Sustainable urban infrastructure for all: Lessons on solar-powered street lights from Kampala and Jinja, Uganda

Providing access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all is the seventh Sustainable Development Goal. The New Urban Agenda also commits to the provision of inclusive and safe streets that are free from crime and violence, including gender-based violence. Solar-powered street lights can contribute to these goals by increasing the electricity supply, improving safety in urban areas and protecting the environment. This paper offers lessons from the cities of Kampala and Jinja in Uganda, where solar street lighting has proven cheaper to build and operate than conventional street lights. It has also generated a range of economic and social benefits, including lower crime rates, better road safety, a more vibrant night-time economy and higher property values. Tens of thousands of working hours a day – equivalent to 14,000 full-time jobs nationwide – could be added to the economy by extending trading beyond daylight hours. Based on this case study, installing and maintaining solar-powered LED street lights across sub-Saharan Africa rather than conventional grid-based options could reduce upfront installation costs by at least 25 percent, electricity consumption from street lighting by 40 percent and maintenance costs of new roads by up to 60 percent. Lighting new roads in sub-Saharan Africa with solar would be an opportunity to generate between 96 and 160 GW of distributed renewable energy across the sub-continent, more than doubling sub-Saharan Africa’s current energy generation capacity of 92 GW

Supporting decent livelihoods through sustainable service provision: Lessons on solid waste management from Kampala, Uganda

Better waste management could cut up to a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it an essential part of delivering the Paris climate agreement. A waste management strategy which supports the 15 to 20 million people who informally work in the waste sector globally can also contribute to achieving the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ending poverty, and the eighth SDG of decent work for all. Partnerships with community-based organisations and small enterprises involved in waste management can generate multiple economic and social benefits in a sector otherwise notorious for appalling conditions and the vulnerability of workers. This paper offers lessons from Kampala, Uganda, where community-based organisations and small enterprises play an important role in municipal solid waste management, especially in informal settlements. One example from Kampala is the Luchacos cooperative, which uses organic waste to produce biomass briquettes – an energy source for cooking that simultaneously reduces both urban air pollution and deforestation. If the Luchacos model could be scaled up to replace half of all charcoal use in Kampala, almost 12,000 additional people would find employment in the biomass briquette industry. Similarly, the private firm Plastic Recycling Industries (PRI) contracts 120 community-based organisations and small enterprises to collect almost one-fifth of Kampala’s plastic waste. 80 percent of the 1,200 employees contracted by these organisations are women, who earn nearly three times as much as they would working as individual waste pickers. Both Luchacos and PRI work closely with the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA). These examples from Kampala highlight how national governments can improve and expand solid waste management services by supporting municipalities to take a more strategic, multi-stakeholder approach to waste management. They can stimulate positive social and economic impacts by designing a framework which requires the systematic inclusion and support of community-based and small-scale enterprises in waste management processes, rather than only seeking partnerships with large private firms. This could involve establishing procurement policies that are more accessible for community-based organisations and small enterprises, providing public land for waste sorting, facilitating links between formal and informal operations, and reforming regulation to favour locally-led initiatives over large-scale technological solutions. The outcome would be an upgraded municipal waste management system that is more economically efficient, socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable

Evidence for conservation in antigen gene sequences combined with extensive polymorphism at VNTR loci

Theileria parva is a tick‐transmitted apicomplexan protozoan parasite that infects lymphocytes of cattle and African Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer), causing a frequently fatal disease of cattle in eastern, central and southern Africa. A live vaccination procedure, known as infection and treatment method (ITM), the most frequently used version of which comprises the Muguga, Serengeti‐transformed and Kiambu 5 stocks of T. parva, delivered as a trivalent cocktail, is generally effective. However, it does not always induce 100% protection against heterologous parasite challenge. Knowledge of the genetic diversity of T. parva in target cattle populations is therefore important prior to extensive vaccine deployment. This study investigated the extent of genetic diversity within T. parva field isolates derived from Ankole (Bos taurus) cattle in south‐western Uganda using 14 variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) satellite loci and the sequences of two antigen‐encoding genes that are targets of CD8+T‐cell responses induced by ITM, designated Tp1 and Tp2. The findings revealed a T. parva prevalence of 51% confirming endemicity of the parasite in south‐western Uganda. Cattle‐derived T. parva VNTR genotypes revealed a high degree of polymorphism. However, all of the T. parva Tp1 and Tp2 alleles identified in this study have been reported previously, indicating that they are widespread geographically in East Africa and highly conserved

The Power of the Weak: How Informal Power-Sharing Shapes the Work of the UN Security Council

To what extent is the work of international organizations shaped by their most powerful members? Can minor powers influence the decisions taken by these organizations? This dissertation presents the argument that great powers engage in power-sharing in order to attain unanimity inside international organizations, which enhances compliance and increases the effect of the signals these organizations convey to the public. The pursuit of unanimity lends weight even to votes that are not needed for the adoption of a proposal under the formal rules. It enables minor powers to exert more influence inside international organizations than they could if the formal rules and/or the balance of material power between member states determined the outcome of decision-making in international organizations. An analysis of the UN Security Council tests this argument. The dissertation identifies a series of informal power-sharing practices in the Security Council, which systematically depart from the organization's formal rules, and which promote consensus and augment minor powers' influence far beyond what one would expect on the basis of the material capabilities and voting power of these states. In turn, these informal power-sharing practices are motivated by great powers' desire to attain unanimous support for the policies enacted in the Security Council, irrespective of the body's formal voting rules. Survey experiments demonstrate the rationale behind great powers' pursuit of unanimity. They show that a policy's endorsement by a united Security Council has a much larger signaling effect on public opinion than the policy's approval by a divided Council. Qualitative case studies and novel design-based causal inference that exploits natural experiments show that minor powers strongly influence the deployment of UN peace operations and UN counter-terrorism sanctions, and that minor powers also use their influence in the Council to attain side-payments. Minor powers' influence is particularly strong during crises, when great powers are most eager to secure small states' votes through power-sharing. Interviews with diplomats in seven countries and quantitative analyses of exogenous variation in minor powers' representation on the Security Council under pre-determined rotation rules trace minor powers' influence to informal power-sharing practices in the Council