Manufacturing sector performance and economic growth in Nigeria

Abstract : The paper attempted to examine the impact of manufacturing sector output on economic growth in Nigeria from 1981 to 2016. The study employed secondary data sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical bulletin for Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and the Granger causality techniques on RGDP, manufacturing capacity utilization (MCU), manufacturing output (LMO), government investment expenditure (GINVEXP), money supply (LM2) and interest rate (INR). Evidence of long-run and short-run relationships among the variables was established. The results showed that MCU has positive influence on RGDP while LMO also affects RGDP positively. It also showed that GINVEXP has negative effects on RGDP whereas LM2 influenced RGDP positively. Moreover, the result indicated a unidirectional causality between RGDP and MCU, LMO and LM2. Based on the above, the study suggest government should intensify efforts to promote socio-economic infrastructural, macroeconomic and institutional framework in Nigeria to provide favourable environment for external and domestic institutions interactions; so harnessed mobilized funds effectively towards productive manufacturing sector

M-Commerce Implementation in Nigeria: Trends and Issues

Nigeria was described as the fastest growing telecoms nation in Africa and the third in the World. The country had experienced a phenomenal growth from a teledensity of 0.49 in 2000 to 25.22 in 2007. This trend has brought about a monumental development in the major sectors of the economy, such as banking, telecoms and commerce in general. This paper presents the level of adoption of ICT in the banking sector and investigates the prospects of m-Commerce in Nigeria based on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. Findings revealed that all banks in Nigeria offer e-Banking services and about 52% of the offer some forms of m-Banking services. The banks and the telecoms operators have enormous potentials and opportunities for m-Commerce but the level of patronage, quality of cell phones, lack of basic infrastructure and security issues pose a major threat to its wide scale implementation

A Framework for e-Commerce Implementation: Nigeria a Case Study

The advent of the Internet has transformed the business environment in no small measure and has influenced the ways and manner businesses are transacted. This platform has brought about enhanced electronic and mobile business transactions. However, the advent of e-Commerce, m-Commerce or i-Commerce has placed a premium on the participating organisations or nations in terms of provision of the basic infrastructure for a secure, seamless and trusted business environment through the electronic media. This paper presents an exploratory study of the prospects of e-Commerce implementation and the factors inhibiting its growth. A set of questionnaire was designed, administered and analysed based on political, economic, social and technological (PEST) analysis. The PEST analysis is to help review the current practices with a view to developing a framework for Nigeria and other developing nations in Africa. Findings revealed that the Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) is the most widely used medium of e-Payment in Nigeria, which is not very suitable for e-Commerce implementation. Similarly, the Internet penetration is still abysmally low and is one of the major threats to e-Commerce implementation. However, the nascent democracy enjoyed in Nigeria is faced with some teething problems, but it promised with time, relative political stability, direct foreign investment, improved economical atmosphere, improved social services and technological development more than ever witnessed in the country. Therefore, a viable framework for Nigeria and Africa would be such that involves the private and public partnership (PPP). This consortium is expected to provide the platform for access to the Internet and popularize the use of e-Payment among other things

An Investigation of the Factors Motivating Students’ Stay in Private Universities’ Hostels

Provision of housing accommodation to students of higher institutions has been a great challenge over the years. Various efforts had been made both by the government and private individuals/organisations to assuage this situation but astronomical increase in the number of students gaining admission into the available institutions has all the time dwarf these efforts. This study therefore examined the factors motivating students to stay in the hostels. Questionnaires were administered on 325 students in the Bells University of Technology and Crawford University. The data collected were analysed using frequency distribution and mean. . The study found that electricity supply, peer/friendship influence, security, parental influence and water supply are mostly the factors motivating students to stay in the hostel. Following these findings, the study recommends that hostel providers should take critical look into and incorporate these factors that motivate students to stay in the hostel. This study is expected to serve as a guide to new hostel providers

Semantic Text Mining using Domain Ontology

Abstract— Presently in Customer Relationship Management, there is a need to achieve greater customer centricity, and this requires a deeper understanding of customer needs. Also, the volume of textual data generated by the social networking sites in recent times has greatly increased, creating a platform for analysis, towards the much needed customer understanding. One of the issues that evolve from analyzing these texts to retrieve non trivial patterns (text mining) is text representation, which this research is aimed at addressing. In particular, this paper focuses on using domain ontology for text pre-processing in order to improve the quality of the textual corpus being mined. The methodology used in this research is based on developing a domain Ontology for textual pre-processing of the experimental data and sentiment analysis of social media data. In conclusion, the inferences gotten from the research carried out reveal that domain ontology has the ability to improve the results of sentiment analysis. It was also discovered that, due to the nature of social media data, there is need for a deeper level of semantic analysis, to be able to maximize its richness

An Investigation of the Factors Motivating Students’ Stay in Private Universities’ Hostels.

Provision of housing accommodation to students of higher institutions has been a great challenge over the years. Various efforts had been made both by the government and private individuals/organisations to assuage this situation but astronomical increase in the number of students gaining admission into the available institutions has all the time dwarf these efforts. This study therefore examined the factors motivating students to stay in the hostels. Questionnaires were administered on 325 students in the Bells University of Technology and Crawford University. The data collected were analysed using frequency distribution and mean. . The study found that electricity supply, peer/friendship influence, security, parental influence and water supply are mostly the factors motivating students to stay in the hostel. Following these findings, the study recommends that hostel providers should take critical look into and incorporate these factors that motivate students to stay in the hostel. This study is expected to serve as a guide to new hostel providers

Tourism Planning and Development: A Panacea to Economic Recession in Nigeria

The current economic recession in Nigeria has come down heavily on the nation’s economy in no small way. Even though crude oil still remain the mainstay of the nation’s economy, diversification of economy and exploitation of potentials of tourism resources are seen as a panacea to the current economic meltdown in the country. This paper therefore identified various tourism potentials and resources readily available in the country. This ranges from water tourism resources, vegetal tourism resources to land scape tourism resources and anthropogenic cultural tourism resources. The authors observed that tourism planning and development in Nigeria is under- exploited despite the enormous potentials. Thus, the paper suggests strategies to adopt by the government, private sector, host communities as well as workers in the tourism industry to alleviate the poor state of tourist centres in Nigeria. The paper concludes that the tourism sector has very huge potentials which if fully supported and the menace of terrorism and kidnapping is curtailed in Nigeria, will contribute significantly to the economic diversification everybody is yarning for and Nigeria will bounce back from the two edged sword of economic meltdown ravaging the country. Keywords: Economic recession, Economic diversification, Tourism development, Public-Private partnershi

Using Ontology-based Information Extraction for Subject-based Auto-grading

The procedure for the grading of students’ essays in subject-based examinations is quite challenging particularly when dealing with large number of students. Hence, several automatic essay-grading systems have been designed to alleviate the demands of manual subject grading. However, relatively few of the existing systems are able to give informative feedbacks that are based on elaborate domain knowledge to students, particularly in subject-based automatic grading where domain knowledge is a major factor. In this work, we discuss the vision of subject-based automatic essay scoring system that leverages on semiautomatic creation of subject ontology, uses ontology-based information extraction approach to enable automatic essay scoring, and gives informative feedback to students

DEVELOPING AN INTERACTIVE STUDENT RECRUITMENT PORTAL FOR UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COOPERATION IN NIGERIA

Institutions of higher learning provide the pool of professional expertise that the industry thrives on. Therefore, there is the need to facilitate a platform that will provide students a ready access to available vacancies in the industry. This platform will also facilitate the recruitment of the most qualified candidate for vacant positions. This paper reports the design and implementation of a webbased interactive portal for students' recruitment. The system enables cooperate organisations in Nigeria to publicly advertise their vacancies for interested students to apply online. Based on different job requirements, the system facilitates on-line assessment and selection of the most qualified candidates for job and internship placements. A preliminary evaluation of the interactive recruitment portal reveals that its features are standard and suitable for viable university-industry cooperation

Cognitive Ontology based Framework for Networking Women in Sciences

In order to increase the percentage of women in academics or researchers, there is need for a functioning research networking through which women can exchange ideas; ask questions and more importantly, mentorship, in Nigeria. In order to make for this, several recommendations have been suggested but are not scientific. Therefore, to bridge this gap scientifically, this paper is presenting an overview of a question and answering system framework that hybridize semantic search methodology and cognitive reasoning. The hybridization will enhance the question and answering accuracy especially due to the introduction of domain ontology for the semantic process. This paper also presents the output of the first phase of the implementation which is the development of the domain ontology for the question and answering syste