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.
In this paper the authors use a series of credit and insurance simulation games to test the role of access to credit and insurance on magnitude and timing of farm technology uptake with small-scale farmers in South Africa. Using Cumulative Prospect Theory, they assess how insurance impacts technology uptake given risk preferences. Their findings suggest that risk aversion is linked to lower uptake of the insured technology. while loss averse farmers are more likely to adopt technology bundled with insurance.
SiriusXM Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School recently had a segment on the Cape Town water crisis. Host Don Loney of the Knowledge@Wharton show discussed the current situation in Cape Town and what it tells us about the future of water in a changing climate with guests Carolyn Kousky of the Wharton Risk Center, Kevin Winter of the Unive
Martine Visser talks about Cape Town's water saving measures on a local radio station.