International Journal of Technology Management & Sustainable Development - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2015

Harmonization of activities in various facets of health systems is an area of considerable historical and current policy and practice interest in Africa. This article emanates from a two-year analysis of processes towards harmonization of medicines regulatory systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed due to low levels of regulatory expertise, high regulatory costs and increasing prevalence of unregistered and counterfeit medicines, African countries are pursuing the feasibility of harmonization of their medicines regulatory systems as a policy option. Some of the challenges for attainment of harmonized cross-national regulatory systems include perennial weaknesses in national medicines regulatory systems and continuous changes in stakeholders, champions, motivations and models for the processes and outputs of harmonization. Confirming the presence of an active agenda towards harmonization of medicines regulatory systems in Africa, this article cautions though that harmonization should not be an isolated activity, but should leverage existing regional integration agendas and political legitimacy, while balancing between commercial and health care interests.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) embodies a complete code of managing businesses in a sustainable and ethical manner. It is also considered to be one of the first initiatives to promote sustainable development. Corporate social responsibility and sustainable education and research have been instrumental in proliferating relevant knowledge and values in a society. In this article, we explored the current state of research pertaining to corporate social responsibility and sustainability undertaken in Chinese universities. We focused on peer reviewed research articles published by the faculty associated with universities in China. A literature review of 430 articles published in leading journals between 2000 and 2014 revealed 25 research studies dealing particularly with CSR in China. We aimed at finding, using meta-analysis techniques, the frequency, methodologies, industry focus, main findings and the overall impact on corporate social responsibility scholarship of the research published. We found that there was a notable increase in the corporate social responsibility articles written by Chinese university researchers during the past five years. Most of the articles employed an empirical research methodology to study corporate social responsibility in various sectors. There were no comparative studies found between China and other countries that may perform better in corporate social responsibility; such studies could provide insights for China’s corporate social responsibility development. We concluded that researchers affiliated with the national key universities in China contributed a large number of articles.

The past decade (2005–2014) was the decade for the Education for Sustainability (EfS) declared by the United Nations, in view of the spread of sustainability awareness. The literature argued that one of the rapid ways of achieving spread of sustainability awareness is to educate students who are more adaptive and eager to learn and who could be turned into more aggressive and revolutionary spreading agents of the ‘sustainability awareness’ practices. In that too, lead might be taken by management and social sciences students because their working field is society itself, and thus they could be more confronted and inclined towards decision-making and social interactions role, as compared to other disciplines. This article demonstrates one of such efforts where selection decision about the sustainability awareness projects lies in root in an academic institution to make students learn about sustainable development concepts and practices. The finding of the study suggests that out of three significantly relevant projects the ‘Reuseactivity Project’ was found to be the best alternative when evaluated on multiple criterion like cost, faculty involvement, time and impact. The analysis used was the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), being one of the highly used multi-criteria decision analyses. The findings were further cross-checked under what-if (sensitivity) scenarios for its robustness amidst different criteria variations.

The Information and Communication Technologies’ (ICT) integration in administration activities provides different managerial implications. The use of ICT helps public services in transforming their ‘traditional’ into more effective and sustainable management practices. The experience of e-administration implementation taking into account a ‘Sustainable management’ dimension will require the adoption of multidimensional approach based on a Human, Activity and Technological dimensions. We associate to these different dimensions a transversal level: Green or sustainable dimension. The main challenge is the implementation of systems able to guarantee to citizens, companies, administrations and international institutions the real access to these systems based on sustainable uses and practices.

Agriculture and rurality have come under severe pressure in the last few decades. The loss of agricultural land and, hence, farming, through urban expansion has been pervasive. As a consequence, farmers tend to engage in pluriactivity to supplement their low farm income. This study explores the pervasiveness and underlying motivation behind pluriactivity by Algerian farmers. Algeria is a particularly interesting case where agriculture has been hit by severe and unique challenges. In particular, Algerian farmers spent more than a decade under the threat of terrorism, followed by a decade and a half of Dutch disease effects. The analysis of a survey data shows that pluriactivity has offered the Algerian farmer the required adaptation capability to survive these two challenges which, ultimately, would sustain agriculture in Algeria.