Financial Intelligence and the Quality of Higher Education in Africa

Improving the quality of curriculum development in private Universities in Africa from time to time is a task that is very essential to achieving effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance in the higher education system. Financial Intelligence is one of the five components of a twenty first century education, the kind of education that actually delivers the financial andwealth building results that people deserve. Unfortunately, a 21st century education is not something that is currently obtainable in the traditional school system in Africa, requiring instead that students go out and seek it on their own. This paper, using the explorative methodology, establishes that without financial intelligence, graduates from African private higher education schools will be forced to follow the road of financial disaster, ruin, and anti-excellence which most people travelled. It therefore recommends among others that financial intelligence be integrated into the curriculum of African Universities to enable students know the how of making money, work for them rather than simply working for money.Keywords: Financial Intelligence, Quality, Higher Education, Afric

Working Capital Management, Liquidity and Corporate Profitability among quoted Firms in Nigeria: Evidence from the Productive Sector

Working capital management is very crucial in this period of global financial turmoil. This is because illiquidity is prevalent world-wide necessitating that effective and efficient management of any available cash will be needed to ensure that company breaks even and survives this distressed time since credit is not easily come by. This article presents empirical evidence of the effect of working capital management and liquidity on corporate profits using a cross-sectional time series data for the period 2005-2006. This micro-data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and an OLS methodology. The authors find a positive effect of inventory conversion period (ICP), debtors collection period (DCP); and a negative effect of cash conversion period (CCP), creditors payment period (CPP), on return on assets (a mirror of corporate profitability). We discover that CCP with a wrong sign is the most significant precision variable in influencing profits and leads corporate profitability in Nigeria. It is closely followed by ICP and then CPP is third in importance in affecting profitability and liquidity in Nigeria. The paper therefore recommends (1) that firms should promptly collect cash from credit sales, (2) that excess cash should be reinvested in short-term securities (assets) to generate profits and (3) that since there exists high sales turnover in the Nigerian emerging markets, government policy should target multinational companies (MNCs) for invitation to participate in investing in Nigeria by creating the right legal and regulatory framework to enable them enter the market for possible FDI, IPI, and FPI injections into the Nigerian domestic economy

A frog with three sex chromosomes that co-mingle together in nature: Xenopus tropicalis has a degenerate W and a Y that evolved from a Z chromosome

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Furman, B. L. S., Cauret, C. M. S., Knytl, M., Song, X. Y., Premachandra, T., Ofori-Boateng, C., Jordan, D. C., Horb, M. E., & Evans, B. J. (2020). A frog with three sex chromosomes that co-mingle together in nature: Xenopus tropicalis has a degenerate W and a Y that evolved from a Z chromosome. PLoS Genetics, 16(11), e1009121, doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1009121.In many species, sexual differentiation is a vital prelude to reproduction, and disruption of this process can have severe fitness effects, including sterility. It is thus interesting that genetic systems governing sexual differentiation vary among—and even within—species. To understand these systems more, we investigated a rare example of a frog with three sex chromosomes: the Western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis. We demonstrate that natural populations from the western and eastern edges of Ghana have a young Y chromosome, and that a male-determining factor on this Y chromosome is in a very similar genomic location as a previously known female-determining factor on the W chromosome. Nucleotide polymorphism of expressed transcripts suggests genetic degeneration on the W chromosome, emergence of a new Y chromosome from an ancestral Z chromosome, and natural co-mingling of the W, Z, and Y chromosomes in the same population. Compared to the rest of the genome, a small sex-associated portion of the sex chromosomes has a 50-fold enrichment of transcripts with male-biased expression during early gonadal differentiation. Additionally, X. tropicalis has sex-differences in the rates and genomic locations of recombination events during gametogenesis that are similar to at least two other Xenopus species, which suggests that sex differences in recombination are genus-wide. These findings are consistent with theoretical expectations associated with recombination suppression on sex chromosomes, demonstrate that several characteristics of old and established sex chromosomes (e.g., nucleotide divergence, sex biased expression) can arise well before sex chromosomes become cytogenetically distinguished, and show how these characteristics can have lingering consequences that are carried forward through sex chromosome turnovers.This work was supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2017-05770) (BJE), Resource Allocation Competition awards from Compute Canada (BJE), the Whitman Center Fellowship Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (BJE), the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (BJE), and National Institutes of Health grants R01-HD084409 (MEH) and P40-OD010997 (MEH). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Audit Committee Quality and Financial reporting in Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria.

The credibility of financial reporting is crucial as it assures the user of its realism; this mandated a crux to examine the effect of audit committee quality on the financial reporting quality of deposit money banks in Nigeria. The descriptive research design was adopted, and secondary data sourced from annual accounts of seven deposit money banks for seven years were used to test our hypotheses. The dependent variable in this study is financial reporting quality measured with accrual model. In contrast, the independent variables were number of members of the audit committee with accounting and finance knowledge, size of the audit committee, number of audit committee meetings held in a year, and audit committee independence. Descriptive Statistics, normality test, multicollinearity test and regression analysis were conducted. A significant outcome revealed that except for several audit committee meeting held in a significant year, other variables were found to be insignificant, hence are not determinant of financial reporting quality in deposit money banks in Nigeria. The study concluded that audit committee quality is not a determinant of financial reporting quality in deposit money banks in Nigeria. The study recommended that ability should be paramount for the appointment of members of the audit committee and advises of the audit committee should always be given adequate and consideration by management in decision makin

FINANCIAL LITERACY: A PANACEA TO POVERTY REDUCTION IN NIGERIA

There are a number of intelligences that humans’ are expected to possess in order to maximise life on the earth. These intelligences include spiritual, mental, physical, social and financial. Whereas all the different intelligences are important determinants of wellbeing, financial intelligence (FI) is pivotal for individual/family prosperity. Unfortunately, the configuration of Nigeria education curriculum at all levels does not include financial intelligence. This lacuna in the educational system has been reckoned to have contributed to the ever increasing rate of poverty in Nigeria. This paper theoretically discussed financial intelligence as a panacea to winning the war against poverty in Nigeria. The discussion covered an overview of the laws of financial intelligence, personal financial statement, the psychology of wealth creation and sources of passive income as well as the process of financial freedom among others. The paper concludes that if financial intelligence is embraced at the same level with other intelligence, the incidence of poverty in Nigeria will plummet significantly