African Multidisciplinary Journal of Research

The Lucan Jesus as the Model for Transformative Masculinity: A Lesson for Nigerian Conservative Churches on Gender Equity

2025-01-17T14:10:57+00:00

Gender inequality has become one of the challenges that the continent of Africa is facing due to how men and women socialized through culture, social norms, and religious interpretations influenced the religious sphere. This has led to toxic masculinity that begins from childhood socialization and how women/ladies are the victims of such abuse and is reflected in conservative Nigerian churches. This paper employs contextualization on the model of Christ Jesus as presented in Luke’s gospel as a model of transformative masculinity towards gender equity. It sheds light on how Jesus relates to women offers ways to deconstruct toxic masculinity within the Nigerian conservative churches. This paper employed African women’s Christology to address gender inequality challenges in the Nigerian church. It sheds light on how to transform toxic masculinity for gender equity. This paper thus provides the model of Jesus as a transformed man towards gender equity in Nigerian conservative churches that have a gender imbalance in the religious space and secular including the home.

The Spread of Information Disorder on Facebook and its Impact on Sociocultural Sustainability

2025-01-17T14:17:09+00:00

This study focuses on how information disorder on Facebook affects sociocultural sustainability. Sustainable development comprises the economic, environmental, and social domains. Several researchers have focused on financial and ecological growth, while the sociocultural sphere concerned with language and communication in a digital space remains unnoticed. Human interaction is essential in sustainable development. Therefore, language as a shared means of communication is worth paying attention to. Information disorder as discussed in this paper includes misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information. Facebook, is one of the largest social media platforms which plays a pivotal role in disseminating information. This makes it susceptible to the spread of information disorder and its potential consequences on sociocultural sustainability. Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing from language, communication, and technology, this study investigates two main questions: How do information disorders spread on Facebook? Moreover, what impact does exposure to information disorder have on sociocultural sustainability? A descriptive research design entailing qualitative and quantitative approaches was used in data collection and analysis. Qualitative data was collected using unstructured interviews in four sessions, which lasted 10 minutes using an interview guide. On the other hand, quantitative data was collected using questionnaires with structured questions. 50 informants were purposively sampled from Roysambu Sub-County in Nairobi County. This sample size is intended to supplement the highlighted gaps from the literature reviewed for generalization. The developmental-sociocultural theory is adopted as an analytical tool, using its cultural beliefs and social cohesion tenets. The findings reveal that Facebook users, especially young adults, are increasingly exposed to information disorder, which distorts societal norms and values. These findings may provide insight for policymakers on social media platforms and communities to develop robust strategies to combat information disorder and promote a more sustainable sociocultural environment in this digital age.

The Impact of the Leadership Style of the Four Caliphates on the Politics of Islam in Contemporary Time

2025-01-17T14:25:39+00:00

This article is about “The Impact of the Leadership Style of the Four Caliphates on the Politics of Islam in Contemporary Time”. The article investigates the historical development of the four Caliphs and caliphates in the early Muslim community, during their reign of Caliphates. The study explores into the different leadership styles of the four caliphs, in managing the community safely and peacefully. Highlighting the impact of the leadership styles of the four Caliphs on the politics of Islam and their effects on the leadership in Muslim communities, whose resonances still resounds in the contemporary times. These effects remain patterned in the leadership styles of some Muslim leaders in Africa today. Adaptation and synthesis, conservative and fundamentalism are the leadership styles of the Caliphs during their reign. In their leadership, they promoted democracy, good governance, and centralization of the power and standardization of the Qur’an, consultations, fairness, justice, accountability, transparency and established the administrative structures in Muslim empire. Their leadership styles have a connection with autocratic, democratic and delegating as the conventional leadership styles. The impact of leadership styles of four Caliphs resonate in the contemporary politics of Islam. These influences are in different African Islamic countries. The article aims to bridge the academic gap by examining the effects that influence the current politics of Islam including the African context. The article adopts a literature-based approach, relies completely on library sources in collecting the data, conducting an inclusive review of academic works, books and journals or articles. This approach aims to collect insights from historical development of Caliphs, and their leadership styles. It also aims to amass comparative perceptions and contribute to a systematic exploration and analysis of the subject issue.

Missions and Digitally Empowered Ministers in the Anglican Church of Uganda

2025-01-17T14:33:33+00:00

This article examines the role of new online ministers in the Anglican Church of Uganda, focusing on how they negotiate authority between digital and institutional settings and how this shapes their relationships with other institutional actors. It demonstrates how competition hinder digital missions while accelerated through collaboration. Additionally, a historical analysis of key intersections between missions and technology in the history of the Anglican Church of Uganda serves as foundational in stressing the present role of digital technology and revealing the conflicting impact of technological advancements on the missional efforts of the Church of Uganda.

Green Supply Chain Management Practices and Sustainability of Pharmaceutical Firms: A Systematic Literature Review

2025-01-17T14:44:34+00:00

The pharmaceutical industry plays a critical role in providing essential healthcare products to people globally. However, the industry's operations and supply chains have significant environmental impacts, including the consumption of resources, generation of waste, and emission of greenhouse gases. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices on the sustainability of pharmaceutical firms. This was a desk review. It followed a systematic approach, conducting a comprehensive search across academic databases such as Google Scholar, Research Gate, JSTOR, Emerald Insight and ProQuest, including journals and conference proceedings. The paper outlined the findings of past studies done on the relationship between GSCM practices and organizational sustainability especially in pharmaceutical firms. The researcher sourced studies online under the criteria that they focused on GSCM and organizational sustainability and were carried out from the year 2010 to 2023. The findings showed that GSCM has a positive impact on firm sustainability. Additionally, firms that embraced GSCM demonstrated a heightened commitment to employee welfare and community engagement further enhancing social sustainability. The research also highlighted the positive relationship between green procurement and firm performance, particularly in energy consumption reduction and waste management. Green manufacturing practices led to improved environmental performance, emphasizing optimized production processes and reduced hazardous substances. The conclusion was that the adoption of GSCM practices holds immense promise for enhancing the sustainability of pharmaceutical firms. The evidence suggests that proactive integration of GSCM practices leads to significant reductions in resource consumption, lower emissions, and heightened operational efficiency. It was concluded that pharmaceutical firms in Kenya should develop and implement holistic GSCM strategies that encompass eco-friendly sourcing, efficient transportation, waste reduction, and responsible disposal practices to minimize environmental impact. Pharmaceutical firms should also build strong partnerships with suppliers to encourage the adoption of sustainable practices throughout the supply chain, ensuring compliance with environmental standards and driving collective efforts towards sustainability goals.

A Clash of Worldviews: Towards an Assessment of its Impact on Discipleship among Evangelical Christians in the Tharaka Community of Kenya.

2025-01-17T14:55:21+00:00

The prevalence of Tharaka’s traditional worldview among Tharaka community continues to reflect a complex dynamic of culture and Christianity. The Tharaka community has maintained a deeply rooted spiritual framework that has withstood the test of time in the emergence and spread of evangelism more than a century ago. This worldview unleashes a profound paradox, challenging the essence of Christianity as it is in many African communities. The Tharaka worldview is inconsistent with the Evangelical faith or the Evangelical Christian worldview. For instance, professing Tharaka Christians consult diviners for help or a witch to harm perceived enemies. Secretly this is for an outward impression of loyalty and faithfulness. In addition, it is the Christian faith, or to impress Church leadership. Evangelicals oppose and condemn such oscillating between the Christian and traditional worldviews because of its impact on discipleship. This study revealed that the unholy alliance of the two worldviews promotes nominal Christianity, produces inconsistent Christian faith, leads to syncretism, demeans the means of grace, leads to poor evangelism, undermines the place of Jesus Christ in redemptive work, and produces imbalanced theology. The study employed a qualitative research methodology, utilizing interviews, focus groups, and literature reviews to understand the paradoxical interplay between faith and traditional beliefs. Reflecting on the theories of the Flaw of the Excluded Middle and Lamin Sanneh’s translatability principle, the paper argues that the persistence of Tharaka's traditional worldview affirms that evangelicals find relevance in the traditional worldview. The study advises that for the gospel to speak to the cultural reality and for the African Church to contribute her influence in world Christianity like the early Church, the gospel must be presented at the level of the Tharaka traditional worldview, ensuring a more authentic and transformative Christian experience.

Cultural, Religious, and Government Institutions: Imagining the Possibility of their Cooperation in Poverty Alleviation in Uganda

2025-01-17T15:03:25+00:00

The paper wrestles with the question: In what possible ways can cultural institutions, religious leaders, and government cooperate to harmonise foreign cultures to develop an Africanised education curriculum towards alleviation of economic poverty in Uganda? The historical literary analysis method was relied on to investigate records that shed light on the impact of culture on the development and implementation of education curricula. Results show that the Europeanised education curriculum at play lacks Africanised colourings and such an anomaly has slowed poverty alleviation in the country. The post-colonial government launched several job creation programmes aimed at alleviating poverty but the resultant outcomes have been dismal in the recent past. In all the poverty eradication endeavours undertaken, constitutional mechanisms are not traceable that were enacted to involve religious and cultural institutions in the architectural process of scrutinising, curriculum development, and piloting poverty eradication programmes among indigenous communities. Findings reveal that the Europeanised curriculum is theoretical in nature and lacks the ethics intended to equip learners with practical skills. To overcome the anomaly, Uganda adopted an Asian mode of education, projecting the approach as a rightful path that will influence innovativeness among young people. On the contrary, this scholarly article postulates that the fantasized education aspirations intended to alleviate economic poverty using copied cultural knowledge transfer methodology are most likely to hit a rock. Every society is wired with unique knowledge transfer attributes that are strongly rooted in their universe ancestry. It is recommended that the Uganda Ministry of Education needs to think tank with cultural, Christian, and Muslim leaders so that an Africanised education curriculum is developed. Without tripartite relational collective involvement in the development process of an integrated education curriculum that speaks the language of Africans, the current rolled-out competence-building curriculum is most likely to take decades to smoke people out of economic poverty in Uganda.

Debunking and Demystifying Mental Health in the Context of African World View Today

2025-01-17T15:13:29+00:00

Mental Health as a condition has not been fully demystified and elaborated thoroughly. In Africa, it is attributed to either curses, spiritual causes, witchcraft or some other cause due to their traditional worldview or belief systems, thus how they interpret phenomena, incidences, events and diseases included. This has led to rampant mental health cases as high as 25% of total population compared to other parts of the world. It could be factual that witchcraft and curses exist in Africa, but they are not the only causes of mental health. Proper understanding to expose the gaps is overdue. Therefore this study set out to debunk and demystify mental health by assessing reasons for limiting mental health to worldview causes and analyzing scientific and possible other causes/characteristics in Africa, prevention and healing of mental health. Mitigation of African world causes, interpretations and challenges provided multifaceted solutions to mental health today, such as clinical, psychological, cultural, and African worldview and beliefs notwithstanding. The purpose of this study is to establish why mental health is still attributed to curses and witchcraft despite modern scientific medical ways of treatment and why mental health is rampant and access to treatment not effective in Africa? The study used qualitative approaches to analyze library information: to collect and describe data, summarize, drew conclusions and recommendations made. The study found out that mental health is only skewed and shrouded in mystery and that it is a health condition like any other and not caused by curses or evil spirits, or witchcraft. It can be treated using conventional and other medical measures. Besides demystification and debunking, the revitalization of traditional methods alongside scientifically proven and conventional approaches to mental health is highly recommended in this paper.

Adoption of Online Church Services and Participation by Kenya Anglican Youth Organization in Cathedral Deanery, Thika Diocese, Kiambu County, Kenya

2025-01-17T15:25:14+00:00

The Church has continued to embrace the use of online media platforms with a view of reaching out to a wider audience. The Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) through her leadership has been on the forefront since 2017 in championing the use of online media platforms due to decreasing youth enrolment in church, which stood at 10% in 2017. This is happening at a time when the number of youth who have subscribed to online media platforms is also increasing. The study examined the adoption of online church platforms and participation of youth in an ACK deanery, the involvement of the youth in planning for online church service and the challenges encountered by the youth in online church service. The study employed Connectivism Learning Theory by George Siemens (2005) to understand how technology and innovations are adopted at ACK, St. Andrew’s and St. Monica’s Mugumo-ini parishes. The study reviewed empirical data on online church services, youth involvement and challenges of online platforms in enhancing participation among the youth. The study adopted a mixed approach method and utilized a descriptive research design. The target population was (1055) and a sample of 15% (159) which was proportionately and purposively selected. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered to members of Kenya Anglican Youth Organisation (KAYO) and parents/guardians, while FGD was carried out among church leadership, whereas the bishop was interviewed. A pilot study was conducted in Memorial Parish and was considered in the final study. This was done by calculating Pearson’s correlation and Cronbach Alpha, which met the 0.7 threshold. Face validity was carried out to ensure the accuracy of the questionnaire and interview schedule. Data collected was then analysed descriptively and thematically. The findings of the study showed that the church adopted Facebook at (84.6%), Twitter (0%), YouTube (38.5%), and WhatsApp (61.5%). On the involvement of the youth, the study found that the church involved the youth in technical support 61.5%. Challenges faced by the youth in online church participation included distraction by other social media (61.6%), internet connectivity at 23% and cost of data at 15.4%. The study found that overall online church attendance among the youth stood at 38.5%. The study's overall recommendations were that; the church ought to utilize YouTube and Facebook for live streaming, run online church services for the youth for a maximum of 30 minutes, and use WhatsApp for online bible study services. Further, the study recommends that the church should offer meaningful involvement of the youth and its leadership rather than limiting them to technical support. These may include offering strategic training on innovative online technologies to church leadership and monitor online youth participation by assessing statistics after each online service/activity.

Gender-Based Violence in Nairobi Informal Settlements: Women Survivors’ Access to Justice through SMS

2025-01-20T07:48:37+00:00

This paper explores the role of SMS platforms in facilitating access to justice for survivors of
Gender-Based Violence (GBV). Specifically, it investigates the extent of SMS use among GBV
survivors in Mukuru informal settlements and the factors influencing their adoption of this
technology. The study is anchored in the Technology Acceptance Model and employs a mixedmethods research design, integrating both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A sample
of 310 women GBV survivors from Mukuru was selected for the study. Key informants included
representatives from ActionAid Kenya – a local NGO that introduced the SMS service – Wangu
Kanja Foundation, ActionAid’s local partner in Mukuru, as well as paralegals, community
health workers, police officers, and local chiefs. The findings reveal that women in Mukuru
heavily rely on SMS platforms to report GBV cases and seek justice. Additionally, the SMS
system provides a safe space for accessing and sharing information, empowering survivors to
make informed decisions. The study concludes that SMS technology plays a pivotal role in
reporting GBV incidents and facilitating access to justice for survivors. These findings are
valuable for technology developers creating mobile-based solutions, GBV practitioners
integrating technology into their interventions, and policymakers addressing the root causes
of GBV in informal settlements.