Experiences With Conservation Agriculture in the Eastern Gangetic Plains: Farmer Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies That Frame the Next Steps for Wider Adoption

While there are numerous studies that explore the agronomic and the economic benefits of Conservation Agriculture in South Asia, only few studies have explored the farmers' experiences and the drivers of its adoption. This study aims to learn directly from current users through exploration of their decision processes, evaluations, and experiences in extrapolating the concept for the broader scaling of Conservation Agriculture across the Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGPs) of South Asia. We analyzed a total of 57 qualitative and semi-structured individual interviews with the farmers who are currently implementing Conservation Agriculture practices across six locations. These farmers faced a variety of hurdles including hesitation in accepting and adopting the technology, technical performance challenges, information gaps, and subsidy/project dependence. To overcome these, respondents adopted various strategic approaches such as assuming the role of an educator by sharing their knowledge with other farmers in the community, changing mindsets for stover retention, adoption through self-investment, and opting for communal purchase of machinery to reduce project dependence. This led farmers to identify a range of benefits including improved socio-economic condition, increased respect in the community, and increased free time to pursue diverse interests and opportunities. Additionally, strengthened information networks such as improved interpersonal connection with agricultural universities, government extension systems, and local farmers groups have positively enhanced the uptake, allowing them to overcome further limitations. These findings provide novel learnings on how farmers overcome nine key friction points, and what this means for increasing the farmer uptake of new practices across the region, which are crucial for successful future interventions as implemented by the government and development organizations.

Quality, Price, and Competition Strategy Effects on Performance of Soft Drink Enterprises in Rwanda

Amidst market performance challenges of declining customer numbers and sales for some soft drinks enterprises in Rwanda, that has caused a big concern for academics and professionals, the study set to empirically investigate the effect of quality, price and competition strategies on sales and customer retention performance for these enterprises. The study was quantitative and cross-sectional where researchers obtained data at a single point in time on more than one case. A sample size of 118 marketing managers was taken from these enterprises in the central districts of Kigali that produce carbonated drinks, mineral water and juice. Due to corona virus pandemic, virtual means of data collection were used through telephone-based questionnaire survey. Despite the positive and significant relationship between quality and price strategies with market performance, ( =0.500, t=1.09, p<0.01) for quality, ( =0.23, t=3.05, p<0.01) for price, results for competition strategies ( =0.23, t=3.05, p=0.281), show nonsignificant relationship with market performance in the studied context. This finding manifests a big gap in managing competition and therefore advise these enterprises to revisit their competition management decisions and make investment in those positioning alternatives that impact on consumer perceptions.

Narratives of the future: immersive stories / indigenous roots

The way we tell stories shapes what we are: it articulates the way we position ourselves in relation to the world. This article explores how immersive practices, as used in virtual reality and intermedial performance, provoke novel dynamics between artist and audience that no longer fit within Western traditions of aesthetic exchange and furthermore challenge our understanding of narrative production and reception. It proposes that new ways of reasoning are needed to allow audience agency and the evolving role of the artist to be explored more fully than is currently possible in mainstream theatre scholarship. One source that can provide a model for considering the dynamics between audience and performer in immersive performance is the Indigenous story systems of Australia. There is a significant synergy between the structure and operation of First Nation songlines and contemporary immersive performance. This is explored with reference to the work of contemporary anthropologists and Indigenous scholars and to recent immersive work from the companies Kaleider and Theatre Conspiracy. The article considers how both ancient narratives and contemporary immersive practices require people to engage with data/ physical space in a specific manner in order for stories to be realised. Furthermore, both bestow creative responsibility and the role of custodian on the user, through whose actions narrative is manifested. Immersive performance challenges assumptions about how information is generated, processed, and passed on, and the power structures involved in such exchanges. This research explores how non-traditional narrative practices can assist the debate about the future of storytelling.

Promise and performance of gender mainstreaming at a Zimbabwean agricultural training college

Gender equality in education and training can be achieved only if curricula at every level of the system become gender-sensitive. The present study examines the extent to which the milieu at one agricultural training college in Zimbabwe promotes the implementation of gender-sensitive training. The main investigative question posed was as follows: To what extent is the agricultural education and training curriculum used at the college gender-sensitive? By responding to this question, the study provided some response to the performance, challenges and prospects for gender mainstreaming in the college’s agricultural education curriculum. Data for this study were generated by document analysis of policy, curricular and instructional documents, interviews with 12 college lecturers, four college administrators and selected final year students, and by lesson observations. The study revealed that while government, and to a lesser extent college policies, articulate the need for gender equality, little attention is paid to these invocations in practice. Likewise, agricultural education and training curricula, training techniques, learning-support materials and out-of-class activities reflect minimal attention to issues of gender equality. The article concludes by discussing possible interventions that correspond to these findings.

Expected competencies of construction project managers in Zimbabwe

Purpose Increased construction risk due to the complexity and numerous construction performance challenges requires improved construction project managers’ competence. However, contextual interrogation of these competencies is limited. This paper aims to report on a study that sought to determine the expected competencies of construction project managers and assesses the existence of statistically significant differences due to gender, designation and educational levels of respondents. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative research design was instituted through the administration of a questionnaire survey on Project Managers, Architects, Engineers and Quantity surveyors working for consultants and contractors’ organizations. Descriptive and inferential statistics analysed significant differences due to demographic variables. Factor analysis was also used to reveal interrelated significant sets of competencies expected of construction project managers. Findings Factor analysis determined 11 significant components with the highest-ranked components comprising organizational savvy and experience in managing project constraints. The univariate analysis determining effective communication, leadership and good team-building skills as being the three most critical expected competencies. Significant differences due to educational levels were established, with shortcomings existing in those with Diplomas. Research limitations/implications The higher education institutions need to establish curricula designs that align with the competency expectations. Mentorship programmes within construction organizations can also be significant in bridging the existing competence gap. However, due to the exploratory nature of the study, the insights of clients were not considered. Originality/value The study determined competencies for construction project managers and demographic-specific interventions.

Performance of Communication- and Computation-Intensive SaaS on the OpenStack Cloud

The pervasive use of cloud computing has led to many concerns, such as performance challenges in communication- and computation-intensive services on virtual cloud resources. Most evaluations of the infrastructural overhead are based on standard benchmarks. Therefore, the impact of communication issues and infrastructure services on the performance of parallel MPI-based computations remains unclear. This paper presents the performance analysis of communication- and computation-intensive software based on the discrete element method, which is deployed as a service (SaaS) on the OpenStack cloud. The performance measured on KVM-based virtual machines and Docker containers of the OpenStack cloud is compared with that obtained by using native hardware. The improved mapping of computations to multicore resources reduced the internode MPI communication by 34.4% and increased the parallel efficiency from 0.67 to 0.78, which shows the importance of communication issues. Increasing the number of parallel processes, the overhead of the cloud infrastructure increased to 13.7% and 11.2% of the software execution time on native hardware in the case of the Docker containers and KVM-based virtual machines of the OpenStack cloud, respectively. The observed overhead was mainly caused by OpenStack service processes that increased the load imbalance of parallel MPI-based SaaS.

Patricia Herrera. Nuyorican Feminist Performance: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater

Patricia Herrera fills a void in scholarship on the Nuyorican Poets Café. Her focus on women performers ( performeras) and their writing and performance challenges these artists’ marginalization and erasure, while the Nuyorican feminist aesthetic she proposes, as situated within intersectional feminism, underscores the work’s critical intervention in feminist performance theory.