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The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence-based policy recommendations for improving the implementation of universal service funds (USF) with a view to closing the digital divide in Africa.

The paper adopts a qualitative approach that draws examples from various African countries supported by 25 interviews from key stakeholders with hands-on experience and roles that shape telecommunications policy in Africa and other developing countries.

The study's findings point out that institutional voids which characterize several African countries inhibit the effectiveness of USF in African countries. The authors identify several institutional and organisational factors and explain how they negatively affect the performance of USF. The authors find that in order to overcome these obstacles, there is a need for a clear redefinition of Universal Access and Service (UAS) policies, restructuring the governance of USF, encouraging cross-sectoral collaborations, and bottom-up initiatives to bridge the digital divide in African countries.

The paper contributes to the underexplored USF literature by shedding light on the role of institutional factors in determining the success of USF. The paper thus complements and provides a different perspective on promoting digital inclusion in Africa from the viewpoint of institutional voids, bringing new insights into the existing literature on how to deal with an intractable area of UAS policy and the wider digital divide debate in developing countries.

This paper aims to shed light on how children's literature in Africa deserves to be studied because African writers “decolonize” the minds of African children and children and adults around the world.

This paper defines children's literature from an African perspective and the “decolonization of the mind.” This is done to examine how two African writers provide narratives for children inspired by their cultures. They deal with themes, characters and symbols that interest children and adults.

Achebe and Youssef crossed many borders: the world of children and adults, animals and humans, vice and virtue, supernatural and real. Their stories take the reader on journeys that involve enriching, engaging and inspiring adventures.

Youssef and Achebe are prolific writers. Providing a survey of what is available in Arabic and Nigerian literature for children, is beyond the scope of this paper.

This paper sends a message to those in charge of the curriculum in schools in Egypt, the Arab countries, Africa and the world at large: decolonize the syllabi in schools because the world is not black and white. Literature for children that encourages critical thinking is available by African writers in Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere.

The works discussed show that African writers are creative, and their works inspire the African child with pride in his/her identity, culture and heritage.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no one has compared Egyptian and Nigerian literature for children before. Youssef and Achebe provide evidence that “Good literature gives the child a place in the world … and the world a place in the child.” – Astrid Lindgren.

The paper examines financial resilience responses/capacities of governments from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana in relation to COVID-19. It highlights the governments’ fiscal, budgetary and actions as either anticipatory or coping mechanisms towards the pandemic.

Multiple case studies and secondary data were used, including official government documentation/records, expert views, policy publications by supranational organisations and international financial institutions and media reports. Textual analysis was conducted to evaluate the case countries’ resilience.

The paper highlights how governmental budgetary initiatives, including repurposing the manufacturing sector, can sustain businesses, aid social interventions and reduce vulnerability during health crises. In addition, the paper highlights that external borrowing continues to be indispensable in the financial and budgetary initiatives of the case countries. The paper finds that lessons learnt from the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in West Africa within the last decade have shaped the anticipatory resilience capacities of the case countries against COVID-19.

The paper uses the notion of resilience, the dimensions of the resilience framework and the resource-based view (RBV) theory to unearth resilience patterns. This sort of combined approach is new to financial resilience studies.

This study aims to examine how couplepreneurs foster an entrepreneurial mindset in their kids.

A qualitative research approach with semi-structured interviews was used as the data collection technique. Narrative analysis was conducted on a sample of 20 couplepreneurs in Mthatha, South Africa.

Narratives of how couplepreneurs foster an entrepreneurial mindset in their kids included purchasing toys and games for kids that encourage entrepreneurship; competition and team activities among kids that are related to entrepreneurship; the piggy bank; encouraging kids to read entrepreneurial books; and kid entrepreneur showcases.

Sample size challenges are a notable limitation, including research being conducted in only one province of South Africa. Caution is advised when attempting to generalise the results to other contexts.

Understanding the strategies used by couplepreneurs to instil an entrepreneurial mindset in children can help parents to influence and encourage their children's entrepreneurial growth, resulting in more creative and innovative people who make a positive contribution to society, economy and the community.

While there is a body of literature on couple entrepreneurship, there are shortcomings in studies examining how coupleprenuers in African countries instil an entrepreneurial mindset in their children. As a result, this study aims to complement the current corpus of African literature on entrepreneurship, particularly in the context of South Africa.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a better understanding of Africa's sport industry and demonstrate how the industry can be transformed.

To do so, the authors rely on their varied experiences within Africa's sport ecosystem. This includes reflections based on consuming sport in Africa, studying the sport business landscape, and first-hand experiences working inside African sport organizations.

The authors find that systemic challenges restrict the growth of Africa's sport industry; however, they maintain there are also reasons to be optimistic about the prospects of the industry.

While not an exhaustive list, the authors' commentary defines various research opportunities for scholars interested in both better understanding and improving Africa's sport industry.

The stated challenges and proposed strategies have the potential to inform decision-makers within Africa's sport ecosystem.

Crucial to the continued growth and development of the continent, the authors propose that investments in sport can drive broader economic and social development beyond sport.

The authors address the dearth of academic literature on Africa's sport industry, while also inviting more researchers to undertake research agendas that enhance Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an early assessment of India’s South-South cooperation for trade and technology (SSTT) with East Africa, focusing on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It aims to analyse the role of SSTT in providing support to targeted sectors.

The paper examines SSTT, focusing on India and East Africa over a specific period (2000–2016) of its emergence, and extends the public sponsorship literature in international business (IB) to better understand the relationship between SSTT and value addition – applying to a particular case study of SSTT interventions in spices.

The paper highlights SSTT as a pathway to support value addition in global value chains (GVCs). Trade between India and East African countries has grown, with three developments over the period of analysis in particular: shifting trade patterns, growing share of intermediate goods trade and differences in GVC insertion. However, East African exports are largely of lower value. Capacity building to support processing capability and thriving markets can encourage greater value addition. Preliminary findings suggest early gains at the margins, as SSTT interventions have been focusing on capacity boosting with buffering and bridging mechanisms for increased volume of trade. Moving up the value chain however requires that specific value-enhancing activities continue to be targeted, building on regional capacities. Our high-level case study for spices suggests that activities are starting to have a positive effect; however, more focus is needed to specifically target value creation before export and in particular higher levels of processing.

While findings are preliminary, policy implications emerge to guide SSTT interventions. There is capacity for building higher value-added supply chains as is evident among East African countries that trade with each other – future SSTT programmes could tap into this and help build capacity in these higher-value value chains. Future SSTT programmes can take a comprehensive approach by aiming at interventions at key points of the value chain, and especially at points that facilitate higher value addition than initial processing. An example is that Ethiopia and Rwanda are likely to benefit from an expanded spice industry, but the next phase should be towards building processing for value-addition components of the value chain, such as through trade policies, incentivising exporters to add value to items before export. From a development perspective, more analysis needs to be done on the value chain itself – for instance, trade facilitation measures to help processers engage in value chains and to access investments for increasing value add activities. (iv), Future research should examine more closely the development impacts of SSTT, namely, the connection between increased trade, local job creation and sustained innovation, as it is these tangible benefits that will help countries in the Global South realise the benefits of increased trade.

The paper underlines how the SSTT approach can contribute to the critical IB and GVCs literature using a theoretical grounded approach from public sponsorship theory, and with a unique lens of development cooperation between countries in the global south and its emerging impact on development outcomes in these countries.

The growth of both the informal sector and illicit financial outflows necessitated this study, in order to investigate how countries in Africa respond to these realities in terms of mobilization of domestic resources. These are the main motivation for the current study to the extant literature in conjunction with the adoption of employing second-generation econometric techniques which take into account cross-sectional dependence and country-specific heterogeneity.

This study therefore examined the capacity of Africa to mobilize domestic resources amidst rising illicit financial outflows and informal sector size in selected African countries between 2000 and 2018. Second-generation econometric techniques such as cross-sectional dependence tests, slope homogeneity tests, Westerlund (2007) long-run co-integration tests, Eberhardt and Teal (2010) augmented mean group estimations and Kónya (2006) panel causality testing were employed.

Findings revealed the existence of cross-sectional dependence and slope homogeneity in the data series. Findings also supported the existence of depressing long-run impacts of IFOs and ISS on domestic savings. Causality test results were not uniform across variables among countries. Policy recommendations favour formalizing the largely informal African economies through budgetary policy adjustments and commitment to building stronger institutions.

The fragility of the African countries economy and its macroeconomic indicators is suggestive for more policy construction.

This economic reality about the nature of the informal sector is one that has negated the traditional view which holds that economic reforms would make the informal sector shrink as it transits to formal sector. Experiences from Latin America and Africa in fact indicate that the informal sector is actually on an expansionary path in the wake of adjustment and policy reforms. It is often called the unobserved, unorganized or unprotected economy. With this sector growing in size, the possibility of a reverse may not be in sight, owing to the increasing poverty levels and unemployment prevalent in most African countries. Uncertain foreign investment and aid inflows coupled with lower export revenues and high levels of indebtedness have created new impetus to examine the capacity of Africa's fiscal policy regime to mobilise domestic resources for the development of the region. Surprisingly, the last decade witnessed continued rise in Africa's illicit financial outflows amidst large informal sector size (ISS).

This conversation presents the reflections from six international disaster scholars on how disaster capitalism manifested in very different ways in different countries, including Japan, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, India and South Africa, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

This paper is based on the conversations that took place on Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast livestream on the September 15, 2020.

The prominent themes in this conversation include profiteering, oppression and the politics of disasters.

The conversation contributes to the ongoing discussions around disaster capitalism and disaster risk creation.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the symmetric and asymmetric effects of exchange rate uncertainty on employment in South Africa’s manufacturing sector over the period 1985Q1–2019Q2.

Jorda’s (2005) local projection method is employed and following Koop et al. (1996); generalized impulse response functions are generated to see the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on employment in South Africa’s manufacturing sector.

The results show that exchange rate uncertainty affects negatively and significantly employment in South Africa’s manufacturing sector. Employment also responds negatively and significantly to export shock. Inflation and output shocks, however, positively and significantly affect employment on impact. Asymmetric responses of employment to exchange rate uncertainty are also found in this study. While high exchange rate uncertainty leads to a reduction in employment, low exchange rate uncertainty brings an increase in employment in South Africa’s manufacturing sector.

This research adds to the scarce empirical literature on the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on employment in South Africa’s manufacturing sector by incorporating mainly non-linearities into the model.

This study examines the impact of China’s trade, aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) on the economic growth of Africa.

Our study covered 41 countries in Africa, cutting across the western, eastern, central, southern and northern sub-regions. The study adopted the dynamic system generalized method of moments (SGMM), feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) and Dumitrescu–Hurlin Panel Granger causality techniques for estimations.

Overall, FDI, trade and aid from China have a nonlinear relationship with Africa’s economic growth. The findings reveal a key novelty in that the marginal effect on real per capita GDP increases when China’s FDI interacts with the manufacturing sector in Africa. These findings are robust to long-run estimations.

Given that we have examined the short-and long-run symbiotic effects of China’s FDI and Africa’s manufacturing sector and China’s aid and Africa’s manufacturing sector, more studies are warranted in this area, particularly to produce further empirical evidence of these findings. Moreover, future work could focus on investigating the country-specific effects of China’s trade, China’s FDI and China’s aid on real GDP per capita in each African country as our results reflect within-country elasticities.

This study provides new evidence on the impact of China’s trade, aid and FDI on the growth of African economies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically explore the long-run effects of China’s trade, FDI and aid on economic growth in African countries. This study also tests the claim of the displacement of Africa’s manufacturing industry by its Chinese counterparts.