Pregnancy-related mortality is an enormous topic that others have studied comprehensively and widely. Despite this, the contribution of nutrition and exercise to maternal wellness and survival has not been addressed systematically. Nutrition, antenatal exercise and maternal health practice are often not effectively integrated. However, malnutrition in pregnancy can lead to increased risk of death, complications, susceptibility to infection, reduced activity levels, and lower productivity. The health benefits of regular physical exercise in pregnancy include maintenance and improvement of physical fitness and cardiovascular endurance, prevention of excessive gestational weight gain and glucose intolerance, conditioning of the muscles needed to facilitate labor and improvement in psychological adjustment to changes in pregnancy. Nonetheless, most of the causes of maternal morbidity and mortality in the Gambia such as anaemia, haemorrhage, prolong labor and eclampsia has some degree of association with the status of maternal nutrition and level of physical activity. Under-nutrition and obesity among women co-exist as major nutritional problems in the Gambia. The Gambian culture plays a major role in limiting exercise during pregnancy. Despites all the efforts on nutritional supplementation during pregnancy, malnutrition and lack of exercise is still a major problem affecting the health of pregnant women in this country. Therefore maternal health programs in the Gambia should alert pregnant women of the need to adjust their nutritional and physical exercise levels in order to achieve and maintain a desirable nutritional status and weight for their own health as well as for better birth outcomes.

Fertility is one of the most dynamic variables that can affect the demographic characteristics of a population, its size, rate of increase, geographic distribution, age and sex structure, life expectancy and family composition. Today, following the path of More Developed Countries (MDCs), a demographic transition from high fertility and mortality to low fertility and mortality can be said to be underway in most of the Less Developed Countries (LDCs) (Adebusoye, 2001). However, this transition is reported to be slowest in Sub-Saharan Africa (ibid). Similarly, slow decline in infertility rates are noted in the Gambia (Gambia Bureau of Statistics, GBOS). The fertility rates recorded during the population and housing census of 2003 and 2013 were 6.7 and 5.4 respectively. Moreover, the report of these censuses also show that Basse, the southern part of the country and predominantly a Soninke community, had the highest fertility rates of 6.9 in 2003 and 6.2 in 2013.
The Soninke society in the Gambia is primarily rural and its highly gender-stratified culture is very supportive of high fertility. Indeed the patrilineal descent, patrilocal residence, inheritance and succession practices and hierarchical relations have remained unchanged in this society. Low status of women, early marriage, extended family system and polygamy are the main driving forces of high fertility among the Soninke people. However, the desire for large family size is restricted by the practice of child-spacing achieved by traditional family planning methods, which are not effective and sometimes dangerous to the health of the women. Despite the free contraceptive services in the Gambia, contraceptive uptake is still low (9%). Low patronage for modern contraceptives is associated with the low status of women in this society. Therefore, the problem of high fertility in the Gambia, especially among the Soninke tribe should be considered from a sociocultural perspective if programs to ameliorate this critical problem are to achieve success.

This study investigates the economic strategies that young Gambian’s employ to achieve their aspirations of fulfilling socio-cultural obligations. In particular, the study explores the economic activities of young Gambians who engage in diverse informal economic activities in the fringes of the Gambia’s tourism sector to provide for themselves and their families. Known as beach hustlers, they consist of small entrepreneurs, principally peddlers, vendors and others who provide informal services with the aim of making a livelihood directly from tourists. Whilst existing research tends to mostly focus on the activities of beach hustlers who engage in transactional sexual activities with tourists as a means of earning a living or getting an opportunity to travel, this study focuses on the strategies of those of those who resort to alternative economic strategies.
Drawing on data collected from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2014 in Kololi, the country’s main tourism hotspot on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, the study uses the cases of two ‘beach hustlers’ to shed light on hustling strategies of young Gambians. The study discusses how ‘beach hustlers’ take advantage of the Gambia’s booming tourism industry by engaging in diverse informal economic activities. This study shows that majority of young Gambians who find it increasingly difficult to migrate to the West pursue local livelihoods to fulfil their aspirations of social and economic advancement. The study further shows that the strategies young Gambians employ are influenced by the structural constraints and opportunities that appear in specific space–time conditions. By doing so, this study contributes to the literature on the economic strategies that young urban youths employ to achieve their aspirations.

This paper focuses on economics of the Boko Haram violence on Africa’s most populous black nation, Nigeria. While it adds to the corpus of the literature on the insurgency, its point of departure is that it looks beyond the analyses that view the crisis essentially in a non-materialistic religious terms to perspectives that focus on the underlying economic factors driving the insurgency. In this context, the paper does not necessarily dwell on the socio-economic factors that provide the army of socially-disadvantaged northern youths from which Boko Haram recruits its foot soldiers. The paper focuses on the economics of the area in which the violence occurs and argues that beyond the façade of Boko Haram’s religious posturing, a robust underground economy and profiteering, including the prospect of an oil economy around the Lake Chad Basin area, have sustained the violence and have the potential to prolong the crisis.