Browsing by Subject "poverty alleviation"

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    Elevating Sub-Saharan Africa: The Effect of Infrastructure Investment in Alleviating Poverty
    (2024) Magolie, Joshua; Alhassan, Abdul Latif
    This study investigates the effect of infrastructure development on poverty reduction in 35 SubSaharan African countries from 2005 to 2015. This timeframe was chosen as it encapsulates the final 11 years of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals era, recognised as one of the most significant anti-poverty initiatives in history. Notably, Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region to fall short of its poverty reduction target under Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. This study is thus underpinned by Sub-Saharan Africa's failure to meet its poverty reduction goal, coupled with the recognised imperative that infrastructure is indispensable for economic and social development. Assessing the results from the battery of panel data estimation techniques, the study unequivocally demonstrates that investment in infrastructure led to poverty reduction. Specifically, transport infrastructure had the most significant impact, followed by water and sanitation, and electricity infrastructure. The robustness of the findings was verified through Wald, Hausman, and Heteroskedasticity tests. The study provides valuable insights for policymakers, recommending increased investment in transport, water and sanitation, and electricity infrastructure across Sub-Saharan Africa. It advocates for the promotion of Public-Private Partnerships to mobilise private capital and alleviate the fiscal burden on governments. Furthermore, it suggests leveraging funds from local pension funds to finance infrastructure development. Additionally, policymakers are urged to create an environment conducive to infrastructure investment by ensuring stability in macroeconomic policies and strengthening and enforcing anti-corruption laws.
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    Home food gardens and poverty alleviation in the rural area of Macekane, KwaZulu-Natal
    (2025) Lugagu, Snenhlanhla; Abdullah, Somaya
    Access to food, water and nutrition is a constitutional right in South Africa, yet the state of food accessibility is questionable, particularly in rural communities. After South Africa achieved political freedom in 1994, development and prosperity were prioritised, and a number of policies were designed to eradicate poverty and inequalities. However, these policies have had little effect on food security, which is still precarious in many places, especially deep rural areas. This research explored the effects of home food gardens on food accessibility and poverty reduction in the rural area of Macekane in KwaZulu-Natal. It sought to investigate the circumstances of food insecurity in this area that prevail in the face of government-related food security interventions in rural areas. The focus of the research was a recent project initiated by the youth in the uMhlathuze Municipality's Ward 31, which falls under the Somopho Traditional Council. The youth initiated a ‘One home, one garden' project to address food insecurity and support self-sustainability in the community. The research employed a qualitative approach in which participants with food gardens were purposively selected and interviewed about their experiences of producing food to sustain their households. The findings revealed that water accessibility was a hindrance to the maintenance of home food gardens in Macekane. Home food gardens could contribute to the livelihood of the Macekane community, but water scarcity poses a major obstacle to achieving this goal. There is also a need for more systematic planning and implementation of community programmes such as this to ensure their success. This research brings a new perspective to the topic of food insecurity as its focus is on a specific rural community and their experiences. It therefore fills a gap in the discourse on poverty alleviation and food shortages in rural areas.
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    Leveraging carbon revenue for poverty alleviation
    (2013) Atkins, Peter; Prasad, Gisela
    One of the intentions of the Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was to use markets to allow the developed countries to supplement their own greenhouse gas reduction efforts with carbon reductions made in developing countries by purchasing carbon offsets. By these means, it was hoped, global greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced and developing countries would benefit through incoming carbon revenue and technology transfer. This has worked for China and India, which together account for 88% of all CDM carbon credits issued so far, but it hasn’t worked for Africa which has only a miserly 1% of the issued credits. The main reasons for this disparity are thought to be the high transaction costs of the CDM and the long and complicated registration, validation, monitoring and verification processes. The costs are around R400 000 to R2 000 000 per project (CCWG, 2009) . In addition it can take up to three years to get carbon revenue, if the project is one of the lucky 13% of projects to make it through to the end (see Appendix A – CDM Pipeline analysis). Partly in response to these CDM shortcomings, the voluntary carbon market has emerged. The voluntary carbon market has many players using many different standards and rules and regulations. Unfortunately, the CDM-like standards used by the bigger voluntary carbon market registries also incur high transaction costs and long lead times and therefore don’t work for typical, small African poverty alleviation projects with low greenhouse gas emission reduction potential. This has encouraged the development of small, agile carbon registries using simplified standards, which better fit the African projects. One such small registry and one of its poverty alleviation projects are analysed in this paper.
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