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A metapopulation model which explicitly integrates vector-borne and sexual transmission of an epidemic disease with passive and active movements between an urban city and a satellite city is formulated and analysed. The basic reproduction number of the disease is explicitly determined as a combination of sexual and vector-borne transmission parameters. The sensitivity analysis reveals that the disease is primarily transmitted via the vector-borne mode, rather than via sexual transmission, and that sexual transmission by itself may not initiate or sustain an outbreak. Also, increasing the population movements from one city to the other leads to an increase in the basic reproduction number of the later city but a decrease in the basic reproduction number of the former city. The influence of other significant parameters is also investigated via the analysis of suitable partial rank correlation coefficients. After gauging the effects of mobility, we explore the potential effects of optimal control strategies relying upon several distinct restrictions on population movement.

Cigarette smoking on college campuses has become a significant public health issue, which in turn led to an increasing focus on establishing programs to reduce its prevalence. In this paper, a compartmental model depicting the spread and cessation of the smoking habit on college campuses, obtained using theoretical principles often employed in mathematical epidemiology, is proposed and analysed. The existence and stability of the habitual smoking-free and habitual smoking-persistent equilibria, respectively, are explored in terms of a threshold parameter, hereby called the smokers generation number and denoted by Rc . A sensitivity analysis indicates that Rc is the most sensitive to the contact rate between habitual-smokers and occasional-smokers and to the rate of successfully quitting smoking. Numerical simulations of the proposed optimal control strategies reveal that the most effective approach to reduce the prevalence of cigarette smoking and possibly achieve a smoking-free campus should combine both control measures, namely allocating mandatory smoking rooms together with educating the public on the harmful effects of smoking and providing large scale guidance, counselling and support therapy to help students quit smoking.

We examine the effectiveness and sustainability of the distance teacher education program established by the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana, by investigating the differences in the academic performance of students who are trained in the teacher education program via traditional and distance education modes, respectively, from 2011 to 2015. Close attention is paid to the factors that affect the academic performance of students in the distance mode. Our findings confirm that traditional mode students perform better than their distance mode counterparts in terms of cumulative GPAs. Gender and economic demographics of distance study centers are found to affect the academic performance of distance education students significantly. The policy implications of these findings are discussed and directions of further action are outlined.

We model a common teller–customer interaction occurring in the Ghanaian banking sector via a Double-X queuing network consisting of three single servers with infinite-capacity buffers. The servers are assumed to face independent general renewal of customers and independent identically distributed general service times, the inter-arrival and service time distributions being different for each server. Servers, when free, help serve customers waiting in the queues of other servers. By using the fluid limit approach, we find a sufficient stability condition for the system, which involves the arrival and service rates in the form of a set of inequalities. Finally, the model is validated using an illustrative example from a Ghanaian bank.

This paper estimates a conditional version of liquidity–adjusted capital asset pricing model in an emerging market in line with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the Ghana Stocks Exchange. We find out that for several years, Ghana stock market has been excluded from the global financial watch and from empirical verification model for lack of transparency in the performance of Exchange. Our evaluation concludes that illiquidity risk can be measured in the local market and exhibit a strong trend of mix reactions from liquidity premia.While the effect of the recent financial crisis do not show much difference between the different market conditions, the effect is more stronger in the down market than the up market. Finally, we explore the size effect on the market and conclude that the net beta as well as the systematic liquidity risk is pronounced in the smaller market though insignificant.