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February 2013

Uganda: Invest at home to promote a deeper regional market

Rachel K. Sebudde's picture

“Uganda might lose the market in South Sudan, if deliberate efforts aren’t put in place to sustain it”, said Uganda Investment Authority Chairman, Patrick Bitature during a hard-talk discussion at the February 14th launch of the Uganda Economic Update – Bridges across Borders: Unleashing Uganda’s Regional Trade Potential.
Bitature argued that Uganda’s supplying of South Sudan was more circumstantial than strategic.
 
“Food items like rice, matooke [green bananas], maize and sorghum that Uganda is exporting to South Sudan will soon be grown there, once stability returns. Uganda instead needs to add value to these exports”, he said.

Please use -but don't abuse- Tanzania’s forests

Waly Wane's picture

Let's think together: Every Sunday the World Bank in Tanzania in collaboration with The Citizen wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a few questions.

Globally, forests are disappearing at an increasing rate. Since 1990 alone, half of the world’s rainforests have vanished. Tanzania also has been severely affected by deforestation as illustrated by the following statistics:

- Forest area as a share of total land area declined from 50 per cent to 43 per cent to 37 per cent from 1938, to 1987 and 2010 respectively.

Punished twice: Kenya’s dual health burden

Wolfgang Fengler's picture

The data are un-ambiguous: Kenya’s economy is starting to catch up with the rest of the world. But many of you probably wonder if that is really true, especially when observing the streets of Nairobi or the daily life in rural areas. In other words, is economic catch-up translating into social progress?  Will today’s children live a better life than their parents? Will everyone enjoy decent social and infrastructure services in the new Kenya? Let’s zoom in on the case of health.

How healthy is Kenya today? Simply said, it could do better. This is important from an economic standpoint, because a population’s health is a key foundation for development. Healthy populations are more productive; they also save and invest more. On average and all other things equal, one extra year of life-expectancy is associated with an increase in a country’s GDP by 4 percent.

Land of opportunity: Should Tanzania encourage more large-scale farming?

Isis Gaddis's picture

Let's think together: Every Sunday the World Bank in Tanzania in collaboration with The Citizen wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a few questions.

Like most developing countries, more than 80 percent of the poor in Tanzania are to be found in rural areas. Nearly all of them are active in the agriculture sector as laborers or owners of a small piece of land that they cultivate for a living. In this context, land is a vital asset for food security and survival. In parallel, global population growth, rapid urbanization, and increases in incomes have resulted in a sharp increase in demand for agricultural products worldwide, leading to an expansion of cultivated area and leading investors to go out in search of new farmland.  The global search for farmland has intensified in sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania. 

Is Rwanda Set to Reap the Demographic Dividend?

Tom Bundervoet's picture

From almost every point of view, Rwanda’s performance over the past decade has been an unambiguous success story.

Between 2001 and 2011, Rwanda’s economy grew by 8.2 percent per annum, earning the country a spot on the list of the ten fastest growing countries in the world. Poverty rates fell by 14 percentage points, effectively lifting more than one million Rwandans out of poverty. Social indicators followed the general trend: Net enrolment in primary school increased to almost 100 percent, completion rates tripled, and child mortality decreased more than threefold, hitting the mark oftwo-thirds reduction as targeted by the Millennium Development Goals.

Yet buried under all this good news lays another maybe even more important evolution.  After a decade-and-a-half stall, total fertility rates in Rwanda dropped from 6.1 in 2005 to 4.6 in 2010. This means that during a period of five years, the average number of children a woman of childbearing age can expect to have, has declined by 1.5.

HIV/Aids: Still Claiming Too Many Lives

Jacques Morisset's picture

Let's think together: Every Sunday the World Bank in Tanzania in collaboration with The Citizen wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a few questions.

HIV/Aids remains one of the deadliest diseases in sub-Saharan Africa, causing misery and suffering to millions of affected people and their families. But there are also signs of hope, as new infections and the number of Aids-related deaths have come down significantly since the mid-2000s. Similar to the broader trend in the region, Tanzania has achieved some success in reducing HIV/Aids:

- HIV prevalence among adults declined from its peak in 1996 (8.4 per cent of those aged 15-49 years) to 5.8 per cent in 2007, though it has stagnated since then.
- The number of people dying from Aids has fallen by about one third, from 130,000 in 2001 to 84,000 in 2011.

Transferts monétaires conditionnels au Burkina Faso: Pour quels enfants les conditions sont-elle importantes?

Damien de Walque's picture

Auteurs: Richard Akresh, Damien de Walque et Harounan Kazianga

Dans une récente étude, nous présentons les impacts sur l’éducation d’un projet-pilote de transferts monétaires au Burkina Faso1, dans la Province du Nahouri. Ce projet-pilote est accompagné d’une évaluation d’impact expérimentale randomisée pour mesurer et comparer, dans le même contexte en zone rurale au Burkina Faso, l’efficacité de transferts monétaires conditionnels et non-conditionnels qui ciblent les ménages pauvres. Les programmes de transferts monétaires conditionnels (TMC), comme les transferts monétaires non-conditionnels (TMNC), transfèrent des ressources monétaires aux ménages pauvres à intervalles réguliers. Mais la différence principale c’est que les TMC imposent des conditions aux ménages, telles que l’inscription et la fréquentation scolaire pour les enfants d’âge scolaire.

Avec les TMC, si les conditions ne sont pas respectées pour une période donnée, les transferts ne sont pas payés pour cette période. Au contraire, avec les TMNC, il n’y pas de conditions à respecter.

Big data and development: “The second half of the chess board”

Wolfgang Fengler's picture

Do you think Fortune 500 CEOs care about Africa? In the past, frankly, with the exception of oil and gas giants, they didn’t. But this is changing… and fast.

This week, IBM is opening its Africa innovation hub in Nairobi. To demonstrate the significance of the occasion, IBM has brought along all its senior team, led by CEO Ginni Rometty (named #1 most powerful woman in business by Forbes in 2012). Like other ICT companies, IBM wants to ride the wave of Africa’s ICT revolution. In this area, Africa has not only been catching up with the West, but is in fact overtaking it in areas such as mobile money.

Is Tanzania Raising Enough Tax Revenue?

Isis Gaddis's picture

Let's think together: Every Sunday the World Bank in Tanzania in collaboration with The Citizen wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a few questions.

The overall tax burden in a country is largely determined by the role that citizens expect the State to play in the economy.  People are paying more taxes in France than in the US, not because the French are richer but because they expect more public services from their government.  For this reason, no single 'optimal' tax burden can be applied uniformly.Tanzania’s tax revenues by the central government were equivalent to 15.7 per cent of GDP in 2011/12.  This was higher than Uganda (12 per cent) but lower than Zambia (16.5 per cent) and Kenya (19.5 per cent).