Welcome to AfricArXiv
This initiative showcases UbuntuNet's commitment to fostering knowledge sharing, collaboration, and accessibility within the African research community. With AfricArxiv, researchers across the continent have a dedicated platform to disseminate their findings, making them accessible to a global audience. By facilitating open access to scholarly work, UbuntuNet Alliance plays a pivotal role in advancing the principles of open science, enhancing research visibility, and driving innovation across Africa.
Communities in AfricArXiv
Select a community to browse its collections.
- The general repository is open for individual submissions by researchers, librarians and research administrators.
- Showcase of project activities, presentations, and scholarly contributions curated by the AfricArXiv initiative.
- Scholarly items sorted by country > Institution > Department
- A Rapid Grant Fund to address research questions and implement science engagement activities associated with COVID-19
Recent Submissions
DIGITAL ADOPTION AND HOUSEHOLD RESILIENCE IN GHANA: THE ROLE OF HOUSEHOLD HEAD GENDER AND MARITAL
(2026-03-25) PHILIP KOFI SIKA EGYIR,CHRISTIANA MARTINA AFFUM AND JOHN AWOTWE ESHUN
Abstract
This study examines the relationship between digital adoption and household resilience
in Ghana, with particular attention to differences by household head gender and marital
status. Using data from the FinScope Ghana 2022 Survey (FinMark Trust), the study
investigates how internet awareness, internet use, digital device ownership or access,
and selected digital financial usage influence household coping strategies and
resilience. Ordinary Least Squares regression, interaction models, joint significance
tests, and marginal effects estimation were employed. The findings reveal that digital
adoption is positively and significantly associated with household resilience
(coefficient = 0.050, p = 0.018), although the explanatory contribution is modest. The
relationship does not differ significantly by household head gender (F = 0.80, p = 0.448)
nor across marital status categories (F = 0.90, p = 0.466). The study contributes to
development literature by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between
digital adoption and household resilience in Ghana, offers practical guidance for
policymakers and financial service providers on designing inclusive digital
interventions, informs policy for addressing gender and marital-status disparities, and
extends the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to digital adoption contexts.
A Context-Aware IoT Framework for Real-Time Firearm Geolocation and User Authentication: Design, Simulation, and Feasibility Evidence from Kenya
(AfricArXiv, 2026-03-31) Mbaluka Solomon Mwaka
Abstract
Kenya experiences a critical firearm management gap, evidenced by a 70% surge of illegal firearm recoveries and a reliance on fragmented manual record keeping. This study developed the Proposed Geolocation Mapping Model (PGMM), a context-aware IoT framework designed to transition Kenyan security forces to an automated, real-time oversight. Using a Design Science Research paradigm grounded in Socio-Technical Systems Theory and TAM, the study employed a multi-method approach: thematic analysis of 18 expert consultations, participatory workshops with 24 stakeholders, and machine learning simulations. The PGMM integrates biometric authentication with hybrid GPS/cellular geolocation using dual Random Forest classifiers, Owner Identification (OIC) and Location Identification (LIC), fused via a novel AND-gate decision module.
The simulation results identified a high internal consistency, with the OIC achieving 93.0% accuracy (AUC = 0.97) and the LIC achieving 87.5% (AUC = 0.81), both significantly exceeding pre-specified global field benchmarks. A Wilcoxon signed-ranks test confirmed OIC superiority while a Kruskal-Wallis test (p =.048, η2 = 0.41) showed that there existed a significant perception gap, as technology specialists’ ratings implied a high system feasibility than security practitioners’ ratings. These findings show that lightweight IoT data can effectively replace bandwidth-heavy video for firearm management in infrastructure-constrained environments.
While the simulation validated the architectural construct, field implementation requires addressing stakeholder perception gaps and doing cellular coverage audits to maintain the LIC’s performance advantage. The PGMM provides a statistically evidenced foundation for transforming firearm management from passive record-keeping to high-assurance, real-time geofencing.
Keywords: IoT, biometric authentication, geolocation, Random Forest, firearm management, Design Science Research, decision fusion.
Modeling Informal Township Economies as High-Entropy Information Systems
(Owethu Mlambo, 2026-04-01) Owethu Mlambo
Modeling Informal Township Economies as High-Entropy Information System:
South Africa’s township economies generate hundreds of billions of rands annually, yet they remain systematically invisible to formal financial instruments and policy tools. This "invisibility" is not a lack of structure, but a measurement problem. Traditional econometric models fail to capture the adaptive, resilient mechanisms of the informal sector because they treat high-variance, unmapped interactions as noise.Methodology: This paper introduces Marikovia, a research framework for an Informational Economic Digital Twin. Grounded in Andrei Markov’s theory of dependent probabilistic transitions, the system represents informal economic actors as stochastic finite-state processes. I utilized a multi-resolution data stack—incorporating Stats SA Census data, GCRO Quality of Life surveys, and administrative microdata—to calibrate agent transitions. Uncertainty is quantified via Monte Carlo ensembles over 10,000 agent trajectories to produce probability distributions of economic output rather than static point estimates
The results came out positive and accurate, this paper shows that informal economies can be measured, just in unorthodox and innovative ways.
From Vanity to Antagonistic Status Ecology
(USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology, 0022-03-20) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi
Public discussion often suggests that contemporary youth culture is marked by greater entitlement, manipulation, performative morality, and normalized cruelty than earlier cohorts at the same age. The dominant academic response has been to ask whether narcissism scores have risen across generations. This article argues that the debate has been framed too narrowly. The central issue is not simply whether one legacy self-report measure increased or declined, but whether toxic self-orientation changed phenotype under new technological and social conditions.
Drawing on research that distinguishes narcissistic admiration from rivalry, shows weak self-informant agreement in narcissistic pathology, links moral grandstanding to status-seeking, connects communal narcissism to validation hunger, and demonstrates that online incivility is reinforced by local norms and feedback, the article proposes a broader construct: antagonistic status ecology. This term refers to a social environment in which status is increasingly pursued through visibility, grievance-centered self-positioning, moral display, rival degradation, and selective cruelty under conditions of social reinforcement.
The article’s central claim is that contemporary social life is better understood not through a simple narcissism epidemic thesis, but through a mutation in how unstable or inflated self-worth is regulated through validation, domination, and moral camouflage. Its first contribution is theoretical: it replaces a narrow generational debate with a broader framework linking trait differentiation, self-presentational distortion, platform reinforcement, and measurable social outcomes. Its second contribution is methodological: it argues that the severe wing of the phenotype is likely to be detected more effectively through discrepancy measures, behavioral traces, discourse patterns, and ecological indicators than through self-report alone.
The Occult Veil of Legitimacy
(CEMA-USK, 2026-03-11) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi
There are forms of power that survive not because they are invisible, but because they are staged so well that people begin to doubt their own perception. Harm appears. Victims speak. Witnesses feel the distortion almost immediately. Yet the language surrounding the event shifts with chilling speed. Injury becomes complex. Domination becomes governance. Cruelty becomes a necessity. Protest becomes instability. The harmed are asked to explain themselves, moderate themselves, discipline themselves, and, eventually, blame themselves. This article offers a theory-building integrative analysis. It does not present a new single dataset or claim to establish causal closure across all domains. It proceeds through historical-functional translation, cross-domain synthesis, and structured comparison of symbolic, discursive, and institutional patterns. Harmful systems preserve legitimacy through a stable grammar of inversion: harm is normalized, victims are displaced, elites are insulated, language is neutralized, dissent is stigmatized, and trauma-coded symbols are mobilized to regulate fear, memory, and moral attention. At the center of this grammar lies pathological entitlement, understood not merely as a personality structure but as a generative and selective principle. Under favorable institutional conditions, it engineers the symbolic, narrative, and administrative conditions required for its own reproduction, elevates tolerance thresholds, punishes reciprocity, and preferentially retains actors adapted to asymmetry, impunity, and moral reversal. Trauma symbols and weaponized fragility form a crucial enforcement layer within this system. Real suffering and real vulnerability remain morally central, but under legitimacy pressure they can also be mobilized to suspend inquiry, redirect causality away from beneficiaries, and recode accountability as aggression. Exposure therefore does not necessarily weaken harmful systems. It often intensifies them through institutional gaslighting, shame discipline, selective disclosure, procedural fog, plausible deniability, and ironic deniability. A further claim concerns symbolic excess. Where plausible deniability alone would already suffice, the repeated reappearance of inversion-coded, sacrificial, humiliating, grotesque, or child-targeted symbolic repertoires indicates surplus-signaling: a recurrent attraction to domination, desensitization, and boundary exemption rather than mere concealment. Its broader contribution is to show that this grammar travels across domains too often studied in isolation, including sexual violence, warfare, propaganda, elite patronage, academic gatekeeping, and political discourse. What appears as an occult aura of untouchable power resolves into a repeatable architecture of symbols, shields, incentives, and behavioral scripts, with varying intensity and scale.