Working Paper
Community-based approaches for neonatal survival
Objective: To analyse the impact of community approaches to improving newborn health and survival in low-resource countries. Methods: We updated previous meta-analyses of published cluster randomized trials of community-based interventions for...
Working Paper
Development and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper puts sub-Saharan Africa’s economic development into perspective. While much did not go as hoped for at independence, much of the region has been on a more promising development trajectory since the mid-1990s, as we illustrate using growth...
Working Paper
The negotiated politics of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa
Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The...
Journal Article
The impact of intergovernmental transfers on local revenue generation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Do intergovernmental transfers reduce revenues collected by local government authorities (LGAs)? There is already a well-established body of literature in public finance, which argues that intergovernmental grants “crowd out” local revenues. Most...
Journal Article
Does connectivity reduce gender gaps in off-farm employment?
Gender gaps in labor force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We...
Working Paper
Glimpses of fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa
There is a widespread perception that taxing in sub-Saharan Africa has been and remains fraught with problems or government failure. This is not generally true. For more than a century, colonial administrations and independent states have steadily...
Journal Article
Informal work in sub-Saharan Africa
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labor markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent...
Working Paper
Fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa: conceptualization and empirical trends
This paper contributes to the debate on domestic revenue mobilization and state-building in the Global South by asking whether there are fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa. To answer this question, we review the diverse understandings of the fiscal...
Blog
Efforts to protect the poor during COVID: How five African countries fared
The number of people living in poverty around the world is estimated to have increased by half a billion people due to the COVID-19 crisis. The...
Blog
The pandemic and Africa's social safety net
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that African tax and social-benefit systems are currently ill-equipped to protect households from sudden income losses...
Working Paper
Financial liberalization and its implications for private savings in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper employs data from 103 developing countries between 1981 and 2012 to examine the determinants of private savings in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with a focus on the effect of financial liberalization on private savings. It also analyses why...
Working Paper
Incorporating informal workers into social insurance in Tanzania
Expansion of social protection reach among workers in the large informal economy represents a persisting and thorny challenge in the development context. In Mainland Tanzania, several domestically led policy reforms have been introduced to...
Research Brief
Are women’s labour force participation rates improving in sub-Saharan Africa?
Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force...
Working Paper
Weathering shocks: the effects of weather shocks on farm input use in sub-Saharan Africa
There has been much discussion on climate change and its adverse effects on agriculture, including excessive loss of food production. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is the major source of household livelihoods, shocks in...
Journal Article
Female labor force participation in sub-Saharan Africa
Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub-Saharan African...