Search results

The paper critically examines the program on Education for All (EFA) in India, namely Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in a financing and development framework. In doing so, the paper identifies a number of policy and implementation gaps in the program. A fine-tuning of the existing matching shares by discriminating the matching shares in terms of need for, ability to provide matching shares and to strengthen the absorptive capacity could go a long way in attaining the horizontal equity in terms of every child completing elementary schooling in India. This would also ensure the other desirable principles of intergovernmental transfers such as predictability, transparency, and incentive mechanism besides improving utilization.

Further, it clearly emerges that only after ensuring the basic minimum levels in terms of physical and human infrastructure, and ensuring equal access to all the child population of age group of 6–14, quality is given priority. Thus, the challenge is both improving the qualitative and quantitative targets of UEE with enhanced resource allocation to education. Hence, Center is to ensure release of funding for SSA through special efforts as the program requires enormous funding and serious commitment of both central and state governments.

On the developmental aspects, the scheme not only widens social inequity but also perpetuates the declining quality of public provision by encouraging alternate schools and para teachers, besides the financing norms. These low-cost options will result in serious ramifications on equity, quality, balance, and sustainability of the basic education structure.

This chapter critically examines the causes and effects of continuous poverty in two sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, despite various poverty alleviation strategies adopted by each country. It reveals the theoretical framework and the accompanying set of programmatic and policy tools for poverty alleviation in SSA.

The authors use laboratory experiments to test two self-assessment tax mechanisms for facilitating land assembly. One mechanism is incentive compatible with a complex tax function, while the other uses a flat tax rate to mitigate implementation concerns. Sellers publicly declare a price for their land. Overstating its true value is penalized by using the declared price to assess a property tax; understating its value is penalized by allowing developers to buy the property at the declared price. The authors find that both mechanisms increase the rate of land assembly and gains from trade relative to a control in which sellers’ price declarations have no effect on their taxes. However, these effects are statistically insignificant or transitory. The assembly rates in our self-assessment treatments are markedly higher than those of prior experimental studies in which the buyer faces bargaining frictions, such as costly delay or capital constraints.

Understanding of the effects of formal education on HIV/AIDS infection in South Saharan Africa (SSA) has been a complex task because consecutive waves of research offer different, seemingly contradictory results and explanations of what exactly are the schooling effects on HIV/AIDS and the causal mechanisms driving those effects. This chapter concentrates on the narrative and implications of the key substantive findings from a multidisciplinary scientific team that was formed to explore the precise nature of the relationship between population education and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in SSA and to determine the main causal mechanisms behind the association. As members of this team, this chapter reviews and synthesizes our technical demographic, epidemiological, and health research. This, and other relevant research, suggests that, like in other cases of education and health risk, because of a historical change in the public health and information environment during the pandemic there was a shift in which outcomes of education dominated individual's sexual and disease prevention behavior. The SSA HIV/AIDS case is thoroughly examined, and then used to bridge to a general discussion of the effects of educational development on population health.

Rural farm and non-farm based entrepreneurial activities within Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) play significant roles in job creation as well as food security for the majority of rural dwelling citizens (UNCTAD, 2018). This chapter examines the policies and strategies for supporting both farm and non-farm entrepreneurial activities within rural communities in SSA. In order to achieve this, the authors have completed a systematic literature review of both conceptual and empirical work on the role of policies and strategies for rural entrepreneurship in selected SSA, namely Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the United Republic of Tanzania (URT). This was completed alongside an assessment of the constraints and potential opportunities in order to stimulate linkages between rural entrepreneurship and structural economic transformation including the potential roles of both farm and non-farm based entrepreneurial activities. Key linkages between rural farm and non-farm based entrepreneurial activities are emphasised The chapter also highlights mechanisms through which governments and private sectors can work together for the maximisation of available opportunities and best practices that rural entrepreneurship can offer for job creation among rural communities in SSA.

Education and knowledge have become the prerequisites for the growth and development of any economy or region. Knowledge is a liberator of individuals and societies from human poverty and is a precondition for rapid advancement in today's global knowledge economy (KE). Any nation or region which does not key into the global KE trend may find it very difficult to catch up and become competitive in the global market so as to benefit from the power of knowledge. The objective of this chapter is to investigate whether knowledge and human capital have contributed to the growth of sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Out of the four pillars of KE – the economic and institutional regime (including governance), education and human resources, the innovation system, and information infrastructure – this study focused on education and human capital in the estimation of how knowledge has contributed to growth of SSA countries. The data for the study were sourced from World Development Indicators published by The World Bank Group. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was applied and the results show that knowledge variables have a significant impact on economic growth of SSA countries. It is therefore recommended that welfare and working conditions of the labor force be improved so as to be more productive; SSA countries should key into the KE policies so as to be competitive in the production, use, dissemination and transfer of knowledge, ICT, and science.

Over the past decade most central governments across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have begun to decentralize some fiscal, political, and administrative responsibilities to lower-levels of government, local institutions, and the private sector in pursuit of greater accountability and more efficient service delivery, often in an attempt to solve broader political, social, or economic problems (SARA, 1997). Education, in particular, has been fertile ground for such decentralization efforts. From Ethiopia to South Africa, SSA countries have engaged in some form of education decentralization, though the pace has been quite uneven. Ethiopia, Uganda, Senegal, and South Africa, for example, are proceeding fast, while Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe are under way more slowly. Guinea, Niger, Zambia, and Nigeria are at the other end of the continuum. Decentralization of social services, including education appears to be embedded in the political changes occurring in the region. In almost all SSA countries the introduction of decentralized systems are accompanied by popular elections for local councils as part of the general trend of the introduction of or return to democratization.

Incidents of violence perpetrated through digital technology platforms or facilitated by these means have been reported, often in high-income countries. Very little scholarly attention has been given to the nature of technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA) across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) despite an explosion in the use of various technologies. We conducted a literature review to identify and harmonize available data relating to the types of TFVA taking place in SSA. This was followed by an online survey of young adults through the SHYad.NET forum to understand the nature of TFVA among young adults in SSA. Our literature review revealed various types of TFVA to be happening across SSA, including cyberbullying, cyberstalking, trolling, dating abuse, image-based sexual violence, sextortion, and revenge porn. The results of our online survey revealed that both young men and women experience TFVA, with the most commonly reported TFVA being receiving unwanted sexually explicit images, comments, emails, or text messages. Female respondents more often reported repeated and/or unwanted sexual requests online via email or text message while male respondents more often reported experiencing violent threats. Respondents used various means to cope with TFVA including blocking the abuser or deleting the abused profile on social media.

Purpose – This study provides insight on how Sub-Sahara African (SSA) countries can ameliorate the impact of environmental pollution in the face of increasing inflow of multinational corporations (MNCs).Design/methodology/approach – An analytical model describing the role of institutions in reducing the environmental impact of MNCs was formulated and analysed for a sample of 43 SSA countries (1996–2010) using descriptive and the System Generalised Method of Moments techniques.Findings – It was found that the ‘tragedy’ of environmental pollution can be ‘managed’ if there are strong institutional framework especially regulatory quality and government effectiveness that will drive environmental policies and make MNCs to comply to the tenets of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in host countries. The study also established that the environmental hazards in the previous year will occur in the current year, but with strong institutions in place, it will be at a decreasing rate. How increase in trade, inflow of MNCs and population growth affect the current extent of environmental pollution was underscored.Research limitation – Aggregated data on the variables were utilised, and thus the results were dependent on the reliability of the data. Examining how MNCs respond to CSR with respect to environmental issues in SSA can be taken up in future studies using micro-data. This will complement this study and further establish the impact of MNCs activities on the environment in SSA.Originality/value of chapter – The relevance of institutions in regulating the behaviours of MNCs with regards to environmental pollution in SSA was emphasised.