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Securing Food Through Women’s Traditional Knowledge In Seed Security: The Case of Mulili Sub-Location,, Makueni County Of Eastern Kenya
Get PDFAlthough achieving seed security is quite different from attaining food security, the crisis of food insecurity can be traced to seed insecurity. A discussion of food security, without paying attention to seed security is, therefore, incomplete. It is even more incomplete without revisiting the key role of women’s knowledge in ensuring seed security and consequently, food security. The decision on the type of seed to conserve falls upon the woman who knows what characteristics of the crop are most useful to the household. This study presents the findings of a survey that investigated women’s indigenous knowledge in household food security in Mulîlîî sub-location, Makuenî County. It is informed by the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) theory and the research design was both qualitative and quantitative. The targeted population comprised the rural women farmers. By use of purposive and simple random sampling, 3 elderly women (>60 years) and 56 women farmers (>18 and <60 years) were selected respectively. Data was collected through an interviewer administered structured questionnaire and an in-depth interview guide. One focus group discussion was held and analyses were carried out using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) for the quantitative data and by thematic analysis for the qualitative data. Findings revealed that despite the existence of vast scientific knowledge on seed and food production, women farmers still rely heavily on their traditional knowledge in ensuring seed security and consequently, food security. Faced with new and challenging realities, they not only rely on their community’s passed down practices but have also devised new methods as they innovate and experiment on the locally available materials. The study recommends revisiting this knowledge and practices with a view of not only integrating and building on the same but also for the purpose of scientifically validating and authenticating such practices
Testing Of Consistent Trends in Stock Performance In The Nairobi Securities Exchange
Get PDFConsistent stock performance contradicts random adjustment of stock prices in efficient markets and is thus anomalous despite the potential of generating significant profits for investors. This research set out to test the existence of consistent stock performance in the NSE during the years 2001 to 2010 and to examine whether consistent stock performance is associated with efficiency of NSE. Balanced monthly closing averagestock price data was employed for 32 sample stocks drawn using purposive sampling technique from a population of 56 stocks listed in the NSE during the study period. In order to identify consistent stock performance, frequency tests were employed. In order to test association between consistent stock performance and efficiency of NSE 3 tests were employed including: t-test to test the significance of abnormal returns of consistentstock performance. Runs serial correlation test was employed to test serial correlation of stock returns. Spearman rank correlation was also employed to test volatility of stock prices with time. The results indicated weak presence of consistent stock performance in the NSE and that abnormal returns of consistently performing stocks were insignificant.There was also zero serial correlation of stock returns and stock prices of consistently performing stocks exhibited low volatility with time. The overall results indicate that NSE may be weak form efficient. This research contributes to new knowledge by combining the alternative definitions of consistent stock performance to minimize on the inherent weaknesses of each definition(cross sectional and longitudinal) which havein the past been studied independently.Key Words: Consistent stock performance, serial correlation, volatility, abnormal returns, stock market efficiency
Relationship between Audit Firm Size, Non-Audit Services and Audit Quality
Get PDFThe study investigates the relationship between audit firm size, non-audit services and audit quality in Nigeria against the background of the global financial crisis. The population of the study is the commercial banks listed in the Nigeria Stock Exchange Market from where a sample of 18 bankswas scientifically established. Well structured 200 copies of the instrument (questionnaire) were administered on the respondents who were selected using the purposive random sampling method. We had a response rate of 75%. We estimated the data using ordinary least squares regressionmethod. Audit firm size and non-audit services were positive and statistically significant. Audit tenure and independence were positive but statistically insignificant while audit fee was negatively related to audit quality. Against the background of the findings, we concluded that the size of the audit firm increases the quality of audit, non-audit services give the auditor a comprehensive knowledge of the organisation thereby helping to increase audit quality. Keywords: Auditor independence, audit quality, non-audit services, audit fees, spillover reputation hypothesis, deep pocket hypothesi
Factors Influencing The Adoption Of M-Banking By Customers In Kenya
No full textThe current business environment is getting more competitive. In order for manycompanies to stay competitive, businesses have always strived to improve themselvesby creating better products and services for their customers. With the recentemergence of the wireless and mobile network a new platform for business to tradetheir product and service known as m-banking is beginning to gather attentions frombusinesses. Unlike e-commerce where the connectivity is through internet, m-bankingis connected wirelessly in a mobile environment using mobile devices. M-banking hasmuch potential in developing countries as small and medium-sized companies inremote areas can use them to reach many potential customers (United Nations, 2002).Prior to the development of m-banking, e-commerce which is associated with costlyinfrastructure and equipments such as computers and fixed line network wasdepended on. M-banking offers more ubiquity and accessibility to the users whencompared to e-commerce. The accessibility of m-banking is an advantage over ecommerceas e-commerce applications usually need a wired end-user device(Schwiderski-Grosche and Knospe, 2002). As mobile devices are small in size and lightin weight, it is also very convenient for users to carry around the device (Schwiderski-Grosche and Knospe, 2002). Given that objectives are usually owned by individual andnot shared between different users, m-banking allows the services to be cateredtowards the users’ needs (e.g. ring tones) (Schwiderski-Grosche and Kntispe, 2002).Mobile banking provides banking services to inaccessible areas. It provides financialservices to clients allowing them the flexibility of accessing their account details fromanywhere in the world. According to Michael et al,( 2008); in the book “MobileInternet for Dummies, 2008” mobile banking is safer than Internet banking with fewerreported frauds. Access to mobile bank accounts requires a PIN (personalidentification number) and a secure password every time a user wishes to log in. Allinformation sent from and received by a mobile phone has 128-bit encryption thatprotects the information during its broadcast. Although there are lots of potentials forbusinesses in m-banking when compared to developed countries such as Japan andSouth Korea, m-banking in Kenya is still at its infancy stage (Wong and Hiew, 2005).According to Financial Sector Deepening Kenya (FSD Kenya), the most recent dataavailable indicates that only 19% of adult Kenyans reported having access to a formal,regulated financial institution while over a third (38%) indicated no access to even themost rudimentary form of informal financial service. This leaves a percentage of more than80% outside the bracket of the reach of mainstream banking (Njenga, 2005)
Relationship Marketing And Customer Loyalty In Mobile Telecommunication Industry In Nairobi, Kenya
Get PDFRelationship marketing is a strategy designed to build customer loyalty, interaction and customer long-term engagement through provision of information and open communication that suits customer needs. The broad objective of the study was to analyze the relationship between customer relationship marketing and customer loyalty in the mobile telecommunication industry in Nairobi, Kenya. The study employed a descriptive survey design. The population comprised individual customers of the four mobiletelecommunication companies in Kenya. A sample size of 384 respondents was utilized. Proportionate stratified sampling method based market share of each company was used.Primary data was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire while descriptive statistics and simple regression analysis was used to analyze the quantitative data. Thefindings were as follows, quality of a service is subjectively perceived by customers during the interactions with a firm and has critical impact on customers' evaluation of servicequality; effective communication of pricing policies as well as flexible pricing for various services offered play a great role in customer loyalty; positive brand image makes it easierfor a firm to convey its brand value to consumers and also generates favorable customer loyalty among people; Businesses operating in an intensely price based competitiveenvironment, dependent on high economies of scale and with low levels of staff-customer interaction are bound to suffer shocks in their market positions and profitability, Howeverlarge investments on relational strategies like building trust, commitment, communication and satisfaction can turnaround the shocks
Women’s Experiences as Sources of Public and Legitimate Knowledge: Constitution Making in Kenya
Get PDFBetty Friedan in her essay, Model Making-Knowledge notes: “All human beings have a biased and limited view of the world: biased in that it begins with self and limited in that it is restrained by experience. This means that there are many ways of seeing the world….”[1] African women’s view of the world is one of those ways, a perspective that needs to be made visible and integrated in our definition of how we see the world. We need to bring this contextual knowledge to visibility. African women have created their own governance structures and generated knowledge which remains outside the mainstream knowledge, policy and Institutional development in Africa. We continue, in our region, to refer to and use theories and frameworks whose basic assumptions do not include African women’s worldviews. Theories of power, political and other, need to be interrogated from the African women’s experiences point-of-view. Looking at such novels as Margaret Ogola’s The River and The Source (Kenya), Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter (Senegal) and Lena Elieshi’s “Parched Earth’’ (Tanzania), among other novels, will help us understand what this means. The story of women’s participation in the review process in Kenya and indeed in Africa south of the Sahara will help us see how they have moved the process of naming, ordering and making sense of the world for themselves and for society. 1.1 African Women and Social Theory Social theory argues that all human beings are influenced by belief systems that we subscribe to, and that we tend to project to the world the value systems we have learnt. We select evidence from the world that reinforces our value systems because this helps us respond to what is meaningful to us.In addition, we always tend to see that which reinforces our worldview.[2]2 The Feminist theory has been concerned with how we think and how we can think differently, appreciating that our reasoning and other processes are always in a flux, always changing and responding to new challenges. In order to change our societies, women’s experiences, vision and philosophy of life needs to find its way into shaping and making sense of the world. We need to offer a more comprehensive view of the world and change the nature of knowledge brewed in our region. Okot p’ Bitek, the great African scholar, during his tenure at the University of Nairobi would often tell his students colleagues: “I have heard what you say about what others have said, but what do you say?” It is this question that I seek to answer in this essay. The voices of African women, their views, perspectives and experiences must be brought to the forefront and find their way to the centre of knowledge making and naming our world. Betty Friedan, For the record, Page 10(Dale Spender, Model Knowledge-Making) Page 2
Feminism, Culture and Development in Africa
Get PDFAfrican women continue to scramble for leftovers and crumbs as far as participation in the development of Africa is concerned. They are still victims of tokenism that is used to exonerate African societies of discrimination against and injustice towards women. In essence, African women are still victims of gender inequality. However, in the second decade of the 21st century they have gone a step further in their search and indeed struggle for justice. Rather than sit back or stand aloof and mourn about their plight, they are holding each other’s hand and from this strong vantage point, they are better able to interrogate the social elements that militate against their participation in the development of the African continent. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate culture as one of the elements or backbones in our social fabric that are used to create obstacles against women’s participation in the development of our continent. It is important to emphasize from the onset that culture per se is not the culprit here; culture and the aspects that go with it are misused to discriminate against women and to institute other forms of oppression on women. For instance, in many African societies women are culturally assumed to be companions for men, who always have to take the second position. As they proverb goes, “the man is the head, the woman is the neck”
Reflections on Feminism and Development in Africa: The Case of Kenya
Get PDFThis paper discusses the importance of moving towards African centered feminist theories. The paper argues that bringing feminism home to Africa will greatly impact our understanding of development processes in Africa. Scholars, world over, have come up with feminist theories, frameworks and ideologies in order to respond to the realities of women at particular moments in history. That there is a plethora of feminist theories out there is an understatement. We have heard of renowned feminists in the West. Feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft,[1] Virginia Woolf,[2] Andrea Dworkin,[3] Catherine Mackinnon[4], Carol Smart,[5] Betty Friedan[6] and so on. We are also familiar with the many different kinds of feminisms that exist to explain women’s realities universally. Feminisms such as liberal feminism,[7] radical feminism,[8] black feminism,[9] materialist feminism,[10] environmental feminism,[11] and postcolonial (third world) feminism[12] The theories are drawn from a wide range of disciplines such as philosophy, law, sociology, psychology, Marxism, post colonialism and the list goes on. These feminist theories and perspectives have a lot to say about non-discrimination, equality, representation of women, domestic violence, class and racial differences and so on.What is interesting however is that these approaches to the woman question have predominantly been developed based on the experiences of women in the West and yet we continue to rely on these forms of feminism, feminist thought and frameworks to describe African women’s experiences.[13] We need to COME HOME. It’s time to for homecoming! We need to consolidate the efforts of various African women across the continent and come up with ways of critically engaging with the realities of women of Africa. The Kenyan women and many African women have, through the constitution making process, agreed resoundingly with Chinua Achebe’s famous statement “If you don’t like someone else’s story, you need to write your own”.[14] That is why this seminar is so important. We are beginning to tell a narrative. A narrative about how women have told and continue to tell their own story of hope, their own story of joy, their own story of resistance, their own story of how they conceptualize themselves and their world.1 See Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects. London: Joseph Johnson, 1792. This is one of the earliest works in Feminist philosophy. 2 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989. 4. 3 See Dworkin, Andrea, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality. EP Dutton, 1976; In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (with Catharine MacKinnon, 1997 4 See for instance Mackinnon, Catherine, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987; Mackinnon, Catherine, Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006; 5 See Smart, Carol. Women, Crime and Criminology: a Feminist Critique. Routledge, London, 1976; Smart, Carol, Feminism and the Power of Law Routledge, 1991; Smart, Carol. The Ties that Bind. Routledge, London, 1984; Smart, Carol. Women, Sexuality, and Social Control. Routledge, London, 1978; Smart, Carol. Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality. Routledge, London, 1992; Smart, Carol. “’Feminism and Law: Some Problems of Analysis and Strategy” International Journal of the Sociology of Law; 14(2) pp 109–23, 1986; Smart, Carol. Regulating Families or Legitimizing Patriarchy?” - Family Law in Britain. International Journal of the Sociology of Law; 10 (2) p 129-47.1982 6 Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, Hardcover Edition, W.W. Norton and Company 7 Bryson, V. (1999): Feminist Debates: Issues of Theory and Political Practice (Basingstoke: Macmillan) pp.14-15; hooks, bell. “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” Cambridge, MA: South End Press 1984. For a critique of liberal feminism by black feminists and postcolonial feminists see Mills, S. (1998): “Postcolonial Feminist Theory” in S. Jackson and J. Jones eds., Contemporary Feminist Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) pp.98-112 8 MacKinnon, Catharine. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State; Willis, Ellen, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism”, 1984, collected in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays, Wesleyan University Press, 1992, 9 White, E. Frances. Listening to the Voices of Black Feminism, printed in Radical America, quoted in Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 239. Hull, Smith, Scott. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, pxvi. Weathers, Mary Ann. An Argument For Black Women’s Liberation As a Revolutionary Force, No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation’, Cambridge, Mass, by Cell 16 vol. 1, no. 2 (Feb 1969) 10 Rosemary Hennessay and Chrys Ingraham, eds. Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, p. 7 (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) 11 MacGregor, Sherilyn (2006). Beyond mothering earth: ecological citizenship and the politics of care. Vancouver: UBC Press. p. 286. 12 Spivak, Gayatri, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) 13 See generally, Kabira, Wanjiku, “Our Second Home Coming” seminar paper, 2012 Department of literature University of Nairobi, 14 Achebe, Chinua, “Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 139 “ available online at http:// www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-acheb
Antimalarial activities and toxicity levels of selected medicinal plants used in Kenya
Get PDFBackground: Resistance development to antimalarial drugs necessitates the look at traditional medicinal plants as sources of novel compounds that could have the otential to be developed into new antimalarial therapies. Four medicinal plants used in Kenya to treat malaria were investigated. Objective: To determine the in vitro and in vivo antimalarial activity and safety of four medicinal plants used in Kenya to treat malaria. Materials and Methods: Ximenia americana, Sericocomopsis hilderbrandtii, Pentas lanceolata and Fuerstia africana were collected from their habitat, dried, and extracted with methanol and aqueous solvents. In vitro antiplasmodial activity carried out using Plasmodium falciparum, In vivo antimalarial activity using Plasmodium berghei ANKA strain in Swiss albino mice. Cytotoxicity was carried out using MTT assay on VeroE99 cell lines, acute toxicity was investigated in Swiss albino mice. Results: All extracts had good in vitro activity against D6 strain of Plasmodium falciparum with IC50<20µg/ml. Aerial parts of Fuerstia africana methanol extract had the highest in vitro activity. Seven extracts showed good in vivo activity with chemosuppresion >30% while three demonstrated low activity. Fuerstia africana was moderately cytotoxic. Except for Ximenia americana water extract, all the extracts were safe with LD50 > 5000mg/Kg. Conclusion: Results of this study support medicinal use of these plants and indicate that useful compounds can be isolated for further exploitation, formulation and use. Keywords: Medicinal plants, antiplasmodial activity, cytotoxicity, acute toxicit