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This study examines patterns of digital inclusion in Ziguinchor, Senegal, using household survey data combined with spatial indicators of infrastructure and access. We construct a Digital Inclusion Index (DII) capturing realized digital practices and a Composite Digital Access Score (CDAS) reflecting enabling conditions across six domains, including technological equipment, electricity, affordability, and spatial access. The results reveal substantial variation in digital inclusion across quartiers, with strong associations between inclusion outcomes and infrastructural and socioeconomic conditions, particularly electricity reliability, device quality, and mobility constraints. A key finding is the coexistence of near-universal smartphone ownership with relatively low levels of internet use, indicating a pronounced gap between access and effective engagement. This divergence suggests that device ownership alone is insufficient to ensure meaningful digital participation. A typology combining DII and CDAS further highlights mismatches between realized use and enabling conditions, identifying groups of “under-utilizers” and “over-achievers.” The findings are consistent with multidimensional digital divide frameworks and point to the importance of both structural conditions and user capabilities. Given the cross-sectional design, results should be interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects. The study contributes a place-based analytical framework for diagnosing digital inclusion gaps in secondary cities and provides evidence to inform targeted, context-specific policy interventions.

Transportation infrastructure is considered a key factor for economic development and poverty alleviation. The United Nations have explicitly included the provision of transport infrastructure access, e.g. through all-season road access, in their Sustainable Development Goal agenda (SDGs, target 9.1). Yet, little is known about the number of people lacking access to roads worldwide, the costs of closing existing access gaps and the implications of additional roads for other sustainability concerns such as climate change mitigation (SDG-13). Here we quantify, for 250 countries and territories, the percentage of population without road access in 2 km. We find that infrastructure investments required to provide quasi-universal road access are about USD 3 trillion. We estimate that the associated cumulative CO2 emissions from construction work and additional traffic until the end of the century amount to roughly 16 Gt. Our geographically explicit global analysis provides a starting point for refined regional studies and for the quantification of further environmental and social implications of SDG-9.1.

The article presents changes in settlement in the southern Radziejowa range and analyzes their causes and impact on local communities. The research paper discusses in detail the availability of infrastructure and social, economic, and natural conditions influencing settlement processes. In addition, important problems are related to maintaining settlement and the possibilities of revitalization activities in order to preserve cultural and landscape heritage.

Food insecurity remains a persistent challenge in rapidly urbanizing regions, particularly in slum areas of the Global South. While traditionally associated with poverty, socioeconomic factors alone cannot fully explain the uneven distribution of food insecurity within metropolitan areas. This study addresses critical gaps by proposing a novel Urban Vulnerability Index to Food Insecurity (UVI-FI) integrating socioeconomic conditions, health outcomes, and spatial accessibility to infrastructure in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region (SPMR) between 2000 and 2010. Using principal component analysis and geospatial techniques, we mapped food insecurity vulnerability at high spatial resolution (200 m × 200 m grid) across 39 municipalities. Results reveal significant disparities, with vulnerability increasing by 75.3% within slums while decreasing by 1.68% in the broader urban population. Spatial analysis demonstrates that vulnerability decreases with distance from slum boundaries, confirming a strong spatial gradient. The study identified critical infrastructure gaps, particularly regarding access to transportation, fresh food markets, and social assistance centers, that exacerbate food insecurity in peripheral areas. This spatially explicit framework offers valuable insights for targeting interventions in rapidly urbanizing regions.

In many developing countries, access to basic infrastructure services, such as sewerage and waste disposal, varies considerably across different areas. In this study, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis identifies configurations of economic and political conditions (population density, population size, income and political participation) associated with good and poor access to sewerage and waste disposal in Turkish provinces. The findings suggest that there is a core configuration of conditions associated with good access to both types of infrastructure service—high income and high political participation. A single core configuration is associated with poor access to both types of service—low population density, small population size and low political participation. Other configurations are observed relating specifically to good and poor access to sewerage and waste disposal services, respectively. We theorise the different pathways that we identify, emphasising that economic measures to support development may offer the best prospect of improving infrastructure access.

Community-based day care centres play an important role in service delivery for Chinese seniors. Little research has examined how community living infrastructure has influenced the establishment of these day care centres in rural communities. The purposes of this study were: (1) explore regional differences in community living infrastructure; and (2) to examine the impact of such infrastructure on the establishment of day care centres for Chinese seniors in rural communities. The data were derived from “The Fourth Sample Survey on the Living Conditions of Elderly People in Urban and Rural China (2015)”. The establishment of at least one day care centre was the outcome of interest, which was dichotomized at the community level into the establishment of at least one day care centre or the absence of any day care centres. Logistic regression analysis was employed to examine the impact of various community living infrastructural characteristics on the establishment of day care centres. The results showed that of the 4522 rural communities surveyed in 2015, only 10.1% had established at least one day care centre. Community living infrastructural characteristics that were significantly associated with the establishment of day care centres were the availability of cement/asphalt roads, natural gas, tap drinking water, sewage systems, and centralized garbage disposal. Our findings suggest that the significant association between community-level characteristics, especially community living infrastructure, and the establishment of rural day care centre for seniors may inform policy decision making.

Maritime heterogeneous wireless networks are characterized by dynamic topology and significant heterogeneity in bandwidth, latency, and coverage across communication paradigms, rendering traditional terrestrial routing protocols inadequate. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a unified multi-radio access fusion infrastructure featuring a gateway that enables protocol conversion and collaborative resource management across heterogeneous systems. Building upon this infrastructure, we introduce CMPGNN-DQN, an intelligent routing algorithm that integrates Contrastive Message Passing Graph Neural Networks with Deep Reinforcement Learning. Specifically, the algorithm employs k-hop neighbor aggregation to expand the receptive field for routing decisions, and utilizes a dual-view contrastive learning mechanism—encompassing both homogeneous and heterogeneous perspectives—to enhance representation robustness against dynamic topology perturbations. By deeply fusing network topology features with real-time state information, including bandwidth, delay, and queue length, the agent makes hop-by-hop routing decisions via an ε-greedy policy within the DQN framework. Extensive simulations conducted across various scales of dynamic maritime communication scenarios demonstrate that CMPGNN-DQN outperforms state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms, including AODV, DQN, and GCN, across key metrics such as packet delivery ratio, transmission latency, and bandwidth utilization. Quantitatively, compared to the best-performing alternative (MPNN-DQN), our algorithm achieves throughput improvements of 2.06–5.04% under standard traffic loads and 6.6–27.1% under partial link failure conditions, while converging within merely 25 training episodes. Notably, under heavy network loads (40% load rate) or partial link failures, the algorithm maintains stable communication performance, demonstrating strong adaptability to complex dynamic environments.

Densification of mobile network infrastructure and integration of multiple radio access technologies are important approaches to support the increasing demand for mobile data traffic and to reduce energy consumption in future 5G networks. In this paper, the benefits of multi-radio transmission diversity (MRTD) are investigated by modelling the radio access link throughputs as uniform- and Rayleigh-distributed random variables and evaluating different user schedulers and resource allocation strategies. We examine different strategies for the allocation of radio accesses to individual users ranging from independent utilisation of the radio accesses to MRTD-enabled schemes. The schemes are compared by considering the statistics of the system throughput and energy consumption of the mobile devices. It is shown that MRTD can increase the throughput significantly through two types of diversity gain: Firstly by having multiple radio accesses to choose from for each user and secondly by having more available users to choose from for each radio access. The increased throughput also helps to reduce the energy consumption per bit, but this comes at a cost of increased energy consumption for channel measurement and reporting.

To transform micro and small enterprises to large companies, owners need to strive to launch new methods, systems, ways and innovations. Accordingly, innovation helps micro-enterprises to bounce to achieve fundamental change in their businesses. Micro and small enterprises are exposed by different factors to innovating new products and services. This study, therefore, focused on exploring factors that determine the innovation of service and manufacturing MSEs: the role of entrepreneurial attitude towards innovation in Woldia city administration. The researchers used a cross-sectional research design and followed a quantitative approach. The data were collected by using a structured questionnaire. The collected data were analysed by using SPSS v-25 and Amos graphics to conduct descriptive, factor, correlation, regression and path analysis. The study finding revealed that government support, access to infrastructure, entrepreneurial training, entrepreneurial attitude and the leadership of the owners significantly affected the innovation of service and manufacturing MSEs. Entrepreneurial training and leadership of the owners directly and indirectly affected the innovation of services and manufacturing MSEs through the mediating variable of entrepreneurial attitude.

Many of the poorest Argentines are invisible in official statistics. Four million rural residents and another 12 million in small urban areas lie outside the reach of the Permanent Household Survey (EPH), which is the basis for poverty figures and most data on social conditions in the country. According to the best estimate, roughly a third of rural residents, more than a million people, live in poverty. The urban bias common too many countries have been accentuated by the lack of data on the rural poor. With little information on their condition, it is exceedingly difficult for policy makers to design policies and programs to help move people out of poverty. The report is organized as follows: chapter one profiles rural poverty base on the limited existing data, including the first in-depth analysis of rural poverty ever conducted with the 2001 population census. Chapter two presents findings from the new qualitative study of the rural poor conducted in the first half of 2007. Finally, chapter three concludes with a discussion of methodology for rural poverty analysis, focusing on the issues related to expanding the EPH to full national coverage.