The welfare of African widows has generated a significant amount of research within the past twenty years, mainly from Nigerian scholars having an insider’s knowledge of these practices, with female scholars often taking the lead. Recent years have seen scholars’ concerns spill over to the public arena, with a growing number of voices challenging long-established traditions associated with widowhood. This article briefly surveys the development of studies on this issue, focusing on Igboland, a linguistic and cultural area in south eastern Nigeria. It shows how these concerns have found their way into Nollywood films, considers the evolution of storylines and explores their links with societal trends, analyzing sixteen films produced between 1998 and 2013.

Education scholars agree that several factors contribute to the low quality of education in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) including the way teachers teach. This article focuses on the impact of educational practices to enhance students’ learning while also improving the quality of education in Africa. Drawing from community of practice perspective which sees learning as a process that does not take place in an individual mind but rather in a participation framework, the article highlights ways in which an action research study using a writing workshop to guide teachers and students in one primary school in Northwestern Tanzania create books for their school library repositioned teachers for optimal teaching and learning. About 19 teachers and 119 sixth-grade students were involved in addition to 19 parents. By examining interviews and participant observations, the data seems to suggest that teachers mediated learning and they were able to notice and name students’ learning in ways they could not do before.

African economy in contemporary times is described as one that is highly dependent on the Global North for its sustenance despite, the enormous resources of the continent. This paper provides empirical evidence that African solutions remains better option to African problems. It employs the “False Paradigm Model” which is a variant of the Dependency theory. It also employ analytical tool in its investigation. It argues that despite the experimentation of external approach/strategies to development, African economies have not made meaningful progress in term of economic development. It suggests that African states must look inward for it developmental needs rather than on the Global North. The Asian Tigers (Newly Industrialized Countries) such as Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea among others were at the same level of underdevelopment in the sixties but have developed leaving African countries behind. It further argues that African states must address the issue of corruption, political instability, poverty, bad governance, seat tight leadership etc and embark on critical economic and political reforms that are people oriented that will address the weak state of private sector in Africa as well as good leadership style. Lastly, this paper argues that African states will not develop as long as they continue to depend of the Global North for it developmental needs African states will perpetually remain underdeveloped and indebted to the global North.

This paper examines the nature of party nomination of candidates and the effect of this on women representations in politics in Nigeria. Women under-representation continues in spite of official party policy of equitable representation of women in party organs based on a 35% affirmative action. The paper demonstrates that this official party policy often comes into contradiction with cultural and political realities. The degree of this contradiction measures the level of democratic consolidation. The underrepresentation of certain groups, particularly women, indicates the limits of the democratic space. The future of democracy in Nigeria will to a large extent depend on the progressive expansion of the democratic space by, among other things, increasing the representation of women beyond statutory provisions of equality and affirmative action on paper. The democratic system will remain unsustainable where political parties are not inclusive, and the candidates they nominate for elections remain male dominated. Based on the November 2013 local election in Enugu State, the paper highlights the particular obstacles that women face in the political process, especially in getting nominated as candidates and concludes that a strong link exists between the prevalent culture of political ‘godfatherism’ and women underrepresentation in local politics in Nigeria since 1999.

Of the developments in media technologies, that have impacted Nigeria’s media landscape, in recent times; the single most powerful development is perhaps video technology. The technology that was introduced into the country in the 1970s, by Igbo businessmen, went on to launch Nigeria’s popular video film industry, Nollywood, and in so doing transformed the face of film and television production in the country. Whether it be hailed as the most visible form of popular expression in contemporary Nigeria or denigrated for the poor quality of its productions, what is not in doubt is that Nollywood offerings must resonate with the Nigerian film audiences going by the rate at which the industry releases video films. Why then has the video film industry succeeded where the Nigerian celluloid film industry failed? This article adopts a historical and critical approach to account for the failure of the celluloid film industry and Nollywood’s ever rising popularity.