Lessons learnt from concern worldwide's conservation agriculture interventions in Malawi and Zambia, 2010-2018.

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is a gateway technology intended to build both the productivity and resilience of smallholder farmers. Since 2010, the Ireland-based NGO Concern Worldwide has been promoting CA with extremely poor farmers in Malawi and Zambia. In the context of the specific regions within both countries, similar conditions of limited labour capacity, low financial capacity, poor soil health and constrained agriculture extension services were the primary barriers to the poorest farmers. Initial CA projects utilized broad, standardized approaches to CA with subsidized inputs that led to yield increases, but saw limited non-subsidized adoption. As a result, Concern has adapted its approaches to CA to better accommodate and embrace innovation by lead farmers, understanding different adoption strategies for follower farmers and working to improve input supply systems to meet farmers' needs. However, major constraints to adoption remain for the poorest and, going forward, CA projects will need to incorporate robust strategies for household financial stability such as the graduation model; fostering greater innovation by lead farmers within CA principles to meet local contexts; and integrating seed selection and saving for non-commercialized food crops to spur large-scale adoption of CA by the poorest farmers.

Leadership in the succession process: the case of a family business from mexico

Family businesses are of great importance because they have generated new jobs over the years, allowing them to be the object of study in various investigations; despite this, no emphasis has been placed on case studies that highlight both leadership and the decisive process in this type of organizations, known as succession. As a result, concern was generated to study a company that has gone through this process, where the main purpose is to show the ability to solve problems, challenges and how to cope with succession, in addition to knowing whether leadership is a key factor in it, deepening it to a greater extent in a case study, with semi-structured interview guides. After analyzing and interpreting what the informants mention, it is obtained as a result that leadership was a fundamental piece in this process, with an autocratic leadership that was exercised by the founder of the company. Currently, the new owner has used different types of leaderships depending on the situation, called situational. It is recommended to continue with that leadership style that characterizes him and to continue to be successful as a recognized family business.

Interconnection of boxed angle compression members

Recent research on the interconnection of starred angle compression members has indicated that the requirements for the interconnection of such members as contained in North American standards are not adequate. It was also determined that the North American and European standards vary greatly in their requirements for the interconnection of double angles. As a result, concern was expressed with regard to the requirements for the interconnection of boxed angles.A total of 27 boxed angle compression members were tested. The slenderness ratio, size of angles, and number of interconnectors were varied. The failure load and failure mode were noted for each specimen.This paper recommends that two interconnectors be used, one at each of the third points, in all boxed angle compression members. Key words: angles, buckling, building (codes), columns (structural), design interconnection, boxed angle.