Centre for African Wetlands

The main objective of the study is to examine the extent to which the ethics of accounting is relevant to professional accountants. In doing so, the factors contributing to accounting fraud and the ethical challenges encountered by accountants will also be examined. The main respondents were accountants and auditors from intuitions in selected districts in the eastern region of Ghana. The study revealed that to a great extent accounting ethics is relevant to the professional accountants. However, there are challenges in adhering to ethical principles/codes of the accounting profession. The study also revealed that some factors, such as money and legalistic culture contribute to accounting fraud. It recommends that efforts aim at increasing ethical knowledge and standards at all levels should be strengthen by all stakeholders in the accounting profession.

Combination therapy of analgesics is well suited for pain management especially in elderly patients and, has been recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Drug analysis plays an important role in the development, manufacture and therapeutic use of drug. In this study, a suitable, cost effective Isocratic HPLC-UV method (Reversed Phase) has been developed and validated for the simultaneous quantification of Acetaminophen, Caffeine, and Ibuprofen in fixed dose combination drugs, using a mobile phase combination of methanol and 0.025M Phosphate buffer –(adjusted to pH 3.2 with Orthophosphoric acid) in the ratio 85:15.A Vertex Column-Eurospher C18 (250 x 4.6 mm), flow rate of 1.0 ml/min at 25°C were the chromatographic conditions. With Piroxicam as internal standard, quantification was achieved with UV detection at 225 nm based on the peak area responses. A good resolution and a short run time (7mins) were achieved with the validated conditions. In consequence, statistical evaluation at the 95% confidence limits revealed that, the method was Linear; with an average correlation coefficient (R = 0.995), and accurate - (mean recovery 99.45% for Acetaminophen, 100.10% for Caffeine and 99.28% for Ibuprofen). With an instrument and intermediate precision RSDs>2.0, the method was found to be specific, Robust, and more economical. Six formulated combination products on the Ghana market were assayed using the validated method. The Acetaminophen, Caffeine and Ibuprofen contents in the combination drugs varied from 97.35% to 103.88%.

Banks all over the world are taking advantage and opportunities brought about by e-banking which happened as a result of Internet. As the security level in this sector becomes stronger, the strength and tactics of these fraudsters also increases. Various lucrative attacks have been launched and unfortunately, many have succeeded. This paper addressed different types of cybercrimes in banking sector, factors contributing to cybercrime, tools used by cybercriminals, effects of cybercrime on Nigeria banking, cyber security technology for preventing cybercrimes and duties of individual and organizations on protecting our banks from cybercrime. Keywords: Cybercrime, Banking Sector, Internet, Cyber security.

Adoption of water lifting technologies for agricultural production in Ghana: implications for investments in smallholder irrigation systems

While entrepreneurial barriers within the SME segment remain a germane issue not least, in the milieu that entrepreneurship and SME development contribute a hefty percentage to the global economy, especially in developing countries, little is to date known about barriers to entrepreneurship development and how to overcome it in the SMEs segment. Scholars suggest that knowing the factors that prevent entrepreneurship development is the bedrock of SMEs' growth and sustainability. However, the current study investigates the barriers to entrepreneurship development in the SME segment. The present study deployed articles from reputable scientific databases: Web of Science, Scopus, EHRIPLUS, EBSCO, Google Scholar, etc. to solicit information on the subject matter under discussion using the keywords search. Out of the numerous articles downloaded, thirty-five of them were used by the researchers to achieve the study objective. From the reviewed literature, it is therefore established that factors such as lack of risk-taking capacity, lack of a Strategic Plan, lack of managing finances, and inadequate market experience usually serve as hindrances to the growth and development of SMEs within the scope of developing countries.

Agricultural use of shallow groundwater in Ghana: a promising smallholder livelihood strategy

The efficiency of buffers in network routers plays an important role in effectively accommodating packets that arrive in bursts at the routers interfaces. The choice of a suitable router buffer size is still a significant problem. Since, the use of small buffer guarantees low packet delay but higher chances of packet lost. Similarly, larger buffer leads to buffer bloat which causes higher delay in a network resulting to poor Quality of Service (QoS). Buffer bloat is a significant problem due to the high changing link characteristics of modern heterogeneous network traffics. The access links can have connections with speedy links (Gbps) with small amount of packet losses and have connection with a susceptible high packet loss with low-bandwidth links like wireless and last mile connections. Hence, what may be thought to be a rational buffer size might be flawed when link rates and delay fall below the minimum value. Thus, this paper analyses buffer size performance and optimization in networks with heterogeneous traffics for Random Early Detection (RED) Queues using NS2 simulations to obtain a range of better suited buffer sizes that improve the QoS without extra signaling and computation by routers. The results obtained established that having a buffer size between five to ten kilobytes yielded best average throughput with low average delay for RED Queue at the congested router Interface. In addition, the optimized buffer size scheme improved the QoS accordingly. Keywords: Buffer Size, Network Traffic, Quality of Service, Simulation

The technological advancement and growth of the cloud computing technologies is changing network service provisioning and operation. Cloud based services represented as XaaS where X refers to service offering such as Platform, Software and Infrastructure as a service, provides flexible on-demand provisioning along with its security concerns that goes with the adoption of the cloud computing. Despite all the advantages of adopting the cloud computing option, the security and privacy of the clients’ data cannot be overlooked. Understanding these security concerns is a fundamental requirement to choosing the cloud solution. This paper focuses on the use of Blockchain technology to mitigate the security challenges of the cloud computing. Literature reviews have discussed other security options for the cloud, but little discussions have centered on the adoption of the Block Chain technology to secure the cloud and open doors for future research of cloud computing using smart contract. Keywords: Blockchain, Distributed Database Systems, Data Integrity, cryptography, Cloud Infrastructure Security, Confidentiality, Distributed Ledger