Lifelong learning (LLL) is progressively recognized as a crucial component of personal and professional development, particularly for adult students. As a heavily populated developing country, China requires profound national education reform to support its economic development and maintain its competitive advantage on the global economic stage. The governmental policy endorses the execution of diverse forms of lifelong learning programs to bolster the national education reform. However, implementing such programs can be challenging for all the stakeholders of the programs, especially for adult students. The weaker foundational knowledge and insufficient online learning abilities of adult students particularly highlight the academic challenges they face. This study explores the academic challenges faced by adult learners in a Chinese vocational college’s LLL program. Focusing on ex-soldiers, unemployed individuals, migrant workers, and new professional farmers (aged 22–44), data were collected from 16 adult students via purposive sampling. Semi-structured interviews and document analysis revealed recurring thematic academic challenges. Additionally, the study found that adult student attributes (highest education level, age) significantly influenced the unique academic challenges they encountered. This research provides practical solutions to improve LLL programs and promote successful lifelong learning experiences for adult students. 

The food supply chain in South Africa faces significant challenges related to transparency, traceability, and consumer trust. As concerns about food safety, quality, and sustainability grow, there is an increasing need for innovative solutions to address these issues. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising tool to enhance transparency and accountability across various industries, including the food sector. This study sought to explore the potential of blockchain technology in revolutionizing through promoting transparency that enable the achievement of sustainable food supply chain infrastructure in South Africa. The study found that blockchain technology used in food supply chain creates an immutable and decentralized ledger of transactions that has the capacity to provide real-time, end-to-end visibility of food products from farm to table. This increased transparency can help mitigate risks associated with food fraud, contamination, and inefficiencies in the supply chain. The study found that blockchain technology can be leveraged to enhance supply chain efficiency and trust among stakeholders. This technology used and/or applied in South Africa can reshape the agricultural sector by improving production and distribution processes. Its integration in the food supply chain infrastructure can equally improve data management and increase transparency between farmers and food suppliers.There is need for policy-makers and scholars in the fields of service delivery and food security to conduct more research in blockchain technology and its roles in creating a more transparent, efficient, and trustworthy food supply chain infractructure that address food supply problems in South Africa. The paper adopted a qualitative methodology to collect data, and document and content analysis techniques were used to interpret collected data. 

Mobile banking has become very important in today’s life as technological advancements have led bank clients to use banking services. Clients’ attitudes toward mobile banking services are based on their expectations is the background of this research. So, the main objective is to observe the purposeful conduct in mind of clients to adopt mobile banking services. This study also examines the influence of six variables on financial services clients’ desire to utilize mobile banking services, including perceived benefits, perceived ease of use, trust, security, perceived privacy, and technology expertise. Consequently, the goal of this study is to find out the crucial and deciding factors that may influence clients’ willingness to use mobile banking features in Bangladesh as a developing country. The sample shaped for this research is 310 respondents from Bangladesh a developing country. For analytical purposes, SEM has been used to test hypotheses. The results show that in Bangladesh, factors like perceived value, security, and technological aptitude greatly determine whether a customer will utilize mobile banking. Financial institutions have proven to be successful in serving clients through mobile phones. Clients have made good use of mobile banking only to save money, cost, and labor. The research suggests that mobile banking operations must be timely and accurate, the transaction process must be short, interactivity, convenience of usage, and so on. The findings have important implications for bank regulatory authority, management, bankers, and executives who wish to increase mobile banking usage to secure their long-term profitability.

In Kazakhstan, for more than 20 years, the state policy on the formation of a single information space, aimed at reducing budgetary resources for the formation and maintenance of information resources of government agencies, as well as the creation of a unified communication environment. The relevance of the article is due to the following factors: the acceleration of digital modernization processes in Kazakhstan under the influence of global informatization and the consideration of the prospects of improving the efficiency of the Kazakh government through the introduction of information technology is not always recognized by society as an institutional advantage. As special methodological tools, the study used experimental, empirical and heuristic methods to analyze factors and identify problems in budget financing in the field of digitalization and E-Government in Kazakhstan. The main source of data is the Bureau of National Statistics of the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The main conclusions: there is a need for further economic and political modernization of Kazakh society through the widespread use of information technology, and in our view, the practical approach to the use of public financing to create a real e-government and the prospects for its development in Kazakhstan is interesting.

The study is focusing on cyberspace—a new type of space mastered by humans with the help of digital technologies. This systematic review uses SPAR-4-SLR protocol to analyze over 30 years of scholarly research indexed in Scopus database, highlighting five time periods: before 1995, 1996–2008, 2009–2012, 2013–2019, and after 2020. A final sample of 6645 publications in social sciences, Business, management and accounting (BMA), and Economics, econometrics and finance (EEF) was analyzed across multiple parameters, including: chronology, types of documents, sources, countries, institutions, authors, topics, and most cited publications. The review has systematized information about the most influential organizations and individuals involved in cyberspace research. First of all, these are researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Key journals that publish research on the topic have been identified, and a ranked list of funding organizations supporting research on the social and economic aspects of cyberspace are identified. The study provides insights into the achievements of the social and economic sciences in cyberspace over the past 30 years. The results will be useful to scholars who seek for a general overview on the topic of cyberspace, as well as experts and policymakers developing mechanisms and tools for regulating cyberspace as a mixture of the virtual and real worlds.