Africa often shines with ideas and is always the origin of good and prosperous ideas. The oldest known possibly mathematical object is the Lebombo bone, discovered in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland and dated to approximately 35,000 BC. It consists of 29 distinct notches cut into a baboon’s fibula, (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LebomboBone.html). The Ishango bone, found near [...]

I was invited and sponsored by GIZ, a German organisation for International Cooperation that attracted over one thousand seven hundred thousand participants from all over the world. For us the GIZ sponsored participants, it all started with a pre-conference workshop that was held on the 24th May, 2011 which introduced to us among others the [...]

Air traffic delay is not only a source of inconvenience to the aviation passenger, but also a major deterrent to the optimisation of airport utility, especially in the developing countries. Many developing countries do less to abate this otherwise seemingly invincible constraint to development. The overall objective of this study was to investigate the dynamics [...]

I would like to wholeheartedly thank all those who turned up at my PhD defense on the 21st October, 2010. Did you know that my birthday was on the 25th October! I also deliver my appreciation to all those who managed to turn up for dinner on the same day at Imperial Royale. May God [...]

The level of difficulty of any human solvable challenge is in the attitude of the beholder! However, it also depends on the level of the stairs one stands. Hence, the best way to make any judgement or criticism  should not only be multi-dimensionally approached, but also should take into account different degrees of statistically significant [...]

The stochastic nature of political and social processes determines economic development of the world’s poorest continent, Africa! History plays a fundamental role in all these interactions! I was either unfortunate or fortunate not to have studied history, not because it was a very difficult subject for me since I was the best in my senior [...]

Delving into this area is often a nightmare because little has been done even by the national statistical offices in Africa. It is a bear truth that national statistical offices have the duty of collecting and safeguarding all the data in a given country, but even a simple survey shows that none of them currently [...]

The just concluded international conference on climate governance in Berlin, Germany, held on the 15th June, 2010, organized by Inwent and Transparent International attempted to discuss the key issues of knowledge & information access, equity and the economy in addressing climate change. However, the common denominator seemingly emerged as failure to define equity! Does equity [...]

It seems straightforward, but a second-long pause reveals serious hitches especially when you intend to carry out this measurement in a developing country. Inwent (read as Invent), a Germany based, non-profit organisation with a major focus on Capacity Building with worldwide operations dedicated to human resource development, advanced training and dialogue delved into this important, [...]

Data discrepancy is a situation whereby different data collection methods about the same indicator for the same period of time produce statistically different data points. By statistically different, it is meant that although the sampling errors are indicated for the different data points, the data still remains different. It worth noting that differences in the [...]