Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (27)
Working Paper
pdf
This paper examines the current interest in addressing the problem of young people’s unemployment in Africa through agriculture. Using notions of transitions and mobilities we set out a transformative work and opportunity space framework that privileges difference and diversity among work...
Working Paper
pdf
Technical, vocational education, and training has remained an explosive topic because it can create a divided society in terms of education and the benefits associated with it. Internationally, it has always been a complex and controversial topic compared to the general education strand. It has...
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from South Africa’s Training and Education Programme
Vocational training programmes, like South Africa’s learnership programme, which combine classroom learning and on-the-job training seem like the type of intervention which can create skills, get young people into jobs quicker, and reduce youth unemployment. This paper uses a longitudinal dataset of...
Working Paper
pdf
– Prospecting a Mineralized Future
Over the last fifteen years many African countries have experienced a ‘mining take-off’. Mining activities have bifurcated into two sectors: large-scale, capital-intensive production generating the bulk of the exported minerals, and small-scale, labour-intensive artisanal mining, which, at present...
Working Paper
pdf
– Post-Millennial Cases of Mobility and Sociality
With a focus on cities in eastern and southern Africa, this paper draws on recent scholarship and my own research in Lusaka, Zambia, to analyse pathways for, and challenges to, greater social mobility for youth against the background of economic, political, and spatial processes that are affecting...
Working Paper
pdf
Institutions are altered by conflict, depending on the scale, duration and type of war. At one extreme, formal political, social and economic institutions may be completely destroyed (e.g. Somalia), while the importance and type of informal institutions may be changed. This survey addresses some of...
Working Paper
pdf
Financial development is vulnerable to social conflict. Conflict reduces the demand for domestic currency as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Conflict also leads to poor quality governance, including weak regulation of the financial system, thereby undermining the sustainability of...
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from Eritrea
With the Derg's overthrow in 1991, Eritrea embarked on the construction of a new state. New economic institutions were created, and considerable reform undertaken. Problems in co-ordinating reform and reconstruction were largely avoided, mainly because of the institutional ‘clean slate’ facing the...
Working Paper
pdf
Privatization, together with liberalization and deregulation, constituted the core of Mozambique's economic transition. Privatization in Mozambique has taken place on an unusually large scale in comparison with the rest of Africa. Privatization interacted with military demobilization and political...
Working Paper
pdf
In 1991, the new Government of Ethiopia faced a triple fiscal challenge. First, a major effort was required to overhaul and modernize the tax system. Second, the need to switch expenditure from military to civilian uses had to take place within a potentially severely reduced resource total. The...
Working Paper
pdf
Ethiopia is one of a number of SSA economies that adopted state-led development strategies in the 1970s (others include Angola and Mozambique), and suffered from intense conflict (leading to the fall of the Derg regime in 1991). The new government was therefore faced with the twin tasks of...
Working Paper
pdf
Angola’s difficulties in achieving macro-economic stability and economic liberalization have serious implications for private-sector development. Hyperinflation, and frequent policy reversal, constrain and distort investment in both the informal and formal parts of the private sector. But macro...
Working Paper
pdf
Since large-scale programmes of post-war resettlement and reintegration are costly, it is important to learn the lessons of the resettlement programme started after the end of Eritrea's liberation war in 1991. Eritrea's system of land tenure largely facilitated resettlement (although long-term...
Working Paper
pdf
The list of illnesses afflicting Angolan society is a long one: political instability, civil war, macroeconomic mismanagement, and the desperation born of poverty. A profound sense of uncertainty afflicts all levels of society-the government (and its opponents), entrepreneurs and rural and urban...
Working Paper
pdf
– Communities, Entrepreneurs, and States
Africa has become synonymous with conflict. There were armed conflicts in 16 of Africa's 54 countries in 1999. For Africa to recover, communities must reconstruct, private sectors must revitalize, and states must transform themselves. Aid donors, NGOs, and international business can do much to help...
Working Paper
pdf
Governments frequently compartmentalize issues of reform and reconstruction into separate strategies and separate ministries (the fate of poverty reduction as well). Donors do likewise, for each has its own responsibilities; the IMF focuses on reform, the UN concentrates on conflict resolution and...
Displaying 16 of 27 results