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...

Sub-Saharan African governments have made significant progress in developing domestic local currency bond markets over the last decade. While this bodes well for their countries’ economic resilience and facilitates necessary investments, many challenges remain.

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...

When New York University Professor William Easterly released his best-seller The White Man’s Burden, it was described by Simon Maxwell, then director of think tank ODI, as the only book in a chain of recent works that dared to go against what he called ‘the inevitable social-democratic...

This paper studies the current state and drivers of the development of government local currency bond markets (LCBMs) in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region whose progress in developing such markets has only recently received attention in the literature. We argue that well-developed LCBMs could reduce...