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Continuing Professional Teacher Development (CPTD) refers to the ongoing learning and development of teachers throughout their careers. It involves a range of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to help teachers improve their knowledge, skills, and effectiveness in the classroom. CPTD programs can take many different forms, such as workshops, seminars, mentoring programs, online courses, and peer networks. This desktop review paper examines the role of CPTD on teachers' and learners’ achievement. The paper reviews among others the following; the nature and concept of  CPTD, the importance of  CPTD, South African teacher education policy framework and CPTD, the educational achievement and CPTD, school effectiveness and CPTD, learner and teacher learning and CPTD. The paper uses social learning theory as a theory that underpins the paper and makes some plausible recommendations.

The paper examines the educators’ perceptions of the influence of administrative communication on effective teaching in a selected school in South Africa. The paper adopted a case study research design of a qualitative research approach. Purposive sampling techniques were used to determine eight (8) participants that, comprises of 4 (four) educators and 4 (four) principals of some selected public schools in Buffalo City Metropolitan.  A semi-structured interview was used to elicit information from the participants. The findings indicated that administrative communication influences educators’ task performance and communication is revealed to influence the attainment of goals and school objectives. Also, the principals use different communication channels according to the skills of their educators to make valuable decisions. Educators performed better when they have a sense of belonging and receive constant communication from the principal. It is, however, recommended that the principals should endeavour to understand the type of communication skills possessed by the educators so that such skills will be used constantly to promote effective teaching.

Recently, many developing nations are disproportionately experiencing the impact of shocks and stressors compared to the rest of the world due to increasing inadequate capability and capacity to withstand the shocks. In particular, farmers and farming households are faced with diverse repeated and unanticipated shocks, which may be socio-economic, ecological and/or environmental in nature. All these shocks become unbearable and worsen in terms of food insecurity. The welfare costs associated with the shocks are significant, attracting humanitarian and development policy experts’ attention to developing suitable interventions to build a resilient food system and society. Consequently, this study analyzed the correlates of farmers’ resilience to food insecurity in South-West Nigeria. Drawing on the data collected from 472 smallholder farmers randomly sampled, descriptive statistics, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s food insecurity experience scale approach, composite score technique, principal component analysis (PCA) and Structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that more than half (55.3%) of the respondents were inadequate in almost all the resilience indicators and components, had low resilience capacity, and were vulnerable to food shocks and food insecurity. In comparison, only 7.8% have a high resilience capacity to be a buffer against food shocks. 54% of the respondents fall into a high food insecurity category, while only 1.9% fall into a very-low food insecurity continuum. The SEM analysis also revealed that social safety net (p<0.01), climate extreme events (p<0.01), access to essential services (p<0.01), presence of enabling institutional environment (p<0.01), and technical level (p<0.05) made direct impacts on the farmers’ food insecurity status. Conversely, possession of assets (p<0.01), and social capital/neighborhood effect (p<0.1) had inverse impacts on the farmers’ food insecurity status. The study recommended transparently implementing a social protection program to assist the farmer in building buffers against shocks. There is also a greater need for sustained investments across the resilience pillars and indicators to build farmers’ resilience capacity to food insecurity and other shocks.

Income inequality is a pervasive problem in South Africa and particularly affects the Eastern Cape, where poverty levels remain high despite several efforts to address this societal issue. The datasets from 1499 households used for this study, were extracted from the 2021 South African General Household Survey. This study thus examined the distributional pattern of households’ income inequality in Eastern Cape, South Africa, through the use of exploratory data analysis and application of regression-based decomposition of inequality. The EDA results revealed that relatively older households are more concentrated than those young people, female-headed households were also predominant in the study area, while the majority of the households are Black South Africans. The magnitude of the monetary variables’ departure from the mean inferred clear evidence of a widened households’ income disparity or inequality in the study area. The decomposition analysis indicated the contributions of various socioeconomic factors to income inequality. The findings from the regression-based decomposition of inequality found household size, access to basic infrastructure services, possession of assets, internet communication facilities, and households’ population group, as the major drivers of the households’ income inequality in the province, while livelihood diversity has a relatively moderate proportionate contribution. On the other hand, factors such as age and gender of the household head, as well as households’ involvements in agriculture have a minor effect on the households’ income inequality. This paper finally concludes that the relative contributions of each factor contributing to inequality were deemed important for designing effective policy-relevant interventions which can be used to promote economic growth and to address this persistent challenge of income inequality in society.

Continuing Professional Teacher Development (CPTD) refers to the ongoing learning and development of teachers throughout their careers. It involves a range of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to help teachers improve their knowledge, skills, and effectiveness in the classroom. CPTD programs can take many different forms, such as workshops, seminars, mentoring programs, online courses, and peer networks. This desktop review paper examines the role of CPTD on teachers' and learners’ achievement. The paper reviews among others the following; the nature and concept of  CPTD, the importance of  CPTD, South African teacher education policy framework and CPTD, the educational achievement and CPTD, school effectiveness and CPTD, learner and teacher learning and CPTD. The paper uses social learning theory as a theory that underpins the paper and makes some plausible recommendations.

Income inequality is a pervasive problem in South Africa and particularly affects the Eastern Cape, where poverty levels remain high despite several efforts to address this societal issue. The datasets from 1499 households used for this study, were extracted from the 2021 South African General Household Survey. This study thus examined the distributional pattern of households’ income inequality in Eastern Cape, South Africa, through the use of exploratory data analysis and application of regression-based decomposition of inequality. The EDA results revealed that relatively older households are more concentrated than those young people, female-headed households were also predominant in the study area, while the majority of the households are Black South Africans. The magnitude of the monetary variables’ departure from the mean inferred clear evidence of a widened households’ income disparity or inequality in the study area. The decomposition analysis indicated the contributions of various socioeconomic factors to income inequality. The findings from the regression-based decomposition of inequality found household size, access to basic infrastructure services, possession of assets, internet communication facilities, and households’ population group, as the major drivers of the households’ income inequality in the province, while livelihood diversity has a relatively moderate proportionate contribution. On the other hand, factors such as age and gender of the household head, as well as households’ involvements in agriculture have a minor effect on the households’ income inequality. This paper finally concludes that the relative contributions of each factor contributing to inequality were deemed important for designing effective policy-relevant interventions which can be used to promote economic growth and to address this persistent challenge of income inequality in society.

The paper examines the educators’ perceptions of the influence of administrative communication on effective teaching in a selected school in South Africa. The paper adopted a case study research design of a qualitative research approach. Purposive sampling techniques were used to determine eight (8) participants that, comprises of 4 (four) educators and 4 (four) principals of some selected public schools in Buffalo City Metropolitan.  A semi-structured interview was used to elicit information from the participants. The findings indicated that administrative communication influences educators’ task performance and communication is revealed to influence the attainment of goals and school objectives. Also, the principals use different communication channels according to the skills of their educators to make valuable decisions. Educators performed better when they have a sense of belonging and receive constant communication from the principal. It is, however, recommended that the principals should endeavour to understand the type of communication skills possessed by the educators so that such skills will be used constantly to promote effective teaching.

Recently, many developing nations are disproportionately experiencing the impact of shocks and stressors compared to the rest of the world due to increasing inadequate capability and capacity to withstand the shocks. In particular, farmers and farming households are faced with diverse repeated and unanticipated shocks, which may be socio-economic, ecological and/or environmental in nature. All these shocks become unbearable and worsen in terms of food insecurity. The welfare costs associated with the shocks are significant, attracting humanitarian and development policy experts’ attention to developing suitable interventions to build a resilient food system and society. Consequently, this study analyzed the correlates of farmers’ resilience to food insecurity in South-West Nigeria. Drawing on the data collected from 472 smallholder farmers randomly sampled, descriptive statistics, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s food insecurity experience scale approach, composite score technique, principal component analysis (PCA) and Structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that more than half (55.3%) of the respondents were inadequate in almost all the resilience indicators and components, had low resilience capacity, and were vulnerable to food shocks and food insecurity. In comparison, only 7.8% have a high resilience capacity to be a buffer against food shocks. 54% of the respondents fall into a high food insecurity category, while only 1.9% fall into a very-low food insecurity continuum. The SEM analysis also revealed that social safety net (p<0.01), climate extreme events (p<0.01), access to essential services (p<0.01), presence of enabling institutional environment (p<0.01), and technical level (p<0.05) made direct impacts on the farmers’ food insecurity status. Conversely, possession of assets (p<0.01), and social capital/neighborhood effect (p<0.1) had inverse impacts on the farmers’ food insecurity status. The study recommended transparently implementing a social protection program to assist the farmer in building buffers against shocks. There is also a greater need for sustained investments across the resilience pillars and indicators to build farmers’ resilience capacity to food insecurity and other shocks.