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"Africa, Sub-Saharan -- Economic conditions"
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The Outcast Majority
The Outcast Majorityinvites policymakers, practitioners, academics, students, and others to think about three commanding contemporary issues-war, development, and youth-in new ways. The starting point is the following irony: while African youth are demographically dominant, most see themselves as members of an outcast minority. The irony directly informs young people's lives in war-affected Africa, where differences separating the priorities of youth and those of international agencies are especially prominent.
Drawing on interviews with development experts and young people, Marc Sommers shines a light on this gap and offers guidance on how to close it. He begins with a comprehensive consideration of forces that shape and propel the lives of African youth today, particularly those experiencing or emerging from war. They are contrasted with forces that influence and constrain the international development aid enterprise. The book concludes with a framework for making development policies and practices significantly more relevant and effective for youth in areas affected by African wars and other places where vast and vibrant youth populations reside.
eBook
Gender, time use, and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa
The papers in this volume examine the links between gender, time use, and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. They contribute to a broader definition of poverty to include time poverty, and to a broader definition of work to include household work. The papers present a conceptual framework linking both market and household work, review some of the available literature and surveys on time use in Africa, and use tools and approaches drawn from analysis of consumption-based poverty to develop the concept of a time poverty line and to examine linkages between time poverty, consumption poverty, and other dimensions of development in Africa such as education and child labor.
eBook
Entrepreneurship in Africa
Chapters in this book contribute to our understanding of the theory, structure and practice of entrepreneurship in diverse African countries. Case studies examined include: African multinational banks and businesses, female entrepreneurs, culture and entrepreneurship, finance and entrepreneurship and SMEs.
Book
Poor numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it
One of the most urgent challenges in African economic development is to devise a strategy for improving statistical capacity. Reliable statistics, including estimates of economic growth rates and per-capita income, are basic to the operation of governments in developing countries and vital to nongovernmental organizations and other entities that provide financial aid to them. Rich countries and international financial institutions such as the World Bank allocate their development resources on the basis of such data. The paucity of accurate statistics is not merely a technical problem; it has a massive impact on the welfare of citizens in developing countries.
Where do these statistics originate? How accurate are they?Poor Numbersis the first analysis of the production and use of African economic development statistics. Morten Jerven's research shows how the statistical capacities of sub-Saharan African economies have fallen into disarray. The numbers substantially misstate the actual state of affairs. As a result, scarce resources are misapplied. Development policy does not deliver the benefits expected. Policymakers' attempts to improve the lot of the citizenry are frustrated. Donors have no accurate sense of the impact of the aid they supply. Jerven's findings from sub-Saharan Africa have far-reaching implications for aid and development policy. As Jerven notes, the current catchphrase in the development community is \"evidence-based policy,\" and scholars are applying increasingly sophisticated econometric methods-but no statistical techniques can substitute for partial and unreliable data.
eBook
Enterprising women
This book brings together new household and enterprise data from 41 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to inform policy makers and practitioners about ways to expand women entrepreneurs' economic opportunities. Women's empowerment is recognized as the third millennium development goal; in 2012 the World Bank dedicated its annual flagship, the World Development Report, to gender equality and development (World Bank 2011); and the Nobel prize for peace was awarded to three pioneering women (two from Liberia) working for peace in their countries' fights for democracy and for greater opportunities for women. This book focuses attention on Sub-Saharan Africa, and specifically on entrepreneurship in the nonagricultural sector. The issue of gender disparities in economic opportunities in the region has been studied in terms of gaps in wage income and in job sorting in wage work (Arbache, Kolev, and Filipiak 2010; Fafchamps, Soderbom, and Benhassine 2009; Kolev and Sirven 2010). Other cross-country work has looked at entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa, but rarely with much attention paid to gender (Bigsten and Soderbom 2006; Tybout 2000; World Bank 2004). But entrepreneurship is where women in Sub-Saharan Africa are most active outside of agriculture. So it is critical to look at entrepreneurship to understand the extent of gender disparities in economic opportunities, determine the underlying reasons for these gender patterns, and develop an agenda to enable more women to realize their full potential.
eBook
Making foreign direct investment work for Sub-Saharan Africa
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is becoming an increasingly significant catalyst for output and trade in developing countries, in part due to a major expansion in the scope of Global Value Chains (GVCs). FDI delivers a number of important contributions to economic development in terms of investment, employment, and foreign exchange. However, it is FDI's spillover potential-the productivity gain resulting from the diffusion of knowledge and technology from foreign investors to local firms and workers-that is perhaps its most valuable input to long-run growth and development. While substantial empirical evidence has been amassed over the past decade on the existence and dynamics of FDI spillovers, the results are mixed-simply attracting FDI by no means guarantees that a country will benefit from spillovers. This chapter provides an overview of the objectives of the research for which the results are presented in this book. The aim of the research is to identify the critical factors for the realization of FDI-related spillovers including dynamic interactions between FDI and local suppliers, service providers, workers, local producers, customers, and institutions. The research involved detailed field surveys in three industries, characterized by GVCs, across eight countries, with a specific focus on low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
eBook