Browsing by Department "Democracy in Africa Research Unit"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Donor Agendas, Community Priorities and the Democracy of International HIV/AIDS Funding
    (2016-03) Oberth, Gemma; Mumba, Olive; Bhayani, Lubna; Daku, Mark
    Each year, donors channel $7.6 billion into HIV programming in affected countries. With this funding often comes significant control over interventions at country level, though there is considerable skepticism about the value of donor-driven strategies. Locally conceived approaches are believed to be more effective, but it is not always clear that donors are responding accurately or appropriately to the priorities of communities. Concept notes submitted to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by eight African countries were systematically measured to determine their responsiveness to community priorities. National Civil Society Priorities Charters were used as a measure of community-identified needs. Malawi’s concept note was by far the most responsive to civil society priorities and Zambia’s was the least. The concept notes were the most responsive to civil society priorities on key populations’ issues, and the least responsible on priorities related to voluntary medical male circumcision. Statistically significant relationships were found between the responsiveness of Global Fund concept notes and Afrobarometer indicators on democracy, participation and civic engagement. There was also a significant relationship found between the voice and accountability rankings from the World Governance Indicators. This makes a compelling case to show that a context of democracy is linked to civil society’s ability to influence HIV/AIDS funding decisions at national level. Understanding the factors which hinder or enable community-led program development is critical for a more effective HIV response.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    South Africa’s youth and political participation, 1994-2014
    (2014-07-09) Mattes, Robert; Richmond, Samantha
    South Africans hold – often simultaneously – contradictory beliefs about young people and politics. On one hand, driven largely by a romanticized memory of Soweto and the street battles of the 1980s, many people see the youth as the primary catalyst of activism and political change. On the other hand, driven by continuing media depictions of youth unemployment, township protests and the antics of the ANC Youth League, a wide range of commentators routinely experience “moral panics” about the apparent “crisis” of the youth and their corrosive effect on the country’s political culture. In this report, we review a wide range of longitudinal survey data spanning the first two decades of democracy and find that there are indeed a series of real problems with South Africa’s political culture, particularly in the area of citizenship. At the same time, these data clearly show that these problems are largely not peculiar to young people. Across a range of different indicators, we find consistently that there are no, or relatively minor, age profiles to most dimensions of South African political culture.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Why CDFs in Africa?: representation vs. constituency service
    (2014-07-07) Barkan, Joel D.; Mattes, Robert
    Since 2002, constituency development funds (CDFs) have been established in nine African countries, and another two countries have created “approximations” of CDFs in that they address the perceived need by members of the legislature for budgeted funds to spend on the development of the districts they represent. Thus, just under one-quarter of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have adopted some type of CDF. In this paper, we consider three alternative explanations for the apparent popularity of CDFs. Using data from the African Legislature Project and Afrobarometer, we find that the best account of the rise of CDFs is that while MP rightly perceive the need to maintain close contact with their constituents, they wrongly believe that their constituents look to them mainly for “pork.” Instead, African constituents’ primary expectations of their MP is that they regularly visit the district to learn what is on their minds, and to then quite literally “re-present” or transmit these views back to the central government via the legislature. In other words, while citizens desire stronger representation of their needs at the centre, MPs respond by delivering services and favours at the periphery (i.e. the district) thinking mistakenly that the CDFs are the answer to what the public wants. We also find little evidence of “good governance” advocates that CDFs lead to increased corruption or entrench MPs in office.