<p>There is a growing interplay of competing realities facing the international community in the general areas of innovation, technological advancement and overall economic development. The highly industrialised wealthy nations, largely located on the Northern hemisphere are on the one hand undoubtedly at the forefront in global research, technology and infrastructure development. The developing and least developed countries on the other hand are mostly situated on the Southern hemisphere. They are not as wealthy or technologically advanced as their&nbsp / Northern counterparts, but are naturally endowed with unique variations of plant, animal and micro-organism species occurring in natural ecosystems, as well as the traditional knowledge on&nbsp / how to use these unique species. This knowledge has been adjudged to be responsible for the sustainable maintenance of the earth&rsquo / s biodiversity. Increasing exploitation of biodiversity,&nbsp / spurred on by the competing realities identified above, has left the earth in a present state of alarm with respect to the uncontrolled loss of biodiversity. The traditional knowledge of local&nbsp / peoples has significantly offered leads to research institutes from the North in developing major advancements in drugs, cosmetics and agriculture. Little or no compensation has however been seen to go back to the indigenous&nbsp / communities and countries that provide resources, and indicate various possibilities through their traditional knowledge to the use of such resources. Efforts by some biodiversity rich countries to&nbsp / ddress this trend through legislation developed in accordance with the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity have been frustrated due to the inability to enforce their domestic laws outside their borders. Theft of genetic resources and its associated traditional knowledge&nbsp / from such countries has therefore remained a major challenge. Against this backdrop, and on the&nbsp / insistence of biodiversity-rich developing countries, an international regime on access and benefit sharing was negotiated and its final text adopted in 2010. This international regime is as&nbsp / contained in the Nagoya Protocol. This research sets out to examine whether the Nagoya Protocol offers a final solution to the protection of traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity in&nbsp / biodiverse countries. It further examines the importance of domestic legislation in achieving the objectives of the Protocol. The research has been tailored to African biodiverse countries, and&nbsp / seeks these answers within the context of Africa.<br /> &nbsp / </p>

<p>There is a growing interplay of competing realities facing the international community in the general areas of innovation, technological advancement and overall economic development. The highly industrialised wealthy nations, largely located on the Northern hemisphere are on the one hand undoubtedly at the forefront in global research, technology and infrastructure development. The developing and least developed countries on the other hand are mostly situated on the Southern hemisphere. They are not as wealthy or technologically advanced as their&nbsp / Northern counterparts, but are naturally endowed with unique variations of plant, animal and micro-organism species occurring in natural ecosystems, as well as the traditional knowledge on&nbsp / how to use these unique species. This knowledge has been adjudged to be responsible for the sustainable maintenance of the earth&rsquo / s biodiversity. Increasing exploitation of biodiversity,&nbsp / spurred on by the competing realities identified above, has left the earth in a present state of alarm with respect to the uncontrolled loss of biodiversity. The traditional knowledge of local&nbsp / peoples has significantly offered leads to research institutes from the North in developing major advancements in drugs, cosmetics and agriculture. Little or no compensation has however been seen to go back to the indigenous&nbsp / communities and countries that provide resources, and indicate various possibilities through their traditional knowledge to the use of such resources. Efforts by some biodiversity rich countries to&nbsp / ddress this trend through legislation developed in accordance with the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity have been frustrated due to the inability to enforce their domestic laws outside their borders. Theft of genetic resources and its associated traditional knowledge&nbsp / from such countries has therefore remained a major challenge. Against this backdrop, and on the&nbsp / insistence of biodiversity-rich developing countries, an international regime on access and benefit sharing was negotiated and its final text adopted in 2010. This international regime is as&nbsp / contained in the Nagoya Protocol. This research sets out to examine whether the Nagoya Protocol offers a final solution to the protection of traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity in&nbsp / biodiverse countries. It further examines the importance of domestic legislation in achieving the objectives of the Protocol. The research has been tailored to African biodiverse countries, and&nbsp / seeks these answers within the context of Africa.<br /> &nbsp / </p>

Magister Legum - LLM / There is a growing interplay of competing realities facing the international community in the general areas of innovation, technological advancement and overall economic development. The highly industrialised wealthy nations, largely located on the Northern hemisphere are on the one hand undoubtedly at the forefront in global research, technology and infrastructure development. The developing and least developed countries on the other hand are mostly situated on the Southern hemisphere. They are not as wealthy or technologically advanced as their Northern counterparts, but are naturally endowed with unique variations of plant, animal and micro-organism species occurring in natural ecosystems, as well as the traditional knowledge on how to use these unique species. This knowledge has been adjudged to be responsible for the sustainable maintenance of the earth biodiversity. Increasing exploitation of biodiversity spurred on by the competing realities identified above, has left the earth in a present state of alarm with respect to the uncontrolled loss of biodiversity. The traditional knowledge of local peoples has significantly offered leads to research institutes from the North in developing major advancements in drugs, cosmetics and agriculture. Little or no compensation has however been seen to go back to the indigenous communities and countries that provide resources, and indicate various possibilities through their traditional knowledge to the use of such resources. Efforts by some biodiversity rich countries to ddress this trend through legislation developed in accordance with the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity have been frustrated due to the inability to enforce their domestic laws outside their borders. Theft of genetic resources and its associated traditional knowledge from such countries has therefore remained a major challenge. Against this backdrop, and on the insistence of biodiversity-rich developing countries, an international regime on access and benefit sharing was negotiated and its final text adopted in 2010. This international regime is as contained in the Nagoya Protocol. This research sets out to examine whether the Nagoya Protocol offers a final solution to the protection of traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity in biodiverse countries. It further examines the importance of domestic legislation in achieving the objectives of the Protocol. The research has been tailored to African biodiverse countries, and seeks these answers within the context of Africa. / South Africa

PHDRDV / Institute for Rural Development / Over 50% of the world's economies face high enterprise failure with African countries being on the top of the list. Specifically, South Africa is among nations with the highest rate of enterprise failure, estimated at 70%, despite sustained investments by the government to support the growth of enterprises. It has been argued that the country has no entrepreneurship models to support enterprise development, as a result, policies for entrepreneurial-supporting initiatives are not driven by correct or informed mechanisms that can adequately transform enterprises. This study investigated the indicators and critical exogenous and endogenous components associated with successful enterprises, borrowing some aspects from the Economic base theory. A mixedmethod was followed and 280 participants were drawn from 16 villages in four local municipalities of Vhembe District using snowball, purposive and cluster sampling techniques. A desktop review, semi-structured and structured questionnaires were tools used for the data collection. An analysis of the qualitative data was achieved through a thematic technique using MAX QDA and Atlas-ti v8. Microsoft Excel functions; descriptive statistics through STATA, while, Crosstabulation, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model through SPSS v26, as well as Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) model using R v3.0, were exploited with the quantitative data. The results indicate that - profit margin, trends of new products, enterprise expansion and enterprise survival - are common success indicators in the area. The PCA fitted on exogenous data structure (n=280) computed 6 principal enterprise challenges from 45 items identified qualitatively. These are - Access to finance (AF: 14.887%), Access to market (AM: 10.297%), Physical capacity (PC: 8.858), Operational cost (OC: 6.052%), Socio-cultural issues (SC: 5.628%) and Competition (Co 4.460%). The MLP based on 83 sample structure of success enterprises, however, revealed that Co presents the most challenge followed by AM, OC, SI, AF and PC which was the least challenging. Similarly, PCA post-endogenous qualitative study computed 5 principal components from 49 initial items. Bridging networks (BN) constituted 38.044% of the variance followed by Self-belief (SB:15.802), Risk Awareness (RA:6.144), Resilience (R: 4.532), and Nonconformist (NC:4.271). The MLR employed to investigate the linear relationship of the parameters revealed that BN (𝛽1 = 7.57) is most influential and statistically significant (p=0.01). Except for SI which is negatively related to enterprise success, R, RA and NC parameters demonstrate positive influences to enterprise success. A model for successful enterprises centred on entrepreneurs’ exogenous and endogenous attributes is proposed as the main contribution of the study towards enterprises’ success in the areas of the research. The key recommendation in this study is that support to enterprises should be informed by the area-specific indicators outlined in the study. Keywords: African model, enterprise development, endogenous attributes, exogenous factors, rural areas / NRF