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

E-Learning In Public Institutions In Kenya: Implementation Challenges

Identification of a business problem is the first step to ensuring that strategic planning and implementation is carried out effectively. In line with this observation, this study was geared towards examining the factor affecting the effectiveness of e-learning in secondary schools in Nairobi County, Kenya. The study objectives included the critical examination of strategies that could be put in place to widen the base of ICT infrastructure provision; to investigate how to provide specialized training on e-learning to computer teachers in Kenya; and to critically review the current ICT policy in schools integrating teachers, students and schools. The study employed the use of mixed method research; the target population was teachers, principals and students from 15 schools, purposively sampled. From the 15 schools, 15 teachers, 15 principals and 150 students were sampled and involved in the study. The students were sampled using simple random sampling. Questionnaire and interview schedule were used for data collection. Both quantitative and qualitative data was analyzed using SPSS and data presented in tables, graphs and charts and some in prose form. Research findings indicated that there is a significant relationship between availability of ICT, teacher competencies, cost of ICT equipments, ICT support staff and ICT policy and effective e-learning in secondary schools. It was concluded that unavailability of ICT equipments, lack of competent teachers and training centers, high cost of ICT equipments, inadequate and untrained ICT support staff and weak ICT policy framework have contributed to the ineffective of e-learning in Kenya. The study recommended that there be a review of ICT policy to allow for clear strategies that have well formulated implementation guidelines and mechanisms for monitoring e-learning integration and use in the classrooms. Moreover, the government should introduce e-learning in teacher institutions and collaborate with e-learning software providers to incorporate e-learning in the current curriculum. Schools should employ an ICT technician who could make computer laboratory accessible to learners at all time, much like the school library and be able to repair and maintain the ICT infrastructure. Moreover, the government should deploy ICT support staff at least once a year in each school to ensure that the problem of availability of staff is dealt with. The school BOGs, with assistance from the government, should look for private sector partners who would be able to install Internet facilities and e-libraries for the public schools having ICT facilities to enhance and improve learners’ personal information base

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

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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