ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
The State of Customer Relationship Management in the Ghanaian E-commerce Ecosystem: Case Management.

Over the past decade, Ghanaian online businesses have increased in number. These business owners have taken tremendous strides to ensure that their businesses stay on top of their game, especially sales and customer service. However, customer management and retention are issues that seems to creep up, especially since the market for e-commerce keeps widening. According to Arnett and Badrinarayanan, managing relationships with customers is challenging for many firms because they engage in many different types of transactions, and their customers vary considerably as to their wants and needs [9]. Due to these complexities, there is a need for a solution that caters to effective customer service and retention. A good case management system that caters to the queries of customer is hence the key that unlocks the door to business success, relationship building, and management [5]. This project aims to understand the state of CRM in the e-commerce ecosystem in Ghana and recommend CRM vendors based on the current needs of e-commerce businesses in the Ghanaian ecosystem. To successfully implement this solution, research will be based on The current state of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the Ghanaian e commerce ecosystem. This research topic will explore the use of CRM, its limitations, and suggestions to improve these systems. We plan to sample a few online businesses such as Jumia, Jiji, and Swoove for our research and case studies.

Source: Ashesi
The state of local content children's television programs: A comparative study of the past and present state of children's television in Ghana

The central focus of this dissertation is to examine the state of local content children television in Ghana with regards to quantity and type and the importance of having more of it in the children’s television in Ghana. In order to place the situation in context, Cultivation Theory and Social Theory were adopted as theoretical frameworks. This dissertation employed three research tools - content analysis, in-depth interviews and questionnaires - in gathering data to answer research questions and achieve objectives. Within the two-year period studied, the three television stations aired a total of 15 unique title children’s programs, as compared to the 89 unique title children’s programs identified by Osei-Hwere within the four year period from 2001 to 2004. Furthermore, locally-produced children television programs were observed to be in a declining state both in Osei-Hwere’s research and in this dissertation. Views from parents and children confirmed that there is the need for more local content children’s programs in order to preserve our culture which is modest and decent and also, give children a reality that they can identify with. Factors identified for contributing to the declining state include unavailability of sponsorship, high cost of production, inadequate support from the government and managerial influence.

Source: Ashesi
The Turtlebot Tour Guide (TTG)

The Turtlebot Tour Guide project is a project that was started in a robotics class. Since then, the project has been worked on within classes, by work-study students and even as capstone projects. The aim of the project is to model a Turtlebot to be a tour-guide that can effectively conduct tour processes within Ashesi University. The project involves mapping of Ashesi University, the creation of path-planning algorithms and other modules. This project plans to improve and complete previous work that has been done on the Turtlebot Tour Guide in a way that makes it functional and effective for tours within Ashesi University.

Source: Ashesi
The Use of AI in Predictive Maintenance for Anomaly Detection in Cars

The integration of artificial intelligence into automotive systems continues to transform predictive maintenance by enhancing vehicle reliability, safety, and operational efficiency. This project presents the development of an Al-driven anomaly detection system designed for vehicles, based on user-provided historical data rather than real-time OBD-II telemetry. The system leverages three machine learning models testing confirmed that the platform is functional, intuitive, and meets its core design objectives. However, further evaluation with technical users and expanded datasets 1s recommended for future enhancement. This project demonstrates a practical application of AI in automotive diagnostics and supports sustainable innovation efforts aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure).

Source: Ashesi
The use of biodegradable hydrogels for enhanced soil moisture and plant growth

Hydrogels are three-dimensional polymer networks that can retain and release stored water over a period of time. Agriculture is a water-intensive industry, and using hydrogels can help reduce the need for frequent irrigation. Most agricultural hydrogels on the market are not biodegradable. Hence, there is a need for increasing research on biodegradables due to the environmental implications that non-biodegradables may have on the environment. This study evaluated the agricultural potential of three biodegradable hydrogels: PVA, Agarose, and Alginate. Among these, Alginate demonstrated superior properties for soil moisture retention. Characterization revealed a swelling ratio of 273%, mass loss of 72% and a flow rate of 0.261 ml/s. Alginate hydrogels exhibited exceptional water absorption capacity, retaining 61% of their original wet mass after 155 minutes. These attributes highlight Alginate hydrogels as a potential solution for sustainable agricultural moisture management solution.

Source: Ashesi
The use of voice interface systems to augment selling and buying on university campuses

Our everyday shopping lives have been significantly augmented by rapid advances in Commerce Technologies. Buying and Selling of items as well as payments are currently mostly done online using advanced technologies, which have sped up shopping activities and made lives more comfortable for consumers. In spite of the rise in e-commerce, e-business, internet communication, and payment systems, physical cash is still popularly used in buying and selling of items on the University Campus in Ghana. There is no issue with that. However, a lot more problems surface when the seller has to give change to the buyer. The inconvenience of getting change for buyers especially when the change amount is quite small, such as GHC 20 pesewas is becoming menacing. This project thus seeks to reduce the inconveniency associated with change collection during buying and selling by allowing students and staff to accumulate their change amounts electronically through voice interface systems. This paper presents a comprehensive implementation of the OkNsesa system which comprises of speaker recognition and speech recognition components to allow users update their electronic accounts using voice commands. The key advantage of using voice interfaces is the ability to automatically log users into the system by recognizing who the user is from his voice.

Source: Ashesi
Timetable Scheduling System Using Genetic ALGORITHM(s)

The university course timetabling problem is an NP-complete problem which makes it challenging to solve considering all the constraints that come with it, be it hard or soft. Hard constraints cannot be violated when generating any feasible timetable solution. An example is a lecturer not being able to teach two courses at a time. Soft constraints can be broken without any significant conflict in the schedule. An example is a lecturer preferring not to teach two classes consecutively. A feasible timetable can be challenging to create, considering the number of courses run with the combinations of courses that a particular student can take. Every semester, courses are rescheduled after registrations are completed due to these constraints, and as such, many students are disadvantaged. This project seeks to solve this problem by developing a timetable algorithm to create a feasible timetable with no clashes. A genetic algorithm is used in this case to help solve the problem. An optimal schedule is generated after the algorithm is developed. The resulting timetable is void of clashes.

Source: Ashesi
TinyML for the Detection of Plant Diseases/Pests in Resource-Constrained Communities in West Africa

Most of West Africa's rural farmers do not have access to smartphones, stable internet connection or electricity - additionally, they typically have low English proficiency and technological competency. Subsistence farmers in the Akuapim-South Municipal Assembly of Ghana face the same reality but have to face the added problem of limited access to agricultural extension agents who provide plant disease identification services. While many technological solutions to plant disease identification exist, they are cloud-based and, thus, require resources not accessible to a rural farmer in this population. This study investigates the use of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML), a subset of computing which facilitates low latency, low power, low cost, and high privacy computing. While this technology has been proven comparable to cloud-based ML, there is a lack of research regarding its applicability both to the area of plant disease identification and the West African context. In order to fill this gap, this study develops a TinyML-based system and compares it to an existing mobile plant disease identification mobile app. The results of this study suggest TinyML is a comparable tool in terms of performance to cloud-based solutions and a better tool in terms of resource consumption. Additionally, a combination of cloud-based model training and on-device inference is suggested as the most suitable ML set-up to address this problem for this particular population. This study also identifies some areas for improvement and further research, such as the creation of a context-specific dataset, expanded experiment scope and use of alternative TinyML development platforms.

Source: Ashesi
Toll collection and business registration system

Data over the last years has become essential to everyday living. It is worth exploring how data and modern-day technology could solve everyday issues in the world. Like every other African country, Ghana boasts a sizeable informal employment sector, so large a sector the correct percentage is always a debate amongst statisticians. Inadequate resources and data have, however, hampered the revenue that could be collected from our informal sector. Ghana is estimated to lose $45 million from the informal sector per annum. Therefore this question comes to bare: how can we use data from the large informal sector to boost revenue collection in the various districts? This project explores data collection, visualisation and forecasting to enhance revenue mobilisation in the Ajumako-Enyan Essiam District. This work hopes to encourage the use of data science tools and machine learning algorithms in government services and uses the Ajumako Enyan-Essiam District as its case study.

Source: Ashesi
Tour guide robot

Ashesi University College is periodically visited by individuals who are interested in seeing the campus. On their arrival, the university has a system in place to give an escorted tour to the visitor if needed. This project stems from the need for an ever-available tour system. The project seeks to replace the existing tour system, which consists of humans, to one that consist of robots. The focus of this project is to map sections of the university campus, create a navigation framework and build a tour guide application that uses the navigation framework to provide visitors with an escorted tour of the Ashesi University campus. This paper presents a detailed description of the implementation of a tour guide robot and its limitations. Finally, the paper outlines short comings of the project as well as future work for the project to improve the tour guide robot.

Source: Ashesi
Towards the paperless office: best practices and exploration of enterprise rights management solutions for Ghanaian business processes

Information Technology continues to have a great impact on the way humans live and work. The business world is one of the aspects of life that has experienced this phenomenon. This advancement of technology has contributed to the growing use of paper in the office place which has had tremendous impact on the environment. However several new technologies have been developed to eliminate paper outright or at least reduce the amount of paper in the office environment. This phenomenon known as the 'paperless office' has become desirable but difficult objective to achieve. The objective of this research is to suggest general best practices and guidelines for implementing paperless office solutions and secondly to find out whether enterprise rights management systems can contribute to the paperless office solution. The research uses a case study methodology to analyze data on business practices. The results of the study showed that stakeholder buy-in, availability and actual use of IT resources and paperless office implementation project leadership have a strong bearing on the success or otherwise of the implementation of paperless office solution. The research also confirms findings in the literature that enterprise rights management does not provide a direct paperless benefit but rather can serve as a security enhancement that allows electronic documents to be protected from unauthorized access throughout the documents lifecycle.

Source: Ashesi
Tracking and locating property on university campuses

The problem of property crime exists on university campuses worldwide. There is also difficulty in monitoring and determining the location of items. Organizations have sought to rely on tracking devices to curb this issue. However, these devices are either too expensive, require high power consumption or are bulky and cannot be used to track small devices. In this project, an affordable and portable system is developed that monitors devices and alerts users once their items cross boundaries (geo fences).

Source: Ashesi
Tracking teacher absenteeism in public schools

Teacher absenteeism has become a canker in our society and it needs urgent measures to be put into place to curb it. There have been many attempts at monitoring teacher attendance using both traditional and technological approaches. This project proposes an application that uses an indirect approach to monitor attendance. On this platform, parents are allowed to submit an attendance status of the teacher of their children after they have inquired from the child as to whether the teacher was in school or not. Unlike other platforms, this application can measure if a teacher was absent part of the time. External educational officers have access to the attendance status and they can view attendance over a specific period in a particular school and generate a report of the degree of absenteeism in the school. This platform is made attractive to teachers and students as it provides an additional channel for teaching, learning and evaluating learning outcomes. The teachers post assignment and quizzes on this platform for the students to do. The students after submitting the assignment, can view their performance.

Source: Ashesi
Trends and cycles in primary commodities: state space modelling and the Kalman filter

Decomposing economic time series into their temporary and permanent components have followed two broad paths: trend versus difference stationary models and detrending versus filtering. Whereas the former breaks down due to their inability to capture the underlying data generation process (dgp), the latter are either one sided filters or are based on ad hoc procedures in achieving parsimony. In this paper, we propose structural time series models in which trends, cycles, seasonal components are treated as stochastic, and which contains the traditional approach as a special case. Cast in state space form, and estimated using maximum likelihood via the Kalman filter, these models accurately predict the behaviour of commodity prices through time. Using data on agricultural raw materials and metal price indices for the 1957(1) to 2008(4) period we document the frequency and duration of commodity prices, key elements for designing policies aimed at smoothing terms of trade shocks and the resulting macroeconomic effects associated with price disruptions. We found that the individual dgp have varied over time and are best captured as stochastic rather than deterministic trends. Moreover, we uncover multiple structural breaks and outliers, far beyond what extant results would like us to believe. Finally, the models remain robust in an out of sample forecast.

Source: Ashesi
TrustHop: Building a Social Trust Network

In recent online social networks, each user can often assign a value to their immediate friends level of trustworthiness. Understanding a social trust value between any two nodes in an online social network is beneficial in a range of applications, like online marketing and recommendation systems. However, assessing social trust between two members in an online social network is difficult and time-consuming. This is because existing work either created handcrafted rules based on specialized domain knowledge or required a large number of computational resources, limiting its scalability. Graph-based techniques have recently been proved to be effective at learning from graph data. Even though social trust may be represented as graph data, its advantages have a lot of potential for trust evaluation. Therefore, we begin by reviewing the characteristics of online social networks and the properties of trust. After which the two types of graph-simplification and graph-analogy methodologies would be compared and contrasted as well as their respective problems and obstacles. We then conduct a quick examination of its pre- and post-processes to present an integrated view of trust evaluation. Finally, we discuss some unresolved issues that all trust models face.

Source: Ashesi
Trustshop: Building a social trust network

Online social networks have increased in recent years. In many areas, such as businesses and governmental organizations, organizations of all sizes have been using social networks to thrive. As a result of this, the concept of trust comes into the picture, as individuals divulge a large amount of personal information on social networks. It is more important than ever to create and measure trust in a social network for people's privacy, safety, and livelihood. This paper aims to identify ways to use the social network structure and the trust links between them to predict how much two people who are not directly connected could trust one another. Inferring such trust values is hard to compute when person A and person B are unconnected in the social network. This paper presents a graph-based model to evaluate trust in an online social network. It focused on computing the quality assessment of person A for person B, considering that person A and B are unconnected in a given graph of quality assessment of people. The proposed model's accuracy in predicting a trust value is calculated and compared to the multiplicative strategies for trust propagation [11]. This paper also proves how this model can be used in real scenarios to answer how trustworthy someone is innate.

Source: Ashesi
TwiGrad: An ASR-based application for learning Twi

Language is a very important aspect of every people's culture and identity. Language is the basic human form of communication made up of various sounds and symbols that pass information from a person to another. The cultural significance of language mades it important for cultural identification and pride, hence the inability to communicate in one's language is simply a loss of part of their identity. The loss of native or heritage language is a problem most common among people living in a place other than their native lands where the dominant language is different from their native language. This projects a technology-based solution aimed at the acquisition and maintenance of Twi (a Ghanaian language) among people who wish to learn the language or increase their speaking proficiency in it. The product, an ASR-based mobile application, was well received, with majority of the stakeholders expressing an 80% acceptance of the functionality and usability of the application.

Source: Ashesi
Ubuntu: An Ashesi group work platform with digitally assisted peer evaluation

One of the most essential parts of education is learning how to collaborate with other people to accomplish a particular task or goal. From extremely large tasks such as running a multi-million dollar company to finishing a simple high school group assignment, the ability to work with other people as a team is a major factor in ensuring success. With the advent of technology, collaborative software has become an integral part of teamwork, providing a more organized platform for collaborative work both physically and remotely. However, students at Ashesi University encounter several difficulties when working collaboratively, including organizing team activities and timelines, agreeing on suitable meeting times, and ensuring that all team members make equal contributions. Additionally, the traditional method of evaluating peers through digital and paper surveys has its limitations. To address these challenges, the Ubuntu project presents a web-based collaborative platform specifically for Ashesi students. This web application combines the classic features of collaborative software such as meeting scheduling and task management with uniquely designed features for the academic setting. The highlight of this platform is a digitally assisted peer assessment score calculator to provide an innovative and efficient way of conducting peer evaluations. The platform shows the potential to be an effective collaboration application that contributes to improving the quality of teamwork within the university by providing a more organized way of tackling team activities and also improving peer evaluation.

Source: Ashesi
UI design and cross cultural communication

This thesis explores young Ghanaian students’ conceptualizations of and reactions to a website. In a study that comprises a design evaluation of an online pen-pal website and usability testing with students, it attempts to determine to what extent such a website can be used to help African-American and African children form better perceptions of each other, and how a design of a website. The approach used first determines what Ghanaian students’ expectations of a pen-pal website are, and comparing them to that of American students, and then having them testing it and giving feedback based on their reactions. Suggestions are then made for future measuring website usability and cross-cultural communication.

Source: Ashesi