting memory that results from a traumatic disorientation. We employ a range of ideas which have trauma and loss as their concern, such as Freudian psychoanalysis and trauma theory especially from Caruth (1996a), to analyze the complexity of narration of violence, genocide and dislocation

A Business Engagement Web Tool for Coachella Valley

The interrelationship between businesses and the surrounding population is an inevitable reality and key to their success. The two play an important role in the development of their surroundings. Some of the businesses in Coachella Valley have participated in collaborative efforts with the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership (CVEP), to aid them in accessing their potential workforce, available in some of their specialized career academies. However, their current methods of easily accessing or finding the workforce have proved to be inefficient. To address this, Workforce Excellence, an arm of Coachella Valley Economic Partnership (CVEP), seeks to adopt spatially-enabled methods to improve its knowledge-base on the location of these academies. This will aid the affiliated businesses to connect with their potential workforce by utilizing the wealth of data currently in place. The business engagement web tool aims to reduce the gap between the academies and the businesses, to enable them to run queries and quick searches. Web GIS was implemented for this project using ESRI ArcGIS for Desktop, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS API for JavaScript. This was an improvement from the initial dependence on static information that was previously shared through CVEP’s website

Playing Offside: An Intersectional Analysis of Sports in Kenya\u27s Informal Sector

The global sports industry revenue amounted to nearly 487 billion dollars in 2022 (Gough, 2023). Yet when the revenues are distributed regionally, Africa is categorized as ‘other’. This data implies that the value of sports in Africa is unknown yet assumes that all regions contribute to the value of this industry in various ways. A factor that may result to undocumented value of sports in Africa is the existence of informal economies. Thus, this study hypothesizes that the informal nature of economies and markets in African countries like Kenya may explain the lacuna generalized as ‘other’. According to the Kenya national bureau of statistics about 1.4 million people are engaged in the community, social, and personal services sector of the informal economy (Faria, 2021). Bearing this in mind, there is a possibility that individuals also engage in unregulated or semi-regulated activities and businesses related to sports that mobilize wealth or interact with the market. Therefore, this study explores how people engage with sports in the informal sector. It asks the question: What are the characteristics of sports in Kenya’s informal sector? It focuses on women’s football and e-sports case studies to establish factors that may determine characteristics of the sector. The idea is to identify patterns that are undetected due to informality. Data was collected through in-depth interviews for women’s football with purposive sampling technique. While e-sports used both close-ended interviews of randomly sampled participants and open-ended in-depth interviews of intentionally selected participants. The target population of the dissertation not only works in the informal sports sector but also live in informal settlements. A crucial factor since those who engage with sports in informal settlements are marginalized by the nature of global sports industry that renders their labor invisible and without value. This creates a specific sports system adapted to its environment and with limited contact from the mainstream. Analytically, intersectionality is used in the dissertation to dispel oversimplifications or generalizations of a particular group of people and their lived experiences (Calow, 2022). It challenges the current analysis of the global sports industry that assumes the experiences of those in the margins as similar due to their difference from the dominant sport system. Concurrently, intersectionality determines how the social categories identified play an active role in determining the structure and functioning of economic and labor systems. Therefore, a nuanced and comprehensive approach to data analysis is applied to identify the characteristics of Kenya’s informal sector and its relation to global actors by looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. The findings identified that Kenya’s informal sector is characterized by inequalities and inequities of gender, class, and location that impact access and voice of those that exist in the sector. The main features of the informal sports sector were: 1.) Women’s labor is categorized as care work and is inadequately compensated. 2.) Women’s football was established through a global development project, 3.) Women’s football is trapped in a cycle of aid dependency with foreign donors, unable to become an activity that interacts with the market, 4.) E-sports are exclusionary based on gender and class 5.) E-sports has adapted to its environment creating an economic activity for those who choose to engage with it

Effect of Talent Attraction on Organizational Performance: A Case of Hotels in South Rift Region, Kenya

Hotel sector in the tourism Industry is more and more treating human capital as a typical positive feature that can be leveraged to provide sustainable competitive advantage. As a consequence investors and administrators of hotels have resorted to embracing strategies geared towards talent building and relating it with their hotels. It is hoped that talented employees would enable the hotels realize their objectives. South Rift Region which was the focus of the study, exhibits diversity of star rated tourist hotels classified by Tourism Regulatory Authority. The study was conducted in two to five star hotels, within South Rift Region.  This research sought to determine the effect of talent attraction on organizational performance of hotels in South Rift Region, Kenya. The study was guided by Resource Based View Theory. Given that the target population was small (40), a census survey was conducted and structured questionnaires administered to all Human Resource Managers and Hotel Managers in hotels in South Rift Region. The instrument was pilot tested to ascertain the reliability of the research instrument using Cronbach Alpha Reliability Coefficient. The reliability of the research instrument was found to be 0.946 which was considered reliable. The study employed both descriptive (frequency distributions, means and percentages) and inferential statistics. Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple Linear Regression analysis was conducted at significant level of α= 0.05. Data analysis was done with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24. The study established that talent attraction, has a positive significant effect on organizational performance of hotels in South Rift Region with correlation coefficients of (r = 0. 810, p < 0.05). The study recommends that further research could be done on Influence of Innovation Management on organizational performance. Keywords: Talent attraction, Talent Management Practices, Organizational Performance, South Rift Region DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-6-02 Publication date: February 29th 202

Christianity in Early Kenyan Novels: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child and The River Between

A dominant feature in the novels of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o is the way he presents Christians and Christianity, at best as indifferent to the plight of the majority of the people, and at worst as accomplices in institutionalized exploitation, humiliation and dehumanization of the greater majority. Parts of the explanation for Ngugi's impatience with Christianity lie, perhaps equally, in his childhood experiences as a colonial subject who was coerced into recognizing Christianity as equivalent to Western civilization, as well as his later encounter with Marxist thought that associated religion with the systematized economic exploitation of the majority of people. Yet as a model of spiritual organization, Christianity has no doubt played an important role in fashioning past and present individual and group identities with regard to existing structures of power, which is probably why Ngugi is unable to narrate the experiences of his people without allocating a remarkably large space to it. In light of this, we read the two novels as attempts by the writer to project the trauma caused by and the tensions of Christianity among the colonized subjects as important influences in the formation and development of (post)colonial Kenyan subjects. Key Words: Ngugi Wa  Thiong'o, Christianity, postcolonial, subjects

Devolution in Kenya: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The adoption of devolved system of government in Kenya was a desire of citizens who wanted access to public services closer to them. The objects of devolution as provided for in Articles 174 and 175 of the Constitution about promotion of democracy and accountability in the exercise of power, fostering national unity by recognizing diversity, enhancing people’s self-governance, enabling communities manage their own affairs, protecting and promoting interests and rights of minorities and the marginalized and ensuring equitable sharing of resources. To achieve these, there must be framework put in place and enabling environment provided to all stakeholders involved in implantation of devolution. However, the environment for implementation of devolution has not been smooth due to various challenges experienced for the past five years. Issues like disagreements between the National Government and County government over funding for County functions, poor or absence of consultation on matters that affect County Governments, little technical support for the implementation of functions, insufficient allocations and delayed disbursements of funds to Counties by the National Treasury, lack of capacity and skills to deliver services, corruption, lack public participation, gender inequality are some of the challenges this paper is going to analyze. It is clear that these challenges have affected the implementation of devolution in Kenya. To achieve the goal of devolution there should be a better working relationship between the two levels of government. Parliament, County Governments, the IGRTC, the  Ministries, Independent Offices and  Commissions, civil society- all should work together in the spirit of Article 6(2) for the good of devolution. DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/9-6-02 Publication date:June 30th 201

Understanding Hate Speech in Kenya

This paper focuses on hate speech in Kenya. We interrogate the prevalence and development of hate speech over time, investigate the perpetrators of hate speech and the targeted groups, critically analyze the consequences of hate speech, dissect the freedom of speech vs. the protection from hate speech, highlight various challenges in curbing hate speech and reflect on strategies and methods of curbing hate speech being used by various agencies

Is National Government a Threat to Devolved System of Governance in Kenya?

This paper addresses the ways through which the national government of Kenya has proved to be a threat to devolution. Challenges emanating from national government actions are hampering the implementation of devolution. Devolution was intended to bring services closer to the people and promote public participation in decision-making. Transfer of functions from the national government to county governments and resource allocation to counties as provided for in the constitution 2010 is core to the implementation of devolution. Public participation permitted communities to manage their own affairs and further their development agenda. The minority and marginalized communities are recognized and protected through a devolved system of government as provided for in Article 174 of the constitution. The issue of inequality which was strongly practiced by the centralized system of governanceshouldbe addressed through devolution. There has been the development of national laws and policies other than devolution laws that were developed on the onset of the devolved system of governance. These laws affected the implementation of devolution. Budget Policy Statement according to the National Treasury (2013) is to accelerate economic growth by sustaining macroeconomic stability; focusing on economic policies and structural reforms; and deepening investment in critical economic infrastructure. The BPS is published under Section 25 of the Public Finance Management Act. However, the national budget policy statement is framed in a manner they encroach county functions mandates. Judiciary has the important role of giving effect to the constitutional provisions on devolution; however, the independence of the judiciary is threatened by political quarters affecting its function in the implementation of devolution. Commissions and independent offices whose collective responsibility to facilitate the achievement of devolution is impaired due to underfunding. Poor intergovernmental consultations are affecting devolution in the sense that plans to undertake Nairobi City County functions without due process and intergovernmental agreements are infringing on the Intergovernmental Relations Act, 2012. Above these challenges, the national government has enacted laws to reduce the power of independent institutions, direct intimidation, and incapacitation through budgetary cuts. DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/10-7-05 Publication date:July 31st 2020