Human Development In Sub-Saharan Africa Research Articles

Toward a food secure future: Ensuring food security for sustainable human development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Food security remains a top development priority and global concern. It is enshrined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Sustainable Development Goal two. Food security is also a core component of the human development and capability paradigm, since food access and entitlements are critical for reinforcing essential human capabilities. In introducing this special issue, this paper argues that agriculture is central to improving food security and reducing poverty in Africa. It suggests that realizing the potential of agriculture in Africa requires rapid increases in land productivity and increases in agricultural yields. A science-based approach that integrates gender and sustainability is critical to meet this goal, through the design and implementation of policies that improve the availability farm inputs and farm technology. The paper concludes by introducing the papers in this special issue.

The Role of Governance in Mobile Phones for Inclusive Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study assesses the synergy effects of governance in mobile phone penetration for inclusive human development in Sub-Saharan Africa with data for the period 2000-2012 by employing a battery of interactive estimation techniques, namely: Fixed effects (FE), Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) and Tobit regressions. Concepts of political (voice & accountability and political stability/no violence), economic (government effectiveness and regulation quality) and institutional (corruption-control and rule of law) governance are employed. The following findings are established. First, the previously apparent positive correlation between mobile phones and inclusive development can be extended to a positive effect. Second, whereas political governance is overwhelmingly not significant across estimated models, average effects from economic governance are higher relative to institutional governance. Third, on the synergy effects from interactions between mobile phones and governance variables, whereas none are apparent in FE regressions, there are significant synergy effects in GMM and Tobit estimations, notably, from: (i) regulation quality in the former and (ii) political stability, voice & accountability and rule of law in the latter. Fourth, there is consistent evidence of convergence in inclusive human development. Policy implications are discussed.

Enhancing ICT for Inclusive Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study assesses if increasing information and communication technology (ICT) enhances inclusive human development in a sample of 49 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 2000-2012. The empirical evidence present in this study, is based on instrumental variable Tobit regressions, in order to account for simultaneity and the limited range in the dependent variable. In the interest of increasing room for policy implications and controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity, the analysis is decomposed into the fundamental characteristics that human development based on: income levels, legal origins, religious denominations, political stability, landlockedness and resource-wealth. Our findings show that policies designed to boost ICT (mobile phone, internet, telephone) penetration will increase inclusive development in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. The degree of positive responsiveness of inclusive development to ICT varies across fundamental characteristics of human development and ICT dynamics. The study has substantial policy relevance because the adoption and/or penetration rate of ICT can be influenced by policy to achieve inclusive development outcomes. Further policy implications are also discussed.

ACCESS TO SAFE WATER AND THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT QUANDARY IN AFRICA: IMPLICATIONS OF A RIGHTS-BASED APPROACH

Despite formal and concerted commitments by African governments to achieve universal access to clean water through various initiatives since 2000, access to clean drinking water remains a continuous challenge for human development in Sub-Saharan Africa. While some states have achieved some progress, achieving largescale availability of safe water remains a humanitarian crisis in much of Africa. The underpinning premise of this article is that a comprehensive and integrated approach can ensure the sustainability of expanding access to drinking water and sanitation while facilitating economic growth and human development. This article thus investigates the institutional, political, economic, and communal constraints in achieving expanded access to clean water among vast African populations. What are the roles and responsibilities that the civil society and local government agencies have to assume (a) to ensure that local water users and their organizations can assume their responsibilities for sustainable water resource management; and (b) to make sure that water is indeed considered a human right, and not in the least for those who have little or no access to power and influence: women and other underprivileged groups in local societies? Beyond the question of funding, what will be the role and place of a rights-based approach to the underlying structural challenges of participatory planning; ownership of the distribution processes as well as local accountability, all of which determine the sustainability of development programming pertaining to water? This article proffers a series of trajectories within a right-based approaches framework and accentuates how pragmatic responses to the foregoing questions could contribute to the policy responses necessary to ensure the realization of a well-managed regime of water access, distribution, and management in Africa.

Global South is Key to Accelerating Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Global South is Key to Accelerating Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Book Reviews

Nicoli Nattrass of Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town reviews, “Patenting of Pharmaceuticals and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Laws, Institutions, Practices, and Politics” by Poku Adusei. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “xamines the need to reconstruct the globalized patent regime to address public health and development challenges that confront the citizens of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the threats posed by HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis epidemics. Discusses exploring the conceptual domains for patent discourse in global trade relations; evolutionary trajectories of patents and the politics of exclusion in sub-Saharan Africa; the ““myth” of patent justifications—triumph and failure dichotomy in the North and South; patent regulatory and institutional mechanisms in sub-Saharan Africa; pharmaceutical patents, the right to health, and constitutional supremacy in sub-Saharan Africa; and pharmaceutical patents and human development in sub-Saharan Africa. Adusei is Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, Land Law, Company Law, and Private International Law at the University of Ghana, Legon.”

NEA Presidential Address: Gender Inequality and Human Development in Sub- Saharan Africa

This Presidential Address considers the effects of gender inequality on human development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Parameter estimates from quantile and ordinal categorical latent variable specifications of the relationship between components of the Human Development Index and measures of gender inequality suggests that human development in Sub-Saharan Africa increases with respect to improvements in several measures of gender inequality. The results suggest that inegalitarian laws, norms, traditions and codes of conduct toward women constrain both human and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Food Security and Human Development in Africa: Strategic Considerations and Directions for Further Research*

Abstract: This paper argues that food security and human development are intricately linked, and that meaningful progress on the one cannot be sustained without concomitant progress on the other. The paper surveys recent research on various aspects of the linkages between food security and human development and highlights areas where further research would enrich our understanding of the complex interactions and synergies between the two. It concludes by calling for a more systematic investigation of the human development–food security nexus with a view to generating new and practical insights for improving food security and advancing human development in sub-Saharan Africa.

External Debt and Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Nigerian Case

The issue of external debt and human development in sub-Saharan Africa with particular reference to Nigeria has risen to the top of the agenda in Nigeria’s politico - economic discourse. It is against this background that this paper examines the implications of external debt on poverty alleviation. The tenet of the paper is to ascertain the extent to which external loans have reduced the incidence of poverty and increase human development. The ordinary least square (OLS) technique was adopted with the use of time series data on aggregate poverty, per capita gross domestic product, inflation, expenditure on education, expenditure on health sector, total debt service and external debt to export ratio. This paper maintains that poverty spread in Nigeria is associated with fallen economic growth, high rate of inflation, and inadequate expenditure on education and health sectors. In order to step up economic growth, human development and reduce poverty, there is need to step up the productive sector. Handling this with a wave of the hands the paper argues, renders the poverty alleviation efforts associated with external loans an illusion.

Determinants of human development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Determinants of human development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Mapping an HIV/STD prevention curriculum for Zambian in‐school settings

HIV/AIDS poses grave risk to human development in sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence-based interventions that are rooted in local culture could help efforts to prevent threats to human development from HIV/AIDS. We used concept mapping (Concept System, 2006 ) to construct the components and content of a locally developed HIV/AIDS curriculum for use by secondary schools in Lusaka, Zambia. Participants were school counsellors (n = 14), youth health program officers (n = 7), and regular education teachers (n = 3) from the education, health, and youth development agencies in Lusaka, Zambia (males = 11; females = 13; mean age 38; SD = 15 years). Concept mapping yielded six statement clusters defining preliminary components of a locally grounded in-school HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum and the content items that define these components: (1) life skills education (18 items), (2) sexuality and reproductive health (10 items), (3) treatment, care and support (13 items), (4) counselling (12 items), (5) basic facts about HIV/AIDS (11 items), and (6) dissemination of information about HIV/AIDS (11 items). Zambian locally constructed constructs for an HIV/STD prevention curriculum overlap those promoted by public health programs in the country and internationally.

Growth and Governance: A Defense

It is clear we have disagreements from our esteemed colleagues on this important issue. The Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi [hereafter KKM] response raises a number of insightful points that advance this debate. We thank them for that and for taking the time to engage our article. As we have reflected on our original essay and KKM’s critique of it, we were struck by the fact that we may actually be talking past each other and that differences in approach between political science and economics may foster this miscommunication. We are not arguing that political science offers a superior approach. To the contrary, our intellectual debt to economics is enormous. Our bibliography offers testimony to that very fact. We nevertheless believe that political scientists have as much to offer economists as vice versa, including not only a venerable literature on state formation and governance but a no less important tradition of self-conscious concept formation that has been less central to most economists. While political scientists have traditionally been producers of political data, and have therefore treated the process of concept formation as a necessary prelude to both measurement and modeling (Collier and Mahon 1993; Gerring 1999; Sartori 1970), economists have until recently been consumers of political data and have, therefore, subordinated the need for self-conscious concept formation to the understandable urge to measure and model. We ultimately hope to demonstrate that conceptual issues—and corresponding measurement problems—are at the core of the debate over growth and governance and that progress will be less than ideal until they are addressed. A meeting of minds may be too much to ask for at the present time, but a meeting of method would almost certainly constitute a step in the right direction. We, therefore, offer this rebuttal as not just a response to the thoughtful critique of KKM, but as an effort to bridge these gaps and develop even better ways to make real advances in understanding the relationship between growth and governance.

Human Development in Africa in 2015

The Perspectives editors handed me the following assignment: “Ten years from now, what will be the status of human development in sub-Saharan Africa? What will be the trajectory of the AIDS crisis; what actors—if any—can we expect to address problems of health, education, and poverty? What political changes can we anticipate, and how will these affect standards of living (and vice versa)?” The choice of language is significant. Most studies of development in Africa have focused on growth. However, here the interest is in the degree to which growth and other things, most especially the quality of government, translate into standards of living and aspects of “human development” or “capability,” typically measured by school completion rates, child malnutrition, under age-five mortality, and related indicators.

Toward Sustainable Adoption of Technologies for Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Precursors, Diagnostics, and Prescriptions

This paper proposes and merges an extension of technology acceptance model with ideas from human development research targeting least developed countries. Specifically, the paper proposes an extension of the influence of perceived user resource, which in turn was developed from the original TAM literature. It is also tied to the Information Technology literature about socio-economic development. Our objective is to shed light on the interactions between socioeconomic development needs and factors generally innate to sub-Sahara Africa and other developing countries that impede sustainable technological adoption and diffusion. We argue that developing countries lag in adopting ‘foreign technologies’. We offer diagnostics and prescriptions for how to effect a sustainable technological adoption to support socio-economic development across Sub-Saharan Africa. This article should bring into focus this and other developing regions that are almost non-existent in mainstream Information Systems research.

Transforming Economic Growth to Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Elite Political Instability

In the light of the increasing attention on human development (HD) as well as the importance of political instability (PI) in economic performance, this paper examines the role of PI in the transformation of economic growth to HD. It finds that élite PI—the frequency of coups d'état in sub-Saharan Africa—adversely affected the transformation of economic growth to HD, measured as the change in an index of life expectancy and literacy, between 1970 and 1985. Coupled with an additional indirect negative effect on GDP growth, élite PI is found to have engendered a significant adverse impact on HD.

Political Instability and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Further Evidence

After more than three decades of independence, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have not yet developed stable political systems. Since the 1960s, when African countries began to achieve independence, many of them have encountered significant levels of institutional instability. In recent years, political violence has emerged as the most common method of governmental change. In this study, the effects of political violence on economic and human development in Sub-Saharan Africa are examined. It is seen that political instability is a significant constraint to the improvement of the human condition in the region.