The European Investment Bank (EIB) has been investing in Africa since 1963, placing the measurement of development impact at the very core of its business approach.
In Nigeria the lack of a reliable, affordable power supply is a major problem facing micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), resulting in reliance on diesel generators that are both expensive and harmful to health and the environment through noise and air pollution.
Nigeria has a large demand base for retail goods, even though approximately 83 million people (40% of the total population) lived below the poverty line.
Microfinance institutions are a crucial lifeline for poorer people in Haiti. Most households and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises cannot access credit through formal financial institutions such as commercial banks, partly because of their inability to meet the standards for loan approval
Access to finance plays a crucial role in business development, sustainability and growth. However, the lack of or insufficient access to credit for medium, small and micro-enterprises (MSMEs) is widespread in developing and emerging countries.
With more than 500 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, mobile phones now provide a cheaper and quicker way for businesses to communicate with customers through mobile customer relationship management (mCRM) systems.
Senegal has only around 3.1 nurses and midwives per 10,000 people, which makes it one of the countries least covered with qualified maternal care in the world (162th out of 187 countries).
In Benin, as elsewhere in Africa, improving agricultural productivity is a priority for economic transformation and for food security, especially since annual population growth in Benin is higher than overall agricultural growth per year. Innovations offered by financial services providers who are relaxing smallholder farmers’ credit constraints have led to promising results.
According to the African Development Bank (2013), the SME sector including microenterprises contributes about 33% of gross GDP and up to 45% of total employment in Africa – thus playing a major role in alleviating poverty.
Many developing countries, including Kenya, are looking not only to expand access to ICT, but also to use the increased internet access to catalyze increased access to information for the education sector and improve the achievements of Kenya’s children.
The young, the educated and the better-off have been early adopters of mobile money technology. Mobile banking and mobile payment systems have been rapidly developing in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. In Ethiopia, only about 5.2% of the adult population uses mobile money. The first mobile money service in Ethiopia, M-BIRR, launched commercially in 2015.
Since the 1970s when major methodological advancements in the measurement of inequality and progressivity emerged, there has been a huge empirical interest in evaluating how fiscal systems affect income distribution. This paper uses a micro approach to calculate indices and their decompositions, by analyzing differences in incomes, taxes, and benefits for pairs of income units.
The natural resource wealth of a country can be a curse or a blessing for the country’s economic development. This study investigates the relationship between commodity dependence and fiscal capacity. A detailed theoretical model is offered, which predicts that higher natural resource rents lead to lower investment in fiscal capacity.
Transition countries in the Balkans and neighboring regions are often constrained in their fiscal policies. This study looks into three dimensions: (i) sustainability in terms of the snowball effect and the level of public debt financial markets are comfortable with, (ii) structural and cyclical balances, and (ii) fiscal risks associated with implicit or contingent fiscal liabilities.
This study applies a micro-simulation model that allows counting for both formal and informal employment, to investigate the implications of a flat-tax regime on informal employment
This paper evaluates microfinance efforts in Senegal and The Gambia, and points to policy measures that can enhance poverty reduction through microfinance.
This paper consolidates large volumes of published and gray literature on agricultural commercialization in order to provide a concise source for policymakers
