93 research outputs found
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Africa : how civil registration and vital statistics systems supported an emergency response
CRVS systems are essential services, providing critical mortality data and legal identity that underpin safety nets and public services. Developing measures to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the registration of vital events is critical. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), with the support of the Centre for Excellence for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) systems, is using its convening role to provide technical assistance to African countries. The programme will reinforce digital tools that make it possible to notify and register vital events as they occur.Global Affairs Canada (GAC
Opportunity or necessity? Conceptualizing entrepreneurship at African small-scale mines
This article critically examines the policy environment in place for artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) â low-tech, labour-intensive mineral extraction and processing â in sub-Saharan Africa, with a view to determining whether there is adequate âspaceâ for the sector's operators to flourish as entrepreneurs. In recent years, there has been growing attention paid to ASM in the region, particularly as a vehicle for stimulating local economic development. The work being planned under the Africa Mining Vision (AMV), a comprehensive policy agenda adopted by African heads of state in February 2009, could have an enormous impact on this front. One of its core objectives is to pressure host governments into Boosting Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining by following a series of streamlined recommendations. It is concluded, however, that there is a disconnect between how entrepreneurship in ASM has been interpreted and projected by proponents of the AMV on the one hand, and the form it has mostly taken in practice on the other hand. This gulf must be rapidly bridged if ASM is to have a transformative impact, economically, in the region. © 2017 Elsevier Inc
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Livelihood diversification and the expansion of artisanal mining in rural Tanzania: drivers and policy implications
This paper provides an extended analysis of livelihood diversification in rural Tanzania, with special emphasis on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Over the past decade, this sector of industry, which is labour-intensive and comprises an array of rudimentary and semi-mechanized operations, has become an indispensable economic activity throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, providing employment to a host of redundant public sector workers, retrenched large-scale mine labourers and poor farmers. In many of the regionâs rural areas, it is overtaking subsistence agriculture as the primary industry. Such a pattern appears
to be unfolding within the Morogoro and Mbeya regions of southern Tanzania, where findings from recent research suggest that a growing number of smallholder farmers are turning to ASM for employment and financial support. It is imperative that national rural development programmes take this trend into account and provide support to these people
Mind the gap? Civil society policy engagement and the pursuit of gender justice: critical discourse analysis of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in Africa 2003â2015
This article presents critical discourse analysis of state and civil society organisationsâ efforts to implement the gender mainstreaming goals set out in the United Nationsâ Beijing Declaration. It is argued that the latter represents a generational opportunity to apply a Feminist Political Economic Framework to development in Africa. However, the research findings show how current practice falls short of the sought-after participative democratic model of mainstreaming. Instead, analysis reveals significant differences in state and civil society organisationsâ policy framing, issues over conceptual clarity and a disjuncture in state and civil society prioritisation of key gendered issues such as poverty, economic inequality and conflict resolution. This matters because it indicates that the capacity of the civil sphere to act as a political arena from which NGOs may challenge the traditionally male-dominated power structures is being undermined by a âdisconnectâ between state and civil society as they pursue contrasting agendas
Sustainable Consumption Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Conceptual Framework
This paper develops a conceptual framework for investigating the adoption patterns, inhibitors, and
facilitators ( PIF ) of sustainable consumption in sub-Sahara African ( SSA ) settings. Literature evidence
shows paucity of empirical studies on sustainable consumption from SSA , which partly explains lack
of suitable conceptual framework to guide research in this area. Also, the existing frameworks, which
were developed outside SSA may not be suitable for constructing sustainable consumption behavior
in SSA because of its peculiarities. The key signifi cance of this article is the potential of providing future
researchers in this area with a framework to guide and manage their studies. As a conceptual article,
insight was drawn from a plethora of scholarly articles in the domain of sustainable consumption and
related areas. The framework is built on four key constructsâadoption patterns, inhibitors, facilitators
( PIF ), and intention. As a guide for studies from the SSA , the article includes an empirical section,
which provides preliminary empirical validation for the proposed PIF conceptual framework based on
a pilot test. The result from the pilot study, using structural equation modeling ( SEM ), led to positing the
PIF Sustainable Consumption model, thus giving support for the PIF Conceptual Framework, which
this article puts forward. In addition, the proposed PIF conceptual framework is capable of providing
insight for crafting sustainability-related policies. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Neoliberalism and the revival of agricultural cooperatives: The case of the coffee sector in Uganda
Agricultural cooperatives have seen a comeback in subâSaharan Africa. After the collapse of many weakly performing monopolist organizations during the 1980s and 1990s, strengthened cooperatives have emerged since the 2000s. Scholarly knowledge about the stateâcooperative relations in which this ârevivalâ takes place remains poor. Based on new evidence from Uganda's coffee sector, this paper discusses the political economy of Africa's cooperative revival. The authors argue that donors' and African governments' renewed support is framed in largely apolitical terms, which obscures the contested political and economic nature of the revival. In the context of neoliberal restructuring processes, state and nonâstate institutional support to democratic economic organizations with substantial redistributional agendas remains insufficient. The politicalâeconomic context in Ugandaâand potentially elsewhere in Africaâcontributes to poor terms of trade for agricultural cooperatives while maintaining significant state control over some cooperative activities to protect the status quo interests of big capital and state elites. These conditions are unlikely to produce a conflictâfree, substantial, and sustained revival of cooperatives, which the new promoters of cooperatives suggest is under way
Report of the inception workshop on the project on an experimental approach to capacity and toolkit development for monitoring and evaluation within climate change adaptation initiatives, 5 - 7 July 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
The workshop brought together representatives and experts from 20 regional and sub regional organizations as well as donor agencies in the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) programme. Participants reviewed and discussed preliminary results of a baseline study on existing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices and toolkits. An M&E framework should be capable of providing a minimum set of indicators for adequate and timely measurement of expected project results and accomplishments. Ideally projects should focus on priorities within national development plans, with M&E allowing decision makers and others to assess the success of individual projects in terms of overarching policies and plans
Growth by destination: the role of trade in Africa's recent growth episode
Over the period 1990â2009, Africa has experienced a distinct and favourable reversal in its growth fortunes in stark contrast to its performance in the preceding decades, leading to a variety of hypotheses seeking to explain the phenomenon. This paper presents both cross-country and panel-data evidence on the causal factors driving the recent turnaround in Africa's growth and takes the unique approach of disaggregating the separate growth impacts of Africa's bilateral trade with: China, Europe and America. The empirical analysis presented in this paper suggests that the primary and most robust causal factors driving Africa's recent growth turnaround are private sector- and foreign direct investment. Although empirical evidence of the role of bilateral trade openness in Africa's recent growth emerges within a fixed effect estimation setting, these results are not as robust when endogeneity and other issues are fully accounted for. Among the three major bilateral partners, Africa's bilateral trade with China has been a relatively important factor spurring growth on the continent and especially so in resource-rich, oil producing and non-landlocked countries. The econometric results are not as supportive of growth-inducing effects of foreign aid. These findings emerge after applying a variety of panel data specifications to the data, including the recent fixed Effects Filtered (FEF) estimator introduced by Pesaran and Zhou (2014) and the dynamic panel Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator, which allows for endogeneity between trade and growth
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