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Unplanned pregnancies among female undergraduate & postgraduate students at higher education institution pose severe public health issue in South Africa (SA) and are also linked to bad health and social consequences that have a detrimental influence on academic advancement and future employment opportunities. The number of unplanned pregnancies among students at higher education institutions continues to rise, despite the government introduction of contraceptives and other preventative methods. Thus, the objective of this study was aimed at explore factors that contribute to unplanned pregnancies among students in higher institution of learning The study adopted non-empirical research, in which existing literature on factors that contributes to unplanned pregnancies among students in higher education institutions. This paper is solely based on a review and analysis of published research and data. The findings of this study indicate that peer pressure, contraceptive uptake, and substance abuse contribute to unplanned pregnancies among students at higher education institution. Peer pressure and inconsistent contraceptive usage are the two interdependent factors that significantly impact unplanned pregnancies at higher education institutions. However, it seems that the lack of sexual knowledge makes these problems worse. The paper notes factors such as peer pressure, contraceptive uptake, and substance abuse that contribute to unplanned pregnancies among students at higher education institutions. The paper recommends adopting policies that emphasize sexual abstinence or the use of contraceptives inclusive of condoms and the government to introduce a long-term injectable contraceptive.

Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) are the key players in the township tourism sector, which contributes substantially to the growth of the economy in South Africa. Township tourism SMMEs are critical to uplifting the rural and township economies. However, they remain marginalized and continue to struggle to be sustainable. The following paper explains how much township tourism SMMEs use to stay sustainable. The paper aims to identify SMMEs involved in township tourism. The paper also aims to establish factors influencing the sustainability of township tourism SMMEs. In addition, the paper also aims to determine the competitive strategy for the sustainability of township tourism SMMEs. The study adopted a positivist research paradigm through a quantitative approach and a survey research design. As a result of having no reliable available sampling frame, a non-probability sampling strategy was adopted, and relevant data was generated through questionnaires. The data was gathered from 61 owners or managers of township tourism SMMEs, in uMlazi, Durban. This paper’s findings revealed that the most influential factors affecting the sustainability of township tourism SMMEs were a lack of funding, strong business competition, and poor business location. The study's findings revealed that only a few entrepreneurs applied a competitive strategy to their businesses. From the data analyzed, relevant recommendations and conclusions were also drawn

Forming university exam schedules in Southern Africa has always been difficult. It is a scheduling problem with strict rules (hard constraints) and flexible ones (soft constraints). Students must take a final exam for most courses they are enrolled in each semester, held in a supervised setting. Therefore, finding a suitable time and location for each student is a common challenge. This paper proposes a solution to this scheduling problem based on the behaviour of bees, using a model called BSet, which uses simulated robotic devices to find and schedule courses. The results show that this approach is efficient and effective in creating exam schedules.

Leadership is a core component of organizational management, but its functions are getting more complex with the increasing involvement of changes taking place in the world. As such, the complicated operation of managing cognitive rigidity as a form of resistance to change amongst employees is very critical. On the other hand, resistance to change is described as one of the impediments to organizational expansion due to its negative consequences. To cope with change, there is a need for an effective leadership style. This study focuses on the association between change leadership styles, i.e., transformational and transactional leadership styles with cognitive rigidity as a form of resistance to change. The study further seeks to investigate the impact of these leadership styles on employees’ resistance to cognitive rigidity at the selected automobile dealerships in the Durban Metropolitan Region of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Theories on change and leadership styles have been considered in this paper. A descriptive survey design was adopted to collect information from a stratified sample size using self-administered questionnaires to 170 staff at automotive dealerships in the metropolitan of Durban in South Africa. Pearson correlational and regression analysis were employed to analyze data. Results indicated significant correlations between these change leadership styles and cognitive rigidity as a form of resistance to change. However, the transactional leadership style revealed a more substantial possibility of increasing resistance to change. The study recommends that management practice the transformational leadership style to encourage employee participation in the decision, build confidence, accept constructive criticisms, effective communication and transparency, thereby reducing rigidity.

This study aims to examine challenges teachers often face when teaching Grade 12 Business Studies in schools situated at the rural Umbumbulu circuit of Umlazi district, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A qualitative research methodology was used to explore challenges that teachers encountered when teaching Grade 12 Business Studies. A purposive sample of five Grade 12 teachers was selected from five rural secondary schools that offered Business Studies as a curriculum subject in the Umbumbulu circuit. The need to elicit lived experiences of a few Grade 12 Business Studies teachers in rural schools in ways that could relate to challenges encountered by teachers inspired the choice of case study research design. Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were used to generate data that was analysed through thematic analysis as a method of analysing qualitative data. The study found that in teaching Grade 12 Business Studies in rural schools, teachers had to face a number of challenges such as the unavailability of updated textbook publications, the language of learning and teaching and learner absenteeism, and late arrival at school. The study raises awareness of challenges Grade 12 Business Studies teachers in rural schools may face in teaching the subject so that teachers in emerging economies can think of ways to strengthen their resilience against these challenges and maximize their teaching potential.

The study was meant to provide a comparative analysis of the association between economic complexity and the current account performance for selected Sub-Saharan Africa and the BRICS group. Economic complexity measures the sophistication of a country’s productive structure by combining information on the diversity of a country (the number of products it exports), and the ubiquity of its products (the number of countries that export that product). The objective was to investigate whether a short- and long-term relationship exists through a Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PARDL) for 1994 – 2018. Additionally, agricultural exports were also incorporated to measure against the economic complexity Index (ECI). On the current account-ECI relationship, the PARDL estimates exposed a positive and significant impact from ECI on the current account performance in both groups in the long run, while short-run results were insignificant. On the other hand, agricultural exports were an insignificant predictor of the current account in both groups in the long run. However, only the BRICS realised a significant negative contribution in the short-run. Hence, it is essential, especially the still developing selected SSA, to improve upon its ECI to facilitate a current account improvement better. There is a need to modernise the agricultural and agro-industries in the selected SSA. The region should harness the full potential of its agricultural sector and also the overall, abundance of raw resources to advance process-led products for the export market.

The paper seeks to illustrate the propinquity between mobile phone technology and the profitability of immigrant entrepreneurs’ businesses and whether there is a positive effect. The outcome should ascertain if mobile technology could be propounded as a credible source of competitive advantage. The paper uses a qualitative approach, using content analysis as the research design tool. Data analysis was done through the conceptual content analysis approach. Various online databases such as EBSCOhost, Google scholar, JSTOR, and Science Direct were accessed for literature. Different terms (keywords) such as; “Mobile phone technology”, “mobile marketing”, and “mobile payment” were searched. The data collected through a systematic literature review were compiled, analysed, and generated conclusions. This paper deduces that immigrant entrepreneurs stand to gain a competitive edge by using mobile phone technology, thereby improving business performance. Future researchers need to expand the scope of their study to other sectors and industries globally. The paper exhibits the significance of apps and websites as mobile technology tools that can positively impact business performance. This paper outlines how mobile technology is now an essential catalyst in the performance of various business sectors. Results are essential to app and website developers, entrepreneurs and the business society.

The teaching of life sciences within the Islamic culture was observed in this investigation by instructors at the Association of Muslim Schools in the KZN region. The following question served as the basis for the investigation: Do Islamic schools teach life sciences from an Islamic perspective? The Association of Muslim Schools gave its approval after receiving ethical scrutiny. A questionnaire, interviews, and observations were used to gather data. The analysis of the data was conducted using an inductive methodology. The philosophy of Islam and its approaches to teaching the required Life Sciences curriculum served as the study's conceptual foundation. The results show that there is a problem with integrating religious knowledge into science teaching in Muslim ethos schools in South Africa. The Professional Teaching Model was an initiative to close the gap caused by educational dualism.

  Society plays a vital role in guiding human behaviours; as a result, the public needs to adhere to societal rules. This then gives primal importance to institutions, especially mass media, which communicate to the public. The accuracy of the institutions' information influences how well the public adheres to societal rules. This paper uses COVID-19 as a case study to investigate how mass media influences society's compliance with societal rules. This paper aims to examine both the positive and negative impacts of the media during COVID-19 and massages out how the media bring about social change through their influence on human behaviour. This paper is guided by strategic communication theory. The paper concludes that moving forward, the ethics of mass media is the best approach as it would go a long way to ensure that the industry's standards are high. Keywords: COVID-19, Mass media, Strategic Language, Communication, Ethics

With the growing popularity of social media as a news source, there is a need to explore the audience-inclusion function of these social media platforms for news reporting. It is imperative to explore how the audience uses these platforms in the production of news to define the transformative nature of the media and its role in empowering society (the audience) to ‘break’ and tell their own story. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand how these social media platforms encourage audience inclusion and provide opportunities for the audience to participate in the production and dissemination of news items. In understanding this, society will be able to situate the role of emerging social media platforms in news dissemination, especially in the 21st century. The study conceptualised the audience inclusion theory to explore and examine the role of Facebook and Twitter in producing and disseminating news, particularly in reporting the #FeesMustFall campaign. It explored how social media allows participation in news production and dissemination and how #FeesMustFall participants used Facebook and Twitter to produce and disseminate news about the protest. The study used a qualitative exploratory approach within the interpretive paradigm to understand the audience inclusion role in news dissemination. Findings indicate that students find recourse in social media as an avenue for news during the peak of #FeesMustFall. There is also a change in news reporting due to audience inclusion provided by social networks. Also, citizens in the form of university students have become more engaged with social media because of its ease of access and sense of connectedness.

Education is generally considered to be the core source of individuals’ better life and countries' economic and social development. Consequently, attending university and getting high qualifications are perceived as tools that generate and enhance economic growth. The current study aimed to analyse the effect of various educational levels on South African economic growth. The study employed quarterly data from 1995Q1 to 2021Q4. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model was employed to assess both long-run and short-run relationships among variables. The long-run results revealed that people who completed their grade 12 (with matric certificate) and bachelor's degrees contribute positively to South African economic growth. However, honours and higher degrees (master's and PhD) were found to have an inverse relationship with economic growth in South Africa. On the other hand, the short-run relationship indicated that all education levels contribute to economic growth in the short term. Based on these findings, the author suggests that the South African higher education curriculum should be revised as the negative effect of high education towards economic growth should be resulting in growing unemployment and graduates waiting to be employed rather than creating jobs themselves. Additionally, increasing job creation for graduates with higher qualifications would reduce the number of graduates that leave the country looking for employment abroad.

In recent years, most South African (SA) municipalities still need to produce clean audits. In 2018 and 2019, most municipalities in SA needed better-quality financial statements and performance reports. Misrepresentation of financial statements in audit reports is linked to inadequate governance, misappropriation of public funds and poor public service delivery. It is upon this background that this study aimed to: (i) assess perceptions of municipality middle management employees on factors affecting auditing, (ii) evaluate the differences in perceptions among municipality middle management employees on factors affecting auditing, (iii) measure the effect of factors affecting auditing on overall clean audit and (iv) establish the effect of clean audit on service delivery at two municipalities in Mpumalanga province. Using a structured questionnaire, a quantitative descriptive approach methodology was employed to collect data from a minimum sample of 294 employees in the middle management category working within the accounting and finance department at two municipalities in Mpumalanga province, SA. SPSS v28 was used to conduct descriptive and multivariate analyses, including mean, analysis of variance (ANOVA), correlation, and regression analysis. Results indicated that employees from the clean audit municipality had positive perceptions of factors affecting clean audit, while employees from the municipality with an unclean audit had negative perceptions. It was also concluded that factors affecting auditing had a statistically significant positive effect on clean audits. The findings in this study led to significant implications for theory and practice.

As qualitative research, this article aims to critically engage on the level of scholarship by modern scholars for pursuing knowledge development in South African public administration. The article also concludes that the purpose of peer review is to evaluate and improve the text and that if scholars perceive their purpose in review as to criticise and not to critique the scientific work for areas of improvement, they expose their weaknesses and biases, which does not contribute to knowledge development and improvement in the scholarship debates.

Business organizations face more issues due to globalization and continually changing customer expectations. To overcome these challenges, businesses must invest in the training and development of their employees. Training and development are essential nowadays. Employee performance is improved via training and development. A company's personnel determine its efficacy. In this era of globalization, training is crucial for the competitive and challenging corporate environment. The nerve must contribute to raising employees' quality of life at work and expanding the business. This paper aimed to investigate the impact of training and development programs on employee performance and productivity in the selected municipality of OR Tambo District Municipality, South Africa. To conduct this study, the researchers embraced an exploratory qualitative approach. The rationale for implementing qualitative methodology emanates from the need to understand the effectiveness of training programs in the Oliver Tambo district municipality in Eastern cape province, South Africa.The administration of the Nyandeni Local municipality conceded permission. The researchers acquired the letter, which permitted them to gather information from employees from the local municipality. Ethical clearance was affirmed genuinely. Non-probability sampling was used for its convenient strength. Precisely, data was obtained using semi-structured face-to-face interviews for this study. Thirty-five participants were included in this research study. According to the results, poor training and development were seen as a cause for the poor performance of employees. Capacity building was seen as a tool to increase employee commitment. Training programs were only visible to some in the municipality and the present study recommended that the Skills office conduct roadshows so that all employees could understand the office's role in the municipality. The study further recommended that training and development be closely monitored to determine its effectiveness.

Leadership theories have underpinned significant leadership studies and practices which span decades. Despite the plethora of research on different leadership theories and styles, there is minimal research exploring the relationship between previous leadership theories and the ethical leadership style. Previous research has shown that the ethical leadership effect goes above and beyond other leadership styles and theories as the latter lack an exclusive ethical focus. Therefore, this paper aims to address the identified gap from a preliminary perspective of previous leadership theories as compared to the ethical leadership style. In addition, ethical leadership is the ‘only’ leadership style that is part of the King IV code and report on Corporate Governance in South Africa. The study is built on previous research conducted on leadership theories in relation to ethical leadership and corporate governance as per the King IV report. The method employed involved conducting a historical narrative review of research from more than 60 relevant sources obtained from different databases and search engines on this topic. The paper found that a relationship exists between historical and contemporary leadership theories, contemporary theories and ethical leadership style, and ethical leadership and corporate governance. Stemming from these results, a conceptual model of the relationship between leadership theories, ethical leadership style, and Ubuntu ethics is shown. It is hoped that different types of organizations in South Africa will benefit from this review paper since most need to comply with the King IV report and code. The focus should be on ethical leadership as it promotes better employee performance and positive organizational outcomes.

Leadership effectiveness is critical for organisational success. An assessment of the factors which promote leadership effectiveness is therefore warranted. The study sought to investigate the attributes of effective leaders within the retail industry and reveal how they influence the perceptions of subordinates of the level of leadership in the sector. A self-administered questionnaire was hand-delivered to a sample of managers employed by retailing firms in the greater Tshwane area. The researchers analysed survey data from 104 respondents, using exploratory factor analysis to tease out the factors representing the attributes of effective leaders relative to the level of leadership. The findings suggest that subordinates believed the level of leadership among retail managers to be average. The results of the multiple-factor analysis revealed four categories of attributes, namely skilful, inspiring, compassionate and persistent. The correlation analysis between the level of leadership and attributes of leadership/management team revealed the level of leadership to be significantly and positively related to skilful, inspiring and persistent. Our discussion highlights the importance of understanding the qualities that make an effective leader. The study furthers the results of the inquiry into leadership and suggests avenues for future research on enhancing leadership effectiveness among retail managers.

A study investigated how normative commitment leads to employee commitment in a South African University. The literature review was conducted on the concepts of employee commitment, normative commitment, and employee commitment in a university setting. An explanatory research design was adopted together with a deductive research approach. Quantitative methodological was chosen to determine the common characteristics of the respondents, and a survey by means of a questionnaire was used to collect data, while descriptive statistics, t-test, and ANOVA (analysis of variance) were conducted on IBM SPSS, Version 26.  Findings suggest that none of the tested variables (gender, age, qualification as well as years in an organisation) influences commitment. This led to the conclusion that normative commitment does not influence employee commitment in that institution. Recommendations to include different variables to test normative commitment have been formulated, involving many other higher learning institutions. 

The proliferation of technology has innovated new ways of saving and investing money: online savings and investment platforms [OSIPs]. Predicting the intention to adopt Fintech has triggered the interest of many researchers in academia and industries. The primary objective of this study was to examine factors influencing the intention to adopt OSIPs in Nigeria by using data gathered from 640 digitally active citizens from selected cities in Nigeria. Reliability and validity tests were conducted through construct reliability and discriminant validity, respectively, through WarpPLS. Data were computed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (version) 24 and analyzed with structural equation modeling via WarpPLS. The findings of this study showed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence significantly affect attitude while facilitating conditions predict intention to adopt. It was also found that attitude significantly influences the intention to adopt OSIPs. The paper also discusses the study’s research limitations and presents implications for theory and practice.

This study investigated the impact of parental financial socialisation on financial attitude of young black African adults in rural and low-income area in South Africa through quantitative research approach, survey design and self-administered questionnaire. Data was collected from young black African adults in Fetakgomo Tubatse and Intsika Yethu local municipalities, low-income and rural areas in South Africa. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the relationship between parental financial behaviour, parental financial monitoring, parental financial discussion, parental financial communication, and parental financial teaching with financial attitude. The results showed that parental financial communication and parental financial teaching had a significant positive relationship with financial attitude. While parental financial behaviour, parental financial monitoring and parental financial discussion had no significant positive relationship with financial attitude. Therefore, the overall results indicated that parental financial socialisation has no impact on financial attitude of young black African adults in rural and low-income area in South Africa. This study provided recommendations to parents, young black African adults, financial educators, financial services institutions, financial counsellors and the government.

This study aims to shed light on the continued difficulties municipalities in South Africa are having in achieving SDG 6 and also explore the impacts of effective governance principles on ensuring sustainable development. To explore this, the study adopted a qualitative research methodology in a form of a conceptual research design to gather secondary data. The secondary data covering SDG 6 challenges and effective governance principles were reviewed and synthesized. Different databases were used to review data from July through October 2022, such as Google Scholar, Google, Sabinet, Scopus, and other online platforms. Different keywords were used to guide and search the existing relevant literature. Secondary data was analyzed using a critical discourse analysis approach. Because of South Africa's lax governance standards, the theoretical findings of this study demonstrate that there are growing concerns about achieving SDG 6 in the near future. However, it can be agreed that progress toward effective governance has been encouraged and promoted, but the challenges remain. Therefore, the study recommends effective and inclusive governance because, without it, South Africa will not achieve its socio-economic goals, like SDG 6. South Africa should put in place structures that support constitutionalism, accountability, democracy, and good governance if it is to meet its development objectives. It is important to overcome lax governance, which is characterized by mismanagement, fraud, bribery, corruption, and a lack of accountability, transparency, and public participation. Again, South Africa should have an efficient government that works to fulfil the localized SDGs and responds to community desires and aspirations enshrined in the Municipal Systems Act (Act 32 of 2000)