Forging Civic and Democratic Governance From Below Through Virtual State and Communities

The demand for accountable and transparent government in post-apartheid is apparent as citizens and social movements are up in arms exercising their democratic citizenship for democratic governance. By employing effective communication, sharing tasks, planning together, and monitoring performance, teams are able to achieve their goals. The advantage of adopting a virtual state and teams is that the usage of technology to mediate virtual teams allows organisations to reduce costs (human and non-human resources), especially for international virtual teams. This chapter argues that without a holistic understanding of how the government works, the existing participatory mechanisms such as the constituency offices and ward committees would not yield the desired outcomes and impact. The chapter made use of case studies of communities of practice to unpack the concept of a virtual state and communities.

Platform for Citizen Engagement for Good Governance in India

Citizens are important stakeholders and play a critical role in advocating and enabling public institutions to become more transparent, accountable, and effective and suggest innovative solutions to complex development challenges. Citizen engagement is at the core of good governance. Mygov.in is a platform to engage citizens and get their input and suggestions for various government policies and plans in India. MyGov platform provides an opportunity to citizens across the world to engage directly with the government departments, policymakers, and implementers. MyGov is planned as the key platform for all citizen engagement needs of the country across various departments and ministries. The presence of such a digital platform in a democratic country reflects willingness on part of the government to share information and make citizens a partner in decision making. This chapter elaborates on the need, discusses the MyGov initiative, compares it to other such initiatives globally and highlights major issues and concerns in the citizen engagement process.

Civic Engagement and Strategic Leadership for Organizational Development

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are non-profit organizations established voluntarily by members in order to deliver specified services effectively. However, CBO development in Tanzania reported performing unsatisfactorily. This chapter highlights causal key problems and controversial and established solutions that can improve CBO development. Among the problems are financial dependency, weak managerial skills, low ICT coverage, gender inequality, poverty, and poor infrastructure. But the controversial issues are ineffective consultation between key actors and gender dominated by males. To achieve CBO development, the chapter notes the use of civic engagement, especially sensitization, awareness creation while strategic leadership focus on voluntary, sacrificial and compromising leaderships. The chapter concludes that CBO development in Tanzania is best to apply components of civic engagement and strategic leadership while the recommendation is to combine and integrate both civic engagement and strategic leadership with their essential sub-components.

Girls' Child Education Challenges and Solutions in MENA Countries

Worldwide, 132 million girls between 6 and 17 are out of school, more than 21 times the number of girls in school in France. However, every year at school allows a girl to increase her future income by 10% to 20%, which directly contributes to improving her country's growth. That is why, on the occasion of the International Day of the Girl on 11 October, we recall that education is a fundamental right for all children, Article 28 of the 1989 International Convention on the Rights of the Child ratified by 195 countries. A girl's education is recognized as one of the most powerful levers to escape poverty and be emancipated. It is a priority to take action so that millions of girls can go to school. Schooling a girl is about giving her confidence, making her own choices, having a job to build her future. This chapter explores girls' education challenges and solutions in MENA countries.

Forging University Social Responsibility Through Community Engagement at Higher Education

This chapter interrogates the notion of community engagement or service learning. The chapter argues that universities pay lip service to community engagement to the detriment of teaching and research functionaries. Most prestige universities operate on the belief that it is only research that matters; hence, research is prioritized. Universities and their staff have adopted an ‘ivory tower' attitude. This modus operandi negates the reality that reliable knowledge could be produced through responsible community engagement and can become the source of empirical data that can be used for teaching and shared through publications. For universities to impact transformational change within and in their surroundings, community engagement should be elevated to equal teaching and learning.

Advent of IND-AS 103 and Its impact on Mergers and Acquisitions

In the business growth models in the corporate scenario, mergers and acquisitions is the key buzzword. Entrepreneurs with a paucity of cash balance and various motives for their poor performance are key targets of mergers. Consolidation of the market share at times leading to competitive advantage with inorganic opportunities to growth seems to be the pace of the era. When it comes to financial consolidation, balance sheet analysis plays a complicated role. In order to improve reliability, relevance in business combinations, IND-AS103 plays a vital role. IND-AS is applicable to the companies with a net worth of Rs 250 Crs, otherwise companies GAAP is applicable. An attempt has been made by the authors through the Idea and Vodafone merger explaining the recognition of identifiable assets, liabilities assumed, and the NCI (non-controlling interest) as per the guidelines of IND-AS103. Through a case, the authors have emphasized the recognition of goodwill acquired in the entrepreneurial enterprise derived from the bargain price.

Are Top Private Banks Digging the Invisible Holes in the Balance Sheet?

Off-balance-sheet activity played a vital role in helping banks limit long-term financial resources in the balance sheet report and increase the bank's profitability worldwide. The authors explored the determinates of OBS items with banking and economic factors influencing off-balance items in the measurement of banks' output of selected large banks in India for the duration of 2008 to 2017. This study used a multiple regression model to describe the logical connection between the role of OBS and its various determinants like bank size, CRAR loan SLR, NNPA, NIM, ROA, GDP, inflation for the said period. This study found that bank size and NIM were positively affected the OBS activities, whereas CRAR and loan negatively affected the OBSA of selected private sector banks.

Social Conduct

A descriptive cross-sectional study of children between 7-14 years was conducted in Delhi, India. Child labour and school-going children (n=1000) of the same socioeconomic background were selected to know the impact of child labour on the behavior patterns of the children. The convenience sampling technique was adopted across Delhi slums to select the children. Children were subjected to strength and difficult questionnaire (SDQ). Results indicated that total difficulty is more prevalent in child labor (45.2%) as compared to school-going children (36%). Social conduct problem is the most prevalent behavioral problem (43.2%) found in child labor. The association between working status and higher conduct problems were found to be statistically significant. A strong positive association was found between working status and difficulty score.

Fiscal Decentralization at Local Government of Ethiopia

In the last quarter century, many countries have engaged in the process of decentralization by transferring the responsibilities of the state to lower tiers of government. The major purpose of this study was to explore the practice of fiscal decentralization at the local government of governments of Ethiopia, with a special emphasis on the Awi Nationality Administration Zone in light of legal frameworks and some theories of fiscal decentralization. The study mainly employed a qualitative research approach to illustrate the theory and the practice of fiscal decentralization in the sub-regional level of governments in ANRS with special emphasis on the Awi Nationality Administration Zone. The finding showed that both the legal frameworks and practice indicate that the means of revenue-raising power is relatively decentralized in the city administration as well as woredas level. Another finding showed that aggregate revenue-raising capacity of different levels of government in the zone fails to match their expenditure responsibilities which result in vertical fiscal imbalance.

Higher Public Officials on Direct Citizen Participation in Turkey

Governments are expected to introduce public policies to empower citizens to engage in government business for various reasons including trust building. This chapter presents enablers/barriers before direct citizen participation (DCP) in Turkey by employing interviews conducted with higher public administrators at the ministerial level. The results reveal that DCP is mostly used for informing and consultation purposes rather than fostering a citizen deliberation. The main barriers before DCP are found as centralized bureaucratic structure, lack of administrators' awareness for DCP, and a lack of participation culture. The authors argue that DCP could be fostered where public officials are curious rather than institutionalized.