MODELING THE IMPACTS OF E-GOVERNMENT SERVICES ON CORRUPTION REDUCTION IN RWANDA: A CASE EVIDENCE FROM NYAMASHEKE DISTRICT, RWANDA

The study entitled modeling the impacts of e-government services on corruption reduction in Rwanda: Case evidence from Nyamasheke District, Rwanda was about assessing the contribution of e-government services use on reducing corruption in the area under study. The study was guided with the objective of exploring the utilization of multinomial logistic regression (MLR) in modeling the impact of e-government services on reduction status of corruption. In this regard, the MLR model was performed using a maximum likelihood estimation method on the data set collected to find the parameter estimates of the model describing the relationship between the explanatory and the outcome variables and determine the significance of the explanatory variables that contribute significantly to the reduction status of corruption in the area under study. The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect data from 381 respondents from the target population of 8041 using Solvin’s formula for sample size calculation. Data were collected using questionnaire and interview schedule techniques and analyzed using SPSS-23. In this analysis, the results show that on the total of eleven independent variables, the explanatory variables such as age, income, ownership of the devices used in applying for the local government services and the advice types were dropped from the training set of explanatory variables that contribute significantly to the reduction of corruption in the area under study. In model selection that overall fits well the data, the obtained variables that contributed significantly to the outcome variable were education, e-government services’ use status, cost of accessing e-government services and the e-government services types delivery. The parameters estimate of the selected model revealed that the variables that best predicted the probability of reducing corruption once the e-government services are delivered online were education, status of using e-government services, types of e-government services delivery online while the cost of accessing the e-government services decreased the logit (the probability) of reducing corruption. The main challenges faced by users of e-government services were the cost given while applying to these e-government services is high and lack of enough skills to cope with technological usage. Finally the study recommended that local leaders in the area under study should strengthen the online system in delivering local services to people, educate people to be aware about the use of e-government services since the more a person is educated the more is attempting to use e-government services and then reduce the cost of using e-government services while applying to the local services since this has been the only explanatory variable that decreased the logit of reducing corruption in the study area. Article visualizations

PRODUCTIVITY AND PROFITABILITY OF RICE PRODUCERS OF KIRIMBI MARSHLAND IN NYAMASHEKE DISTRICT, RWANDA: A GENDER WISE ANALYSIS

The topic of gender in agriculture sector has had an increasing interest for many researchers. Authors of this paper assess the productivity and profitability levels of rice producers of Kirimbi marchland in Nyamasheke district using an indicative gender approach. To achieve the objective, data were collected from 333 farmers whereas 198 were male farmers while 135 were female farmers using an interview schedule. This study employs a mixed approach of research viz qualitative and quantitative to analyze the study. Descriptive statistics method was used to describe the data with continuous variables while inferential statistics method was used to ascertain whether there is difference significant between productivity levels of male and female farmers, profitability levels of male and female farmers and benefit cost ratio levels of male and female farmers in Kirimbi marshland. Findings of the study revealed that land productivity for female farmers is high compared to that of males though there is a meager difference between productivity levels. With regards to benefit cost ratio, it is high for male farmers than that of female farmers. It was also found that rice farm business for female farmers was not profitable as the BCR equals to 0.45 therefore female farmers were advised to revisit their expenditures patterns because it was observed that the higher amount of variable costs led to the rice business to be a non-profitable business. For both categories, the average cost of field protection was the highest among others. It is also seen through the differences in total costs where the total cost for males was found to be 609,841Rwf and 979,073Rwf for females which indicates that females spent more money on various agricultural practices and inputs than male. This might lead to loss and affected negatively the BCR of female farmers found to be less than one. Article visualizations