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Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / It is necessary to improve on Africa poor and stagnated share of the global trade and to attract bigger share of the global investments funds to meet the growing developmental challenges. The bottlenecks at the borders of most countries have made Africa the continent with the highest cost of trade. This has worsened the competitiveness of the continent’s economy thereby imparting its ability to draw full benefits from the global trading system. The introduction of simpler trade procedures is expected to lower trade costs and boosts flows of goods among African countries and with the global community. It is imperative then to explore frameworks for innovative trade facilitating instruments within the ambits of the multilateral trading system to enhance intra-African trade. The idea is to evolve an Afrocentric framework that will not precipitate retaliatory measures from the trading partners. This study encourages African countries policy makers to avail themselves of the concessionary provisions in the WTO agreement to design a targeted trade facilitation framework. It is posited that an Afrocentric trade facilitation legal and regulatory policies are necessary to improve African countries capabilities to trade more with each other and with other countries at similar stage of development. This must be structured to specifically facilitate intra-Africa trade via the development of regional or sectoral competitive advantages rather than the multilateral trade facilitation protocols that is targeted to boost African trade with the international partners. A mega-regional trade agreement that will facilitate intra-African trade in the specific sectors and then use the bigger economies of scale to develop competitiveness on the global stage, is proposed. Based on the continent abundant agricultural and natural resources, and the huge and growing young populations, it is found that investments in value creating manufacturing industries in the agricultural, power and the transport sectors as well as the service sectors were found to hold the biggest potentials. This is necessary to generate large jobs and employment opportunities and diversify exports. In these sectors, region-owned companies in each sub-region to be complemented with private investors are being proposed. This is necessary due to the huge resources outlay and the poor margin that will not encourage private investors to commit into this sector. To protect the companies being proposed without precipitating retaliatory actions by the trading partners, Article XXIV, the Enabling Clause and the contingent trade protection measures as contained in Article XIX of the GATT Agreement (the safeguard measures and the subsidies and countervailing measures) were presented to be sufficient.

Thomas Kuhn's 1962 groundbreaking work, The Scientific Revolution, established the process for creating, and the components of, a disciplinary paradigm. This "scientific revolution" has evolved to become the standard for determining a field's claim to disciplinary status. In 2001 and 2003, Ama Mazama, used Kuhn's model to establish the disciplinary status of Africology, through the categorical structuring of the Afrocentric Paradigm. Though her work conclusively made the claim that Africology is a legitimate academic discipline, still more work remained in effort to meet other criterion set forth by Kuhn. Through the use of content analysis, this work extends Mazama's work by addressing four additional areas of paradigm development that was established by Kuhn: (1) the scientific revolutionary moment for the discipline; (2) the nature of consensus among the scholars of the discipline; (3) the intellectual identity of the discipline's scholars; and (4) the distinct intellectual behavior of the discipline's scholars as seen through their evolved epistemic and methodological tradition. This work also reconfirms Africology's fidelity to the roots of the original Black Studies Movement, identifies independent intellectual tools for Black Studies scholars, identifies Afrocentric excellence and rigor, and provides an instructive tool for burgeoning Afrocentric Scholars. / African American Studies

In the available research on Afrocentric K-12 education, one area of primary concern is measuring Afrocentric education’s effectiveness at enhancing the performance and achievement of African American children relative to what they would achieve in traditional schools. A significant part of determining the level of success of the Afrocentric educational model involves ascertaining the efficacy of Afrocentric teachers. However, the existing research on various specific Afrocentric schools, both past and present, suggests that acquiring teachers sufficiently qualified to teach an Afrocentric curriculum is an area of concern. This raises a number of important questions including whether this suggested problem actually exists in the current Afrocentric school community, what constitutes “sufficient qualification,” how important Afrocentric qualification is relative to a particular school’s mission, and what is being done by actual schools to ensure that its teachers are properly qualified. In an effort to address these questions, this study investigated Afrocentric school administrators’ attitudes toward Afrocentric teaching competence. It also explored their assessments of the proficiency of their own teachers, and their opinions about what constitutes effective teacher preparation programming. This primarily qualitative exploratory study was conducted by surveying principal administrators of Afrocentric and African-centered schools. The participants in the study worked at private and public charter schools located in various states. Qualitative analysis was used to analyze the responses to a participant-administered online questionnaire. The results of the survey indicate that there is significant variation in the ways that the participants define and implement the Afrocentric education model as well as in the ways that they both conceive of and measure Afrocentric teaching competence. The findings imply a need for further, more intense exploration of what it means to be a competent teacher within an Afrocentric school as well as extensive research into potentially establishing standards for the demonstration of competence in the classroom. Doing so should provide a starting point for fully engaging the Afrocentric education community’s beliefs about the successes and failures of its teachers, which should in turn open up space for exploring how best to proceed with future teacher development. / African American Studies

The purpose of this study is to examine how members of the community, educators, legislators, and members of the academy organized and mobilized to bring Florida Statute 1003.42(h) into being. This Afrocentric case study policy analysis centers African people, educators, and policymakers as agents, actors, and subjects with agency who determined that such legislation was needed and necessary for the education of African American students and all students. Data, in the form of document analysis, websites in the states of New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and South Carolina with similar laws, and Florida’s Commissioner’s Task Force on African American History, newspaper accounts, and interviews with key people involved in the creation of the Florida legislation, were analyzed using an Africological methodology. Findings include several major themes that emerged about educational curriculum content, intent, needs, and analysis relative to why this legislation was sponsored and passed including: (a) inaccuracy and omission, (b) correction and inclusion, (c) consciousness and competence, (d) policy and priority, (e) power and precedence. The final product includes a theory of Selective Memory Manipulation and a Paradigm for Afrocentric Educational Policy Production and Analysis.

The purpose of this study was to determine if aging attitudes, informal knowledge and formal education impact Master of Social Work (MSW) student interest in geriatric social work. A total of 70 MSW students participated in this study. The students were recruited from several metropolitan Atlanta MSW programs. A quantitative research design was employed, and surveys were used to gather the data. This study was designed to document the characteristics of MSW students and to predict interest based on perceptions using Ordinal Regression analysis. There was statistical significance identified with the aging attitudes and formal education variables and no statistical significance identified with the informal knowledge variable. The conclusions from this study suggest continued research regarding the factors influencing interest in geriatric social work.

The history of European hegemony in the Western hemisphere has been marked by “objectivity” or a collective subjectivity in which European historians and scholars believe that their viewpoints and perspectives about the world are dominant, causing them to push their ideologies as universal. This objectivity is problematic because it leads to the deliberate omission and falsification of the histories and cultures of other groups of people. This is especially true for Africans who have been relegated to the margins in most European narratives about world history. The most apparent display of this marginalization occurs in the educational sector, specifically at U.S. public schools, where African children are indoctrinated to believe that they lack both a history and culture and therefore, must assimilate to European ideals in order to fare well in society. This narrative is detrimental because it aids in agency reduction. In order to restore African agency in the classroom and to correct the miseducation that African children receive in Eurocentrically grounded school systems, Black scholars and educators began creating Afrocentric schools, a branch of Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) that prioritize the history and culture of Africans across the diaspora, in the late 1960s. Although many of these schools have and continue to combat this successfully, many have collapsed and closed over time thus presenting a significant and alarming issue since they are still relatively new institutions and play a crucial role in unlocking the African genius. The purpose of this study then, is to Afrocentrically examine the history and effectiveness of Afrocentric schools in order to further advocate for their presence in the U.S. in light of these closures. This will be done by discussing the characteristics of Afrocentric schools as well as the ways that they have and continue to impact African people, by analyzing the criticisms that they receive from Eurocentrically aligned Africans and Europeans, by assessing literature from Afrocentric scholars who have explored the closing of some Afrocentric schools, and most importantly, by comparing Eurocentric and Afrocentric curricula to highlight the importance of agency restoration and cultural reclamation for Black children in centered learning. This study will also proffer suggestions for African community members, educators, and activists to promote Afrocentric education beyond institutional settings. This study is framed by several research questions, specifically: (1) What is an Afrocentric school and why are they important for African people? (2) What are the components of Afrocentric Education? and (3) What corrective measures can Afrocentric educators, scholars, activists, community members, and institution builders take to maintain the status and stability of Afrocentric schools and more importantly, promote Afrocentric education beyond institutional settings? / African American Studies

Given increasing cultural diversity, behavioral health professionals and researchers are paying greater attention to the need for cultural competence. Behavioral health treatment research has included predominantly individuals of European ancestry; research on parenting practices/interventions has been no exception. African-American parents are particularly underrepresented, raising questions of cross-cultural applicability and acceptability. Acceptability of interventions is crucial, predicting engagement in, adherence with, and premature withdrawal from treatment. In this study, acceptability of rewards, a frequently used intervention for changing children’s behavior, was examined among African-American parents. Children’s characteristics (gender, behavior problem type), culturally-linked variables (authoritarian parenting, promotion and prevention focus, Afrocentric worldview), and parenting beliefs (behavioral attributions, irrational parenting beliefs) were examined as predictors of reward acceptability. African-American parents (n=79) of children aged 4-12 read four vignettes (two with girls and two with boys) describing children’s behaviors (externalizing and internalizing symptoms). Parents rated the acceptability of rewards to improve the behavior. Authoritarian parenting and prevention focus were hypothesized to be negatively associated with reward acceptability. Acceptability was expected to be lower for externalizing males and additional variables were investigated as moderators and co-variates. Exploratory analyses examined differences between mothers and fathers and between low and high Afrocentric worldview. The main hypothesis was unsupported. Authoritarian parenting and prevention focus did not contribute to a model predicting acceptability, and gender differences were not found. Behavior type was associated with acceptability opposite the expected direction, with higher acceptability for externalizing symptoms. Acceptability on a general-attitude measure was predicted by efficacy expectations, internal behavioral attributions, and Afrocentric worldview. However, on a measure specific to the vignettes, few variables predicted acceptability; ratings were lower than on the general-attitude measure. This may suggest that parents viewed rewards as acceptable in circumstances different from those depicted in the vignettes. Individuals endorsing high Afrocentric worldviews had higher reward acceptability, were more likely to be older, were less driven by prevention goals, had lower authoritarian parenting styles, and had less rigid and more rational parenting beliefs. Fathers and mothers did not differ. Results underscored the importance of inquiring about specific situations rather than general attitudes in assessing intervention acceptability.

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This dissertation seeks to examine the obstacles and experiences of a Black female charter school leader using an Africentric approach to educating Black children, and ways in which social and material inequalities may have shaped her journey. A conceptual framework that blends African-centered pedagogy, African womanism, and transformational leadership is used to guide this qualitative autoethnographic study. Use of the autoethnographic method provides an opportunity to examine the relational dynamics of the experiences of this Black female charter school leader in the cultural context of the Black community and neoliberal education. Data analysis is captured from autobiographical storytelling within three key time periods or epochs of her 17-year experience starting, operating, and closing a charter school. Data analysis includes coding based on themes that emerged from the data collection process. Findings indicate how attempts to implement an African-centered approach to educating Black children in a DC charter school in the U.S. Eurocentric education model in the neoliberal era was compromised by neoliberal policies, particularly high-stakes testing, a history of separate and unequal education, the lack of support for African-centered education, and the lack of access to facilities. These findings also support the need to continue to examine how non-European children can be educated, not just schooled, in a manner that places them at the center of their learning, builds agency, and develops them into creative and critical thinkers and future builders.