Recent studies reflect increasing levels of HIV infection amongst married women in sub-Saharan Africa. The institution of marriage, which is highly revered within the church and society, is thus now regarded as a 'potential death trap' for many married women. This study examines the drivers of these increasing levels of HIV infection amongst married women in sub-Saharan Africa. It offers a critical reflection of the socio-cultural factors and gender-insensitive theological traditions that expose married women to the vulnerability of HIV infection. In order to observe the sacrosanctity of the marriage institution as well as preserving the dignity of life for many married women in sub-Saharan Africa, the study presents the imago Dei theological motif as a gender-sensitive theological response to the increasing levels of HIV infection among married women. The imago Dei theological motif argues that both men and women equally reflect the divine image of God. This theological motif also brings to the fore the realization that HIV and AIDS is fuelled by conditions of inequality, socio-economic and socio-cultural discrimination, hence the need to promote human dignity for both men and women within our communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, emanating from the imago Dei theological motif, the study offers a bold community praxis through the transformation of gender-insensitive theological traditions; the transformation of hegemonic masculinities; and the transformation of gender-insensitive HIV prevention models as practical ways aimed at redressing the vulnerability of married women to the increasing levels of HIV infection. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic remains a large threat for developing countries, es- pecially for Sub-Saharan Africa. To be able to fight the epidemic, we need to understand the socio-economic drivers of it to distinguish the groups of people at the highest risk of the HIV. We performed an econometric analysis using logistic regression dealing with the relationship between education and several HIV connected factors - HIV status, HIV knowledge and sexual behavior - based on a large sample from 21 Sub-Saharan African countries from Demographic and Health Survey data collection from years 2008-2014. The education ap- pears to be non-lineary correlated with the HIV status as people with primary and secondary education are at the highest risk of being HIV positive. These results can be nevertheless influenced by e.g. survivorship bias as the education appears to have a positive effect on both HIV knowledge and protective sexual behavior. It is thus advised to promote education in the Sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, it is needed to target the help primary to the groups at the highest risk of being HIV positive to prevent further spread of HIV and to help families of the HIV positive individuals. Moreover, we found that there is no significant difference in the correlation between education and HIV status between...

A closely related factor to economic growth is FDI - Foreign Direct Investment. Foreigninvestment in a country made in order of utilizing specific markets or certaincharacteristics of a region. Sub-Saharan Africa is a region receiving remarkably smallfraction compared to its peer regions considering the sources of natural resources andother riches. The purpose of the thesis is to find the determinants of FDI in Sub-SaharanAfrica. The determinants are a selected set of variables based on the research of previousstudies in the field of study. A panel data regression is performed for 23 Sub-Saharancountries with data from 1997 to 2017. The result of the regression demonstrated similarresults regarding the affiliation between the variables of the model and the independentvariable, FDI as previous studies. The findings of the study do not answer the question ofwhy certain other regions of developing economies receive larger amounts ofinvestments. However, our hope is that the findings of this study will gain furtherresearch on the area

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / Thesis advisor: Andrea Vicini / Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the worst health care systems in the world. Besides, underdeveloped economies paired with political instability do not offer much hope for improvement. In fact, despite many efforts by local, international organizations and governments to help in this field, the majority of the populations in this region do not have access to basic health care. With this in mind, the aim of this research project is to develop a personal and social anthropology of the human rights language read through the lens of the common good in order to contribute to creating and developing sustainable healthcare systems. While agreeing that many efforts have been made using different frameworks in the sphere of public health ethics in the past two decades and aware of the possibility that other underlying causes may have contributed to the failure of health systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, we will choose to address the human rights language as the main interlocutor for future contribution. This choice is motivated by the influence of human rights on public health policies that affect the lives of people in general. / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Thesis advisor: Anderson James / Malaria kills over 3,000 people each day—mostly in sub-Saharan Africa—and remains the world's number one killer of children under five. While efforts to combat the disease were largely successful in past decades, eradication has since stalled as the parasite (and its mosquito vector) have retreated to the core tropics and become increasingly resistant to pesticides and anti-malarial drugs. This study seeks to determine what other factors are significant in producing high malaria rates, and, based on those results, to offer policy suggestions that may provide alternatives to the “traditional” methods of combating malaria. The project uses cross-country models and individual country models of malaria output to analyze country indicator data and household survey data from around the world. Empirical analysis reveals that foreign aid flows may be less significant in reducing malaria outputs than originally suspected. Furthermore, the data suggests that other factors such as political stability, access to goods and services, and the use of bednets perhaps demand greater attention than they currently receive. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This study focuses on economic development and political turmoil in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa. There has been a resurgence of interest in the region following the end of the Cold War. In 1997 U.S. president Bill Clinton took a 12-day tour of the region. In 1999 the U.S. Congress (106th Congress) passed the Growth and Opportunity Act and the Hope for Africa Act, designed to encourage political stability and economic development in the region. Although most Sub-Saharan African countries attained independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, more than 30 years of self-government have brought little economic development and political stability to the region. This study attempts to analyze, theoretically and empirically, the relationship among economic development, social dislocation and political turmoil. Social dislocation, as defined in this study, means "urbanization," and it is used as an exogenous variable to model and test the hypothesized causal relationship between economic development and political turmoil. This study employs pooled cross-sectional time-series and seemingly unrelated regression analyses, as well as Granger-causality, to examine the hypothesized relationships and causality in 24 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1971 to 1995. The results confirm the classical economic development theory's argument that an increase in economic development leads to a decrease in political turmoil. The result of the pooled analysis is confirmed by a SUR analysis on the strength of the relationship at the individual country level in 21 of the 24 countries. However, an indirect positive relationship exist between economic development and political turmoil through social dislocation. At lag periods 1 and 2, I found a causal ordering leading from economic development to political turmoil, indicating a causal relationship from economic development to social dislocation and from social dislocation to political turmoil.

<p>Mobile phone ubiquity in much of the developing world has turned from a question of when rather than if. Some of the poorest and most remote parts of the world are being connected to the global telecommunications network to enable an unprecedented ability to both observe and interact with previously hard-to-reach populations at scale. While many mobile phone owners adopt this technology for basic phone use, the connectedness this expansive ownership enables presents an opportunity to the study and practice of economic development that extend beyond simple peer-to-peer communication. The modern information technology sector and its underlying network infrastructure presented this same opportunity during its own formation. The network was not only valuable for the communication it enabled, but also for the data it produced from those who utilized its services. It also serves as a platform for a deluge of information systems and services that have become a part of our everyday lives and has spurred significant economic growth over the past few decades. This "data revolution" is well underway in the developed economies but is diminishing in its returns, solving increasingly marginal problems. This same transformation is relatively nascent in developing economies where more salient challenges, such as poverty, have yet to be overcome. In this dissertation, we explore a data-driven approach that leverages mobile phone technology to better measure and address poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Our approach starts with the identification of a problem: in this case, poverty. In the first chapter, we apply novel machine learning methods to analyze roughly ten terabytes of data of mobile phone use from Rwanda's largest telecommunications operator to measure poverty at a national scale. We demonstrate that an individual's history of mobile phone usage can be used to infer his or her socioeconomic status. Using this individual model of mobile phone use and socioeconomic status, we can predict poverty and wealth across the entire network and accurately reconstruct national and regional distributions of wealth. Once we obtain this measure of poverty, we can then focus our efforts in regions that are most afflicted. The second chapter helps moves us from diagnosis to a potential cure. Predictions may be helpful to provide some guidance on which regions or populations to target but does not provide much in the way of what to do to have impact. In three years of field research in poor regions of rural Kenya and Rwanda, it was clear that much of the world's poor thrive and survive on subsistence agriculture, but many of these farmers also own mobile phones. Having such a platform enabled the ability to provide potentially welfare-improving information at scale. This chapter presents the research design and analyzes the results of of six randomized controlled trials testing the welfare effects of sending hundreds of text message formulations encouraging agricultural experimentation to over 500,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. Targeting farmers with the right messaging and delivery characteristics was a focus of these trials. We find statistically significant effects on agricultural technology adoption and high rates of return on welfare outcomes by providing information over this medium. This mirrors the digital advertising industry in many developed economies and reminds us that advertisements as information can have very large welfare effects in poor information environments. The third chapter dives deeper into one of the six studies where the research design focused on information spillover in Rwanda where mobile phone ownership was about half of what it was in Kenya. We find that information does indeed spillover onto other farmers within the same group, and those farmers who don't have phones experience the largest percentage increases in adoptions when others within the same group receive a text message. This has large implications on the effectiveness and cost efficiency of information treatments to regions with lower mobile phone adoption. Not only were these interventions effective, they were also very inexpensive and resulted in network effects, further improving agricultural technology adoption, increasing food production and reducing poverty. The chapters in this dissertation develop a theory and methods for understanding how to leverage mobile technologies to measure and reduce poverty. It serves as a guide for both research and practitioners to approach solving problems in development that is grounded in measurement, data, collaboration, impact and scale.

Thesis. 1975. Sc.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil Engineering. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 241-250. / Sc.D.

This research examines the collective action and financial dimensions of rural waterpoint sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa. Four interlinking papers empirically evaluate the nature and drivers of financial risks, and how they in turn impact the operational performance of community water supplies. The research is grounded in conceptual and theoretical frameworks pertaining to collective action and common-pool resource management, in particular Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework (Ostrom, 2007), Musgrave & Musgrave's economic good framework (Musgrave & Musgrave, 1973), and Marwell & Oliver's critical mass theory (Marwell & Oliver, 1993). The first paper analyses data extracted from national waterpoint inventories in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. The remaining three papers draw on primary data from rural Kenya comprising 229 years' worth of water committee financial records, a census of 571 waterpoints, and a survey of 3,361 households. These data were collected during extensive field work campaigns in Kwale, Kenya. Quantitative analyses were carried out by way of advanced statistical techniques, including logistic regression, linear mixed (repeated measure) models, and generalised estimating equations. Results suggest collection of user fees is a significant determinant of waterpoint sustainability, alongside other institutional, technical, geographical and environmental variables. However, monthly payment arrangements are beset by non-payment and late payment, particularly if rainfall levels are high, group size is large, households are far away, and water is aggressive and unpalatable. Although monthly contribution levels remain relatively stable above a collective payment rate of 60%, there is little evidence of self-sustaining growth beyond this point, and revenue collection is prone to collapse below this collective payment threshold. In comparison, pay-as-you-fetch fees are associated with increased revenue and improved operational performance, but result in a higher proportion of households opting for an unimproved water source. If the Sustainable Development Goal of universal access to safe water supplies is to be achieved in rural sub-Saharan Africa, strategies are needed to strengthen revenue collection systems and bolster payment incentives. External support and professionalised service delivery models present potential pathways to advance these goals. Policymakers may also need to introduce carefully designed subsidies, or promote self-supply approaches that realign lifecycle costs with users' willingness-to-pay.

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