Abstract

In Africa, the population of senior citizens (60 years and above) has increased rapidly from 12 million in 1950 to over 64.5 million in 2015. It is projected to reach 103 million by 2030 and 205 million by 2050. Majority of the African senior citizens are living in extreme poverty in rural areas. In the present African society, senior citizens are not given much importance in their families and expected to face sorrow till end of their last breathe. Senior citizens are treated as a burden in their families and given least care by the African society. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate how discrimination affects senior citizens livelihoods in the society through Linguistic Delphi Adapted Fuzzy Associative Memories. Using Fuzzy Number and Fuzzy Associative memories, the relationship between causes and effects of the senior citizens discrimination is elucidated. Delphi Adapted Fuzzy Associative Memories (DAFAM) and algorithm was used to gather consensus of opinions, attitudes and choices of the society towards the senior citizens. DAFAM was used with expert’s views to create one relational matrix. The expert’s view deals statistically with several process of feedback from the group that gives the final prediction of consensus. The problem was further adapted to Linguistic Delphi Adapted Fuzzy Associative Memories model to analyse the impact of discrimination of senior citizens to their livelihoods. Finally, it was concluded that the attitude of the people should change towards senior citizens so that the problems faced by them in the society can be lessened.

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