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Despite a few attempts to automatically crawl Ewe text from online news portals and magazines, the African Ewe language remains underdeveloped despite its rich morphology and complex "unique" structure. This is due to the poor quality, unbalanced, and religious-based nature of the crawled Ewe texts, thus making it challenging to preprocess and perform any NLP task with current transformer-based language models. In this study, we present a well-preprocessed Ewe dataset for low-resource text classification to the research community. Additionally, we have developed an Ewe-based word embedding to leverage the low-resource semantic representation. Finally, we have fine-tuned seven transformer-based models, namely BERT-based (cased and uncased), DistilBERT-based (cased and uncased), RoBERTa, DistilRoBERTa, and DeBERTa, using the preprocessed Ewe dataset that we have proposed. Extensive experiments indicate that the fine-tuned BERT-base-cased model outperforms all baseline models with an accuracy of 0.972, precision of 0.969, recall of 0.970, loss score of 0.021, and an F1-score of 0.970. This performance demonstrates the model’s ability to comprehend the low-resourced Ewe semantic representation compared to all other models, thus setting the fine-tuned BERT-based model as the benchmark for the proposed Ewe dataset.

AbstractThe study examines factors that influence consumers’ preference for secondhand clothes over traditionally produced textiles and garments or otherwise within the Tamale metropolis in the Northern region of Ghana. A qualitative descriptive design was employed to determine reasons that might account for patronage of secondhand goods over traditionally produced items or vice versa by considering Lyon’s “Models of customer choice” framework. An inductive thematic analysis was employed through in-depth interviews to collect and analyze data from 28 Participants using purposive and accidental sampling techniques. The findings identified higher patronage of secondhand goods over the traditionally produced ones within the metropolis. Factors identified include low-income level of consumers, high taste for foreign goods, high cost of locally produced textiles, lack of patriotism, among others, as main reasons for the high patronage of secondhand goods compared to items produced traditionally within the metropolis. Interventions suggested were lowering the importation of secondhand goods or placing total ban on them, others suggested that stakeholders must make efforts to improve on indigenous technologies to enhance and speed up production processes in the weaving, dyeing and printing sectors, developed means of producing raw materials locally for the industry thereby reducing the overall cost of end products.

AbstractThe paper focuses on lunsi (drummers) as promoters of indigenous communication in the Dagbon Kingdom in Ghana. The study fills a gap in research about lunsi cultural performances as indigenous communication. In ethnographic research, the study relied on personal observations, key informant interviews and focus group discussions to collect data from chiefs, elders and lunsi. A major finding of the study is that lunsi are vessels of speech, which not only transmit messages and entertain audiences but more importantly they encapsulate the Dagomba culture and strive to preserve it. The study concluded that the emergence of modern media of mass communication seems to trigger concerns about the survival of lunsi as a means of communication and transmission of culture. The study notes that the ubiquitous nature of modern mass media rather offers the lunsi a unique opportunity and a lever to strengthen cross-cultural communication and preserve the cultural patrimony of the Dagomba people.

AbstractMigration has been an inseparable and indispensable part of the history of the Igbo nation. However, the nature, dynamics, and drivers of migration among the Igbo significantly altered since colonial era. Scholars have interrogated aspects of migration and its impact on the Igbo nation. Not many studies; however, have interrogated Igbo migration into Cameroon as well as the Igbo-Cameroon Intergroup relations during the period under review. This paper, therefore, examines the drivers of migration, the nature, dynamics, and impact of Igbo-Cameroon intergroup relations on both groups during the period under review. The study utilized primary and secondary sources while thematic, historical descriptive and analytical approaches were employed in the analysis of its data. The study reveals that colonialism impacts the nature of migration among the Igbo, particularly, from the 20th century up to the mid-20th century.

While high fertility levels in sub-Saharan Africa pose multiple challenges for economic, social, and environmental prospects, the perspectives of actors from this region have not been well documented. We offer a selection of viewpoints from 42 countries in sub-Saharan Africa along four main dimensions: perceptions of the role of population growth for broader societal implications; the representation of sub-Saharan Africa in discussions of population growth; the integration of population dynamics and reproductive health and rights in environmental considerations and instruments; and the sensitive nature of the topic of population growth. A mixed-methods qualitative project was conducted, using an online survey of 402 participants followed by 18 in-depth interviews, to collect the views of policy makers, researchers, and activists in sub-Saharan Africa. We find overwhelming agreement that population growth has negative implications for environmental sustainability and other social welfare outcomes. We find broad support for the integration of population dynamics and reproductive health and rights dimensions at international environmental meetings and in environmental sustainability instruments. Participants also stressed the under-representation of sub-Saharan Africa in discussions of population dynamics and in international environmental governance. Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of sub-Saharan African perspectives and attitudes on the interconnectedness of reproductive health, population dynamics, and environmental sustainability.