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The unprecedented rate of urbanization across the world has led to increased demand for good, affordable housing. This research was conducted to ascertain the reasons and challenges of urbanization on housing shortages in Gaborone, Botswana. The focal point of this study was to assess the impact of urbanization on the demand of housing in Gaborone, Botswana. Thereafter the study recommended astute strategies desirable to curb the problem of urbanization and scarcity of accommodation in Gaborone. This research used a descriptive research design and distributed questionnaires to Gaborone residents during data collection. The researchers used stratified and clustered sampling methods. The study results indicated the need for better educational facilities and employment opportunities as the major causes of urbanization in Gaborone. Shortage of housing, high rentals and escalating land prices were also identified as some of the major challenges of urbanization in Gaborone. The study recommended that the government to introduce rent control measures to restrict rising prices, the private sector should be encouraged to further participate in the provision of accommodation for different income groups to be sold or leased at subsidized rates. The study also recommended the government to buy plenty of land and real estate, to reduce speculative behaviour of land barons.

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 study sought to examine the effect of Accounting Information and Communication control on the financial performance of Sacco’s in Kenya. The study employed a mixed research design targeting 175 Sacco’s with 875 respondents. A purposive sampling technique was used to select the CEOs, Finance Managers, Risk Managers, ICT Managers and Internal auditors. Data were collected by the use of both primary and secondary techniques. Primary data collection was using questionnaires, while secondary data detailed document analysis of audited accounts to capture information on financial performance. A pilot study was conducted in Nairobi County. Content and construct validity were tested at a KMO value of 0.870, which signified that factor analysis was appropriate. Cronbach Alpha was applied to establish reliability, ranging from 0.859 for accounting information and communication control to 0.916 for financial performance. Data were analyzed by use of descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive analysis included; frequencies, Mean, Standard deviation and percentage, while inferential analysis involved regression analysis. The results showed a significant positive relationship between Accounting Information and Communication control and financial performance (r=0.661, P=0.000). Accounting Information and Communication control explained 43.7% (R2 =0.437) of variance in financial performance; the beta value for Accounting Information and Communication control from the regression model was 0.551 at p< 0.05.  The study concluded that Accounting Information and Communication control has a significant positive effect on financial performance. The study recommended that SACCOs conduct periodic reviews of the effectiveness of its accounting information and communication system to ensure management receives timely, relevant, and reliable reports for decision-making.

Tour operators have ensured the success of the Kenyan tourism sector, poised to contribute to achieving key government economic policies like the Tourism Agenda 2018-2022, the National Tourism Blueprint 2030, and the Big-Four Agenda. However, due to the volatility of the tourism industry, stiff competition, rigid tourism policies, and pandemics, tour operators’ performance has recorded a 2% steady decline since 2011. Therefore, this paper explores the upscaling of performance using a differentiation strategy among tour operator companies in Nairobi City County. The study followed a descriptive design approach, with the balanced scorecard and Porter’s generic strategies forming the theoretical basis. Fifteen (15) company owners and 210 managers participated in the study. Data were collected using structured questionnaires and interviews. Stratified simple random sampling was used to sample respondents from the companies while purposive sampling was used to select company owners. Data collected were analyzed in SPSS (Ver.26) using descriptive statistics to infer variable characteristics. Inferential statistics; Pearson correlation, ANOVA, and simple linear regression were used to detect the strength of the relationship and test the hypothesis. Correlation analysis revealed a strong positive relationship between differentiation strategy and organizational performance (r=0.77, P=0.000), leading to the rejection of the null hypothesis. Regression analysis revealed an adjusted R2(0.602) indicating that differentiation strategy explains 60.2% of organizational performance’s variation (b=0.594, P=.000). The study recommends that tour operator companies should develop innovative packages based on place and price and significantly invest in R&D to enhance a strong brand for optimal performance. This study provides policymakers with an avenue to scrutinize levels of organizational performance using a strategic management approach.

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.

This study seeks to measure the effectiveness of traditional media in promoting tourism in this digital age in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This study employed a descriptive research design and a questionnaire was used to collect the data. The findings revealed that traditional and online media are more or less equally competitive in promoting tourism. Traditional media is still effective in promoting tourism in this digital age, especially in the domestic market. The study concluded and recommended that tourism marketers and authorities must come to terms with coexistence with traditional media and online media. There is no need to rely on one media to do it all. Where traditional media is lacking, online media must be there to make up for the difference and enhance the tourist experience.

The aim of this study was to determine the nexus between brand consciousness and psychological antecedents of consumer decision-making styles of Generation Y consumers in Botswana. Brand Consciousness refers to the degree to which people use brand names to make purchase decisions. The study employed quantitative and causal research. E-questionnaire was employed to collect data from 400 generation Y consumers, of which 320 were successfully selected and tested through purposeful sampling. The study results revealed that there is a positive relationship between brand consciousness and psychological antecedents of consumer decision-making styles and also the research findings indicated that millennial consumers in Botswana identify themselves as independent decision-makers that do not rely on external influence when making their purchasing decisions. The study results also indicated that most Batswana millennials are more cognitive innovators than sensory innovators. It is recommended that retailers must be encouraged to add excitement to shopping amenities to attract and retain millennial sensory innovators. Tangible evidence on future research is also required on the actual effects of modern smart e-shopping on generational transformation from Gen X, and Y to Z.

The current study examined the impact of financial aspects in achieving sustainable public procurement at the Zanzibar Urban Services Project. To achieve this objective, the study used a questionnaire and documentary review checklist to collect data on identifying the impact of financial aspects on sustainable public procurement. The study used a case study design using Zanzibar Urban Services Project. Both primary and secondary data were collected through questionnaires and documentary reviews. The researcher employed the probability sampling technique specifically stratified sampling technique to sample 107 out of 153 individuals from the field and content analysis for documentary review. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse preliminary data and lastly multiple regression analysis modals was used to measure the relationship among variables. Study results indicated that in spite of the contribution of financial aspects in procurement, there is a challenge of undermining the emphasis of other non-financial aspects in procurement procedures. It was also confirmed that there is a need of balancing between financial, social and environmental aspects which are argued to achieve sustainable public procurement.

This study argues that preservation of internal security of Namibia should not be the primary responsibility of only the Namibian Police Force (NamPol). The issue of security has been the subject of interest throughout human existence and still reserves its principal occupation in the public domain. However, the challenges of insecurities and increased threats to human existence domestically and globally have triggered incessantly renewed security inquiry by scholars, security practitioners, politicians and public administrators. The study employed a qualitative approach; interviews were used to purposively collect data from 20 participants which comprised of the heads of directorates, the regional commanders in the Namibian Police Force, Legal Assistance Centre, NamRights, Namibian Defence Force, Namibian Correctional Service and Windhoek Municipal Police. The data was analysed using thematic analysis, which led to the development of the Framework for Performing Internal Security [FPIS] model. The findings indicate that due to the nature of factors linked to insecurities, such as technology, porous borders, political factors, environmental factors, inequality, poverty, unemployment and lack of provision for essential services, the Namibian police alone cannot preserve internal security effectively. As such, the study recommends that constitutional amendments to incorporate other stakeholders in the preservation Namibia’s internal security.

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.

This study aimed to analyse the impact of the environment on the transfer of training in the work environment, as little has been done to explore the nature of the transfer of the learning work environment. This study used secondary sources. The information was outsourced from online journals (published peer-reviewed articles), published and unpublished dissertations, online sources, and textbooks relevant to the studied topic. An employee's work environment consists of the physical and social conditions in which employees perform their daily duties and impact how well a person puts their training to use. This study concludes that organizational level (characteristics of the work environment) significantly affect the transfer of training in the work environment positively or negatively. Trainees who worked in a more positive environment and received more encouragement from their peers made the most progress on transferring training. However, peer-supported trainees in a negative environment were just as successful at transferring what they learned as those in a favourable one. Training transfer was highly correlated with supervisory assistance, work autonomy, and preferred support. There is a lack of theory on the transfer of training. This study will contribute to the theory by expanding the subject of the work environment about the transfer of training. Findings from this research will advance the science behind the work environment variables and transfer of training. This study will bring new knowledge of the work environment on the transfer of training and will provide leads for future research. Since this study relied on secondary sources, it was limited to the scholarly work that was available at the time the research was conducted.

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.