Mobile remittances have a high development potential as they hold the promise of providing quick, easy and cheap money transfers. In Africa mobile phone usage has increased sharply and mobile banking providers are extending their services, enabling greater opportunities for mobile remittances....

Knowledge brokering has been explored in the innovation literature to understand how different innovation tasks are organised toward technological development. This paper reflects upon the role of different organisations as knowledge brokers in regulatory policy processes towards putting...

How responsive are remittances to various disasters, both natural and human-made? And would remittances be affected by systemic financial crises (such as the 2008/09 financial crisis)? Using panel data on 23 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1980 to 2007, we find that...

This paper is a synthesis of research undertaken as part of the Research Into Use programme (RIU) to explore the question of how agricultural research can be used more effectively to improve agricultural production and farmers' livelihoods in developing countries. Many of the challenges the...

Drawing insights from firm-level survey, this paper addresses three broad issues relating to the role of learning and knowledge in African industry. First, we examined modes of learning proxied by training in small and medium firms. We found that elementary learning mechanisms such as...

Translating R&D and inventive efforts into a market product is characterized by significant financial skills, and the ability to overcome technical and instititonal barriers. Research into and translation of new technologies such as biotechnology products to the market requires even greater...

This study focuses on innovation in a cluster of informal shoemaking firms in Ethiopia - namely the Mercato footwear cluster. It examines how differently those firms are embedded in networks and how heterogeneous they are in absorptive capacity, and how this heterogeneity affects their...

This paper explains the importance of IPRs and examines the factors hindering and those contributing toward enhancing IPRs in Sudan. We find that the inadequacy of IPRs protection in Sudan is attributed to low integration in the international institutions, lack of legal issues, lack of...

Using empirical and new field data, this exploratory study investigates the pattern of adoption of constraints to the use of the Internet in Africa. Cross country exercise using regression shows that Internet use is constrained by structural as well as cost-related factors. Field data from...

In this paper, we propose that historically generated institutions and persistent pattern of human capital formation conditions the emergent systems of innovation in Africa. These effectively determine the development trajectory of the region. We advance the notion of dynamic and non-dynamic...