5 research outputs found
Strategic Management: A Policy To Enhance Sustainable Business Development In Small And Medium Scale Enterprises In Nigeria
No full textICT ADOPTION IN EMERGING CONTEMPORARY MARKETING PRACTICES: THE CASE OF THE NIGERIAN PAINTS INDUSTRY
No full textThe growing awareness of firms about the deployment of information and communications technology continued to stimulate competitive advantage for them in the marketplace. This study investigated the numerous information and communications technologies deployed for products marketing in the Nigerian paints industry and also examined the degree of capacity in which ICTs were deployed in relations to contemporary marketing practices. This study considerably administered 240 questionnaire on paints manufacturing and marketing firms in Nigeria which resulted to 84.5% response rate in year 2014. The outcomes of the analysis revealed that the telephone and e-mail were widely embraced for marketing in the Nigerian paints industry. It was also discovered that paints companies adopted ICT more in a reinforcing capability as against enhancing and transforming purposes. The study suggested that paints producing and marketing firms in Nigeria need to incorporate more of ICT facilities and utilize the various offers of electronic marketing for their daily operations and automations thereby improving firm’s profitability and performance. More importantly, attention should be shifted on companies’ capability to innovate and consequently introducing new ICT products and services in the market
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND PROJECT PLANNING IN THE NIGERIAN FOOD AND BEVERAGE INDUSTRY
No full textInformation and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been known as vital technologies that are associated with production mechanisms for technological progress. The study examined the impact of ICT on project planning activities in Nigerian food and beverage industry. Data from primary sources were obtained through the use of questionnaire and interview scheduled on one hundred and seventy five (175) purposively selected users of ICT across three Departments of food and beverage firms in Nigeria. This was with a view to elicit information on the level of outputs and significance of the application of ICT to the performance of the industry. Data collected were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results of the analysis of variance shows that there were significant difference in the mean rank of respondents’ opinion on ICT to improve quality (F=110.07, P = 0.05), reduce cost (F=110.07, p<0.05), improves process (F=140.93, p<0.05), and reduce processing time (F=184.36, p<0.05). Evidence shows that Internet usage, Virtual Private Network (VPN), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) had strong impact on product quality, process improvement, cost and time reduction. It was concluded that the absence of ICT in the firm will slow down the effective coordination of raw materials
Demilitarisation Nigeria and South Africa compared
No full textIn sub-Saharan African countries that have made democratic transition from military
rule and military-backed authoritarian regimes, state elites have embarked upon
strategies aimed at demilitarising the new democratic political process. Demilitarisation
of the state and politics has become an imperative because it is decisive for
consolidating democratic politics and for ensuring improvements in public safety and
security. Yet the process of such demilitarisation in these countries has often generated
a paradox, whereby the reduction of the political influence of state institutions of
violence has been associatedw ith rising civil militarism and the prevalenceo f organised
violence in the wider society.
In these circumstances, taking cognisance of the dangers of civil militarism and other
forms of private violence is a priority for designing and implementing demilitarisation
strategies and other security reforms in post-authoritarian African states. Reformminded
political elites and external supporters need to be sensitive to these dangers or
risk perpetuating the shell of electoral democracy that cannot deliver the goal of human
security in the region. This dissertation explored how the current approach to
demilitarisation is related to the problem of civil militarism by examining the case
studies of Nigeria and South Africa. It explains that given the condition of the state in
Africa, demilitarisation of politics after transition from military or military-backed
authoritarianism contributes to the emergence of civil militarism. Based on this finding,
it argues for a comprehensive approach to demilitarisation as a strategy that caters to
both state and societal violence in order to mitigate the risks of civil militarism in the
process
Global PIQA: Evaluating Physical Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures
No full textTo date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark for over 100 languages, constructed by hand by 335 researchers from 65 countries around the world. The 116 language varieties in Global PIQA cover five continents, 14 language families, and 23 writing systems. In the non-parallel split of Global PIQA, over 50% of examples reference local foods, customs, traditions, or other culturally-specific elements. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on Global PIQA in aggregate, but they exhibit weaker performance in lower-resource languages (up to a 37% accuracy gap, despite random chance at 50%). Open models generally perform worse than proprietary models. Global PIQA highlights that in many languages and cultures, everyday knowledge remains an area for improvement, alongside more widely-discussed capabilities such as complex reasoning and expert knowledge. Beyond its uses for LLM evaluation, we hope that Global PIQA provides a glimpse into the wide diversity of cultures in which human language is embedded.See §A for author list. Global PIQA would not be possible without the efforts of all of the authors. Wealso thank several anonymous contributors who preferred not to be authors on this paper. The research of Yolanda Xavier is supported by Portuguese national funding through the FCT– Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P. as part of the project UID/3213/2025– Linguistics Research Centre of NOVA University Lisbon (CLUNL) and by the Doctoral Grant (FCT PhD grant) number 2022.13977.BD from the same funder. Group 0025 is supported by the following grants: CLARIN-PL (POIR.04.02.00-00C002/19, FENG.02.04-IP.040004/24, 2024/WK/01), DARIAH-PL (POIR.04.02.00-00-D006/20, KPOD.01.18-IW.03-0013/23). Annika Simonsen was funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101135671. CEB has been partially funded by the German ministry for education and research (BMBF) through the TRAILS project (grant number 01IW24005). Group 0070 is supported by funding from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)- Center of Excellence for Generative AI, under award number 5940. Group 0079 would like to thank Mr. Sudhir R. Narayana for help with correction and verification of items in their dataset. Sina Ahmadi gratefully acknowledges support from the University of Zurich (UZH) Postdoc Grant (reference number 269093). Group 0133 would like to thank the MbazaNLP community, including students from the University of Rwanda, School of Art and Languages. We would also like to thank Yonatan Bisk for useful insights into the original PIQA dataset
