Jean Baptiste Ukwizabigira

Artificial intelligence is the new direction for future growth of today’s business landscape increasing customer satisfaction, systems efficiency and effectiveness, and data-driven decision making. It is a powerful tool to revolutionize business processes and create a competitive advantage. Through a desktop research approach review, this paper investigated the potential of AIbased models to improve performance creating business value through customer satisfaction by Rwandan companies. It examined the potential benefits of adopting AI-based models, and the challenges existing, and drew experience from success stories of Rwandan companies that are one step ahead of millions of steps to be taken. It revealed and concluded that artificial intelligence intelligence-based models create business value by increasing customer satisfaction through improved data-driven decision-making, customer interaction, processes, systems, and infrastructure. It concludes with why Rwandan companies need to position themselves to global competitive advantage by adopting artificial intelligence.

Constant teacher observation is considered to be the best tool to invest in teacher performance for growth. It creates rooms for assessment, feedback, and setting the next steps for improvement. Teachers get an opportunity to learn how they are running their classes in the eyes of other experts, co-teachers, managers, and even students. When done perfectly, the desired teacher’s continual development is achieved. Using a desktop literature review, this paper identifies the common issues in teacher observation, why there is a need for blueprint shift from announced observation to unannounced observation and draws conclusions on the future of teacher observation to ensure quality, effectiveness, and reliability in observation. KEYWORDS: teaching, observation, teacher performance

Background Despite a global drop of under-five mortality by 59% between 1990 and 2019, it remains high in Low- and Middle- income Countries (LMICs)with a preponderance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Southern and Central Asia. Besides preterm and intrapartum complications, undernutrition contributes 45% of the deaths in these developing regions. In Africa, under-five mortality due to severe acute malnutrition (SAM) has stagnated at 10–40%, higher than WHO targets and the SDGs projections. Methods We searched MEDLINE (via PubMed), Scopus, Web of Science, Science direct, Google Scholar, Cochrane Library and Open Grey databases for literature reporting under-five mortality due to SAM in Africa from 2014 to 2024. Estimates of the primary and secondary outcomes were pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis due to the anticipated between study heterogeneity. Results Fifty-two out of 82 studies (63.4%) analyzed reported an overall under-five mortality of 11% (95%CI: 0.08–0.13). Diarrheal diseases, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and pneumonia were the three most frequently reported risk factors associated with mortality by 21 (40.1%), 20 (38.5%), and 14 (26.9%) studies, respectively. No significant regional variation was found. Conclusion Under-five mortality due to SAM in Africa is still high as reported in the included studies. There were no regional variations. Diarrheal diseases, HIV and pneumonia were the most frequently reported risk factors associated with under-five mortality due to SAM in Africa.