Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies help guide actions needed to transform and reorient ... more Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies help guide actions needed to transform and reorient agricultural systems to effectively support development and ensure food security by increasing farmers’ resilience to climate change. Agroforestry has been vouched for as one of the best CSAs because it provides ecosystem services such as water quality enhancement and prevents land degradation. This study sought to establish and document the adoption of agroforestry as a CSA practice among smallholder farmers in Kakamega County. Stratified sampling was used to select six sub-counties to represent the county's various agroecological zones and regions for the research sample. A combination of purposive and snowball sampling was used to select 428 smallholder CSA farmers, of whom 376 (87.9%) were practicing agroforestry. Primary data was collected using interview guides developed through the Kobo Collect application. Microsoft Excel and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) sta...
Methodology for Risk-Benefit Analysis in Research, 2024
Risk-benefit analysis in the context of research activities has recently become a mandatory exerc... more Risk-benefit analysis in the context of research activities has recently become a mandatory exercise. It is an integral part of the more extensive exercise, the scientific and ethical review for research approval and subsequent monitoring and evaluation exercises. However, how to undertake the process remains a largely subjective process that results in somewhat 'incomplete' inventories of potential risks and benefits for many research activities. There is also the challenge of computing an overall study risk-benefit score when objective and subjective measures of risks, benefits, severity, and magnitude are involved. This study employed the integrative literature review methodology to summarize past empirical and theoretical literature to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon. The result is a simple, concise, and practical guide for identifying research risks and benefits, the computation of risk scores, benefit scores, and the overall risk-benefit score in a research activity. These scores are subsequently utilized to compute the study's overall risk-benefit analysis score. This step-by-step process for the computation of a risk-benefit ratio will introduce clarity in the process of risk-benefit analysis in order to help ascertain if specific risk probabilities and their severity have been correctly assessed. Conversely, the approach is also helpful in ascertaining if study benefits and their magnitude have been adequately assessed and rated.
East African Scholars Journal of Engineering and Computer Sciences
Public participation is important because it helps to close the gap between the public, private s... more Public participation is important because it helps to close the gap between the public, private sector and the government. However, a successful devolution process in Kenya is hampered by a lack of/inadequate public participation in county governments. Communications gaps are one of the arguments made for this development. The main objective of the study was to develop a sentiment analysis model for use in public participation forums in County Governments in Kenya. The study was conducted through the design thinking process. The population of interest of this study comprised of county management and staff also area residents in Nakuru, Busia and Baringo counties who have participated in public participation forums before. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) approach was used to create the cloud NLP package and obtain user sentiment magnitudes for the sentiment analysis model. Following that, cross validation was utilized to assess the performance indic...
Blood pressure is one of the measurements that is taken during antenatal care visits. Though moth... more Blood pressure is one of the measurements that is taken during antenatal care visits. Though motherhood is a fulfilling experience in the society, it is connected to ill-health and even death in some women leading to maternal morbidity and mortality due to preeclampsia syndromes. United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 aims to reduce global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births. Therefore, this study sought to assess the suitability and affordability of smart armbands for preeclampsia management in antenatal care. An exploratory design was adopted in the study to assess the suitability and affordability of the device in antenatal care to ensure real time monitoring. Twelve categories were used in assessment to select the most suitable smart armband. It was found out that F1 smart armband was suitable and affordable. The study has shown great potential for actual adoption in health care systems in developing countries
This video contains the recording of the presentation titled "Kenyan Research Productivity a... more This video contains the recording of the presentation titled "Kenyan Research Productivity and e-infrastructures at KENET" given at the 7th Sci-GaIA workshop on "e-Infrastructures and Open Science in support of Public Health", held on the 8th of February 2017 at the Kenyatta University Conference Centre, Nairobi, Kenya. For more information about the event, please visit http://agenda.ct.infn.it/e/scigaia-seventh-workshop. For more information about the Sci-GaIA project, please visit http://www.sci-gaia.eu.
The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from busines... more The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from businesses to clients has the potential to help them increase revenues, personalize offerings and reduce marketing costs. However, there is a lack of adoption of this emergent mode of advertising among micro-enterprises. This study examined the underlying reasons for this lack of adoption using an exploratory factor analytic study based on an adaptation of the Technology Acceptance Model with the choice of technology as an additional factor. Data was collected in a survey involving 304 micro-enterprises by means of structured questionnaires and interview schedules. The study findings validate the technology acceptance model and also reveal that the choice of technology is an important factor influencing the intention to use location-based mobile advertising by micro-enterprises.
Millions of shillings are lost by mobile phone users every year in Kenya due to SMs Spam, a socia... more Millions of shillings are lost by mobile phone users every year in Kenya due to SMs Spam, a social engineering skill attempting to obtain sensitive information such as passwords, Personal identification numbers and other details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic commerce. The design of efficient fraud detection algorithm and techniques is key to reducing these losses. Fraud detection using machine learning is a new approach of detecting fraud especially in Mobile commerce. The design of fraud detection techniques in a mobile platform is challenging due to the non-stationary distribution of the data. Most machine learning techniques especially in SMs Spam deal with one language. It is in this background that the study will focus on a client side SMs Spam detection in Kenya’s mobile using machine learning. Naive’s Bayes algorithm was used for this purpose because it is highly scalable in text classification. The contributors of Corpus include mobile service prov...
The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from busines... more The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from businesses to clients has the potential to help them increase revenues, personalize offerings and reduce marketing costs. However, there is a lack of adoption of this emergent mode of advertising among micro-enterprises. This study examined the underlying reasons for this lack of adoption using an exploratory factor analytic study based on an adaptation of the Technology Acceptance Model with the choice of technology as an additional factor. Data was collected in a survey involving 304 micro-enterprises by means of structured questionnaires and interview schedules. The study findings validate the technology acceptance model and also reveal that the choice of technology is an important factor influencing the intention to use location-based mobile advertising by micro-enterprises.
Technological and financial limitations have hampered the effective advertisement of products and... more Technological and financial limitations have hampered the effective advertisement of products and services by microenterprises thus limiting their contribution towards national economic growth. Recent advances in mobile technologies makes the use of location based mobile advertising (LBMA) a viable option in addressing this challenge. However, a majority of LBMA are developed for use on smart and feature phones with inbuilt positioning and program execution capabilities thus leaving out a majority of microenterprises who use basic phones. This study therefore examined the use of alternative positioning methods, namely symbolic and network based geo-location, and device independent system access methods; SMS and USSD, for the development of LBMA for use by microenterprises. The delivery of LBMA services to microenterprises using network based geo-location, SMS and USSD was found to be feasible and practical for microenterprises. The LBMA concepts developed in this work will be useful...
Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies help guide actions needed to transform and reorient ... more Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies help guide actions needed to transform and reorient agricultural systems to effectively support development and ensure food security by increasing farmers’ resilience to climate change. Agroforestry has been vouched for as one of the best CSAs because it provides ecosystem services such as water quality enhancement and prevents land degradation. This study sought to establish and document the adoption of agroforestry as a CSA practice among smallholder farmers in Kakamega County. Stratified sampling was used to select six sub-counties to represent the county's various agroecological zones and regions for the research sample. A combination of purposive and snowball sampling was used to select 428 smallholder CSA farmers, of whom 376 (87.9%) were practicing agroforestry. Primary data was collected using interview guides developed through the Kobo Collect application. Microsoft Excel and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) sta...
Methodology for Risk-Benefit Analysis in Research, 2024
Risk-benefit analysis in the context of research activities has recently become a mandatory exerc... more Risk-benefit analysis in the context of research activities has recently become a mandatory exercise. It is an integral part of the more extensive exercise, the scientific and ethical review for research approval and subsequent monitoring and evaluation exercises. However, how to undertake the process remains a largely subjective process that results in somewhat 'incomplete' inventories of potential risks and benefits for many research activities. There is also the challenge of computing an overall study risk-benefit score when objective and subjective measures of risks, benefits, severity, and magnitude are involved. This study employed the integrative literature review methodology to summarize past empirical and theoretical literature to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon. The result is a simple, concise, and practical guide for identifying research risks and benefits, the computation of risk scores, benefit scores, and the overall risk-benefit score in a research activity. These scores are subsequently utilized to compute the study's overall risk-benefit analysis score. This step-by-step process for the computation of a risk-benefit ratio will introduce clarity in the process of risk-benefit analysis in order to help ascertain if specific risk probabilities and their severity have been correctly assessed. Conversely, the approach is also helpful in ascertaining if study benefits and their magnitude have been adequately assessed and rated.
East African Scholars Journal of Engineering and Computer Sciences
Public participation is important because it helps to close the gap between the public, private s... more Public participation is important because it helps to close the gap between the public, private sector and the government. However, a successful devolution process in Kenya is hampered by a lack of/inadequate public participation in county governments. Communications gaps are one of the arguments made for this development. The main objective of the study was to develop a sentiment analysis model for use in public participation forums in County Governments in Kenya. The study was conducted through the design thinking process. The population of interest of this study comprised of county management and staff also area residents in Nakuru, Busia and Baringo counties who have participated in public participation forums before. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) approach was used to create the cloud NLP package and obtain user sentiment magnitudes for the sentiment analysis model. Following that, cross validation was utilized to assess the performance indic...
Blood pressure is one of the measurements that is taken during antenatal care visits. Though moth... more Blood pressure is one of the measurements that is taken during antenatal care visits. Though motherhood is a fulfilling experience in the society, it is connected to ill-health and even death in some women leading to maternal morbidity and mortality due to preeclampsia syndromes. United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 aims to reduce global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births. Therefore, this study sought to assess the suitability and affordability of smart armbands for preeclampsia management in antenatal care. An exploratory design was adopted in the study to assess the suitability and affordability of the device in antenatal care to ensure real time monitoring. Twelve categories were used in assessment to select the most suitable smart armband. It was found out that F1 smart armband was suitable and affordable. The study has shown great potential for actual adoption in health care systems in developing countries
This video contains the recording of the presentation titled "Kenyan Research Productivity a... more This video contains the recording of the presentation titled "Kenyan Research Productivity and e-infrastructures at KENET" given at the 7th Sci-GaIA workshop on "e-Infrastructures and Open Science in support of Public Health", held on the 8th of February 2017 at the Kenyatta University Conference Centre, Nairobi, Kenya. For more information about the event, please visit http://agenda.ct.infn.it/e/scigaia-seventh-workshop. For more information about the Sci-GaIA project, please visit http://www.sci-gaia.eu.
The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from busines... more The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from businesses to clients has the potential to help them increase revenues, personalize offerings and reduce marketing costs. However, there is a lack of adoption of this emergent mode of advertising among micro-enterprises. This study examined the underlying reasons for this lack of adoption using an exploratory factor analytic study based on an adaptation of the Technology Acceptance Model with the choice of technology as an additional factor. Data was collected in a survey involving 304 micro-enterprises by means of structured questionnaires and interview schedules. The study findings validate the technology acceptance model and also reveal that the choice of technology is an important factor influencing the intention to use location-based mobile advertising by micro-enterprises.
Millions of shillings are lost by mobile phone users every year in Kenya due to SMs Spam, a socia... more Millions of shillings are lost by mobile phone users every year in Kenya due to SMs Spam, a social engineering skill attempting to obtain sensitive information such as passwords, Personal identification numbers and other details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic commerce. The design of efficient fraud detection algorithm and techniques is key to reducing these losses. Fraud detection using machine learning is a new approach of detecting fraud especially in Mobile commerce. The design of fraud detection techniques in a mobile platform is challenging due to the non-stationary distribution of the data. Most machine learning techniques especially in SMs Spam deal with one language. It is in this background that the study will focus on a client side SMs Spam detection in Kenya’s mobile using machine learning. Naive’s Bayes algorithm was used for this purpose because it is highly scalable in text classification. The contributors of Corpus include mobile service prov...
The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from busines... more The use of location-based mobile advertising to deliver context specific information from businesses to clients has the potential to help them increase revenues, personalize offerings and reduce marketing costs. However, there is a lack of adoption of this emergent mode of advertising among micro-enterprises. This study examined the underlying reasons for this lack of adoption using an exploratory factor analytic study based on an adaptation of the Technology Acceptance Model with the choice of technology as an additional factor. Data was collected in a survey involving 304 micro-enterprises by means of structured questionnaires and interview schedules. The study findings validate the technology acceptance model and also reveal that the choice of technology is an important factor influencing the intention to use location-based mobile advertising by micro-enterprises.
Technological and financial limitations have hampered the effective advertisement of products and... more Technological and financial limitations have hampered the effective advertisement of products and services by microenterprises thus limiting their contribution towards national economic growth. Recent advances in mobile technologies makes the use of location based mobile advertising (LBMA) a viable option in addressing this challenge. However, a majority of LBMA are developed for use on smart and feature phones with inbuilt positioning and program execution capabilities thus leaving out a majority of microenterprises who use basic phones. This study therefore examined the use of alternative positioning methods, namely symbolic and network based geo-location, and device independent system access methods; SMS and USSD, for the development of LBMA for use by microenterprises. The delivery of LBMA services to microenterprises using network based geo-location, SMS and USSD was found to be feasible and practical for microenterprises. The LBMA concepts developed in this work will be useful...
Essential Guidelines for Writing Scientifically and Ethically Sound Research Proposals, 2024
The Scientific and Ethics Proposal Preparation Guideline is designed to assist researchers, acade... more The Scientific and Ethics Proposal Preparation Guideline is designed to assist researchers, academicians, and professionals in preparing high-quality research proposals. It is concise yet comprehensive and covers pertinent scientific and ethical issues. The guideline provides expectations regarding scientific considerations, such as the preliminaries, objectives, research questions, hypothesis, justification, significance, limitations, assumptions, the scope of a study literature review, and choice of research design. The methodology section of the guideline outlines considerations on primary and secondary data collection, sampling, informed consent, assent, privacy and confidentiality, data management, data analysis, and risk-benefit analysis. It further highlights aspects of research proposals that often need to be improved in most proposal guidelines, such as professional, legal, and regulatory requirements, researcher credentials, qualifications and competencies, conflict of interest, and dissemination.
Uploads
Papers by Moses Thiga