All publications and documents

What are the major economic and social trends in Africa? What is Africa’s role in globalisation? This annual report presents an Africa open to the world and towards the future. Africa’s Development Dynamics uses the lessons learned in the five African regions – Central, East, North, Southern and West Africa – to develop recommendations and share good practices. The report identifies…

Sub-Saharan Africa's turnaround over the past couple of decades has been dramatic. After many years in decline, the continent's economy picked up in the mid-1990s. Along with this macroeconomic growth, people became healthier, many more youngsters attended schools, and the rate of extreme poverty declined from 54 percent in 1990 to 41 percent in 2015. Political and social freedoms expanded, and…

A new six-part cartoon highlights the links and synergies between education and many of the other Sustainable Development Goals. The cartoon shows the importance of different sectors working together to achieve their aims. This publication has been produced on the occasion of the 2019 High-Level Political Forum by the Global Education Monitoring Report and draws upon findings from reports…

Gum Arabic has been seen as a symbol of the “noble Orient” and later as a symbol of trouble. It is the hardened sap of varieties of acacia trees which grow exclusively in the Sahel, an area stretching across the African continent just south of the Sahara. From the time of the Crusades, when Europeans purchased it in Arab countries, it has played an ever-growing role in the global economy. It is…

The support plan for the Sahel is a regional approach to collectively address the root causes of disruptions such as poverty, migration and youth unemployment, climate change, insecurity, governance and institutional issues in the region. In this report an overview of the current situation for each of the priority areas of the UN Support Plan is presented to demonstrate that the full…

This paper presents a framework to analyse the political economy of rural youth policy and institutions’ opportunity space, with a quadrant that measures the extent to which rural youth are a priority in policies and institutions versus the extent to which the government has the capacity to effectively implement rural youth policies. It asks under what conditions policies focused on rural youth…