Suchergebnisse

This fact-filled reference book brings the reader the latest available economic information for most of the economies of Africa. Drawing on the expertise of both the African Development Bank and the OECD, it opens with an overview that examines the international environment, macroeconomic performance, progress towards attaining the Millennium Development Goals, and governance and political issues. This edition includes a special focus on technical and vocational skills development. The second part provides individual country reports for 35 countries. Each country report provides an assessment of recent economic performance, projections for 2008 and 2009, an examination of structural issues, and a discussion of the political and social context. The statistical annex presents 24 tables comparing economic and social variables across all the countries of Africa.

IT IS ARGUED THAT DISCOURSES ON AN AFRICAN HIGH COMMAND IS AS OLD AS AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE, AND THAT WHILE THE ACTORS MAY HAVE CHANGED, THE EVENTS AND PLACE LARGELY REMAIN THE SAME. IN THIS RESPECT, CONGO HAS REMAINED A PIVOTAL POINT IN THIS DISCOURSE. IN POINTING TO THE IMPERATIVE FOR A PEACEKEEPING FORCE, THE AUTHOR DRAWS ATTENTION TO SOME OF THE PROBLEMS IN THE WAY OF SUCH A CONTINENTAL FORCE, IN PARTICULAR THE QUESTION OF INSTITUTIONAL CAPACITY DEFICIENCY.

President Clinton has approved an ambitious plan to organize, train, equip and help deploy an all-African military force of 10,000 troops to intervene in the continent's recurrent crises , senior administation officials said." This was how one newspaper described in September 1996 the U.S-initated concept of the African Crisis Response Force (ACRF). The idea has arisen from the United Nations "standby force" proposed by the then Secretary-General, Boutros-Ghali. The initial idea was to deploy such a force in Burundi under UN auspices to avoid a repetition of the violence that had erupted in neighboring Rwanda two year previously.

Suggests ways in which material on African studies published in Britain can be supplied to the African market in order to relieve the 'book famine in Africa'.

During the last decade of the 20th century, Africa has been marked by a "constitutional wind" which has blown across the continent giving impetus to constitutional reforms designed to introduce constitutionalism and good governance. One of the main features of these processes has been the promotion of public participation, encouraged by both civil society and the international community. This book aims to provide a systematic overview of participation forms and mechanisms across Africa, and a critical understanding of the impact of public participation in constitution-making processes, digging beneath the rhetoric of public participation as being at the heart of any successful transition towards democracy and constitutionalism. Using case studies from Central African Republic, Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the book investigates various aspects of participatory constitution making: from conception, to processes, and specific contents that trigger ambivalent dynamics in such processes. The abstract glorification of public participation is questioned as theoretical and empirical perspectives are used to explain what public participation does in concrete terms and to identify what lessons might be drawn from those experiences. This is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and students with an interest in politics and constitution building in Africa, as well as experts working in national offices, international organizations or in national and international NGOs.

Spurred by major changes in the world economy and in local ecology, the contemporary migration of Africans, both within the continent and to various destinations in Europe and North America, has seriously affected thousands of lives and livelihoods. The contributors to this volume, reflecting a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine the causes and consequences of this new migration. The essays cover topics such as rural-urban migration into African cities, transnational migration, and the experience of immigrants abroad, as well as the issues surrounding migrant identity and how Africans re-create community and strive to maintain ethnic, gender, national, and religious ties to their former homes.

Energy efficiency in South African industry has only recently started receiving attention due to the low cost of South Africa's electricity, and a not too distant history of isolation leading up to democratic elections in 1994.This study shows that strong incentives exist for energy efficiency improvement in South African industry, in particular, the potential for increasing profit, the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the need to maintain economic competitiveness, and the need to delay the cost of new peak-load electricity generation facilities. Barriers to the implementation of energy efficiency projects need to be anticipated and addressed by managers, policy makers and energy efficiency practitioners. In particular, the lesson from the case study in this paper showed how organisation structure, financial controls and culture, can be barriers to the implementation of energy projects. By ensuring the support of top management, and by the initiation of an energy management program early on, these barriers can be avoided and results and recommendations from an energy assessment can feed into a receptive management system.

Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be 'saved', and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as 'rising', African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually and analytically, the collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption and gardening to re-centre the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent.

AbstractThe paper aims to investigate the legitimacy of the African Union by examining the socio‐demographic determinants of citizens' support of African integration. To do this, we use Rounds 4, 5, 6, and 8 of the Afrobarometer survey data corresponding to more than 110,000 respondents. Using logistics regressions, we find that individual characteristics such as living area, education, employment status, political membership, freedom, living conditions, and Living Poverty Index (LPI) are significantly related to the probability of supporting African integration. The findings are largely robust to dynamics of regional integration, the African Union, and Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Thus, since African citizens' trust in the unification could be considered a condition of legitimacy in the process, our results suggest that more efforts should be made to gain credibility, especially as it pertains to the benefits of African integration.