While informal finance flourishes in Africa, formal finance flounders. This is especially true for poorer households. This paper investigates whether publicly observable characteristics help predict which households get access to informal finance and which do not. It also examines whether Accumulating Savings and Credit Associations (ASCRAs) reach poorer borrowers than do Rotating Savings and C...

Whilst formal organizational knowledge is often stored in archives and accessed through a range of IT tools, informal knowledge from face to face meetings, email exchanges, team meetings is usually not stored and remains implicit. This work aims at finding effective ways of capturing and making use of informal communications, making it available through a knowledge management system to support ...

Much of the work on validation and verification of knowledge based systems (KBSs) has been done in terms of implementation languages (mostly rule-based languages). Recent papers have argued that it is advantageous to do validation and verification in terms of a more abstract and formal specification of the system. However, constructing such formal specifications is a difficult task. This paper ...

The Internet and its increasing usage has changed informal learning in depth. This change has affected young and older adults in both the workplace and in higher education. But, in spite of this, formal and non formal course based approaches have not taken full advantage of these new informal learning scenarios and technologies. The Web 2.0 is a new way for people to communicate across the Inte...

The conventional schooling is considered the formal education where students acquire knowledge in classrooms. In the formal schooling system, each student receives the same science curriculum. When students did not catch on to the pace with other students, they often lack the opportunity to ask questions and to fully understand the logic and theory behind the science knowledge. Therefore, an in...

the concept of mathematical proof has been controversial for the past few decades. different philosophers have offered different theories about the nature of mathematical proof, among which theories presented by lakatos and hersh have had significant similarities and differences with each other. it seems that a comparison and critical review of these two theories will lead to a better understan...

Drawing on a social network perspective of organizational coordination, this paper investigates the effectiveness of coordination mechanisms on knowledge sharing in intraorganizational networks that consist of both collaborative and competitive ties among organizational units. Internal knowledge sharing within a multiunit organization requires formal hierarchical structure and informal lateral ...