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Rural Africa's low level of electrification is a topic of much discussion. One widely cited estimate is that only fourteen percent of rural households in Sub- Saharan Africa have access to electricity (2012). As a first step to improving access, most governments in the region have developed national electrification strategies. Virtually every one of those strategies recommends a two-track approach to providing greater access to grid-based electrification. Although there is widespread agreement on the need for a two-track approach, most national electrification strategies contain few, if any, details on how the two tracks should be implemented. This guide focuses on the regulatory and policy decisions that African electricity regulators and policy makers must make to create a sustainable decentralized track and how the decentralized track can complement the traditional centralized track.

Remote areas often lack access to reliable power, internet, and surveillance infrastructure, making them vulnerable to threats such as illegal intrusion, poaching, and environmental risks. To address these challenges, the propose a self‐sufficient, edge‐AI‐based surveillance system capable of real‐time monitoring, detection, and alerting without relying on cloud connectivity. The system deploys Vision Surveillance Motes equipped with cameras, motion sensors, and acoustic inputs, and uses lightweight artificial intelligence models (MobileNet‐SSD for vision and support vector machines for sound) processed locally on Raspberry Pi boards. Long‐range wireless communication is enabled via LoRa (Long Range) modules, transmitting alerts to a Control Room Mote that displays data using a human‐machine interface (HMI) and pushes updates to a cloud server for optional remote access. This multimodal architecture allows the system to operate in completely offline environments, with optional cloud integration for centralized visibility. The solution is field‐tested and optimized for deployment in forests, disaster‐prone zones, border areas, and rural locations requiring independent surveillance. This study explores the use of aspect tool generation in agriculture for real‐time surveillance and tracking using imaginative prescient and long‐range (LoRa) technology. This study focuses on the deployment of a Control Room and Vision Surveillance Mote at remote locations to address issues with real‐time tracking capabilities and limited connectivity. The innovative Edge‐based fully Vision Technology Enabled Security Surveillance System for Remote Locations uses TensorFlow Lite, OpenCV, PyTorch, and other frameworks to process sensor data in real‐time for quick identification and alerting. The Vision Surveillance Mote sends signals to the Control Room Mote, which serves as the central hub for monitoring and alert management. The Control Room Mote then displays alerts at the HMI display and sends data to a cloud server for remote tracking using internet and cell applications. This system provides real‐time tracking, event detection, and alerting capabilities, offering a comprehensive remote security surveillance solution. The aspect‐based methodology ensures powerful support use while maintaining connectivity in isolated settings.

To explore challenges and stressors experienced by rural and remote area nurses and identify any interventions that aided in decreasing stress and increasing job satisfaction. Demand for a generalist nursing workforce in rural and remote locations exposes nurses to the same conditions as people residing there: higher mortality rates and higher incidence of chronic diseases and inadequacies in accessing health services. Christmals and Gross’s integrative review framework was used with specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. Four databases were searched with no date limits. Only Australian studies were searched as international scope of practice differences for nurses could have distorted findings. Eighteen studies identified three broad themes: access to education; isolation (geographical, professional and personal) and recognition of role. Interlinked themes showed positives and negatives from differing viewpoints. Ambivalence to education stemmed from inadequate exposure to learning and was linked with geographical isolation. Isolation was found to be less of a challenge to nurses who had an existing emotional connection with the community. The themes identified were recurrent and interconnecting. The benefits of working in small rural and remote communities are being used as a driver for recruitment. These benefits include higher wages, providing a sense of belonging and allowing nurses to work to their full scope and develop generalist nursing skills. The geographical isolation generates challenges through inequality in access to education and professional support, working outside their scope of practice, safety and vulnerability that comes with living remotely and adapting to extreme weather conditions. What are the challenges and enablers of rural and remote working and living that influence job satisfaction for rural and remote area nurses in Australia?

Supplying power to remote areas may be a challenge, even for those communities already connected to the main grid. Power is often transmitted from long distances, under adverse weather conditions, and with aged equipment. As a rule, modernizing grid infrastructure in such areas to make it more resilient faces certain financial limitations. Local distribution may face stability issues and disruptions through the year and—equally important—it cannot absorb significant amounts of locally-produced power. The European policy has underlined the importance of energy production in local level towards meeting energy security and climate targets. However, the current status of these areas makes the utilization of the local potential prohibitive. This study builds on the observation that in the vicinity of such mountainous areas, irrigation dams often cover different non energy-related needs (e.g., irrigation, drinking water). Transforming these dams to small-scale hydropower (SHP) facilities can have a twofold effect: it can enhance the local energy portfolio with a renewable energy source that can be regulated and managed. Moreover, hydropower can provide additional flexibility to the local system and through reservoir operation to allow the connection of additional solar photovoltaic capacities. The developed methodological approach was tested in remote communities of mountainous Greece, where an earth-fill dam provides irrigation water. The results show a significant increase of renewables’ penetration and enhanced communities’ electricity autarky.

Sociocultural theory aims to explain how physical and cultural environments shape learning. The research uses Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory as the lens to investigate sociocultural issues faced by EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers in remote areas. Teaching in these areas presents difficulties and obstacles due to geographic distance. This qualitative study was designed to investigate the difficulties encountered by EFL instructors from schools in isolated villages of Hail, Saudi Arabia. Using semi-structured individual interviews with eight EFL teachers, the research uncovers various obstacles affecting the efficacy of EFL teaching. The primary issues identified are religious conservatism and cultural differences, lack of support from family and environment, geographic distance and resource constraints, and lack of awareness of future opportunities. The study highlights how differences in educational quality are made worse due to geographic remoteness. The project seeks to improve EFL instruction in remote places by offering a deeper knowledge of these issues, ultimately working towards equity in learning environments.

The increasing number of supermarkets and hypermarkets poses a risk to the survival of small local shops in rural areas. As a result, people living in remote areas might need to travel several kilometers to obtain food, and this can create objective difficulties for those who do not drive or cannot afford the cost of owning a car. This study uses a natural experiment to analyze outshopping practices in Italian remote areas using the database of the multipurpose survey on Italian families carried out by Italian National Institute of Statistics. For this study, we used the COVID-19 lockdown as a state of nature when long-range shopping trips were less frequent, and we compared it with the pre-COVID-19 habits, in order to identify changes in consumption and shopping behavior. Our study is the first to explore outshopping behaviors in remote areas of Italy, offering original insights into food access and healthy eating where research is currently lacking. We performed a difference-in-difference analysis, comparing remote areas with other areas in Italy, to highlight the effect of outshopping in remote areas. Our results show how a considerable share of consumer food expenditure is paid to firms outside the local area, supporting the hypothesis of financial resources shift from the local business to large retailers. Moreover, we found limited food access and diet issues in Italian internal areas when outshopping practices are constrained.

The policy of developing remote area schools’ quality in Indonesia is getting stronger. The government has set minimum service standards as a reference for schools’ development quality while remaining based on local, national, global, and 21st-century values. This study revealed efforts to improve the 21st-century school’s quality through the contribution of superior leadership, school climate, total quality management implementation, and the school principal’s performance approached quantitatively and analyzed descriptively using Structural Equation Modeling. Participants involved in the study were 147 remote area principals and teachers in two provinces in Indonesia. Results show that (1) school climate had the most dominant contribution to school quality and (2) there was a significant simultaneous effect among superior leadership, school climate, total quality management implementation, and the school principal’s performance on the school quality. Implications of the study’s findings from a theoretical and practical lens as well as recommendations for future studies are also discussed.

Background To assess the availability, price and market share of quality-assured artemisinin-based combination therapy (QAACT) in remote areas (RAs) compared with non-remote areas (nRAs) in Kenya and Ghana at end-line of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm) intervention. Methods Areas were classified by remoteness using a composite index computed from estimated travel times to three levels of service centres. The index was used to five categories of remoteness, which were then grouped into two categories of remote and non-remote areas. The number of public or private outlets with the potential to sell or distribute anti-malarial medicines, screened in nRAs and RAs, respectively, was 501 and 194 in Ghana and 9980 and 2353 in Kenya. The analysis compares RAs with nRAs in terms of availability, price and market share of QAACT in each country. Results QAACT were similarly available in RAs as nRAs in Ghana and Kenya. In both countries, there was no statistical difference in availability of QAACT with AMFm logo between RAs and nRAs in public health facilities (PHFs), while private-for-profit (PFP) outlets had lower availability in RA than in nRAs (Ghana: 66.0 vs 82.2 %, p  < 0.0001; Kenya: 44.9 vs 63.5 %, p  = <0.0001. The median price of QAACT with AMFm logo for PFP outlets in RAs (USD1.25 in Ghana and USD0.69 in Kenya) was above the recommended retail price in Ghana (US$0.95) and Kenya (US$0.46), and much higher than in nRAs for both countries. QAACT with AMFm logo represented the majority of QAACT in RAs and nRAs in Kenya and Ghana. In the PFP sector in Ghana, the market share for QAACT with AMFm logo was significantly higher in RAs than in nRAs (75.6 vs 51.4 %, p  < 0.0001). In contrast, in similar outlets in Kenya, the market share of QAACT with AMFm logo was significantly lower in RAs than in nRAs (39.4 vs 65.1 % , p  < 0.0001). Conclusion The findings indicate the AMFm programme contributed to making QAACT more available in RAs in these two countries. Therefore, the AMFm approach can inform other health interventions aiming at reaching hard-to-reach populations, particularly in the context of universal access to health interventions. However, further examination of the factors accounting for the deep penetration of the AMFm programme into RAs is needed to inform actions to improve the healthcare delivery system, particularly in RAs.

Background Unequal access to primary healthcare (PHC) has become a critical issue in global health inequalities, requiring governments to implement policies tailored to communities’ needs and abilities. However, the place-based facility dimension of PHCs is oversimplified in current healthcare literature, and formulating the equity-oriented PHC spatial planning remains challenging without understanding the multiple impacts of community socio-spatial dynamics, particularly in remote areas. This study aims to push the boundary of PHC studies one step further by presenting a nuanced and dynamic understanding of the impact of community environments on the uneven primary healthcare supply. Methods Focusing on Shuicheng, a remote rural area in southwestern China, multiple data are included in this village-based study, i.e., the facility-level healthcare statistics data (2016–2019), the statistical yearbooks, WorldPop, and Chinese GDP’s spatial distribution data. We evaluate villages’ PHC service capacity using the number of doctors and essential equipment per capita, which are the major components of China’s PHC delivery. The indicators describing community environments are selected based on extant literature and China’s planning paradigms, including town- and village-level factors. Gini coefficients and local spatial autocorrelation analysis are used to present the divergences of PHC capacity, and multilevel regression model and (heterogeneous) difference in difference model are used to examine the driving role of community environments and the dynamics under the policy intervention. Results Despite the general improvement, PHC inequalities remain significant in remote rural areas. The village’s location, aging, topography, ethnic autonomy, and economic conditions significantly influence village-level PHC capacity, while demographic characteristics and healthcare delivery at the town level are also important. Although it may improve the hardware setting in village clinics (coef. = 0.350), the recent equity-oriented policy attempts may accelerate the loss of rural doctors (coef. = − 0.517). Notably, the associations between PHC and community environments are affected inconsistently by this round of policy intervention. The town healthcare centers with higher inpatient service capacity (coef. = − 0.514) and more licensed doctors (coef. = − 0.587) and nurses (coef. = − 0.344) may indicate more detrimental policy effects that reduced the number of rural doctors, while the centers with more professional equipment (coef. = 0.504) and nurses (coef. = 0.184) are beneficial for the improvement of hardware setting in clinics. Conclusions The findings suggest that the PHC inequalities are increasingly a result of joint social, economic, and institutional forces in recent years, underlining the increased complexity of the PHC resource allocation mechanism. Therefore, we claim the necessity to incorporate a broader understanding of community orientation in PHC delivery, particularly the interdisciplinary knowledge of the spatial lens of community, to support its sustainable development. Our findings also provide timely policy insights for ongoing primary healthcare reform in China.