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.

<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.

Unemployment and underemployment, particularly among the youth, are serious concerns to governments across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Fifteen years on from the World Conference on Education For All (EFA) in Jomtien, EFA policies have started to result in some of the largest cohorts of primary school leavers ever witnessed in many parts of SSA. This is occurring at a time when SSA’s formal sector is unable to generate sufficient formal employment and income opportunities. The great majority of all school leavers, therefore, are obliged to enter the informal, micro-enterprise economy, urban and rural, and receive informal training in traditional apprenticeships and/or through other on-the-job means. However the links between education, training and enterprise are still poorly understood. This study presents an investigation into how young people construct and are able to navigate these pathways to informal self-employment in rural Ghana by acquiring skills and schooling from multiple sources, and through seeking assistance from informal networks. It makes a contribution not only to understanding the transition from training to self-employment, but also to the nature of the rural informal sector in Ghana. This study examines three types of skills training provision; on-the-job apprenticeship training, short-term modular training and longer-term pre-employment training, examining both the delivery context of these different training modalities, as well as the graduates’ labour market outcomes. The analysis is based on 12 months fieldwork in rural Ghana in 2004 and 2005 during which time multiple approaches were used to uncover these skill-to-work pathways; tracer studies with 162 vocational training graduates, semi-structured interviews with 160 apprentices and a household survey capturing data on 147 youth. Furthermore, retrospective interviews with 114 enterprise owners were conducted to better understand pathways to informal self-employment and the multiple occupational realities, or occupational pluralism, of many of those in this rural African economy. This data suggests that the school-skill-enterprise relationship is highly dependent on the delivery context of training as well as the type of enabling or disabling environments within which the training is translated into employment outcomes. This study also includes an analysis of the long history of Ghana’s skills development policies and practice - up to 2006. This is integrated with a discussion on the wider environment within which skills are delivered, particularly the labour market, and how this impacts on the employment opportunities of technical and vocational education and training graduates in Ghana.

Fertility rates in sub Saharan Africa (SSA) have been identified to be depicted by a  unique demographic scenario, that sets  the region  apart from other regions in the world. Demographers are particularly keen on comprehending the dynamics surrounding the demographic transition of the sub continent especially with respect to its shift from high fertility rates to low fertility rates.  The decline in fertility embodies the second phase of the demographic transition process. The discourse on fertility rates in the sub continent has been coined to be an anomaly based on its prevalence being an exception in the world. Discussion pertaining to fertility levels in the region in this paper was made  with the purpose of illuminating the factors that account for the region’s high fertility rates, as well as on  fertility discourse in the region, and the variation that characterize its prevalence amongst the countries in the sub continent. Information on the fertility rates revealed that social organization and cultural setting in the region play pivotal roles in forging high fertility rates in the region.

Globalization of the world economy has made knowledge a critical element of effectiveness in the world economy. Current economic and trade conditions change rapidly and require constant improvement to ensure economic development. These conditions stimulate innovation and improvements in technology, designs, and other tangible and intangible assets. Most Sub-Saharan African countries have not exploited the benefits that intellectual property rights offer to its users, despite considerable improvements to existing knowledge and options for protecting knowledge. Strong intellectual property laws are important for effective incentives to invent continuously. It is important to provide some form of compensation and guarantee that their innovation is credited to them. This is achieved through the establishment of intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights have far-reaching effects on several sectors of the economy, such as trade, manufacturing, and other industries. Intellectual property rights policies are therefore, important for economic development.

The newly independent states of Africa came into being at a time when the ideology of nationalism was universally dominant. The ruling elites, presiding over long-term economic and political decay and searching for legitimacy to preserve their power, set about nation-building through the development of various discourses, the indoctrination of schoolchildren, anthems and flag waving. The focus of this thesis is on a number of these discourses particular to Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking state in sub-Saharan Africa. Four main themes are identified: firstly, the Hispanic inheritance has been important in the building of a national cultural identity; secondly, the likelihood of the various ethnic groups 'bonding in adversity', as a result of living through the tyranny of Macias Nguema, is explored as are the more recent commemorations of his overthrow; thirdly, those 'on the move' such as the large Equatoguinean diaspora and other travelling groups in the colony and independent state are shown to assist the national project and fourthly, a 'myth' of Bantu unity has been proposed which claims that all the ethnic groups of the state have a common origin. A national identity is being assembled, like a collage or assemblage, out of diverse materials. Finally, it is argued that the appearance of banal, everyday nationalism in written texts in Equatorial Guinea indicates that a sense of national identity may have emerged. Although the small size of the country may have assisted here this does indicate that it is possible for the state in Africa to construct a nation starting from a multi-ethnic base. There are considerable disintegrative forces working on the sub-Saharan states but the evidence presented here suggests a more optimistic outlook for the survival of these states in the next century.

<p> Contrary to the logical conclusion that the more natural resources a country has or controls, the more prosperous, rich and happy will be its people, the evidence from many Sub-Saharan countries is pointing to a different direction with numerous conflicts occurring mostly near mineral deposits or in countries heavily endowed with natural resources of various sorts. This paper seeks to tackle the basic questions of a sub-Saharan African and any person interested in the region; why are there so many conflicts in the region? Why is there absolute poverty despite the presence of enormous natural resources? What are the factors contributing to the present problems facing the region? This paper establishes the relationship between poverty, resource endowments and conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper reviews literature, stressing on the different conditions under which resource abundance can and have been a primary cause of conflicts. It argues that poverty and conflicts have re-enforced each other and that natural resources have played a role. The paper also makes use of conflict, resource and poverty data among other variables to establish the probable cause for the numerous conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper suggests statistically that Political Stability and Absence of violent conflicts can only be altered by the lack of sustainable economic opportunity, failure to control corruption and rising levels of poverty. It is worth noting that the resource variables are not statistically significant. This however, do not dismiss the role of natural resources in the present conflicts of the region because the trend is observable that most conflict ridden countries in the Sub-Saharan African region are resource rich. It rather lays an emphasis on the fact that resource revenues could be used to avert the current situation by provision of basic needs like shelter, potable water, security, accountable institutions, education and the promotion of enterprise that will be a guarantor of sustainable economic opportunities. The paper employs Maslow's Human needs theory for some explanations and also multiple regression, using panel data for statistical analysis. Fixed and random effects estimation techniques are used, and other statistical testing to determine the validity of the different variable coefficients generated. The paper suggests concrete economic and policy recommendations to the problems enumerated that could leapfrog the region out of the current bad situation it has been in for decades.</p>

There is an abundance of biomedical and social science research relating to HIV/AIDS which has focused on understanding the disease from a medical crisis. The research has attended to matters of prevention and clinical treatment. This study is a naturalistic study which explores the socio-economic and political-cultural aspects of the disease in and on the lives of nine women living in one of the world’s mega slums, Kibera in Kenya. The study is based on the assumption that the HIV/AIDS pandemic has brought about social disruption and profound changes to the micro contexts of community and family life. Cultural norms, practices and values that historically sustained the fabric of African life are slowly being stripped away as those infected with HIV and their families cope with the impact of the chronic illness. Living as HIV+ women is yet one more challenge that these women face every day. They struggle to provide self-care and a healthy life for those they are responsible for within an environment that lacks so many social determinants of health. Using a methodological convergence of narrative, feminist and Indigenous methodologies within a post-colonial paradigm, I have explored how nine HIV+ African women story/experience their daily lives and participate in community activities. Consideration of the reality of the day to day experiences of HIV+ women living in an African slum settlement may offer insights for government, policy makers, and community-based and non-government organizations to better support and promote quality of life for those living with HIV/AIDS. / Graduate