The last trillion-dollar industry was built on a code of 1s and 0s and the next will be built on genetic codes. Well, who knows? It's no longer unthinkable. Traditional economics had maintained that factors of production comprised of land, labour and capital. While that may still be true, it is only valid in certains ways, today; just as was the case once upon a time, when land was the raw material for the agricultural age. It only lasted for a period before the inevitable change, and iron became the new raw material for the next age the industrial age. Today, we live in the information age, where technology has taken charge and data is its raw material. More specifically, identity data is the focal point of data structures and dimensions. This is well corroborated in one of the opening statements of the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As emphasised by Voigt and Von dem Bussche (2017), (t)he processing of personal data should be designed to serve mankind. The world that we live in today, and the way that we conduct business transactions, has changed incredibly from the past decades, and all thanks to a deep-reaching digital transformation ushered in by the information age. This transformation has proliferated into all human interactions and is feeding a demand for innovation and advancement, while introducing a new form of identity digital identity and challenging the traditional ways of day-to-day transaction.

This dissertation examined the efficacy of Islamic financing instruments in bridging the energy infrastructure investment gap in Nigeria, a fiscally-burdened, developing country. A growing energy infrastructure investment gap is an imminent concern in Nigeria, like in many developing countries, and has been precipitated by financial and economic challenges. This research sheds light on two critical problems associated with the conventional infrastructure financing instruments in PPP: a. high risk of financial distress due to high debt gearing; and b. a substantial fiscal risk that endangers fiscal sustainability. Using a case study approach, the dissertation presents the case of Nigeria's Mambilla Hydro Electric Power (HEP) Project that has failed to kick off for over forty years since its initial approval due to several financing hurdles. This study examined in the Mambilla HEP project in its pre-set conventional financing framework and developed research hypotheses to design and structure an alternative Islamic financial instrument. Further, the study employs two distinct financial modelling techniques to test each of the hypotheses. First, it uses Monte Carlo simulation with optimisation algorithms to solve an objective function that maximizes the project's financial viability subject to specific economic constraints. Second, the dissertation uses scenario-based sensitivity analysis to assess Nigeria's (as the host country) fiscal sustainability position of the host country before and after implementing the infrastructure project using both the pre-set conventional financing instrument and the proposed Islamic financing solution.

World demand for oil and natural gas is driven by economic growth and social development across the globe. According to the U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA, 2016), world oil consumption increased almost fourfold in the last 45 years. As at 1st quarter 2016, It reached 96mb/day (more than 35billion barrels per year) from 86mb/day in 2006. Muslim countries, which include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, are blessed with crude oil and natural gas reserves, making a concentration of the world oil production in the Muslim world. Jointly, they possess about 60% of the world proven oil reserves (CIA, 2015) and some of them constituting the richest countries in the world. Due to the surplus exports of oil and gas, most of these countries have established sovereign wealth funds, which out of the current ninety-two (92) Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF) with a total asset value of seven trillion dollars ($7 million), thirty-nine percent (39%) are in Muslim countries.

The goal of this paper is to address the relationship between crude oil-price changes on some selected African Islamic indices, using daily data from May 4, 2011, to January 25, 2018. We employed three main techniques: MODWT, CWT, and multivariate-GARCH-DCC, to analyze whether these markets have any diversification opportunities. Our findings reveal that, first, the results of MODWT shows Egyptian Islamic index leading all indices. Second, CWT results show that investors would gain diversification benefits in almost all markets (except South Africa) and enjoy the benefit that comes with long-term investments. Third, we observed low correlations between the Egyptian and Tunisian Islamic indices, with oil-price returns suggesting diversification benefits in these markets. Of all the Islamic stock markets, Tunisia's has the lowest volatility with the crude oil index. Investors holding a portfolio of these stocks can afford to have exposure in crude oil-related assets and achieve maximum diversification benefits