Dept of Social Sciences

Boko Haram(BH) is the name given to the Islamic militia group found within the residents of Maiduguri the North-Eastern City of Borno State, Nigeria. Their meaning and mission is simply put as western education is forbidden in Nigeria. It is for this reason that BH has been rising to great influence. It is in this city that the group is formed and has its headquarters. As an ethnic group, ethnicity is therefore defined as a social phenomenon associated with interaction among members of different ethnic groups. Boko Haram is also understood to be an ethno-religious militia group. Various theories are employed to give clear understanding and background to the study. Examples of ethno-religious instances, formation and activities were also discussed while the data used for the study was purely secondary. The study was undertaken to determine how the ethnic and religious groups are formed in complex ethnic countries like Nigeria with 250 languages.

The United Nations (UN) has characterised societies. As such, the youth are encouraged to participate in municipal development programmes, activities and elections. This can be done amongst others through local youth council aim to promote and protect the interest of the youth. They also represent the youth in governance of municipality. In South Africa, Department of Social Development White Paper for Social Welfar 16 and 30 years of age. The Correctional Services also refers to the youth as all those in the age range 14 to 25 years of age. The National Health Policy Guidelines focus on the adolescent and the youth as age. The African Youth Charter also defines youth as those between the ages of 15 years and 35 years and excludes the 14 year olds. The paper reviews the factors that hinder/promote youth participation in rural communit and projects in the Mafikeng Local Municipality (MLM). It also examine the role of the LYC in involving the youth in community activities in MLM. The study used open enabled the respondents to respond beyond the borders of the questionnaires.

The study was carried out to provide an understanding of the participation of the Municipality's youth in the local electoral processes. The objective of the study measured and examined the extent of youth participation in the local electoral processes of the Municipality, investigated and identified factors that prevents the youth from participating in electoral processes within the Municipality. The study applied a qualitative research methodology, questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data. A number of factors posed challenges to the youth and hinder their participation in electoral processes. These challenges emanated from negative attitudes of the youth towards politics. Also, employment/income, age, gender and race were some salient factors backed by poor education background, poverty and unemployment. The study recommends that the youth in the Municipality should be educated by their parents, teachers, church elders and the Mafikeng community to enable them acquire skills and positive attitude towards participating in the local electoral processes.

Youth unemployment and the quest for empowerment have led to a growing surge in youth volunteerism in South Africa. The objective of this paper is consequently to examine how youth volunteer activities (YVAs) have offered opportunities and created an enabling development environment for young men and women to be employable, thereby improving their quality of life. To be able to achieve this objective, the researchers used quantitative methodologies to generate data for analysis. The researchers relied on secondary information from Statistics South Africa's (StatsSA) database. The study found that the youth volunteer rate has increased over the past decade by 2.1 percentage points from 3.7% to 5.8%. It also found that youth volunteerism has become a way of life and a route to fulltime employment that assured them and improved their quality of life.

Youth unemployment and the quest for empowerment have led to a growing surge in youth volunteerism in South Africa. The objective of this paper is consequently to examine how youth volunteer activities (YVAs) have offered opportunities and created an enabling development environment for young men and women to be employable, thereby improving their qualityof life. To be able to achieve this objective, the researchers used quantitative methodologies to generate data for analysis. The researchers relied on secondary information from Statistics South Africa’s (StatsSA) database. The study found that the youth volunteer rate has increased over the past decade by 2.1 percentage points from 3.7% to 5.8%. It also found that youthvolunteerism has become a way of life and a route to fulltime employment that assured them and improved their quality of life.

The solar energetic particle (SEP) event is a kind of hazardous space weather phenomenon, so its quantitative forecast is of great importance from the aspect of space environmental situation awareness. We present here a set of SEP forecast tools, which consists of three components: 1) a simple polytropic solar wind model to estimate the background solar wind conditions at the inner boundary of 0.1AU (about 20 R⊙); 2) an ice-cream-cone model to estimate the erupted CME parameters; and 3) the improved Particle Acceleration and Transport in the Heliosphere (iPATH) model to calculate particle fluxes and energy spectra. By utilizing the above models, we have simulated six realistic SEP events from August 14, 2010 to September 10, 2014, and compared the simulated results to the GOES spacecraft observations. The results show that the simulated fluxes of > 10MeV particles agree with the observations while the simulated fluxes of > 100MeV particles are higher than the observed data. On...