The Urgent Need for Financial Reform to Mobilise Savings in Sub-Saharan Africa
By Sedat Aybar and Costas Lapavitsas
A highly unsatisfactory mobilisation of savings by the liberalised financial systems of Sub-Saharan Africa has severely constrained investment and growth in the region. To a large degree, Sub-Saharan savings are directed towards non-financial assets and the informal financial sector because:
• one can demonstrate status and wealth this way
• the financial environment is typically risky
• there are few formal options
• minimum deposit and balance requirements as well as the time and administrative effort needed to access the formal sector are too high
The paper highlights the need of improvements in access, adequacy and reliability of financial assets as well as more effective public mechanisms to mobilise savings.
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The Paris Declaration, Women's Rights and Gender Equality
By Cecilia Alemany, Nerea Craviotto, Fernanda Hopenhaym, With Ana Lidia Fernández-Layos, Cindy Clark and Sarah Rosenhek
This paper argues that the Paris Declaration (PD) is gender blind, and as a result, it becomes an unjust and unequal framework for understanding and implementing the aid effectiveness agenda.
The PD relies on a range of “new†aid modalities (budget support, sector wide approaches, poverty reduction strategy papers, basket funding and join assistance strategies). These modalities raise concerns in terms of the possibilities for real civil society participation in influencing development plans and funding for development, limited capacities to play an informed role in shaping and monitoring budgets, persistent conditionalities imposed by donors, and fears that “country ownership†in contexts of warm political commitment to gender equality will translate in far-reduced donor support for women’s rights.
The paper claims the need of a holistic approach that integrates parallel efforts (such as those by several donors to analyse in depth the relationship between aid effectiveness and gender equality) as part of the monitoring of the impact of the PD. Finally, it offers several recommendations to strengthen a gender equality dimension in the aid effectiveness agenda
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