Africa is known for inadequate access to all sorts of human needs including health, education, food, shelter, transport, security, and energy. Before the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs), open access to higher education (HE) was exclusive of Africa. However, as a generally affordable method of post-secondary education delivery, MOOCs place the developing countries at the centre of universal access to HE. This paper provides the strategy for MOOC implementation in the context of limited resources in Africa. The strategy is clustered under five baseline requirements: national accredited MOOC curriculum, electronic content development, development of an online and offline eLearning platform, establishment and funding of MOOC coordination units at public HEIs, and establishment of MOOC access hubs at strategic locations. Emerging from this paper is the insight that a new era of universal access to HE in Africa is achievable through MOOCs only if initial requirements are met by the respective governments.

Food security at subsistence farmers' level in sub-Saharan Africa has become an issue of concern due to increasing vulnerability caused by a number of factors such as: changing climate, resource scarcity (e.g. land and inputs), environmental degradation (e.g. declining soil fertility, deforestation, and surface water eutrophication), market failures and weak public/donor support initiatives. In light of these challenges, farmers must be prepared to survive by self-provisioning. To pursue the fastest and most practical route to improved food security, focus should be on resilience based initiatives at household and community levels. In this paper, the authors investigate the factors that have enabled subsistence farmers to succeed despite the previous shocks and stresses, and develop a system dynamics model for sustainable food security based on initiatives exclusive to the farmers. The model is used to examine the question: how can innovative subsistence farmers engage in better livelihood and market orientated production irrespective of external public or donor support?

Higher education institutions' quality management related problems are rooted in the underlying dynamics, complexity and nonlinearity of the systems' structure in educational settings. An attempt to address these problems before understanding their causes has often led to no lasting solution. It has also been suggested that the degree of success of any intervention approach to quality improvement depends on the rigour of problem conceptualisation phase. This paper calls for the adoption of cause-effect analysis in identifying and representing higher education quality management problems, taking into account the inherent feedback within the quality system structure. The paper contends that feedback systems thinking provides higher education managers and quality assurance researchers with tools for quality process analysis. A feedback structure drawn from the Ugandan universities' setting is used to illustrate the usefulness of feedback systems thinking for conceptualisation of quality problems.

Speech recognition systems emphasise: accent recognition, recognition system performance through calculation of word error rate (WER), pronunciation modelling, speech-based interactions (tone, pitch, volume, background noise, speaker's gender and age, speaking speed and quality of recording equipment) and speech database solutions. However, research into the use of speech recognition systems for improvement accents is scarcely available. In this paper, we focus on development of an speech recognition system for recognizing African English accents and enabling the speakers improve their English accents. This is achieved by using a dual speech recognition engine: the first, a multiple accent recogniser receives African English speech input, classifies it and sends to the second recogniser that evaluates the speech against standard English pronunciations. Speech deviations from standard English pronunciations are captured and read by the system as a way of supporting the learner to improve his/her reading proficiency. Preliminary tests indicate that terminologies that are rarely used in ordinary conversations (e.g. enthusiasm, exuberant, vague, etc) are most poorly pronounced irrespective of the educational level of the reader.

Food security (FS) challenges exist in both the developed and the developing countries, the difference being the severity and the proportion of the population affected. Previous studies maintain that chronic food insecurity at subsistence farming level has persisted due to a number of factors including unsustainable subsistence agriculture and livelihood policies, lack of inputs, poor conservation methods, weak extension services, unregulated markets, limited land among others. This article investigates FS challenges at subsistence farming level using system dynamics tools. The emerging system dynamics model is conceptualised into four sectors; food production, sales, income and food consumption, representing a real-life food security system. The model is used to evaluate policies for better livelihoods as well as explore strategies for profitable subsistence farming and food security.