Suchergebnisse

Agroecology has been recognized as a paradigm that can offer multiple ecological and socio-economic benefits. In many developing countries, the promotion of agroecology is facilitated by intermediary organizations such as Farmers' Organizations (FOs). Detailed studies on how FOs support their farmers in the adoption of agroecology innovations are still scarce, and particularly there are limited studies on the roles of FOs in this realm in Africa. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a study on how FOs stimulate farmers' adoption of agroecological innovations in Burkina Faso. Three case studies of FOs were done to unravel the ways FOs support of farmers' adoption of agroecological innovations processes, using the lens of innovation intermediaries. The findings show that FOs fulfil both knowledge and innovation intermediation functions in the process of stimulating their farmers' adoption of agroecological innovations. By doing this, FOs act as a facilitator for the introduction and/or development of complementary agroecological innovations over longer periods of time. Future studies could look more deeply into how intermediation may contribute to broader transitions and how it connects with the political activities of FOs such as advocacy and lobbying.

Egypt has one of the largest economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and several of its industries are large sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As part of its contribution to mitigate GHG emissions within the framework of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, Egypt is focusing on the development of an ambitious renewable energy programme. Some of Egypt's main industries are big consumers of hydrogen which is produced locally using indigenous natural gas without abatement of the CO2 emissions resulting from this production process. In the long-term, the production and consumption of this unabated hydrogen, known as grey hydrogen, could become a serious challenge for Egypt's exports of manufactured products. Thus, the Egyptian government is planning to develop low carbon hydrogen alternatives and has set up an inter-ministerial committee to prepare a national hydrogen strategy for Egypt. This paper explores the prospects for low carbon hydrogen (blue and green hydrogen) developments in Egypt, focusing on the potential replacement of Egypt's large domestic production of grey hydrogen with cleaner low carbon hydrogen alternatives.

Egypt has one of the largest economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and several of its industries are large sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As part of its contribution to mitigate GHG emissions within the framework of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, Egypt is focusing on the development of an ambitious renewable energy programme. Some of Egypt's main industries are big consumers of hydrogen which is produced locally using indigenous natural gas without abatement of the CO2 emissions resulting from this production process. In the long-term, the production and consumption of this unabated hydrogen, known as grey hydrogen, could become a serious challenge for Egypt's exports of manufactured products. Thus, the Egyptian government is planning to develop low carbon hydrogen alternatives and has set up an inter-ministerial committee to prepare a national hydrogen strategy for Egypt. This paper explores the prospects for low carbon hydrogen (blue and green hydrogen) developments in Egypt, focusing on the potential replacement of Egypt's large domestic production of grey hydrogen with cleaner low carbon hydrogen alternatives.

The European solidarity was challenged by the coronavirus pandemic both at institutional regulations and nation-state levels. The presented analysis is based on a review of the official speeches of the heads of European institutions and expert publications of leading European think-tanks and researches demonstrating that the geopolitical dimension of the EU foreign policy today is a new basis for intra-European consolidation in light of growing frustration about the global role of the US and China. The European foreign policy is nevertheless regarded as a new consensus within the integration alliance. Actually, the EU geopolitical role is an updated foundation for domestic consolidation, as it allows to push aside the contradictions on the value-based internal political development, which were clearly associated with the growth of nationalism, and to articulate the external conditions for political identity. The need for a stable consensus on foreign policy priorities creates the preconditions for the formation of new principles of relations with China, the emergence of Africa as a promising area for the application of the common foreign policy and a decrease of interest in integration projects in Eurasia.

Economic growth, although being a major quest of all the economies, is not an automatic phenomenon. Among its determinants, structural change in the form of reallocation of labour from low to high productivity sectors is of crucial importance. In view of the remarkable growth performance and unprecedented structural change of Asia in the last couple of decades, this paper empirically investigated the case of 20 selected Asian countries. By employing the data spanning from 1991 to 2018, the study shows three main results. First, by employing Shift Share Analysis framework, it reaffirms the findings of previous literature that structural change contributes to the aggregate productivity growth. Second, by utilizing Generalized Methods of Moments technique, the results find it to be an important booster of growth. Third, the results are reliable and consistent with alternative measures of structural change like Norm of Absolute Values and Modified Lilien Index. Taken together, these findings suggest that the governments in Asia (other regions like Africa and Latin America may alike) must chalk out policies for structural change promotion.

This visual essay offers a journey through a series of posters made for campaigns in defense of the environment and the land, led by indigenous and farming communities, as well as environmental organizations, in Ecuador's Amazonia region and other parts of Abya Yala, since 2009. Specifically, they represent acts of resistance to fossil fuel drilling and mining campaigns carried out by multinational corporations such as Chevron–Texaco, or by economic sectors of the national elites, which have torn apart the region's eco-social fabric by forcibly displacing its inhabitants and stripping the land of its resources. This overview of the posters likewise reveals the author's own dynamic understanding of the conflicts, as her perspective shifts from that of doomwatcher to that of situated participant whose practice takes place alongside those who live in this region, with their own culture and worldview. At the same time, the potential of these images is reflected through their reuse by other movements in different geopolitical spheres of Africa and Latin America, forming networks of empathy that have joined together far-flung but like-minded struggles for cultural, economic and environmental difference.

Namibia gained independence and ended the rule of apartheid only in 1990. It is often lauded as a model of human rights-based countries in Africa. Immediately after independence, the country introduced a distinctly rights-based Constitution with a broad Bill of Rights and also promptly laid the base for a modern police by enacting the Police Act of 1990. In that framework the Namibian Police are endowed with a broad set of 'police powers', i.e. means or measures of the police like questioning, arrest, search and seizure etc. 'Preventive' powers as a legally distinctive feature refers to law and order policing and prevention of crime, both clearly to be distinguished from investigation of criminal offences. Standards of human and fundamental rights protection developed under criminal procedure law are not directly applicable when it comes to the broad field of "preventive" powers of police. Subsequently these powers often lack a clear cut notional and legal concept, resulting in a deficit of predictability and delimitations despite of a rights based approach in the Constitution and the Police Act in general.

AbstractThis article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel's theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana's early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on the one hand, and intimacy with a unified Africa on the other. By creating juxtapositions between Ghana and these idealised international others, he was able to create a fantasy of a coherent state, built on a fundamental misrecognition of the wider world. As the fantasy bumped up against the realities of Ghana's failing economy, fractured social structures, and complex international relationships, it foundered, causing alienation and despair. I argue that the failure of this early fantasy was the start of Ghana's quest to begin processes of individuation and subjectivity, and that its undoing was an inevitable part of the early stages of misrecognition, laying the way for more grounded struggles for recognition and the development of a more complex state-subjectivity.

Femi Osofisan belongs to the new breed of writers, inadequately referred to as the 'second generation of writers'. An accomplished writer whose works include plays, poems, essays, and novels, Osofisan is widely regarded as the most significant playwright in Africa after Soyinka. As a committed playwright, Osofisan focuses on the reappraisal of his immediate society and the challenges of living in this society. He calls attention to all that is undesirable in the politics, economy, and religion of contemporary Nigeria and asks for a change of attitude which, hopefully, will bring sanity to the country. One of the means by which Osofisan achieves his artistic objective is the use of lore from Yorùbá mythology. Specifically, we shall show in this essay that Osofisan makes use of the myths of Ṣango and Èṣù and the legends of Môrèmi and Solarin as a means of thematic exploitation. By so doing, he creates a unique contemporary Nigerian theatre which other playwrights emulate and develop. We shall use Many Colours Make the Thunder King, Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, Morountodun, and Who's Afraid of Solarin? as our illustrative texts.

There is a growing body of practice and literature on the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in preventing and responding to violence. There is also a lot of excitement and corresponding literature about the role of the internet in non-violent change and democratization. The use of mobile phones, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and user-generated content (UGC) like blogs and YouTube videos in the protests in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as throughout the wider middle-east and North Africa (MENA) region have shown how ICTs can complement and augment the exercise of rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of peaceful assembly. This literature focuses on the use of ICTs before and during conflict, for example in conflict prevention and early warning. What about the use of ICTs in post-conflict situations; after the negotiation of peace agreements? How can ICTs be used in post-conflict interventions; more specifically in post-conflict peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction and recovery? What role of can be played here by social media and user-generated content?

AbstractSubnational estimates of HIV prevalence can inform the design of policy responses to the HIV epidemic. Such responses also benefit from a better understanding of the correlates of HIV status, including the association between HIV and geographical characteristics of localities. In recent years, several countries in Africa have implemented household surveys (such as DHS surveys) that include HIV testing of the adult population, providing estimates of HIV prevalence rates at the subnational level. These surveys are known to have nonresponse bias, but are nonetheless thought to represent a marked improvement over alternatives such as sentinel surveys. At present, however, most countries are not in a position to regularly field such household surveys. This paper proposes a new approach to the estimation of HIV prevalence for relatively small geographic areas in settings where national population‐based surveys of prevalence are not available. The proposed approach aims to overcome some of the difficulties with prevailing methods of deriving HIV prevalence estimates (at both national and subnational levels) directly from sentinel surveys. The paper also outlines some of the limitations of the proposed approach.

The APSA Africa Initiative brought diverse group of about 25 scholars to Dakar to discuss research on political participation. Our working language was French. All participants were interested in some aspect of party politics or political participation. The conference-length research papers or research proposals that participants worked on over the course of our three-week workshop centered on questions about the weakness of opposition parties in some countries, the improbable strength of the opposition in others, regional patterns of party mobilization and voting, the role of traditional authorities in voter mobilization, the role of teacher and student unions in politics, political mobilization outside the party system (as in motions de soutien for ruling parties), the role of the press in shaping political preferences, women's movements and party politics, civil society and election monitoring, historical legacies that shape political culture, and the possible impact of ethnic identity on regional patterns of political behavior. There was plenty to talk about. The participants appreciated the four-tome reading packet of articles and book chapters that we prepared for the workshop and used as the launching point of our seminar and break-out group discussions.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the marginal position of artisanal miners in sub‐Saharan Africa, and considers how they are incorporated into mineral sector change in the context of institutional and legal integration. Taking the case of diamond and gold mining in Tanzania, the concept of social exclusion is used to explore the consequences of marginalization on people's access to mineral resources and ability to make a living from artisanal mining. Because existing inequalities and forms of discrimination are ignored by the Tanzanian state, the institutionalization of mineral titles conceals social and power relations that perpetuate highly unequal access to resources. The article highlights the complexity of these processes, and shows that while legal integration can benefit certain wealthier categories of people, who fit into the model of an 'entrepreneurial small‐scale miner', for others adverse incorporation contributes to socio‐economic dependence, exploitation and insecurity. For the issue of marginality to be addressed within integration processes, the existence of local forms of organization, institutions and relationships, which underpin inequalities and discrimination, need to be recognized.

Malaria pandemic (MP) has been linked to a range of serious health problems including premature mortality. The main objective of this research is to quantify uncertainties about impacts of malaria on mortality. A multivariate spatial regression model was developed for estimation of the risk of mortality associated with malaria across Ogun State in Nigeria, West Africa. We characterize different local governments in the data and model the spatial structure of the mortality data in infants and pregnant women. A flexible Bayesian hierarchical model was considered for a space-time series of counts (mortality) by constructing a likelihood-based version of a generalized Poisson regression model that combines methods for point-level misaligned data and change of support regression. A simple two-stage procedure for producing maps of predicted risk is described. Logistic regression modeling was used to determine an approximate risk on a larger scale, and geo-statistical ("Kriging") approaches were used to improve prediction at a local level. The results suggest improvement of risk prediction brought about in the second stage. The advantages and shortcomings of this approach highlight the need for further development of a better analytical methodology.