african drylands institute for sustainability

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Personal wealth as denoted by accumulated net assets is a key ingredient of a people’s standards of living. This is because wealth facilitates consumption, especially in old age, cushions people against adversities such as illness and unemployment as well as enables further wealth creation through access to bank credit. The assets that comprise wealth include cash and bank balances, properties, shares in cooperatives and listed companies, life assurance policies, accrued pension benefits, corporate bonds, and treasury bills and bonds.
This paper examines the sizes and composition of the wealth portfolios of salaried middle and upper income employees in Kenya in order to find out which personal attributes are key determinants of the portfolios. Primary data was obtained from questionnaires that were administered on a stratified random sample of 1,067 salaried middle and upper income employees in Kenya in mid 2010, the time of survey. The preliminary tests employed the use of Kaiser Mayer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s Test based on correlation and partial correlation as well as the results of Bartlett’s Test of sphericity to test for the presence of correlations among variables. For this paper, the results KMO measure of sampling adequacy of 0.758 was acceptable, since it was higher than the recommended minimum of 0.50. Additionally, the Bartlett’s Test of sphericity recorded an acceptable p-value of 0.000, which was lower than the test value of 0.05 percent, thereby indicating that there is correlation between the variables To establish the determinants of the wealth portfolios of employees in Kenya, 21variables were used. These variables were analyzed using factor analysis procedure and in order to achieve a simple and meaningful structure, that is, have a nonzero loading of the explained variance for each individual factors, varimax rotation was done. As a result, six critical factors were established as the determinants of wealth portfolios of salaried middle and upper income employees, which include earning capacity, life cycle factors, investment objective, employee’s cultural background, employees’ risk taking behavior and savings. The findings largely conform to theory and corroborate evidence from prior studies.
Key Words: assets, attributes, characteristics, salaried middle and upper income employees, socio-economic, wealth portf

Education is an important determinant of individuals’ income, health as well as the capacity to interact and communicate with others. In spite of this view, there is considerable evidence of inequalities of opportunity in education in most developing countries. Differences abound with respect to sex of the head of the household, rural and urban areas heads, across population groups defined by parental education, region of residence and wealth. The probability that the household head is uneducated is higher than average when she is a woman and in general, household heads are more likely to have no education when they are in rural areas than in urban areas. Achievements by children in school vary considerably depending on the wealth of their household, their place of residence, the education of their mother and that of their father.
From the foregoing, the overall policy goal for the Kenyan Government is therefore to provide every Kenyan the right to education and training no matter his/her socio-economic status through the provision of all-inclusive quality education that is accessible and relevant. This vision is guided by the understanding that quality education and training contributes significantly to economic growth and the expansion of employment opportunities. The vision is in tandem with the Government’s plan as articulated in the Economic Recovery Strategy Paper which provides the rationale for major reforms in the current education system in order to enable all Kenyans to have access to quality lifelong education and training.
For the above reasons, the Kenyan Government has, over the years, demonstrated its commitment to the development of education and training through sustained allocation of resources to the sector. However, despite the substantial allocation of resources and notable achievements attained, the sector still faces major challenges related to access, equity, quality, relevance, efficiency in the management of educational resources, cost and financing of education, gender and regional disparities, and teacher quality and teacher utilization.
Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss some of inequalities that still exist within the Kenyan education system despite the Government’s efforts and at the same time suggest some policy issues and strategies thereof. The paper looks at the background to inequalities in education, education with respect to employment and national development, impact of free primary education, inequalities in education, an analysis of education expenditure and ends with a discussion on several strategies that must be implemented in order to reverse the current inequalities in education in Kenya.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), also referred to as Relationship Marketing, is heralded by some marketing academics and practitioners as the new paradigm of marketing. However, despite the intense growth in the adoption of CRM practices by organizations all over the world and the widely accepted conceptual underpinnings of CRM strategy, conflicting opinions and increased pessimism about the effectiveness of CRM strategy abound the marketing literature. To this effect, scholars have called for more rigorous studies
to establish the usefulness of CRM as a strategic orientation.
The general objective of this study was to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework of the influence of CRM practices on organizational competitiveness and conduct an empirical assessment of the framework on the commercial banks in Kenya. The study utilized a descriptive correlational research design. A survey methodology was employed for data collection.
The study found statistically significant positive linear relationships between CRM practices and organizational competitiveness. The study also established that the relationships between CRM practices and marketing productivity, marketing productivity and organizational competitiveness, organizational factors and marketing productivity and the moderating role of organizational factors on the relationship between CRM practices and marketing productivity were all significant. However, the relationship between organizational factors and organizational competitiveness was found not statistically significant. The overall conclusion of the study was that organizational competitiveness is not significantly influenced by the mere existence of a range of organizational factors within the firm such as age, size, and ownership structure, type of customers served, corporate reputation, and duration of CRM implementation or even technology level. Rather, organizational
competitiveness is achieved through appropriate CRM practices and marketing productivity.
Nonetheless, organizational factors positively enhance the relationship between CRM practices and marketing productivity thus indirectly influences organizational competitiveness. The results of the study have significant managerial and theoretical implications.
Key words: Customer Relationship Management, Relationship Marketing, Organizational Competitiveness, Marketing Productivity, Organizational Factors.

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This study examined the Efficiency Market hypothesis in its weak form using run tests, unit root tests and the Ljung-Box Q-statistics. The motivation was to determine whether foreign exchange rate returns follow a random walk. The data covered the period starting January 1994 to June 2007 for the daily closing spot price of the Kenya shillings per US dollar exchange rate. The main finding of this study is that the foreign exchange rate market is not efficient. The results showed that most of the rejections are due to significant patterns, trend stationarity and autocorrelation in foreign exchange returns. This is attributed to both
exchange rate undershooting and overshooting phenomena.

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