Studies have shown that fertility rate in Africa is still among the highest in the world. However, there are few spatial investigations into the variation of fertility rate and its determinant in Africa. This study aimed to examine the spatial distribution of fertility rate as well as highlight its significant determinants. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression was carried out on dataset for 53 African countries on Total Fertility Rate (TFR) and eleven determinant factors to obtain a best model, which was then used for Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). The study showed that TFR was significantly influenced by adolescent fertility rates, contraceptive prevalence rates and gross domestic product per capita. GWR model diagnostics of Akaike Information Criterion and adjusted R-squared showed that GWR fitted TFR in Africa better than OLS model. Also, countries around Middle to Western Africa comprising Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Mali, were regions with high TFRs that impacted Africa’s positive TFR spatial autocorrelation. More intense works could therefore be carried out in these countries to manage the identified significant factors affecting TFR to address the negative consequences of high TFR in Africa.

Modelling of Nigeria's Crude Oil Production and Price Volatilities was the major focus of this paper. The paper investigated the stationarity of the multivariate time series positive definiteness property, and the results revealed the stationarity of the multivariate time series. Special classes of MARCH and MGARCH models were fitted to the crude oil price and production volatilities, and MARCH [p (3,1)] outperformed other models with the aid of model selection criteria. The research has established interaction and interdependence between the two macroeconomic variables and has also revealed bilateral causality between crude oil production and price. This further substantiates the fact that every regime of oil price shock is tantamount to high variability in production, which, in effect, causes a setback in the economic development of the affected country. Hence, this paper proposes proactive measures that can always guarantee stability in crude oil production whenever the country experiences instability in the oil price in the international market.