Decision Making and Kenya’s Foreign Policy Behaviour: The Moi and Kibaki Presidencies in Perspective

Kenya’s foreign policy has overly been characterised by continuity and change, with idiosyncrasies of the president informing most foreign policy decision outcomes.  This reality is further reinforced by institutional and structural discrepancies associated with periodic elections, some of which have had significant changes on the presidency as a core institution in Kenya’s foreign policy decision making process. Such was the case in 2002 general elections that witnessed the end of President Moi’s twenty-four-year rule, and ushered in Mwai Kibaki as the third president of Kenya. In an attempt to explore the continuity and change in Kenya’s foreign policy behaviour during the Moi and Kibaki presidencies, this paper adopts decision making theory as a framework of analysis. The actor-specific decision-making theory conceives the individual human decision maker as the focal ontological unit, whose actions whether singly or in groups are responsible for state behaviour. In this paper I argue that, continuity and change exhibited by Kenya’s foreign policy behaviour during the Moi and Kibaki presidencies was informed by individual decision makers, acting singly or in a group, within the constraints of existing institutions of the state, where internal and external influences are channelled through to inform state behaviour. &nbsp

Bystanders, parcelling, and an absence of trust in the grooming interactions of wild male chimpanzees

The evolution of cooperation remains a central issue in socio-biology with the fundamental problem of how individuals minimize the risks of being short-changed (‘cheated’) should their behavioural investment in another not be returned. Economic decisions that individuals make during interactions may depend upon the presence of potential partners nearby, which o ers co operators a temptation to defect from the current partner. The parcelling model posits that donors subdivide services into parcels to force cooperation, and that this is contingent on opportunities for defection; that is, the presence of bystanders. Here we test this model and the e ect of bystander presence using grooming interactions of wild chimpanzees. We found that with more bystanders, initiators gave less grooming at the beginning of the bout and were more likely to abandon a grooming bout, while bouts were less likely to be reciprocated. We also found that the groomer’s initial investment was not higher among frequent groomers or stronger reciprocators, suggesting that contrary to current assumptions, grooming decisions are not based on trust, or bonds, within dyads. Our work highlights the importance of considering immediate social context and the in uence of bystanders for understanding the evolution of the behavioural strategies that produce cooperation

Contrastive Environmental Sound Representation Learning

Machine hearing of the environmental sound is one of the important issues in the audio recognition domain. It gives the machine the ability to discriminate between the different input sounds that guides its decision making. In this work we exploit the self-supervised contrastive technique and a shallow 1D CNN to extract the distinctive audio features (audio representations) without using any explicit annotations.We generate representations of a given audio using both its raw audio waveform and spectrogram and evaluate if the proposed learner is agnostic to the type of audio input. We further use canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to fuse representations from the two types of input of a given audio and demonstrate that the fused global feature results in robust representation of the audio signal as compared to the individual representations. The evaluation of the proposed technique is done on both ESC-50 and UrbanSound8K. The results show that the proposed technique is able to extract most features of the environmental audio and gives an improvement of 12.8% and 0.9% on the ESC-50 and UrbanSound8K datasets respectively

Regional Organizations and Conflict Management in Africa: A Contextual Assessment of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in Somalia

The role of regional organizations in managing protracted conflicts within and among Member States cannot be overemphasized.  This has been the case of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in the Horn of Africa, a region characterised by protracted conflict, instability and state failure as in the case of Somalia. Established in 1986 as Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGADD), the organization was re-established in 1996 as IGAD with its mandate expanded to include regional peace and security. Adopting diplomacy of conflict management as an approach towards conflicts in the Horn of Africa, IGAD has visibly been involved in the continued search for peace in the embattled state of Somalia.  Political stability and sustainable peace in Somalia however remains elusive as new actors and interest in the conflict emerge. While acknowledging IGAD’s critical role towards political stability in Somalia and the larger Horn of Africa, I argue that IGAD lacks institutional capacity to sustainably resolve complex and protracted conflicts as in the case of Somalia, which calls for multiple approaches to conflict management than those provided for in the IGAD’s founding Agreement

The quality of care in family planning: a case study of Chogoria, Eastern Kenya

This paper compares the quality of family planning services in the catchment areas of Chogoria and Maua hospitals, both in the Meru district of Kenya. The quality issues compared are personnel, types of methods, information, recruiting and counselling of clients, knowledge and source of modern contraceptives, desired family size, use of contraceptives, and satisfaction of providers and clients. A comparative approach is adopted to study the aspects of family planning that have made Chogoria relatively more successful than Maua and the rest of Kenya. The data used in this analysis is qualitative and was collected through personal observation, interviews, and group discussions with health care providers. The results show that while the family planning programmes of Chogoria and Maua are comparable in many respects, there are also important differences. For example, Chogoria family planning personnel were more knowledgeable about contraceptives and were more satisfied with the training provided by Chogoria hospital than were their counterparts in Maua. The relationship between the senior and the junior staff was more cordial in Chogoria. The content of the information about contraceptives provided to women attending clinics was similar in both hospitals. But the teachers in Chogoria were more knowledgeable and confident than those in Maua. In Chogoria, the decision to use family planning is jointly taken by the husband and the wife, and if a client fails to turn up for an appointment a follow-up is scheduled. In Maua, the decision to use family planning is taken unilaterally by the wife and defaulters are not followed up. The study showed that 78 percent and 33 percent of the participants were using modern family planning methods in Chogoria and Maua respectively. Three conclusions are drawn from the study. First, that the satisfaction of family planning providers and their clients contributes positively towards more knowledge and use of modern contraceptives. Second, that women feel more secure and comfortable with the methods they use if their husbands are involved in deciding whether or not to adopt them. Finally, follow-up services for those who fail to attend appointments helps to strengthen rapport between providers and clients and provides an opportunity to learn of the circumstances that lead to discontinuing the use of contraceptives

A Review of Smishing Attaks Mitigation Strategies

Mobile Smishing crime has continued to escalate globally due to technology enhancements and people's growing dependence on smartphones and other technologies. SMS facilitates the distribution of crucial information that is principally important for non-digital savvy users who are typically underprivileged. Smishing, often known as SMS phishing, entails transmitting deceptive text messages to lure someone into revealing individual information or installing malware. The number of incidences of smishing has increased tremendously as the internet and cellphones have spread to even the most remote regions of the globe

I. Effect of Nitrogen Rate on Plant Nitrogen Loss in Winter Wheat Varieties II. Glutamine Synthetase Activity in Winter Wheat Varieties III. Effect of Nitrogen Fertilization and Cation Removal on Soil pH

Soil Scienc

SUCCESSION MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE OF TELECOMMUNICATION FIRMS IN KENYA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SAFARICOM LTD AND TELKOM KENYA

A well-structured and effectively enforced succession management plan is important for business. It has been argued that better performing and big corporations employ and benefit more when using effective succession management to improve their performance and productivity than struggling or emerging companies. How far this is true for Safaricom which is a big and successful company and Telkom which is a struggling and newly rebranded company in Kenya remains significantly uninvestigated. The purpose of the study was to explore the influence of succession management on organizational performance of Telecommunication Firms in Kenya with a comparative study of Safaricom and Telkom telecommunications companies. It specifically established the influence of talent retention, talent attraction, career management and training on the business performance. The study was based on the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Talent DNA Model, the self-concept theory explaining career growth and resource based view of the firm theory. This study employed descriptive research coupled with correlational research designs to anchor the methodology. For this study a target population 232 management personnel and 218 staff working at Safaricom and Telkom headquarters respectively were targeted. From the population 70 respondents for Safaricom and 65 from Telkom were sampled, thus getting 30% of the target population. The respondents were selected first via stratified sampling to categorize the 10 and 12 departments from Safaricom and Telkom respectively. Then simple random sampling became the sampling technique utilized to get the staff from the departments. The study used questionnaire rendered in a 5-point Likert scale that was given to the staff and secondary data to get the measurements for performance. A pilot study was done on 10 of the target population respondents (1% of the target population). Content validity was measured by the researcher‟s supervisors looked at the items in the questionnaires and advised the researcher on what needed to be changed to improve data collection and analysis. To test the reliability of the instruments, therefore, Cronbach Coefficient formula was used and a reliable figure of .722 was achieved. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data and included counts, percentages, means together with the standard deviations. Pearson‟s correlations and t-test were used and the findings were then presented in tables. The results showed that: talent retention (β=.384 Safaricom; -.172 Telkom), talent attraction (β=.322 Safaricom; .221 Telkom) and career management (β=.387 Safaricom; .191 Telkom) was more effectively employed and worked better for Safaricom than for Telkom and its efficient use had a significantly positive influence on Safaricom‟s performance and likewise its inefficient use had a negative influence on Telkom‟s performance. The study thus recommends that: Telkom management should offer attractive remuneration packages to ensure substantial talent retention in the organization. Telkom management should employ proactive knowledge and skills together with competency as the mode via which the company mainly recruits. They should also, have a robust talent search matrix which allows for experienced, academically qualified, driven and competent employees to be hired and the company should then use a work-life balance matrix which motivates and rests employees to make talent attraction easier. Both Safaricom and Telkom should continue to invest in training of their staff as a means to enabling efficient succession management in both companies. Further, both companies should device workable succession management plans to effectively manage the process

First report of food sharing among Nicobar long-tailed macaques

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Quaternary International on 04/12/2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.11.049 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The sharing of food is an essential component of human societies and has likely played a key role for the evolution of several human traits such as reduced sexual dimorphism, a more flexible maturational pace in relation to environmental variation and an increase in human tolerance and co-operation. For this reason, the investigation of the evolutionary origins of food sharing in humans has been a central topic in biological anthropology. Since behavior does not fossilize, investigations on food sharing in non-human primates are key in providing a window into the evolution of food sharing and co-operation in humans. Among non-human primates, evidence of non-kin food sharing has largely been found in apes and New World monkeys, while this phenomenon has rarely been reported in Old World monkeys. Here we provide the first descriptive report of food sharing in wild macaques. We studied two free-ranging groups of Nicobar long-tailed macaques from two different islands (i.e., Great Nicobar and Katchal), that have very different ecological settings and vegetation, for over 168 days. Using focal animal sampling, we observed a total of 18 food sharing events, that revolved around monopolizable food items (coconut and termite log) and mostly involved males. Females, even when present near the food owner, took very little interest in observing the event. The macaques shared food only among the individuals who sat close to the food owner, who, in turn, displayed very little aggression against bystanders. Given that, among Nicobar macaques, males have been previously described as forming strong social relationships, and since harassment was rarely observed in the present study, we argue that our observations could support the reciprocal exchange rather than the harassment hypothesis. While more observations are needed to better clarify the ultimate function of food sharing in this species, our study on Nicobar long-tailed macaques highlights some features that might make this species an ideal model to study the evolution of human behavior