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This paper critically evaluates the transition from crisis to development in northern Uganda from the perspective of agricultural service provision. It contributes to debates on how efforts to link relief to rehabilitation and development may bypass the underlying challenges in linking humanitarian aid to prevailing national development policies and structures. This paper is based on research into agricultural services undertaken in Pader district, northern Uganda, between 2010 and 2012. It studied the interplay between humanitarian interventions and the parallel development of the government's agricultural departments and services in northern Uganda. The article brings out how Ugandan agricultural policies do not suit the post-conflict realities of northern Uganda. The evolving policies affect power relations and processes of inclusion and exclusion in northern Uganda. As a result, at the time that the government is ready to integrate northern Uganda into the mainstream development of agricultural policy, the gap between addressing humanitarian needs and development has become larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microcredit transactions in developing countries create risks for borrowers that are routinely overlooked in the literature. This paper argues that common microfinance-lending methodologies that allow lenders to collateralize loans and unilaterally collect this security create opportunities for malicious lenders to steal from clients in good standing. In places where any lender can simply call itself a 'microfinance institution' (MFI), opportunistic lenders can use the halo effect associated with microfinance to encourage borrowers to make themselves unusually vulnerable to theft. Evidence of these abuses can be seen in a case study of Uganda, where theft and fraud by a small number of microfinance institutions created a large-scale crisis and contributed to a precipitous decline in trust in the financial sector as a whole. Even when it occurs only on the margins of the sector, I conclude, this type of opportunism may have problematic implications for all MFIs and undermine efforts to increase financial inclusion. This possibility provides a new impetus to consider innovative regulatory approaches for microfinance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uganda has experienced high economic growth rates over the past decade, averaging 5.4 % per year, while poverty rates have declined over 14 % points over 2002-2003 and 2009-2010. However, conventional wisdom is that the benefits of poverty reduction have not been distributed equally and some authors even question the large decline in poverty. This paper seeks to examine poverty trends across Uganda from 1995 to 2010 by using non-monetary indicators based on household assets, housing characteristics, and household size and composition. In a variation on poverty mapping methods, we select household characteristics that are available in four Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the 2005-2006 Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS). Using the UNHS data, we estimate household per capita expenditure as a function of these characteristics. Finally, these estimated equations are applied to the same characteristics from the DHS data to generate estimates of per capita expenditure, which are then converted to estimates of the incidence of poverty. The results confirm that the overall incidence of poverty has declined in Uganda over the past 15 years, but they show less progress than official expenditure-based estimates of poverty. We explore several explanations for this discrepancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on Uganda's experience during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-2005. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer (Round 4 Afrobarometer Survey in Uganda, , ), including information on socioeconomic characteristics at the individual level, and geo-referenced measures of fighting events from ACLED. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the both the spatial and ethnic intensity of fighting. We find that more intense fighting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The effects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and different statistical techniques involving ethnic and spatial fixed effects and instrumental variables. Controlling for the intensity of violence during the conflict, we also document that post-conflict economic recovery is slower in ethnically fractionalized counties. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between conflicts and ethnic cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many developing countries, especially in Africa, contribute only very small amounts to the world total of greenhouse gas emissions. For them, the reduction of such emissions is not a priority, and the more important issue is to find ways to reduce their vulnerability to the projected climate change which is being imposed upon them largely as a result of emissions from developed countries. This priority does not accord with the ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper reports upon studies in Uganda designed to help in the development of a national adaptation strategy, and addresses the need to reconcile such a strategy with the global priority accorded to mitigation and with national economic development priorities. Some features of a national climate change adaptation strategy are identified and questions are raised about the need for an international regime to facilitate and support adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether Ugandan women who marry at younger ages fare differently on a wide range of later-life outcomes than women who marry at later ages. Using a nationally representative data set, I identify the plausibly causal impacts of women's marriage age by using age at menarche as an instrumental variable. Results indicate that a one-year delay in marriage for Ugandan women leads to higher educational attainment (0.5-0.75 years), literacy (10 percentage points), and labor force participation (8 percentage points). I also explore intergenerational effects of later marriage and find that the children of mothers who marry later have higher BMI (0.11 kg/m2) and hemoglobin levels (0.18 g/dl), and they are also less likely to be anemic (4 percentage points). Finally, I present evidence suggesting that the observed effects might be mediated through an enhancement of women's agency within their household and positive assortative matching in the marriage market. By pointing to the beneficial consequences of delaying marriage, this research calls for concerted policy action to prevent child marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]