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This paper aimed examining the contribution of female labour force participation rate on economic growth in the sub-Saharan Africa during the period of 1991–2019.

The study employed a sample of 42 sub-Sahara African countries using annual data from the World Bank development indicators. The long-run causal effect of female labour force and economic growth was analysed using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model and Granger causality test for causality and direction since the variables did not have the same order of integration.

The estimated results indicate that a long-run causal relationship exists between female labour force and economic growth in sub-Sahara Africa and the direction of causality is unidirectional running from economic growth to female labour force. The results also showed that female labour force participation rate negatively and significantly contributes to economic growth (GDP) is sub-Saharan Africa in the long run with an insignificantly negative contribution in the short run hence a liability.

The author recommends the promotion of women's economic empowerment to encourage female labour force participation to increase economic growth in the entire sub-Saharan region.

This paper adds to existing literature by using more comprehensive and up to econometric analysis and variables. This paper also makes further recommendation on how female labour force participation can boost economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

This paper adds to existing literature by using more comprehensive and up to econometric analysis and variables. This paper also makes further recommendation on how female labour force participation can boost economic growth in SSA.

The study aims at examining the level of financial transparency of local governments in a sub-Saharan African country and how financial transparency is affected by democracy in the sub-region.

The study applied a panel regression model to data collected from public accounts of 43 local authorities in Ghana from 1995 to 2014. Financial transparency was measured using a transparency index developed based on the Transparency Index of Transparency International and the information disclosure requirements of public sector entities under the International Public Sector Accounting Standards.

The study finds the low level of financial transparency among the local governments in Ghana, creating information asymmetry within the agency framework of governance. Further, evidence from the study suggests a strong positive relationship between democracy and financial transparency in the local government.

Deepening democracy is necessary for promoting the culture of financial transparency in local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps in entire Africa.

There is a need for the local governments and governments, in general, to deepen democracy to ensure proactive disclosure of the financial information to the citizens to improve participation trust and eventual reduction in corruption. Effective implementation of the Right to Information Act would also help promote financial and other forms of transparency in the sub-region.

The study contributes to the public sector accounting literature by linking democracy to financial transparency in the local government. Hitherto, studies concentrate on how entity level variables impact on the level of financial information flow in the local government without considering the broader governance infrastructure within which local governments operate.

This article examines why Universal Primary Education (UPE) has shifted from being a developing country challenge more broadly in the last half of the 20th century to become largely a sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) challenge today. It discusses a number of national and education sector system-wide challenges that have constrained the implementation of UPE in SSA more so than in other developing regions.

This article reviews the literature and policy documents on a wide range of developing country issues, and discusses why most SSA countries have faced unparalleled challenges in achieving UPE.

SSA governments should take the opportunity offered by their post-pandemic “build back better” efforts to fundamentally reset education policies to address the key causes of this major development failure. The overarching objective must be to develop education systems that are more inclusive, equitable and responsive to national development needs by better serving the large population groups, parts of society and economic sectors that currently derive little benefit from public education spending. This article highlights the urgency and challenges associated with achieving this objective.

Although the main responsibility lies with SSA governments, this paper stresses that the global community will be affected in many ways by how effectively this crisis is addressed. Therefore, this effort merits sustained global support including through more catalytic use of aid.

This study provides a systematic literature review and categorization of the costs reported in the literature for the introduction of new vaccines, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa within LMICs, where vaccines are highly needed, financial resources are scarce and data are lacking and scattered.

A systematic literature search of PubMed and Web of Science databases was conducted according to the PRISMA requirements. Searches also included the relevant grey literature. In total, 39 studies were selected and nine cost categories were investigated to build a comprehensive framework.

The paper considers nine cost categories that cover the whole life of the vaccine, from its initial study to its full implementation, including for each of them the relevant subcategories. The systematic review, besides providing specific quantitative data and allowing to assess their variability within each category, points out that delivery, program preparation, administration and procurement costs are the most frequently estimated categories, while the cost of the good sold, costs borne by households and costs associated to AEFI are usually overlooked. Data reported on R&D costs and investment in the production plant differ significantly among the selected contributions.

The literature contributions on cost estimation tend to focus on a precise vaccine, a specific geographic area, or to adopt a narrow approach that captures only a subset of the costs. This article presents a rich and inclusive set of the economic quantitative data on immunization costs in limited-resource countries.

Weaknesses in the grades and standards system in low-income countries across Sub-Saharan Africa undermine the transparency of agricultural markets. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ghana and Mozambique rice is predominately sold in open bags and if rice price does not reflect its quality, then inefficiencies may lead to consumer welfare losses. Importantly, it is possible that impoverished communities are priced out of the market due to inflated and inefficient prices. The objective of this study is to examine determinates of rice price by estimating the impact of selected rice quality attributes on rice prices in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and Mozambique.

We collected 363 rice samples from open air markets in Bukavu (DRC), Nampula (Mozambique) and across Ghana in 2019. Each rice sample was analyzed in a food science lab for the quality attributes: percentage of chalk and brokens, chalk impact, length and length-to-width ratio. We used multiple regression analysis to estimate if and to what extent quality attributes were the drivers of price.

Findings suggest that there are irregularities in the Ghanaian market for broken rice and that regardless of quality, imported rice is priced higher than domestic rice. In the DRC and Mozambique, our results indicate price is driven by length and length-to-width ratio in the former and length-to-width ratio in the latter.

Rice samples were purchased from market vendors and thus consumer preferences for attributes were not revealed.

These results provide valuable insight to policymakers regarding the need for proper labeling and regulation of open bag rice sales in an effort to increase consumer welfare and improve food security.

This paper intends to investigate the empirical link between governance and energy investment in PPP. To succinctly account for biases in the fixed effects (FE) model, the authors adopted different bias-corrected techniques. The majority of these techniques provided evidence that PPP investments in energy are boosted by increasing the desire for accountability, prioritising the voice of the masses and disabusing the rule of laws. This study could not find any positive influence from the control of corruption to PPP investment in energy.

The acute shortage of power supply in SSA has attracted PPP investments in the energy subsector of the economy, leading to the recent debate on governance and public, private investment. The authors contributed to this argument by examining the impact of country governance on PPP investment in energy using a sample of countries in SSA.

Therefore, the authors concluded that low control of corruption is responsible for the inadequate volume of PPP investments. In the light of this, the government should redefine the anti-corruption bill of their sovereignty to accommodate severe sanctions when necessary.

This paper uses the fixed effects (FE) model by introducing batteries of nonlinear panel models to capture the relationship between the impacts of country governance on PPP investment in energy.

The purpose of this systematic review was to assess the determinant factors of climate change adaptation (CCA) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Studies that focused on determinant factors of CCA by crop–livestock farmers and pastoralists in SSA and written in English were reviewed from five major databases using the applications of Endnote and NVivo. The review process followed a sequence of steps to reach into the final selection.

A total of 3,028 papers were recovered from the databases and screened for duplicates (777) and publications before 2000 (218). The titles and abstracts of 2,033 papers were reviewed, and 1,903 of them were excluded owing to preliminary exclusion criteria. Finally, 130 papers were selected for full-text review and more detailed assessment, where 36 papers qualified for the final review. The most important determinant factors of CCA by pastoralists were household income, access to information, access to extension services, government support and access to market. In the case of agro-pastoralists, access to information, household income, age and land/livestock ownership were found as the major determinant factors. Household income, land ownership, access to information, farm size, household size and access to extension services were the determinant factors found for CCA by smallholder farmers.

This systematic review identified the major determinant factors according to production systems and highlights the importance of considering specific factors in designing CCA strategies.

After clearly stating the research question, a literature search was conducted from the major databases for climate-related research, and a comprehensive search was performed by two independent researchers.

Literature contends that not much is known about smallholder farmers’ perceptions of climate variability and the impacts thereof on agricultural practices in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa in particular. The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of smallholder farmers from Botlokwa (a semi-arid region in South Africa) on climate variability in relation to climatological evidence.

The study area is in proximity to a meteorological station and comprises mainly rural farmers, involved in rain-fed subsistence agriculture. Focus group discussions and closed-ended questionnaires covering demographics and perceptions were administered to 125 purposely sampled farmers. To assess farmers’ perceptions of climate variability, their responses were compared with linear trend and variability of historical temperature and rainfall data (1985-2015). Descriptive statistics were used to provide insights into respondents’ perceptions.

About 64% of the farmers perceived climate variability that was consistent with the meteorological data, whereas 36% either held contrary observations or were unable to discern. Age, level of education, farming experience and accessibility to information influenced the likelihood of farmers to correctly perceive climate variability. No significant differences in perception based on gender were observed. This study concludes that coping and adaption strategies of over one-third of the farmers could be negatively impacted by wrong perceptions of climate variability.

This study highlights discrepancies in perceptions among farmers with similar demographic characteristics. To guarantee sustainability of the sector, intervention by government and other key stakeholders to address underlying factors responsible for observed discrepancies is recommended.

This paper aims to analyze the effectiveness of aid in stimulating investment using different measures of aid and up-to-date panel time-series techniques. This study controls for endogeneity by using dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and minimizes the risk of running a spurious long-run relationship by using series that are cointegrated. This paper finds evidence that aid promotes investment in countries with good institutional quality and gain interesting insights on the influence of country characteristics and the amount of aid received. Aid is ineffective in countries with unfavorable country characteristics such as a colonial past, being landlocked and with large distances to markets. Aid can boost investment in regions that receive high (above-median) amounts of aid such as Africa and the Middle East but not in regions that receive low amounts of aid. Investment-targeted aid is effective but non-investment-related aid can also enhance investment.

Regressions on the aid-investment nexus are based on either a rather simple (115 countries) or an extended/augmented investment model (91 countries). The data covers the period of 1973–2011 and 1985–2011 if the institutional quality is included. This study estimates the relationship between aid and investment by applying the DOLS/dynamic feasible generalized least squares technique which is based on a long-run relationship of the regression variables (cointegration). In this framework, this paper incorporates country-fixed effects, control for endogeneity, autocorrelation and take heteroscedasticity and cross-country correlation of the residuals into account.

This study finds empirical evidence that aid promotes investment in countries with good institutional quality and gain interesting insights on the role played by country characteristics and the amount of aid received. Aid is ineffective in countries with unfavorable country characteristics such as the colonial past, being landlocked, distant from markets. Aid can boost investment in regions that receive high (above-median) amounts of aid such as Africa and the Middle East. Investment-targeted aid is effective but non-investment-related aid also able to enhance investment.

The study looks at the investment to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio (including domestic investment and foreign direct investment (FDI)) and, hence does not disentangle these factors. It looks at the net effect (positive and negative impact together) and, therefore does not allow to identify the direct crowding out the impact of aid. Of course, if this paper finds that aid has a negative impact on investment, it is clear that aid must have crowded out either domestic investment or FDI or both.

The authors think that it is relevant to have identified the circumstances and settings in which foreign aid can be particularly effective and in which foreign aid needs accompanying measures that improve the effectiveness of aid. Also, it is relevant that the relative amount of aid received (aid-to-GDP ratio) must be quite high so that aid can increase investment.

This study sees that the least developed, low-income countries and (in terms of regions) the sub-Saharan Africa countries benefit from aid. This is very desirable. This paper further sees that higher relative amounts of aid do help more and that it is helpful to care about a better institutional quality in developing countries. Hence, this study provides some support for the desirability of aid.

The paper was done very diligently, and this study is very confident that the results are robust. This paper is also confident that this study has studied the long-run (which is of special importance) nexus between aid and investment. The estimation technique used is original, as it combines regular DOLS with corrections for autocorrelation and cross-section dependence.

This study aims to identify the main challenges to achieving humanitarian logistics in the context of United Nations peace missions in sub-Saharan Africa and to present suggestions for overcoming the logistical gaps encountered.

The methodological approach of the work focuses on the comparative case study of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic and The United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2014 to 2021. The approach combined a systematic literature review with the authors’ empirical experience as participant observers in each mission, combining theory and practice.

As a result, six common challenges were identified for carrying out humanitarian logistics in the three peace missions. Each challenge revealed a logistical gap for which an appropriate solution was suggested based on the best practices found in the case study of each mission.

This paper presents limitations when addressing the logistical analysis based on only three countries under the UN mission as a case study, as well as conceiving that certain flaws in the system, in the observed period, are already in the process of correction with the adoption of the 2016–2021 strategy by the UN Global Logistic Cluster. The authors suggest that further studies can be carried out by expanding the number of cases or using countries where other bodies (AU, NATO or EU) work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first comparative case study of humanitarian logistics on the three principal missions of the UN conducted by academics and practitioners.