Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mature-aged students who are aged 25 and older have higher participation rates than younger Indigenous students within Australian higher education institutions. Despite steady increases in enrolments and completions, the completion rates of Indigenous students remain relatively low. Challenges persist, such as lack of representativity and financial hardship, particularly for Indigenous students from regional areas or enrolled through enabling programmes. While initiatives such as the Universities Australia Indigenous Strategy, the Indigenous Student Success Programmes (ISSP) and Closing the Gap policies aim to support Indigenous students, obstacles persist and hinder Indigenous students’ engagement and success.

In this chapter, we focus on unpacking factors that influence Indigenous mature-aged students’ university degree completion based on the previously identified factors in the Higher Education Success Factor (HESF) model. The five factors include: social environment, physical environment, economic conditions, health and wellbeing, and individual characteristics. We wanted to understand how the above-mentioned factors influenced mature-aged Indigenous students’ completion rates. We also analysed 271 open-ended survey responses from Indigenous Australian graduates aged 25 and over who graduated between 2018 and 2022 to draw out the unique concerns of Indigenous mature-aged students based on the previously identified five factors that influence Indigenous mature-aged students’ completion. Our findings highlight the key concerns and needs of Indigenous mature-aged graduates through each factor we examined. While economic conditions had a greater impact on Indigenous graduates compared to other factors, the health and wellbeing factor played a crucial role in their completion rates. Additionally, the social and physical environments affected both their physical and mental health and in turn influenced their ability to complete their studies. Notably, our study found that individual characteristics serve as a strong motivational factor, significantly encouraging Indigenous graduates to complete their programmes. Implications from this research point to the inclusion of a number of systemic issues which need to be addressed, namely, support for career interruptions, enhanced enrolment flexibility, improvements in university administration, and increased financial support to foster success among Indigenous mature-aged students in Australia.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the changing practices of cattle rustling in Kenya from a relatively small isolated and opportunistic activity to a much more planned and systematic entrepreneurial business involving collusion and corruption.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides a conceptual approach using key literature and documentary evidence to show how, in the northern part of Kenya, cattle rustling is common occurrence with criminals taking advantage of remote rural environments with minimal surveillance and consequently less opportunity of being stopped and searched by police.

Findings – Results evidence significant differences in how rustling is perceived and valorized. Rustling in Kenya is now an entrepreneurial crime with the involvement of rural organized criminal gangs (ROCGs), who are operating in food supply chains throughout Kenya and the African continent.

Practical/implications – This paper suggests that a more nuanced understanding of the entrepreneurial nature of some illegal practices in a rural Kenya is necessary and how it requires multi-agency investigation.

Originality/value – The paper is unique in that it considers how cattle rustling is becoming a more entrepreneurial crime than previously. Little prior work on this subject exists in Kenya. The paper utilizes the framework of Smith and McElwee (2013) on illegal enterprise to frame cattle rustling as an entrepreneurial crime.

The decades between the years 1967 and 1992—the period when the autocratic all people's congress governed Sierra Leone—can best be described as the decades of impossibility in terms of the attainment of a gender-equal society in the postcolonial state. With regards to economic rights, the regime was only concerned about its pseudo-Marxist rights to control, on the one hand, the economic modes of production—land, labor, and capital—and, on the other hand, the economic functions of the family. The amended Act gave the state's security apparatuses the powers to crack down on women who attempted to exercise their self-proclaimed reproductive rights. Women were in the majority in Sierra Leone, but it was common practice for men to dictate who their wives' vote for during elections. The expectation that women would choose to marry Sierra Leonean men; but if, as a result of love or lust for wealth they married "outsiders," they should be ready to face the consequences.

Under Siaka Stevens's rule, human rights were determined by his personal beliefs in what he felt was right, and his unequivocal rejection of a neoliberal Sierra Leone. The first narrative purported that "the neoliberal agenda behind the universalization of the western conception of human rights was hegemonic, oppressive and a neocolonial instrument to control the postcolonial state." The second narrative posited that "the neopatrimonial Stevens regime, however violent, offered the best possible developmental outcomes for Sierra Leone." From a Foucauldian standpoint, the disciplinary outlook of United States foreign policy in the decade-plus following Sierra Leone's independence created political anxieties in many African countries. In part, this uneasiness was created by the response of the United States to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The regime's lumpenproletariat understanding of human rights was based on the assumptions that "rights" are legitimate only if they promote the best possible outcomes for the patron and his clientele.