While the Congolese government is actively promoting large-scale industrial mining since it provides easy rents, artisanal mining seems to escape most attempts to control and regulate it. Yet artisanal mining provides employment and livelihoods to an estimated million people. This paper presents...

We study whether conflict had an impact on economic performance across Rwandan administrative sectors six years after end of massive violence. Economic performance is measured using household expenditure data from a nationwide survey. Conflict intensity is measured using an index of excess...

Le 9 et 10 octobre 2013, le Conseil des Ministres burundais a adopté un projet de loi portant modification de certaines dispositions de la Constitution du Burundi. Moins de deux ans avant les élections générales de 2015, cette démarche suscite de nombreuses interrogations. La présente...

Benin’s shrimp sector collapsed following a ban on its exports to the EU. The ban was imposed in July 2003 and resulted from the non-compliance with EU food safety standards. Strikingly, the sector did not revive, despite the lift of the ban in 2005 and considerable Aid for Trade flows. We...

The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda started on 7 April 1994. In a mere hundred days, three-quarters of the Tutsi minority was exterminated. At the beginning of the massacres, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) the rebel movement that invaded the country in October 1990 from Uganda and with...

Over the past years, there has been an increasing attention for the use of tradition-based or home-grown justice and reconciliation mechanisms in the aftermath of violent conflict. The Rwandan gacaca court system is often evoked in this global trend. The gacaca courts operated nationwide between...

Ivory poaching and trading in central and eastern Africa has recently received a lot of attention. On the one hand, there have been a number of analyses highlighted how ‘tusks fund terror’ for the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). On the other hand, there have been a wide range of news reports...

In May 1999, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, made an epochal transition to democratic civilian rule following roughly thirty-three years of military dictatorship. Since 1999, Nigeria has held four successive elections, which have all been (more or less) undermined by electoral...

Since the turn of the millennium the aid business has witnessed an important shift in the conceptualization and practice of aid delivery. The move towards harmonized and aligned approaches, including the need to make aid more predictable and flexible, introduced the budget support modality....