Africa’s achievement of the first United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG), eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, requires rural growth and development. Agriculture is a major source of livelihood for rural Africans and constitutes a significant percentage of exports, but the sector has not reached its full potential. Productivity and quality improvements are major drivers of rural income and sector growth, but, adoption of productivity and quality-enhancing technologies is often limited by education and access to information. Achievement of the second MDG, universal primary education, and the implied next step of retaining those students through secondary school, can provide a strong foundation for bridging this technology gap. However, it will take several generations before the benefits of increased educational levels will be realized. Cocoa is a vital commodity to many economies in West Africa, especially the world’s leading producers of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. Unique public-private partnerships between U.S. government agencies, the chocolate industry, and African governments are strengthening primary and secondary education in such a way as to support the achievement of the first MDG in cocoa-growing communities. At the same time, these partnerships are supporting education opportunities for youth and adults in cocoa-growing communities who are no longer in school. This approach presents a valuable model that may be adapted and replicated in other countries and other sectors.

This article explores the need for an integrated approach that includes private pharmacies to meet the growing demand for HIV and AIDS prevention, care, and treatment services in South Africa. The state of the epidemic is presented as are policy recommendations for an integrated approach. Five themes are discussed: public-private partnerships, HIV/AIDS resource centers in pharmacies, antiretroviral therapy, task shifting and task sharing, and interprofessional obstacles. The article concludes by providing policy recommendations for further research to facilitate partnerships and encourage greater research in this field. It also highlights the need for patient-centered partnerships and incentives for task sharing.

Agricultural policy in Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire has failed to develop subsistence farming, which provides food security and employment for millions of Africans, particularly the majority of African women. Climate change is now threatening the livelihood of millions of farmers in the subsistence economy. This article argues that strengthening the subsistence economy will improve farmers’ capacity to mitigate the deleterious effects of climate change on fragile rural economies. This will require a change in the dominant agricultural policies as well as in the implementation strategies to orient them to adopt programs that can address micro-farming on a large scale.

This article attempts to clarify how public performance affects General Budget Support (GBS) decisions in Tanzania and how performance indicators and GBS-driven incentives shape public policy design, budgeting, and performance. On the first issue, we find that development partners fail to agree on a common way to monitor performance, that headquarter policies rather than country performance is the main determinant of aid disbursements, and finally that the incentives General Budget Support creates are weakened by the lack of explicit rules regarding aid disbursements and the increasing number of donor-specific triggers. On the effects of General Budget Support performance monitoring on public policy decisions, we find that the lack of prioritization between donor triggers confuses the signal donors send to government, that the effect of the triggers are limited to the act of cutting or increasing aid, which stirs a lot of debate but not the intended development outcome, and finally that because of capacity constraints, government’s ability to affect outcomes cannot be taken for granted. Based on these findings we recommend a number of critical steps to enhance the effectiveness of GBS-driven incentives.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa aims to develop and extend new technologies to benefit Africa’s poor farmers and make African agriculture more productive. In some cases, the World Bank indicates that it would support what it calls “smart subsidies” to assist bringing such productivity to poor farmers. In the 1980s Malawi demonstrated that with subsidies on hybrid seed and fertilizer and with reasonably good rainfall, it could produce more than enough maize for its own commercial demand, exporting the “surplus” to others in the region. Following a serious food crisis in 2005, Malawi has again demonstrated that relatively massive input subsidies and good rainfall can generate maize surpluses. However, the subsidies are too large to be sustained, and they do not meet a reasonable definition of “smart.” The real potential green revolution — truly increasing productivity for all farmers by changing input/output ratios and cropping systems — has yet to gain donor support. The Malawai government’s “Starter Pack program” demonstrated its potential but after two years was abandoned by donors in favor of a less costly nonrevolutionary safety net program only for the least able. Predictably, that failed to produce enough maize, and the current fertilizer subsidy approach was adopted — US $74 million annually compared to the Starter Pack’s $25 million. Analysis would show that the current brute-force use of fertilizer is far less cost-effective and less sustainable than a truly revolutionary approach that changes input/output ratios and not just raises inputs. In comparison to the current subsidy, the Starter Pack approach meets much more closely the World Bank’s definition of a “smart subsidy.” The current “surplus” is not a green revolution; it is simply a return to the subsidized surpluses of the early 1980s that coexisted with widespread malnutrition. As the Starter Pack program demonstrated, a “smarter subsidy” could produce better results at far lower cost and with the prospect of long-term improvement of agricultural productivity.

This article discusses the challenges of developing meaningful public space in Johannesburg, a city built on apartheid policies that separated White from Black residents. While the advent of democracy in 1994 has turned Johannesburg into one of the more integrated and vibrant South African cities, it has also sadly resulted in the decline of public space in the city, as soaring crime has forced wealthier residents to seek refuge in privately secured enclaves. Policy makers need to actively shape a public space to build the sense of commonness that will be essential to the success of Johannesburg as a “world-class African city.” The 2010 World Soccer Cup could provide an opportunity to do so.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been growing at very low rates over the past few decades. The roles of malfunctioning institutions, geographic misfortune, and lack of integration in explaining this have been the subject of much debate. This article assesses the role of institutions in explaining the slow growth of Africa. In addition, it explores one of the possible transmission channels — aggregate technical inefficiency — through which institutions affect economic growth. In order to evaluate the impact of institutions on economic growth, the classical growth models have been estimated using difference and system generalized method of moments (GMM) using data from thirty-five selected SSA countries from 1996 to 2005. Rule of law, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, political instability, and voice and accountability are found to influence the growth of SSA. However, control over corruption has no relation to growth in the continent. Using stochastic frontier analysis, this study found that only two aspects of governance —regulatory quality and government effectiveness — matter in influencing technical efficiency. Political aspects of governance—voice and accountability and political instability—have no relation to technical efficiency. Therefore, Sub-Saharan Africa’s poor economic performance (slow growth and aggregate technical inefficiency) can in part be attributed to bad governance.

Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have all created special institutions to reduce corruption. Their formal and informal powers vary, but they have grown over time and launched many high-profile investigations. Perceptions of corruption have barely changed in Kenya or Uganda and only fallen slightly in Tanzania, which has the weakest anticorruption institution. Even when the agencies enjoy adequate formal powers, their informal powers are constrained so as to limit their impact. Moreover, corruption is sustained by the political system in East Africa and so creating an institution focused on criminal investigation will not be enough to reduce it.

Over the years, the office of the ombudsman in the public services of African states has been wobbling in its performance. The reasons for this are largely a result of overcentralization of government, bureaucratization, and the unwillingness of government to become truly democratic. The resultant effect has been that many citizens in African states cannot meaningfully seek redress against maladministration nor can they complain about poor governance and services delivery. This article argues that public servants in African states should be perceived as existing to help citizens, not to make citizens’ lives more difficult; it needs to be clear that the office of the ombudsman must be strengthened so that all the tenets of a credible public service are seen to be present and working to the advantage of all. This will help to put a check on government activities in the interest of the citizens and thus help to address the problems of human rights abuses, lack of accountability, and the absence of good governance.