In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is central to political discourses and educational concerns as a means for economic development, poverty alleviation, youth employment, and social mobility. Yet, there is an intriguing contradiction between this consideration and the real attention dedicated to TVET. Research on African TVET is varied, but tends to be narrowly focused on issues of policies, economic strategies, cost-efficiency, curriculum contents, and outdated equipment. Offering an alternative inquiry, the purpose of this conceptual dissertation was to use critical education theory and post-colonial insights to explore the macro and micro challenges SSA TVET systems are facing in a global context. Indeed, in the era of economic and cultural globalization, the African continent has the opportunity to make its way toward socioeconomic development. Still, rich countries are getting richer and the poor poorer. The African continent is rich in natural, mineral, agricultural, human, and intellectual resources. Thus, there are opportunities for well-being and educational prosperity. However, all statistics show that Africans are the poorest in the world. I argue that this poverty is socially constructed and not an inevitable condition for Africans. Unemployment is a tough reality in SSA. The number of students enrolling in TVET is increasing. From the critical and post-colonial conceptual framework I illustrate structural and systematic concerns to show how SSA TVET systems involve oppression, exploitation, marginalization, prejudice, stereotypes, gender discrimination, reproduction, hegemony, and subalternity. Through the concept of democratic education Dewey and Freire offer, I envision, idealistically and realistically, a holistic and emancipatory TVET where the main concern would not just be to train hands but also heads. In so doing, SSA TVET could develop students' critical awareness about citizenship, self-determination, and problem-solving in order to create social cohesion, peace, and stability in Africa.

Environmental entrepreneurs are considered to be important drivers for an environmentally sustainable development. As other entrepreneurs, they face survival challenges while operating their businesses. Due to the increased importance of environmental entrepreneurs in counteracting environmental issues we argue that it is necessary to gain an understanding of their specific challenges of survival. In this thesis, we build theory based on environmental venture cases located in Sweden. We provide an extensive overview of the current literature and contribute by identifying an institutional dimension being of high relevance in this field. Our findings are of particular interest for policy makers, public institutions, environmental entrepreneurs and their advisors. Additionally, we provide further necessary access to this relatively new research field and suggest future research directions.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: Information Technology in the Faculty of Informatics and Design, at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology / Transitioning from childhood to adulthood is typically coupled with many puberty related challenges, and such challenges are heightened by access deficiency to reproductive health information. The situation is worsened in under-resourced communities in Southern Africa as the youth’s socio-economic status is hampered by a lack of timely informed education. Such youth groups are referred to as youth-at-risk. The youth are the most affected in recent days as they are exposed to various health disturbances. The youth need to be aware of critical life information, particularly reproductive health information, in order to make better choices. With mobile technology being an integral part of everyday life and more appealing to the youth, opportunities are opened up for the use of mobile functionalities or an extension thereof to provide relevant mobile-based services for information access. Recently, health information is shared and is accessible on different mobile platforms. This research project focuses on mobile-based services to promote reproductive health information for youth-at-risk groups, aged 18 to 24 from the Grabouw community in the Western Cape of South Africa. Most of mobile technology’s solutions and proposed mobile-based services come from elsewhere with little or no consideration of the communities and people who will use these services. The youth was engaged in different activities as participants to design a mobile-based service to promote reproductive health information, putting them at the center of the design process as design partners. Service design methods and tools were used as the methodology in a systematic manner. A Double Diamond framework consisting of four phases (Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver) was followed in order to collect the data. The phases guided the design process from ideation to co-designing of the service prototyped herein. Different ways of accessing information especially reproductive health information by youth-at-risk were identified. The available technology and existing practices to access reproductive health information were also identified. Results clearly indicate that the youth are motivated to use mobile phones to share and receive health information. The youth currently have access to reproductive health information and services, however some services require the youth to travel long distances by vehicle or by walking. The youth walk as a result of lack of transport in some locations because there is no infrastructure in place to support vehicles. Furthermore, the information available to the youth currently is not contextualised, therefore making it irrelevant with consideration to resources available in this particular community. The research project recommends that when a solution is being designed for any community, all the relevant stakeholders have to be involved in the design and development process to allow for a co-design interaction that allows for a usable and relevant solution design with and for the intended users. Involving the user in the design process accelerates adoption if an innovation and easy technology appropriation in the user’s environment. The users add the value needed as they are sharing knowledge, experiences and way of doing things which have a positive effect on the solution. The study recommends service to be developed in the future according to the findings herein. The implementation, testing and use of the mobile-based service (RHIAY) prototyped in this thesis are for future work.

Context/Background: The adoption of Open Source Software involves more than using OSS products and this has marked a new trend in software development. This new practice has potential benefits while introducing peculiar practical challenges in software development; particularly in areas concerning OSS selection. This involves OSS search and establishment of selection criteria which selects the best OSS product that matches the system requirements. These challenges have also introduced significant bottlenecks into software development industry. In order to mitigate or solve these problems, there isa need to identify OSS success factors for any software development firm that wants to go OPEN. Objective: This thesis aims to investigate the benefits and limitations of adopting OSS and to identify the success factors that lead to the benefits of OSS in software development. Method: Systematic literature review, through searches in library databases, was used to review empirical studies on OSS success factors when going OPEN. The data was extracted and synthesized from the selected papers for analysis. Mapping was used to obtain information concerning the OSS success factors when going OPEN, benefits, limitations/bottlenecks encountered in the industry, and were used to validate our findings from the literature. Results: Ninety three papers were identified. The data extraction from the SLR helped to identify the success factors, benefits and the bottlenecks from the literatures in the past decade. Conclusion: The implications of our thesis are two fold; practitioners should be acquainted with the benefits and limitations of adopting OSS and also learn from our identified success factors that leads to benefits in software development. This will help them when going OPEN. Alternatively, researchers should align their work and try to identify more knowledge gaps using our identified bottlenecks/limitations for software organizations when going OPEN. / Context/Background: The adoption of Open Source Software involves more than using OSS products and this has marked a new trend in software development. This new practice has potential benefits while introducing peculiar practical challenges in software development; particularly in areas concerning OSS selection. This involves OSS search and establishment of selection criteria which selects the best OSS product that matches the system requirements. These challenges have also introduced significant bottlenecks into software development industry. In order to mitigate or solve these problems, there isa need to identify OSS success factors for any software development firm that wants to go OPEN. Objective: This thesis aims to investigate the benefits and limitations of adopting OSS and to identify the success factors that lead to the benefits of OSS in software development. Method: Systematic literature review, through searches in library databases, was used to review empirical studies on OSS success factors when going OPEN. The data was extracted and synthesized from the selected papers for analysis. Mapping was used to obtain information concerning the OSS success factors when going OPEN, benefits, limitations/bottlenecks encountered in the industry, and were used to validate our findings from the literature. Results: Ninety three papers were identified. The data extraction from the SLR helped to identify the success factors, benefits and the bottlenecks from the literatures in the past decade. Conclusion: The implications of our thesis are two fold; practitioners should be acquainted with the benefits and limitations of adopting OSS and also learn from our identified success factors that leads to benefits in software development. This will help them when going OPEN. Alternatively, researchers should align their work and try to identify more knowledge gaps using our identified bottlenecks/limitations for software organizations when going OPEN. / D.Tharashasank Phone no:00919505953735

Context: Electronic Government (sometimes referred to as digital government, online government) is the use of information and communication technologies to: a) enable optimization and innovation of all government internal processes in the back-office and external processes by providing government services to customers through Internet and other electronic means; and b) facilitate achieving goals of all government policies and strategies. Objectives: In this study we are explaining e-Government practices, perceptions and performances of state institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and analyzing obstacles and challenges of current approach to e-Government management, in order to propose immediate and middle-term e-Government actions for BiH state institutions to start delivering integrated and useful e-Government services. Methods: In this, three sources of information are used: a) comprehensive survey of state employees, b) interviews with some of the e-Government practitioners and c) systematic review of a number of relevant article sources. All questions/reviews have been done in order to find out what measures could be taken and what guidelines should be followed by the BiH state institutions so they become more IT savvy in taking advantage of e-Government implementations. Results: Measures for improvements have been proposed in several distinct areas: building human capacities for e-Government development, changing management and leadership practices, building regulatory and organizational framework for e-Government and resolving interpersonal issues in e-Government systems design. Additionally, a Phase plan for e-Government project implementation is proposed to those having a vision and idea on some e-Government project, but maybe lacking the skills and knowledge on how to actually initiate, design and implement it. Conclusions: We conclude that BiH state government should realize that e-Government is not just about implementing some IT projects; it is an overall public administration reform process which has to be adequately supported by regulative and organizational measures. This thesis provided arguments for such strategic e-Government decision-making and necessity for government-wide management and development capacity. We conclude that there is a need for BiH state government to understand the current situation and arguments presented, and take steps in building its capacities in this field.

Context. Compare with bespoke RE, market-driven requirements engineering (MDRE), has manyclassical requirements engineering activities of bespoke RE. Elicitation is one of these activities. Thisprocess is to capture, extract and obtain needs from stakeholders. And there are many techniques toguide MDRE elicitation, and some techniques for bespoke RE are also used in MDRE contextnowadays. However, not all of these techniques are suitable for MDRE due to the difference betweenMDRE and bespoke RE, for example, in MDRE context, there is no specific customers’ participation.Meanwhile, there is a lack of studies that compare elicitation techniques by evaluating theircompetence of mitigating MDRE challenges. Objectives. In this study, we investigate and collect techniques which can be used for MDREelicitation. We also identify challenges of MDRE elicitation practice from literature as evaluatingcriteria. Then, we evaluate elicitation techniques’ competence of mitigating these challenges. Finally,we discuss with some interviewees to validate our result with real-world MDRE context. Methods. We use literature review and snowball sampling to investigate and collect MDRE elicitationtechniques and challenges. Next, we summarize elicitation techniques’ advantages and limitationsfrom literature and compare these techniques by evaluating whether they can mitigate MDREchallenges we find. Next, we conduct interview with 8 interviewees who are practitioners or havedeveloping experience in order to find out and discuss the difference between academic and realworldMDRE. Results. We identify 6 elicitation techniques which can be used in MDRE to compare. We also collect6 challenges which may happen in MDRE elicitation process. We compare them by literature studyand interview with practitioners and find that although some interviewees’ opinions are similar withliterature, there are still many different cases we need to consider before choosing elicitationtechniques. Conclusions. In this research, we fill the gap that there is a lack of studies about the comparison ofelicitation techniques in MDRE context. We also find 4 factors which should be studied in-depth inthe future MDRE elicitation techniques research, and validate our result with practice and discuss thereason of differences. Our result can help requirements engineers to choose suitable elicitationtechniques in MDRE projects.

Software development comprises of different phases like requirements, analysis, design coding and testing. In this contemporary world of software development, development of software in globalized scenarios is prevalent and prominent. As part of different globalized scenarios this thesis magnifies the scenario of software product transfer which deals with the testing of software in the offshore location. / +919502697610 +919849674412

The purpose of this study is to explore the integration of the iPad as a learning and teaching technology into the Foundations Program at the two Higher Colleges of Technology in Fujairah: Fujairah Men’s College (FMC) and Fujairah Women’s College (FWC) in the United Arab Emirates. The new technology was introduced to enable the Program’s teachers and students to support their teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. Specifically, the study investigates how these teachers and students used the iPad’s technical affordances to create pedagogical affordances designed to construct and promote English language teaching and learning. It also examines the challenges they faced in doing so, the types of tasks and activities for which the new technology was used. Finally, it sheds light on the limitations of the iPad as perceived by these users as well as other relevant issues arising from the launch of the technology in the two colleges. The data for the research were drawn from class observations, interviews and surveys. Six Foundations Program classes were observed, five teachers were interviewed, five more teachers were asked one written research question, and ten students were asked another written research question. In addition, two surveys – one for the teachers and one for the students – were conducted to obtain further data. The study finds that the Foundations Program’s teachers and students used the iPad’s technical affordances effectively to construct activities that largely enhanced their teaching and learning by making it more interesting, and engaging. In doing so, they faced challenges that they tried to resolve and which had some impact on their teaching and learning. In addition, the study has identified a number of issues relating to the use of the iPad in the Program as well as what these iPad users perceived as limitations of the new technology. Finally, the study stresses the importance of conducting a pilot scheme prior to any proposed rollout of a new educational technology and suggests longitudinal studies with larger and more representative samples to assess and measure any contributions or lack thereof the iPad makes to the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. I believe that the study contributes to the area of TESOL and mobile learning by its focus on the rich experience of two higher education colleges using the iPad as a teaching and learning technology in classes of Arab learners and by highlighting the challenges the teachers and students at these two colleges faced in their attempt to integrate the new technology in their context as well as what they perceived as the technology’s pedagogical and technical limitations. Another important contribution of the study is the exploration of other issues arising from the use of the iPad in the Fujairah colleges’ teaching and learning environment. It is also important to note that study findings could provide insights into the integration of the iPad into the foundations programs of the other fifteen colleges in the Higher Colleges of Technology system given the similarities these colleges share with the two Fujairah colleges. Neither would it be an exaggeration to suggest that these findings could also provide an insight into the experience of using the iPad in similar learning environments in other UAE educational institutions.

Following the exposure of abuse of people with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) at Winterbourne View, the Government launched the Transforming Care programme, to support people to transition out of hospital into their own home. A literature review revealed limited research into people with IDs experiences of transitioning. The study aimed to explore how transitions through Transforming Care were experienced. Eleven people with ID were interviewed about their experiences, with ten nominating a Key Support Person to be interviewed alongside them on a second occasion. Interviews were analysed using a Social Constructionist Grounded Theory methodology. The model demonstrated that participants experienced transitioning as a highly complex process of managing change. In hospital, how participants were seen by significant others and how they saw themselves resulted in a 'restricted story'. In moving to the community, participants and those around them were able to shift ideas about who they were, allowing for a 'widening out' of their story. Participants discussed seeking a sense of safety in new relationships, managing loss, and going through uncertainty as part of the process of transitioning. The findings of this study demonstrate that transitioning is not a single event, but an ongoing process over time. Clinical implications include ensuring that people with ID feel prepared about their move and the importance of staff understanding peoples' behaviours within a wider context.

Magister Artium - MA / Staff members of a district hospital experience various challenges in managing psychotic patients in the emergency department. Psychosis can result from the use of illicit drugs. Persons presenting in a psychotic state due to use of illicit substances are common at emergency departments of district hospitals. In terms of the South African legislation, mental health services are accessible at general district hospitals with the 72-hour observation period being mandatory. Emergency departments are the first area where behaviourally disturbed and psychotic persons are assessed and managed in terms of the Mental Health Care Act of South Africa (Act No. 17 of 2002). Emergency staff members render a 24-hour service to all public users requiring emergency services, and should have the skills, training and resources necessary to manage any public user presenting for emergency services. A large proportion of the patients presenting with psychosis at the hospital where the study was done, were reported as using illicit substances. This study sought to discover and understand: What are the challenges experienced by staff members in managing substance-induced psychotic patients in the emergency department of a district hospital? In an attempt to answer the research question, the aim of this study was to explore and describe the challenges experienced by emergency department staff members in managing substance-induced psychotic patients in a district hospital in the Western Cape. An explorative and descriptive research design was used, grounded in the qualitative research approach. Ten staff members managing or assisting with managing substance-induced psychotic patients in the emergency department were purposefully sampled. This sample comprised doctors, nurses, and other support staff members, such as security guards, porters and general workers. An interview schedule guided the face-toface semi-structured interviews as the method of data collection. The digitally recorded data from these interviews were transcribed verbatim, and analysed into six themes as well as sub-themes. Data were analysed according to Tesch, as cited in Creswell (2009). Measures to ensure trustworthiness were adhered to, such as neutrality, consistency, truth value, and applicability. Ethical considerations were closely followed, such as obtaining permission from the Senate Higher Degrees of the University of the Western Cape and the Provincial Health Ethics Committee, participants’ gave voluntary written consent to partake in the study, aware of the right to withdraw at any time, and of their anonymity and confidentiality being maintained through the use of pseudo names. The findings of the study were that the emergency department was inappropriate for the managing of acutely psychotic or behaviourally disturbed patients such as these, particularly if these staff members were not adequately trained, and where there were staff shortages. Though there was recognition of these patients’ rights to obtain medical care, fear and resentment accompanied by stress on the part of staff presented throughout the themes. The study yielded recommendations such as the need for training and debriefing of staff members and support by hospital management, as well as services such as groupwork and supportive services to patients and family. Recommendations were also made for a review of staffing, infrastructure, facilities and legislation. These recommendations are considered important to assist in the planning, and implementation of healthcare services to mental healthcare users, with specific reference to substance-induced psychotic patients.