Influence of Legal Requirements on Environmental Concern and sustainability Practices in Small and Medium-size Manufacturing Enterprises in Nairobi, Kenya.

Until recently it has been too easy to overlook Small and Medium-size Enterprises in the analysis of environmental impact of particularly the manufacturing sector (ibid 2003). SMEs continue to grow, so do their environmental impacts. SMEs are faced by such challenges as difficulty in raising capital, limited managerial skills, regulatory constraints, limited extension services and difficulty in getting access to technology The study found out that SMEs where copies of environment related laws existed and staffs were aware of the laws, respondents indicated involvement in environmental management practices. It is thus concluded that legal provisions influenced adoption of good environmental management practices by Small and Medium-size Manufacturing enterprises. Key words: Legal Requirements. Environmental Concern. Sustainability Practice

Tropical Data: Approach and Methodology as Applied to Trachoma Prevalence Surveys

PURPOSE: Population-based prevalence surveys are essential for decision-making on interventions to achieve trachoma elimination as a public health problem. This paper outlines the methodologies of Tropical Data, which supports work to undertake those surveys. METHODS: Tropical Data is a consortium of partners that supports health ministries worldwide to conduct globally standardised prevalence surveys that conform to World Health Organization recommendations. Founding principles are health ministry ownership, partnership and collaboration, and quality assurance and quality control at every step of the survey process. Support covers survey planning, survey design, training, electronic data collection and fieldwork, and data management, analysis and dissemination. Methods are adapted to meet local context and needs. Customisations, operational research and integration of other diseases into routine trachoma surveys have also been supported. RESULTS: Between 29th February 2016 and 24th April 2023, 3373 trachoma surveys across 50 countries have been supported, resulting in 10,818,502 people being examined for trachoma. CONCLUSION: This health ministry-led, standardised approach, with support from the start to the end of the survey process, has helped all trachoma elimination stakeholders to know where interventions are needed, where interventions can be stopped, and when elimination as a public health problem has been achieved. Flexibility to meet specific country contexts, adaptation to changes in global guidance and adjustments in response to user feedback have facilitated innovation in evidence-based methodologies, and supported health ministries to strive for global disease control targets

Decision support for COTS selection

Bibliography: p. 249-25

Agent-Based Commercial Off-The-Shelf Software Components Evaluation Method

In the last decade, the world of software development has evolved rapidly. This evolution has led to Component-Based Software Development (CBSD), which in turn has generated tremendous interest in the development of plug-and-play reusable software, leading to the concept of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software components. The use of COTS is increasingly becoming commonplace. This is mainly due to shrinking budgets, accelerating rates of COTS enhancement, reducing development time and effort constraints, and expanding system requirements. However, the COTS marketplace is characterized by a vast array of products and product claims, extreme quality and capability differences between products, and many products incompatibilities, even when they purport to adhere to the same standards. Therefore, there is need for a robust COTS evaluation methodology to help software developers select appropriate components for projects. A variety of COTS evaluation methods have already been proposed. These methods are based on either consensual opinion aggregation approach or regression models. However, both approaches are inadequate for the COTS Evaluation process. In this paper, we propose an agent-based COTS evaluation method, which models each of the players as either a cooperative or a competing agent that is capable of making its own decisions to meets its goals. In this model, there is an administrator agent that collects, evaluates, and combines knowledge from different areas of expertise (Roles) to offer support in the COTS selection process. This way, we circumvent COTS evaluation problems associated with the consensual opinion aggregation and the regression models approaches. 1