Challenges of congenital malformations: an African perspective

Background: Congenital malformations are defects of morphogenesis of organs or body regions identifiable during the intrauterine life or after birth. The etiological factors proposed have varied in history based on prevailing understanding, culture, and religion. Worldwide historically, the role of the supernatural had been in the forefront of etiological considerations but has changed with advances in embryology and teratology. It has, however, remained a part of many societies and cultures especially in Africa.Purpose: The aim of this review article is to highlight the psychosocial and economic impact, as well as the ethical and management challenges, posed by congenital malformations in the African setting.Materials and methods: A literature search was done using PubMed, African Journals Online, HINARI, and Google Scholar, regarding issues and challenges faced by parents who have children with congenital malformations, the affected children, and the healthcare workers who manage them. Focus was on the peculiarities of the African society.Result: Superstitious beliefs about congenital malformations bred negative attitudes toward these children and their parents. Chronic illness, long-term disabilities, and overall poor quality of life were associated with congenital malformations. These problems in a background of negative sociocultural beliefs created enormous psychosocial challenges for the parents and children. This was further complicated by economic challenges posed by the absence of health support systems in most African settings. Furthermore, the healthcare teams caring for these children were faced with challenges of difficult ethical and medicolegal considerations, as well as paucity of appropriately skilled manpower and facilities.Conclusion: The role of the supernatural in the etiology of congenital malformations still has a stronghold in the many African settings and poses an enormous psychosocial challenge for the affected. It is hoped that this review caninfluence policy formulations to support affected parents and improve outcomes of affected children.Keywords: African, challenges, congenital malformations, psychosocial, superstitious belief

Evidence of Students’ Academic Performance at the Federal College of Education Asaba Nigeria: Mining Education Data

One main objective of higher education is to provide quality education to its students. One way to achieve the highest level of quality in the higher education system is by discovering knowledge for prediction regarding enrolment of students in a particular course, alienation of traditional classroom teaching model, detection of unfair means used in online examination, detection of abnormal values in the result sheets of the students, and prediction about students’ performance. The knowledge is hidden among the educational data set and is extractable through data mining techniques. The present paper is designed to justify the capabilities of data mining techniques in the context of higher education by offering a data mining model for the higher education system in the university. In this research, the classification task is used to evaluate student’s performance, and as many approaches are used for data classification, the decision tree method is used here. By this, we extract data that describes students’ summative performance at semester’s end, helps to identify the dropouts and students who need special attention, and allows the teacher to provide appropriate advising/counseling