Monday, February 10, 2014

3-9 February 2014

SCROLL DOWN FOR EASTERN CONGO - RWANDA - UGANDA
BURUNDI
  • Plans to reshape and modernize African cities, in part driven by investment, architecture and construction companies seeking new markets, could deepen existing social inequalities, according to recent research. But these development plans could also benefit the poor if governments are responsive to the needs of their citizens, argue analysts.

    tags: congo rwanda uganda cities urbanization modernization poor report

  • The central African nation of Burundi was plunged deeper into a political crisis Wednesday after the three government ministers from the main Tutsi party resigned.

    tags: burundi political crisis resignation Nkurunziza CNDD-FDD UPRONA report

  • I provide evidence that history and culture can weaken out-group relationships and simultaneously increase the reliance on in-group members for economic activity. This is tested using field data from Hutu and Tutsi farmers in Rwanda and Burundi, and shown to have economic costs of up to 15% of income. Colonial era Tutsi mistreatment of Hutu resulted in some Hutu harbouring resentment towards the Tutsi. This resentment influences contractual partner matching. Hutu with a family history of mistreatment are less likely to choose a Tutsi economic partner. This results in 28% more contractual default, as the replacement partners are less able to fulfill their end of the agreement. Results are robust to the effects of the genocide in Rwanda, historical and current state capacity and is not driven by current location or industry.

    tags: burundi rwanda social capital forced labour trust resentment analysis

  • Learning is a critical component of organisational effectiveness, particularly in the complex world of development NGOs. Drawing from the literature on organisational learning, this article highlights the key dynamics of a strong learning organisation and proposes an integrated ‘leverage-learning’ model adapted to the NGO context. This model integrates learning domains that are critical for greater effectiveness, or leverage. The model is then applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning culture and commitment of a specific development NGO, World Vision Burundi. The model shows promise as an heuristic tool to evaluate NGOs and help them become more effective in aid delivery.

    tags: burundi development effectiveness NGO NGOS learning analysis

  • In this article, we explore the precarity of rural youth livelihoods in the aftermath of war in eastern Burundi. Combining ideas from agrarian studies and youth studies, we argue that a generational approach helps to expose structural problems of reproduction in rural communities. In the aftermath of civil war, young men and women experience their livelihoods and preparations for independent householding as ‘lacking’. They are aware of the unsustainability of current practices of land inheritance and farming, and their concerns orient them to other livelihood possibilities. Their responses to difficulties in social reproduction vary. Formal (secondary) education and gender in particular affect strategies of circular migration and marriage, and expose young people to hardship and violence in different ways. However, in contrast to what is often assumed in studies of rural African youth, most young people do aspire to a farming future, at some time and under better conditions.

    tags: burundi youth agriculture farming land livelihoods analysis

EASTERN CONGO

RWANDA

  • Alain and Dafroza Gauthier have spent the last 13 years hunting down people living in France suspected of participating in the Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

    tags: rwanda genocide justice trial France report

  • Although the potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households to assess empirically the extent and nature of credit rationing in the semi-formal sector and its impact using an endogenous sample separation between credit-constrained and unconstrained households. Being credit constrained reduces the likelihood of participating in off-farm self-employment activities by about 6.3 percent while making participation in low-return farm wage labor more likely. Even within agriculture, elimination of all types of credit constraints in the semi-formal sector could increase output by some 17 percent. Two suggestions for policy emerge from the findings. First, the estimates suggest that access to information (education, listening to the radio, and membership in a farm cooperative) has a major impact on reducing the incidence of credit constraints in the semi-formal credit sector. Expanding access to information in rural areas thus seems to be one of the most promising strategies to improve credit access in the short term. Second, making it easy to identify land owners and transfer land could also significantly reduce transaction costs associated with credit access. 

    tags: rwanda credit productivity credit access information analysis

  • Whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in Rwanda, where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector. Nationwide plot-level data from Rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications. The inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used, but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village-level market wage rates. These findings imply that, in Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.

    tags: rwanda productivity agriculture farm-size markets analysis

  • tags: rwanda France Simbikangwa trial genocide debate video

  • Peter Erlinder, a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in the US state of Minnesota and author of The Accidental Genocide, talks to Al Jazeera. E. Peter Erlinder, a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in the US state of Minnesota and author of The Accidental Genocide, talks to Al Jazeera. E.

    tags: rwanda genocide France trial ICTR planning Erlinder video

UGANDA