ABSTRACT The synergistic relationship between HIV/AIDS and respiratory infections, such as tu- berculosis(TB) and pneumonia not only results in high mortality rates but is also a source of economic burden borne by many nations in the sub-saharan Africa. The search for a cure or vaccine for HIV/AIDS has yielded no conclusive results so far. Treatment fail- ure and lack of adherence to treatment schedule which results in the evolution of drug resistant strains of diseases are challenges to grap...
Abstract The study assessed the environmental impacts associated with urban agriculture in selected residential areas of Gweru Urban. Qualitative research methods were prominently utilised throughout the research and were complimented by quantitative methods. Questionnaires, structured interviews and direct observations were used in soliciting significant information relevant to the study objectives. Self-administration of questionnaires was done to 35 household units which were selected thr...
Abstract Lippia javanica (Burm. F.) Spreng occurs naturally in eastern, central and southern Africa. It has widely been used as herbal tea, for ethnomedicinal applications and as a botanical pesticide. Lippia javanica species exhibit great morphological and chemical variations which are notable across a number of natural populations. Differences in morphological taxonomy on important characters such as peduncle length and number of inflorescence per axil have been reported which has led to th...
ABSTRACT It is the desire of every person to have a career. Not much thought has been taken by young people on how they can arrive at their future careers. The reason is mainly because they are not aware. As much as many people have attained their careers through education, not much consideration has been given to the other factors within education that leads one to his or her career. The study traced one’s career from primary to present position. There are stages one follows to reach the c...
ABSTRACT Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), one of the main stay of Lake Victoria fisheries, was introduced in the 1950s and 1960s to boost capture fisheries. However, its production has declined dramatically over the years due to over exploitation and its consumption preference by the ever increasing Kenyan population. The decline of capture fisheries has made aquaculture production be considered as the future solution to the declining of capture fisheries and the availability of fish glo...
ABSTRACT Heavy seasonal use of specific organophosphate and carbamate in the catchment area of Lake Naivasha is a potential cause of pollution of sediment, water and fish in the lake. However, there is lack of data on the potential pollutants, their levels in the aquatic ecosystem and monitoring strategy. The objectives of this study were to identify the commonly used pesticides and the timing of their application in Lake Naivasha catchment area through a survey; to evaluate the performance o...
ABSTRACT The issue that a pension fund manager faces is how to optimize his or her investment strategies. The question we resolved is the optimal design of the minimum guarantee in a defined contribution pension Fund Scheme. We study the optimal asset allocation strategy a given fund manager can adopt to maximize surplus (the difference between the total wealth and the Guarantee) and the payback ratio (ratio between total wealth and Guarantee). Finally, We analyze the impact of the main param...
ABSTRACT Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the economies of developed and developing countries, through creation of new jobs. Access to bank financial resources seems to be a major constraint to the growth of SMEs in the developing context. This study thus, aimed at finding out the constraints faced by SMEs in particular accessing bank financing. The study adopted the adverse selection theory of credit markets. This study adopted an explanatory and descriptive surv...
ABSTRACT Income accrued from Retirement Benets Fund is an exceptionally important component of every working individual's life cycle globally. The major sources of such income are: unfunded state pensions; funded private pensions; mandatory schemes; and post-retirement work. The urgency and importance has made many countries to give it considerable attention by enacting enabling laws and policies to safeguard it. In Kenya, steps have been made by establishing the National Social Security Fund...
ABSTRACT Development programs designed to address particular global challenges are facing increasing pressure to demonstrate their impact on the targeted com munities. The method mostly used to measure impact of development programs is by comparing the changes in outcomes of the program participants over time commonly know as before-and-after comparison. However, in some cases, the treatment and control groups are usually heterogeneous at baseline, making the difference in difference (DiD) me...
ABSTRACT Sugarcane is an important cash crop in Kenya. Due to its economic value, efforts are in progress to increase its production. The efforts include intense use of fertilizers, besides the use of high-yielding varieties. The intense use of fertilizers adds heavy metals to the sugarcane growing soils. The sugarcane plants can bioaccumulate heavy metals from soils to levels above safe limits. Metal levels in soil and factors such as soil pH and soil organic matter (SOM) influence levels of...
ABSTRACT Human activities (including agriculture) contribute to enhance release of primary greenhouse gases (GHGs) (CH4, CO2, N2O) into the atmosphere leading to global warming. Sugarcane is an important economic crop in Kenya being third highest contributor to gross domestic product (GDP) after tea and coffee. About 90% of Kenya‘s production is contributed by smallholders. To improve/maximize sugarcane yields, farmers convert natural vegetation to sugarcane farms; apply nitrogen fertilizer...
ABSTRACT Intact ecosystems can regulate the transmission of infectious diseases by maintaining the diversity of species in equilibrium. However, human driven land use change is a major driver of environmental change and can affect the emergence and the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. This study investigated how land use change, and hence the extent of wildlife-livestock interactions affect the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases in the Maasai Mara ecosystem in Kenya, us...
Abstract Latent semantic analysis (LSA) application in information retrieval promises to offer better performance by overcoming some limitations that plagues traditional termmatching techniques. These term-matching techniques have always relied on matching query terms with document terms to retrieve the documents having terms matching the query terms. However, by use of these traditional retrieval techniques, users’ needs have not been adequately served. While users want to search through i...
Abstract A shift from technology-oriented knowledge management to people-oriented knowledge management is indispensable. To achieve this, organizations must understand the nature of knowledge. In this work, knowledge has been found to be both a process and a collection of artifacts. This makes knowledge and the knower to be two inseparable entities. Consequently, the appropriate way to share both the explicit and the implicit knowledge components is through people-with-people connection. Howe...