Student Number 9705165A Master of Arts in Forced Migration Studies Faculty of Humanities / Objective: To identify and investigate barriers faced by Somali forced migrants when accessing health care in Johannesburg. In particular, the study seeks to compare perceptions of health personnel and migrants as to the nature of such access constraints. Design and Methods: The study made use of semi-structured and in-depth interviews with a snowball sample of health personnel and migrants. Ten health personnel were interviewed and twenty migrants (ten male and ten female). Results: Constraints of language and xenophobia were identified by both health personnel and forced migrant interviewed. Constraints related to the shortage of resources and the poor functioning of the referral system are experienced by all users of the public health system, irrespective of their nationality. No mention was made of traditional or allopathic medicine. Conclusions: There exists a gap between the access to health care guaranteed in the Refugees Act and practices at facility level. There are many similarities across interviews in the constraints identified by migrants and some agreement in the constraints identified by migrants and health personnel. These results confirm that migrants experience a fairly severe level of constraint when attempting to utilize formal health care services in Johannesburg.

<p>  </p> <p>Over the past decades, adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has become an area of interest. The advancement of information and communication technologies in rural areas of developing countries offered opportunities to disseminate timely and accurate for rural development. However, the adoption and use of agricultural market information services (AMIS) remained insignificant among smallholder farmers in the rural areas of developing countries. Therefore, a sound understanding on possible factors associated with the use of mobile phone-based services in support of agricultural supply chain is necessary. This study applied an extended diffusion of innovation model (DOI). The study relied on a convenient sample of 200 smallholder farmers in Bungoma County, Kenya. Data was analyzed using descriptive and multinomial logistic regression (MLR) statistics to identify possible factors associated with the adoption and use of mobile phone-based services in Bungoma County, Kenya. The backward selection analysis confirmed that innovativeness, social influence, and compatibility were statistically significant on the use of mobile phone-based services in the study context. Overall, the results confirmed a positive relationship between the final model and the use of mobile phone-based services (M-services). Therefore, the results of this study may contribute knowledge to the domain of ICT4D in the rural context of developing countries. Further, the findings of this study established knowledge that may be useful for practical implications among smallholder farmers and policy makers in the field of ICT4D. </p>