Agricultural Exports: Important Issues for Sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract: The central argument of this paper is that African countries stand to benefit more from the goodwill currently being shown by industrialized countries who have committed themselves to further opening up of their markets for commodities from the region. However, more needs to be done by African governments and the international community if these benefits are to trickle down to the African farmers and result in attaining the goal of poverty reduction. This paper identifies the issues that need to be addressed by all parties involved. At the macro level, our results find that the distortion in the macro environment is a major factor hindering African exports. At the micro level, our results show that for farmers to benefit from the opening up of the international market, they would need more access to market information, easier road access to the markets for both their output and inputs, improve their farming techniques by utilizing modern scientific farming methods and inputs, and to increase their productivity. At the international level, our study finds strong results indicating that foreign tariff rate, price support (PNAC) and standards act as a market barrier to African agricultural exports.     

Capabilities,human development,and design thinking: a framework for gender-sensitive entrepreneurship programs

This paper discusses the ways that capabilities and human development theory can guide the creation of entrepreneurship programs, utilizing a framework of human-centered design thinking. It is well known that a variety of institutional factors shape gender outcomes and gender inequality within entrepreneurship, particularly with regard to necessity versus opportunity entrepreneurship and informal versus formal sector entrepreneurship. Failure to understand the diversity of entrepreneurial activity among women, and the connection (or lack thereof) of such activity to human freedom, leads to biased entrepreneurship programs. This paper links social economic theory and practice by: (1) discussing the ways that capabilities and human development theory relate to entrepreneurship programs; (2) demonstrating that human-centered design thinking reflects the capabilities approach; and (3) showing how the design thinking framework would be used to create a gender-sensitive entrepreneurship program.