3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions

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    Technical cooperation and sub-Saharan Africa’s development dilemma
    (2022) Siyanbola, Adedamola Akeem
    It has been established by Chenery and Strout (1966) that developing countries do not have sufficient capital that can bring about their much-needed growth and development. In addition to foreign investment (in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment), foreign aid has in recent times become a much sought after method of augmenting their stock of capital. This thesis examines the impact of technical cooperation (TC), a subset of foreign aid on the development dilemma that plays out in Sub-Saharan Africa. We chose TC because of its direct impact on development, particularly human development. This thesis employs a three essay method to achieve its objective. Chapter one and chapter five give the introduction and conclusion of the thesis respectively. The middle chapters examine the impact of technical cooperation on development in the region with the assistance of three interlinked essays. The first examines the role of technical cooperation in the development of human capacities in Sub-Saharan Africa while the second essay looks at the impact of technical cooperation on educational development in the region. The third essay focuses on the role of technical cooperation on health outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The objective of the first essay is to examine the role of TC in the development of human capacities through the use of the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP). It further examines whether the impact is predicated on good policy and institutional quality and whether productivity is the transmission mechanism for TC to human development in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use the Kripfganz (2017) variant of the generalized method of moment (GMM), which permits both linear and non-linear moment conditions and the two-stage sequential regression with analytical second-stage standard error correction of Kripfganz and Schwarz (2015) to analyse our data. Our results show that TC significantly influences human development in SubSaharan Africa (SSA). It also enhances policy formulation, coordination, evaluation, and 6 institutional quality which leads to improved human development. The study also indicates that improvement in productivity is a veritable transmission channel through which TC is routed to human development. The second paper (Chapter three) examines the effectiveness of technical cooperation on educational outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study analyses panel data of Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1996 -2018 based on a dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique. The result suggests that technical cooperation and institutional quality have a significant negative effect on educational attainment while per capital income and gender inequality have a significant positive effect on educational attainment in SSA. In addition, it was found that the lag of educational attainment affects the current, indicating that there is a consistent relationship between the past periods of educational attainment and the present. The study recommends the need to reposition the institutional and policy environment in SSA countries by instituting a more serious and swift legal prosecution of corrupt cases especially those that have to do with foreign aid and grants for education The third essay (Chapter four) investigates the effect of technical cooperation on health outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Previous literature has either focused on SDG-related or non-SDG-related health targets but not both. This study estimates a pool of data from SubSaharan Africa from 1996 to 2018 via the dynamic panel Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach. The estimates of the static model suggest that technical cooperation flows to Sub-Saharan Africa translate to an increase in infant mortality rate and immunization. The result of the dynamic panel model finds that immunization is the only component among all the health targets that increase with technical cooperation in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, government health expenditure shows a significant effect on both the SDG and non-SDGrelated health targets tested in the study. It was shown to increase with increased life expectancy, health facilities, and infectious diseases and to decrease with infant mortality rate. The study emphasises the need to reposition technical cooperation to directly stimulate not only immunisation but also other SDG and non-SDG-related health targets. This may be through a prototype model used in the immunisation programme that engages the local government in the provision of house-to-house technical assistance in areas that can improve life expectancy, health facilities and reduce infant mortality rate and infectious diseases in SSA
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    Inhibiting Hepatitus B virus replication with short hairpin RNA sequences that target the viral X open reading frame
    (2006-11-17T12:55:38Z) Ely, Abdullah
    Chronic infection with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) is endemic to sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia where it is a major risk factor for the development of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Currently available therapy is only effective in a small subset of chronic carriers. The development of novel treatment modalities for the management of HBV therefore remains an important global medical objective. Sequence plasticity of the HBV genome is limited by its small size and the overlapping nature of its open reading frames (ORFs). These features make HBV an ideal target for therapy based on nucleic acid hybridization. The use of ribozymes (RNA enzymes) and antisense molecules to inhibit gene expression is well documented. The recent discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) has added to the arsenal of therapy based on nucleic acid hybridization. RNAi is the process whereby short RNA duplexes (called short interfering RNA or siRNA) mediate the sequence-specific post-transcriptional silencing of genes homologous in sequence to the siRNA. siRNA function by guiding a protein complex (RNA Induced Silencing Complex or RISC) to target mRNA for degradation or translational repression. The protein X ORF (HBx ORF) is a conserved region of the HBV genome and is common to all viral transcripts. HBx is required for infection by the virus and plays an important role in the establishment of chronic infections in vivo as well as in the development of HCC. RNAi targeted against the HBx ORF may therefore prove useful as treatment of chronic HBV infection. Plasmid based expression cassettes capable of endogenously generating short hairpin RNA (shRNA) targeted to the HBx ORF were constructed. The shRNA function as substrates for the RNAi machinery and are processed into siRNA. The ability of the expression cassettes to knockdown markers of HBV gene expression was tested in a human hepatoma cell line. A panel of 10 U6 promoter-driven shRNA expression vectors was generated. The U6 promoter (an RNA polymerase III promoter) is normally involved in the transcription of small nuclear RNA and as such is ideal for the generation of shRNA of precisely defined length. Three cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter-driven shRNA expression cassettes incorporating ribozymes that produce defined hairpin sequences were also generated. The CMV promoter (an RNA polymerase II) promoter is involved in the transcription of large messenger RNA. Two hammerhead ribozymes lying 5’ and 3’ of the shRNA encoding sequence were incorporated into the cassette. Cis-cleavage by the ribozymes releases a shRNA of defined length thereby overcoming the limitations imposed by extraneous sequences from CMV promoter-driven transcription. U6 promoter-driven shRNA expression vectors efficiently knocked down markers of HBV replication in liver cells. The CMV promoter-driven expression vectors were incapable of inhibiting HBV gene expression; however shRNA generated in vitro from these vectors mediated efficient knockdown of HBV replication. shRNA-mediated inhibition of gene expression therefore holds promise as a novel treatment strategy for the management of HBV and other mobile genetic elements.
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