Regional integration in Africa is underway but ongoing progress requires that the gains are widely spread. South Africa’s huge regional trade surplus in manufactured goods is already leading to protectionist pressures in neighbouring countries.

Agro-processing is a large sector, which is widely regarded as having significant potential, but the export performance of the region has been quite poor if South Africa is excluded.

Pervasive threats of climate change and land degradation have compounded the low farm productivity problem inherent in sub-Saharan Africa. Though sustainable agricultural intensification practices have been shown to improve resilience of farm production in the face of these emerging threats, they suffer low adoption rates typical of technology adoption in these regions. Recent evidence shows the emergence of large grain traders in the smallholder farm output markets.

Until recently, women have not been seen as having the potential for entrepreneurial success. Yet women’s engagement in the energy sector could substantially improve energy access for those most underserved. This article examines the role of women as energy entrepreneurs from the perspective of gender inequality within the energy industry.

This paper evaluates the impact of the Purchase 4 Progress (P4P) intervention implemented by World Food Program in Ethiopia on per capita income as well as across sub-social groups. The intervention is intended to improve the market power of smallholder farmers through cooperatives that has the potential to increase the relative farm gate price of agricultural produce, particularly staple crops. Using a semi-parametric difference-indifference (DID) model, which relaxes the parallel trend assumption, we show that the P4P intervention has raised per capita consumption of smallholders.

We investigate the behavioural responses of resource users to policy interventions like sanctioned quotas and information provisioning. We do so in a context when multiple resources (pastures and wild animal stocks) are connected and could substantially and drastically deteriorate as a result of management. We perform an experimental study among communities that are managing common pool wildlife in Zimbabwe.

When it comes to securing Cape Town’s future water supply, clearing alien plants from within the key water catchments will bring a better return on investment than building desalination plants.

South Africa has been in the grip of one of the worst droughts in decades with eight provinces having been declared disaster areas (all provinces except for Gauteng). The news that Cape Town could be the first major city in the world to run out of drinking water made headlines across the world in the beginning of 2018. In 2016, the University of Cape Town (‘UCT’) in collaboration with the Water Research Commission (‘WRC’) and the City of Cape Town (‘CoCT’) concluded a large-scale study on the impact of nudging to motivate water conservation amongst residential households in Cape Town.

In 2015, Malawi became one of Africa’s first countries to impose a ban on plastic bags, following global concerns around the environmental damages caused by single-use plastics and joining a surge of policy instruments to deal with the issue in Africa. However, this led to a backlash from the business community, who argued in court that the ban would lead to economic costs and job losses, following which Malawi stopped implementing the Environment Management (Plastics) Regulations of 2015 in accordance with a court order.

Development largely depends on how given places participate in global economic processes. The contributions to this book address various features of the integration of sub-Saharan Africa into the world economy via value chains, so as to explain corresponding challenges and opportunities.