Publications and media
Africa's Demographic Transition : Dividend or Disaster?
This book lays out a range of policy actions that are needed at the various phases of the demographic transition and uses global and regional experiences to provide evidence on what has worked and wha...
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Confronting Drought in Africa’s Drylands : Opportunities for Enhancing Resilience
Drylands make up about 43 percent of the region’s land surface, account for about 75 percent of the area used for agriculture, and are home to about 50 percent of the population, including many poor....
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Impacts of Rural Electrification Revisited: The African Context
The investment requirements to achieve the United Nations’ universal electricity access goal by 2030 are estimated at 640 billion US Dollars. The assumption underlying this goal is that electrificatio...
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Green Growth and its Implications for Public Policy: The Case of South Africa
South Africa is a rapidly growing middle-income economy with a coal-based energy system that generates high greenhouse gases emissions, on a par with the richest economies in the world. The country ha...
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Powering Africa: Facing the Financing and Reform Challenges
Africa faces chronic power problems, including insufficient generation capacity, low connectivity, poor reliability and high costs, all of which constrain development. Power capacity additions in Sub-...
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Creating Alliances to Accelerate Commercially Viable Sanitation - Lessons learned from the toilet board coalit...
The past decades have seen a growing appreciation of the role of market-based approaches in driving global development. Many coalitions of public and private players have emerged to promote them. How...
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Evaluation Summary - District development facility (DDF), Ghana
In Ghana, the District development facility project (DDF) was subject to an evaluation in September 2015. Access to funds by the Metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) for implemen...
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The Challenge of Stability and Security in West Africa
This book seeks to critically examine the challenges of fragility and security in West Africa, along with the factors of resilience. It seeks to investigate key drivers of conflict and violence, and t...
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Are the Cities of Sub-Saharan Africa so Dependent on Food Imports?
Prevalent in discussions of food provision issues in Western and Central Africa is the idea that urban centres in Western and Central Africa are dependent on food imports, and that urbanization is acc...
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Sub-Saharan Africa's significant changes in food consumption patterns
Self-produced food amounts to less than half of the total food that people consume, and the provision of food is therefore largely reliant on market supply, in urban and rural areas alike; domestic fo...
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Beyond the maps
Through several interviews, this film shows how the African scientific community has appropriated technology to sustainably manage logging in forests, to the benefit of the people living in the Congo...
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When Can Work Performed by Women Become a Factor in Their Empowerment? - Women‘s access to quality employment ...
The employment of women in Morocco, Tunisia and Türkiye is not necessarily equated with financial, social and/or political empowerment. Though the three countries share striking similarities as regard...
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Nigeria: The Restrained Ambitions of Africa‘s Largest Economy
With 180 million inhabitants, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. Its economy is also the strongest. Just twice as large as France in size, its people are also very diverse: more than 250...
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Facing Water Scarcity in the Mediterranean
Pressure on water resources has reached critical levels in many countries in the Mediterranean Basin. Sophisticated water mobilization strategies have been implemented but physical, financial and envi...
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Overextraction of Groundwater Resources: What Are The Solutions?
The amount of water extracted from aquifers worldwide has increased threefold in the past fifty years, leading to an aggravated overdraft of these common resources. This “pumping race” brings about ma...
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Land Delivery Systems in West African Cities: The Example of Bamako, Mali
"In any city, the price and quality of housing is so influenced by what land is available for housing, under what terms, with what services, and at what cost. This book provides a very rich and detail...
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Safety Nets in Africa : Effective Mechanisms to Reach the Poor and Most Vulnerable
The need for safety nets in Sub-Saharan Africa is vast. In addition to being the world‘s poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa is also one of the most unequal. In this context, redistribution must be see...
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Enhancing the Climate Resilience of Africa's Infrastructure : The Power and Water Sectors
This book evaluates -using for the first time a single consistent methodology and the state-of-the-arte climate scenarios-, the impacts of climate change on hydro-power and irrigation expansion plans...
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Highways to Success or Byways to Waste : Estimating the Economic Benefits of Roads in Africa
Roads are the arteries through which the world’s economies pulse. Roads connect sellers to markets, workers to jobs, students to education, and the sick to hospitals. Yet in much of the developing wor...
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Evaluation Summary - Small towns water supply and sanitation project (STWSSP), Tanzania
In Tanzania, the Small towns water supply and sanitation project (STWSSP) was subject to an evaluation in December 2014. The project was implemented to help fulfill the need for further decentraliz...
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