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Africa is not achieving its potential in regional trade. This is of particular importance given the uncertainty surrounding the global economy and stagnation in traditional markets in Europe and North America and the emergence of Africa as a rising growth pole. The contributions to this volume highlight the enormous scope for increased cross-border trade in Africa in both goods and services and the reasons why such opportunities are not being exploited. The varied contributions show that for effective regional integration policy makers must look beyond simply removing tariffs to address barriers on the ground that constrain the daily operations of ordinary producers and traders. This requires a reform agenda, covering both goods and services that puts in place appropriate regulations for integrated markets and builds the capacity of institutions that are essential for trade across borders. The incidence of barriers to regional trade fall most heavily on the poor and women and prevents them from exploiting the opportunities that regional trade provides to diversify exports away from a narrow range of minerals and primary products that have been driving recent growth. Regional trade can play a key role in delivering the jobs that are needed for Africa’s young populations. The chapters have been written in a non-technical way to promote dialogue on regional integration in Africa amongst a broad audience that includes policy makers, officials, academics, entrepreneurs, consumers as well as the international development community.
This book is the result of an extensive agenda of analytical work on regional trade integration in Africa involving staff from various units of the Africa region of the World Bank. The aim of this volume is to provide the main messages from this work to a wide audience the private sector, civil society, key ministries, relevant agencies that is necessary to provide the consensus and broad base for successful implementation of reforms. Africa is not achieving its potential in regional trade. The contributions to this volume highlight the enormous scope for increased cross-border trade in Africa and the reasons why such opportunities are not being exploited. The main objective of this introductory chapter is to draw attention to the key reason why Africa's potential for regional trade remains unexploited: the high transaction costs that face those who trade across borders in Africa. The contributions to the volume discuss a wide range of policy related barriers that drive up costs and limit trade. The chapter starts with a review of recent export performance in Africa, noting the strong growth rates in many countries. However, the impact of such growth on employment and poverty has been much muted and important challenges remain, especially with regard to greater diversification of exports, and it is here that effective regional integration that reduces transaction costs can play a key role. The paper then discusses the key barriers that raise costs for traders and continue to fragment the African market. Finally, the paper ends with some specific recommendations for action that policy makers can take at the regional level to support integrated markets in Africa and discusses how the World Bank and other donors can support those wishing to implement the necessary reforms.
"Africa is not achieving its potential in regional trade. This is of particular importance given the uncertainty surrounding the global economy and stagnation in traditional markets in Europe and North America and the emergence of Africa as a rising growth pole. The contributions to this volume highlight the enormous scope for increased cross-border trade in Africa in both goods and services and the reasons why such opportunities are not being exploited. The varied contributions show that for effective regional integration policy makers must look beyond simply removing tariffs to address barriers on the ground that constrain the daily operations of ordinary producers and traders. This requires a reform agenda, covering both goods and services that puts in place appropriate regulations for integrated markets and builds the capacity of institutions that are essential for trade across borders. The incidence of barriers to regional trade fall most heavily on the poor and women and prevents them from exploiting the opportunities that regional trade provides to diversify exports away from a narrow range of minerals and primary products that have been driving recent growth. Regional trade can play a key role in delivering the jobs that are needed for Africa's young populations. The chapters have been written in a non-technical way to promote dialogue on regional integration in Africa amongst a broad audience that includes policy makers, officials, academics, entrepreneurs, consumers as well as the international development community."--Page 4 of cover.
Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing rapid population growth. Yet their economic growth has not kept pace. Why? One factor might be low capital investment, due in part to Africa's relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This study, however, identifies a deeper reason: African cities are closed to the world. Compared with other developing cities, cities in Africa produce few goods and services for trade on regional and international markets To grow economically as they are growing in size, Africa's cities must open their doors to the world. They need to specialize in manufacturing, along with other regionally and globally tradable goods and services. And to attract global investment in tradables production, cities must develop scale economies, which are associated with successful urban economic development in other regions. Such scale economies can arise in Africa, and they will--if city and country leaders make concerted efforts to bring agglomeration effects to urban areas. Today, potential urban investors and entrepreneurs look at Africa and see crowded, disconnected, and costly cities. Such cities inspire low expectations for the scale of urban production and for returns on invested capital. How can these cities become economically dense--not merely crowded? How can they acquire efficient connections? And how can they draw firms and skilled workers with a more affordable, livable urban environment? From a policy standpoint, the answer must be to address the structural problems affecting African cities. Foremost among these problems are institutional and regulatory constraints that misallocate land and labor, fragment physical development, and limit productivity. As long as African cities lack functioning land markets and regulations and early, coordinated infrastructure investments, they will remain local cities: closed to regional and global markets, trapped into producing only locally traded goods and services, and limited in their economic growth.
When insurgent organizations factionalize and fragment, it can profoundly shape a civil war: its intensity, outcome, and duration. In this extended treatment of this complex and important phenomenon, Michael Woldemariam examines why rebel organizations fragment through a unique historical analysis of the Horn of Africa's civil wars. Central to his view is that rebel factionalism is conditioned by battlefield developments. While fragmentation is caused by territorial gains and losses, counter-intuitively territorial stalemate tends to promote rebel cohesion and is a critical basis for cooperation in war. As a rare effort to examine these issues in the context of the Horn of Africa region, based upon extensive fieldwork, this book will interest both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences interested in insurgent groups and conflict dynamics.
Sustainable infrastructure development is vital for Africa s prosperity. And now is the time to begin the transformation. This volume is the culmination of an unprecedented effort to document, analyze, and interpret the full extent of the challenge in developing Sub-Saharan Africa s infrastructure sectors. As a result, it represents the most comprehensive reference currently available on infrastructure in the region. The book covers the five main economic infrastructure sectors information and communication technology, irrigation, power, transport, and water and sanitation. 'Africa s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation' reflects the collaboration of a wide array of African regional institutions and development partners under the auspices of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa. It presents the findings of the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD), a project launched following a commitment in 2005 by the international community (after the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland) to scale up financial support for infrastructure development in Africa. The lack of reliable information in this area made it difficult to evaluate the success of past interventions, prioritize current allocations, and provide benchmarks for measuring future progress, hence the need for the AICD. Africa s infrastructure sectors lag well behind those of the rest of the world, and the gap is widening. Some of the main policy-relevant findings highlighted in the book include the following: infrastructure in the region is exceptionally expensive, with tariffs being many times higher than those found elsewhere. Inadequate and expensive infrastructure is retarding growth by 2 percentage points each year. Solving the problem will cost over US$90 billion per year, which is more than twice what is being spent in Africa today. However, money alone is not the answer. Prudent policies, wise management, and sound maintenance can improve efficiency, thereby stretching the infrastructure dollar. There is the potential to recover an additional US$17 billion a year from within the existing infrastructure resource envelope simply by improving efficiency. For example, improved revenue collection and utility management could generate US$3.3 billion per year. Regional power trade could reduce annual costs by US$2 billion. And deregulating the trucking industry could reduce freight costs by one-half. So, raising more funds without also tackling inefficiencies would be like pouring water into a leaking bucket. Finally, the power sector and fragile states represent particular challenges. Even if every efficiency in every infrastructure sector could be captured, a substantial funding gap of $31 billion a year would remain. Nevertheless, the African people and economies cannot wait any longer. Now is the time to begin the transformation to sustainable development.
At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the “Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world.” This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include “sexual orientation” as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. Yet despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government’s alliance with neoliberal interests and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic left South Africa an increasingly unequal society. Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa’s self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized “Africanness;” white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences’ complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable. Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies’ identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging.
Collected papers from the first Scramble for Africa conference held from 25-27 May 2011.
Unravelling the mysteries of Africas underdevelopment presents an Afrocentric ideological understanding of the continents fragmentation; a scientific and objective (Mijadala) discourse as well as an approach of how to move progressively and sustainably Africa forward. The breadth and depth of the book shows the unwavering impoverishment and urgent need for the continent to stand up and take the bull by the horn. It offers an inspiring means of grappling with the continents problems to build the change we want An African Wealth of Nation not the continent of collapsed, failed states under the governance construct of centralised authoritarian regimes It is a thought-provoking discourse that challenges us all to be inherent participants in the reconstruction of a Brave New Africa far beyond the 21st Century.
This book examines the challenges and opportunities of administrative and territorial reconstruction in Africa from independence until the present time. In light of the rise of separatist movements in various African states and the ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity of many African societies, the book sheds new light on the fragmentation and decentralization of the African continent. The authors analyze the mechanisms, forms, and models of decentralization practiced today in Africa, taking into account both federalist and unitary experiences of decentralization, and discuss the potential of federalism to resolve conflicts within the continent. The generalizations made in the course of such an analysis can significantly enrich the current vision of the development of the African continent and its future prospects. The book will appeal to scholars and students of political science and African studies.