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The purpose of this paper is to assess the critical risk factors affecting mining projects in Ghana.

A purposive sampling approach was used in selecting the respondents for the study. These were practitioners working on mining projects in Ghana.

The study identified 22 risk factors contributing to mining project failure in Ghana. The five most critical mining project risk factors based on both probability of occurrence and impact were unstable commodity prices, inflation/exchange rate, land degradation, high cost of living and government bureaucracy for obtaining licenses. Mitigation measures for addressing the identified risk factors were identified.

This paper is limited to data collected from practitioners working on mining projects. Due to geographic and logistical constraints, the study did not include the perception of local communities in quantifying the risk factors.

This paper has documented the critical risk factor affecting the mining industry in Ghana. Though the identified risk types are also prevalent in other sectors of the construction industry, the key findings of this paper emphasize the need for a comprehensive risk management culture in the mining sector. From an academic research perspective, the paper contributes to a conceptual risk assessment framework.

The information gathered through this research can be utilized in identifying and understanding risks during the early stages of mining project implementation.

The main purpose of the study was to analyse the mediating effects of psychological safety (PS) and psychological availability (PA) on the relationship between leader trustworthiness (LT) and intrapreneurial behaviour (IB) among employees from the manufacturing industry in Ghana.

A sample of 291 who were employees from five manufacturing companies in the industrial hub of Ghana provided data for the study. A closed-ended questionnaire, specifically a seven-point Likert-type scale, was the instrument used for the data collection. The seven hypotheses developed were tested using a structural equation model.

The study established that LT was related to PS and PA but not IB. Like PS, PA was found to be related to IB. Similarly, both PS and PA were related to IB. Again, both PS and PA fully mediated the relationship between LT and IB. Also, gender had a confounding effect on IB.

LT yields direct positive outcomes such as PS and PA as well as indirect IB for employees and organisations. For organisations, especially in the manufacturing sector, to have employees who are psychologically safe, psychologically available and intrapreneurial, there should be a focus on trustworthy leaders. The leaders should be encouraged to be transparent and communicate by way of their actions and inactions and trustworthy values. Leadership training, colleague supervisor support and participation in professional and or management development programmes should be used to acquire trustworthy values.

This study investigated the mediating roles of PS and PA on the relationship between LT and IB among employees of manufacturing firms in Ghana, which has not received the needed attention in the literature despite the challenges manufacturing firms encounter.

Decades after feminist scholars first applied the lens of patriarchy to explain gender inequalities, and wrestled with the consequences of the patriarchal order, masculinity studies have moved from an emphasis on hegemonic masculinities to more nuanced constructions of men’s gendered performances. However, many analyses about men’s social interactions still focus on a limited set of behaviors, and men’s relations with women are often presented as problematic. Many accounts pay insufficient attention to changing contexts and men’s own explanations or perspectives, so we do not see men’s struggles or fully understand why and how some men resist patriarchal norms and perform less conventional masculinities, and what the costs and benefits of contesting dominant constructions are. One of the abiding ideologies of manhood is related to the role of the provider. In this chapter, we propose that the persistence of the social expectation that men should be the (main) family providers, despite changing economic circumstances and historical evidence to the contrary, is profoundly implicated in the tenacity of social expectations for men to perform dominant roles. We explore this contention through conversations with young African men in six cities on the continent and in the diaspora, namely Accra, Kampala, London, Nairobi, Philadelphia and Pretoria.

Small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) are the engine of growth of most developing countries, as they employ a large number of people as opposed to large firms. Consequently, these enterprises should succeed in expanding to become significant employers and producers. However, what seems obvious at least through cursory observation is that the current state of SMEs betrays an economic loss with respect to the benefits that ought to be forthcoming from their potential. This loss can be triggered by a number of factors. The study determines the drivers of internal fraud and their impact on Ghanaian SMEs and prescribes coping mechanisms.

Primary data collected on 250 SMEs collected from various sectors across Accra, the capital of Ghana, are used for this study. Using a cross-sectional regression, the authors identify the key drivers of internal fraud that hamper the growth of Ghanaian SMEs.

The regression results show that although several fraud variables impact negatively the growth of the SME sector, it is only accounting fraud which is significant. This study also revealed that stealing, fake currency issued for the payment of goods or service and non-payment of goods or service account for almost 83 per cent of fraud cases experienced by SMEs.

The study was limited to the SMEs located in the Accra, the capital of Ghana.

The study will offer SMEs owners methods that will assist in their determination to fight fraud in the business that they manage.

The survival of SMEs is paramount to job creation. Consequently, combating fraud that stifle the growth of SMEs will allow SMEs to grow to their full potential and create more job opportunities for the unemployed. This will minimizes the social vices such as robbery, stealing, drug trafficking and prostitution that confront nations.

This study should be useful to managers of SMEs, auditors and the security agencies in developing economies in particular, in their quest to combat fraud within SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how to build and implement information and communication technology (i.e. ICT) to help vulnerable people when significant social, cultural and economic barriers exist between the stakeholders.

The authors followed an action research approach to design and implement a mobile health hypertension education application to help India's most vulnerable populations. The authors used interpretive analysis, guided by the sustainable livelihoods framework, to uncover key findings.

Successfully implementing information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) requires understanding that all stakeholders (i.e. donors, facilitators and the beneficiaries) have important assets to contribute. Facilitators play an important role in connecting donors to the beneficiaries and fostering cultural humility in donors so that the donors will understand the role beneficiaries play in success. Stakeholders may use the ICT4D in unintended ways that both improve the people's health and increase some beneficiaries' financial livelihood.

This research expands the definition of information systems success when implementing ICT4D in resource-constrained environments. Success is more than creating an mHealth app that was easy for beneficiaries to use and where they learned based on a pre- and post-test statistical analysis. Success involved development in all the stakeholders impacted by the social innovation collaboration. For the beneficiary community, success included getting screened for noncommunicable diseases as a first step toward treatment. For the facilitator, success involved more resources for their community health program. Amongst the donors, success was a change in perspective and learning cultural humility.

Although universities encourage faculty to work in interdisciplinary research teams to address serious world problems, university researchers may have to exert considerable effort to secure contracts, approvals and payments. Unfortunately, universities may not reward this effort to build ICT4D and continue to evaluate faculty based on journal publications. When universities undertake social innovation collaborations, administrators should ensure responsive and flexible university processes as well as appropriate academic reward structures are in place. This need is heightened when collaborations involve international partners with limited resources and time needed to build relationships and understanding across cultures.

This study discovered the importance of fostering cultural humility as a way of avoiding potential conflicts that may arise from cultural and power differences. Cultural humility moves the focus of donor-beneficiary relationships away from getting comfortable with “them” to taking actions that develop relationships and address vulnerabilities (Fisher-Borne et al., 2015). This research shows how the facilitator helped the donor develop cultural humility by involving the donor in various initiatives with the beneficiary community including allowing the donor to live in a dormitory at the hospital, work in an urban slum and visit health screening campus.

This study (1) extends the ICT4D literature by incorporating cultural humility into the sustainable livelihoods framework, (2) provides a contextual understanding of developing cultural humility in ICT4D projects with a complex group of stakeholders and (3) describes how facilitators become a catalyst for change and a bridge to the community. The culturally humble approach suggests revising the livelihood framework to eliminate words like “the poor” to describe beneficiaries.

This paper investigates the endogenous relationships between banking performance and social welfare in Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries.

A comprehensive three-stage multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach based on alternative informational assumptions is applied.

Results indicate that banking performance is paradoxically associated with stagnant economic activity and higher wealth concentration for the minority. The authors found that SADC banking performance promotes higher Human Development Index (HDI) standards possibly via efficient financial intermediation, dissemination of best managerial practices and other forms of positive spillovers in these countries.

This paper contributes to the MCDM literature by simultaneously exploring the key concepts of “utility functions” (using COPRAS) and “distance to ideal solutions” (using TOPSIS) in mapping and explaining the feedback and cause-effect processes between banking performance and social welfare that may exist. Another distinctive aspect is related to the computation of bias-free criteria weights, using a robust SWARA order-rank based on information entropy. Finally, this paper is concerning the endogeneity measurement, using a novel stochastic structural relationship non-linear programme.

This work compares the performance of the three boundary element techniques for solving Helmholtz problems: dual reciprocity, multiple reciprocity and direct interpolation. All techniques transform domain integrals into boundary integrals, despite using different principles to reach this purpose.

Comparisons here performed include the solution of eigenvalue and response by frequency scanning, analyzing many features that are not comprehensively discussed in the literature, as follows: the type of boundary conditions, suitable number of degrees of freedom, modal content, number of primitives in the multiple reciprocity method (MRM) and the requirement of internal interpolation points in techniques that use radial basis functions as dual reciprocity and direct interpolation.

Among the other aspects, this work can conclude that the solution of the eigenvalue and response problems confirmed the reasonable accuracy of the dual reciprocity boundary element method (DRBEM) only for the calculation of the first natural frequencies. Concerning the direct interpolation boundary element method (DIBEM), its interpolation characteristic allows more accessibility for solving more elaborate problems. Despite requiring a greater number of interpolating internal points, the DIBEM has presented higher-quality results for the eigenvalue and response problems. The MRM results were satisfactory in terms of accuracy just for the low range of frequencies; however, the neglected higher-order primitives impact the accuracy of the dynamic response as a whole.

There are safe alternatives for solving engineering stationary dynamic problems using the boundary element method (BEM), but there are no suitable comparisons between these different techniques. This paper presents the particularities and detailed comparisons approaching the accuracy of the three important BEM techniques, aiming at response and frequency evaluation, which are not found in the specialized literature.

This empirical research investigates the impact of board nationality diversity on the efficiency of banks. Additionally, our analysis examines the interacting impact of women's representation on bank boards in the correlation between nationality diversity on board and bank efficiency.

This research utilizes a dataset comprising banks operating in the MENA countries over an eight-year period. We apply diverse statistical methodologies, with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) being the primary econometric analysis, alongside several robustness tests.

The research results offer important insights into the importance of board nationality diversity, as well as its interaction with the inclusion of women on boards. The findings indicate that having foreign directors on bank boards enhances efficiency. Furthermore, they suggest that increased women representation on boards improves the positive correlation between presence of foreign directors in boardrooms and efficiency of banks, thereby mitigating agency problems and enhancing governance practices.

These results carry substantial implications for legislators across the MENA countries. Advocating for diversity policies within banks to encourage the inclusion of foreign directors on their boards could lead to efficiency enhancements. Furthermore, policymakers might explore the implementation of quotas or directives to bolster gender heterogeneity within board appointments, ultimately fostering improved bank efficiency and bolstering competitiveness within the region.

This study breaks new ground by investigating how board nationality diversity affects efficiency of banking sector in the MENA countries. It stands out for examining the moderating role of women representation on boards, offering novel insights into how these factors interact.