Christopher Tarisayi Chikandiwa

Attracting and retaining profitable customers to new and unfamiliar products and services is one of the challenges that the banking fraternity is faced with today. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the important factors that influence attitude in the Islamic banking. Probability sampling was used and 250 questionnaires were distributed among participants based at a local university in Johannesburg. The results revealed that there is a positive relationship between product awareness, social norms, community influence and attitude towards Islamic banking. Also, the results indicated that most of the respondents were not aware of the Islamic banking. The bank practitioners and marketers were, therefore, recommended to take a focused approach on creating awareness of the Islamic banking. Marketers can target community leaders or opinion leaders in order to shed light on Islamic banking to the rest of their community.

Keywords: product awareness, social norms and community influence.
JEL Classification: G21, Z13

There is a growing need to understand how leaders can initiate changes that address the problems of strategy execution. The current article attempts to address the issues that concern strategy implementation. As such, a study was carried out in a local municipality. The results of the study highlighted several important factors: the difficulty of understanding the organizational strategy, the detriment of the strategy and operations gap, as well as the financial challenges faced during the implementation of the strategy. It was, therefore, recommended that the leadership should ensure effective communication of the organizational strategy. Furthermore, there is a need for bridging the strategy and the operational divide.

Keywords: strategy and operational implementation, municipality, vision, municipal financial challenges and effective communication.
JEL Classification: E6, L21, L80

There is a growing need to understand how the scarce water resources could be conserved and efficiently provided to the local societies. This paper examines the non-revenue water management practices in the local municipality and its impact on water service provision. The results of the study indicated that the municipality does not have sufficient capability to monitor and manage water provision and usage. Almost half of the respondents thought that the municipality does not take non-revenue water management seriously. The results suggest that the local water service provider operations and approaches to non-revenue water management is a real threat to the local government and society. The municipality needs to be proactively involved in the efforts to adapt to practices and mitigation strategies to reduce non-revenue water.