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This paper proposes a broad set of conditions for effective foreign aid that can promote sustained economic growth and development in Africa in line with the African Continental Free Area (AfCFTA) programme of “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want”. It argues that lenders should insist on guarantees that borrowing African countries will use loans, grants and technical assistance for projects and programmes that advance regional economic linkages – tacitly the AfCFTA programme. The assertion is that this ‘good’ aid conditionality ensures discernible economic diversification that creates sustainable and decent employment – the essence of economic development. The proposed form of aid conditionality carries broad theory, policy, and practice lessons to the development aid discourse.

The adverse impacts of climate change are not always immediately discernible. Managing the impacts of this dynamic phenomenon demands an equally dynamic policy regime instead of the traditional and often static policy response mechanisms. The traditional policy responses are often a result of long consultative processes sometimes stretching over several years. Frequently, this generates obsolete policy responses. In this chapter, we propose the development of a dynamic policy and legislation formulation and implementation system that respond to dynamic disturbances such as climate change. The proposal draws from natural systems that have been constantly evolving over aeons. The proposed approach uses the systems lens of biomimicry positing that lessons from natural systems can be mimicked using models that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor changes through analysing and learning from Big Data and utilising rapid feedback loops to subsequently self-improve policy response mechanisms. Hypothetically under this approach, some key indicators for climate change and related hazards, exposure, risks and vulnerability can be tracked and material policy changes automatically made to appropriately to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change thus avoiding the pitfalls of the traditional protracted policy change routes.

Increasing energy demand arises from increasing urbanisation and industrialisation. If this energy is from traditional energy sources, then this translates into increased greenhouse gas emissions which lead to accelerated global warming and climate change. Sustainable development could avert this. This paper discusses the link between urbanisation, economic development and climate change through a review of literature examining this nexus in a global and the Nigerian context. The findings lead to the reiteration of the old call for economic diversification in Nigeria and other similar countries to shift urbanisation from a rural push mode to an urban pull mode. More important is that the shift should be powered by the efficient use of both non-renewable and renewable energy sources.

This research sought to determine the most readily available modes of innovation in South Africa and Nigeria to exploit both conventional and renewable energy sources, in order to generate adequate and reliable electricity as part of meeting sustainable development objectives. The research analysed a variety of documents and made two important findings. First, the two countries’ innovation abilities lag those of competing economies, most notable China. Second, despite limitations, both countries have exhibited innovation abilities that can be applied to increase the supply of sustainable, adequate and reliable electricity. The study concludes that, despite limited capacity to innovate at the technology frontier, both countries could alternatively exploit adaptation and commercial scale-up innovation modes to drive their sustainable development agendas.

The essence of green economy transition is resource efficiency for improved economic, environmental and human well-being. For primary commodity-endowed developing countries, this reflects a call for industrialisation to reduce economic dependence on primary commodities. The now desired ‘green’ industrialisation makes the industrialisation process a double structural transformation for developing economies. The technological and pecuniary barriers of such a transformation render market allocations unlikely to efficiently and speedily facilitate the process. Through an analysis of discourses in the industrialisation and green economy transition spaces, this paper argues a case for green industrial policy in developing countries. It finds merit for a temporal and scope limited green industrial policy regime as a plausible route to green industrialisation in developing countries. It concludes that industrial policy is most effective when the dominant policy regime limits or prevents rent-seeking practices and only supports interventions that confer systemic competitiveness and efficiency.

This is a study of backward linkages in emerging mineral economies in Sub-Saharan Africa as a potential driver of industrial development in the region. The study covers two sub-sectors namely the exploration and production in a case study of Tanzania?s large-scale gold mining operations. For data collection, the study used open-ended interviews, semi-structured interviews, observations and reviewed relevant secondary documents. Based on the two case-studies, the study makes the following broad findings: (i) the Tanzanian large-scale gold mining sector is dominated by multinational companies (MNCs), (ii) the MNCs source high critical and high complex goods and services mostly through long established external supply channels. Local content is limited to low critical products, such as food and beverages, (iii) there is virtually no local value-added in imported high critical and high complex goods and services, and (iv) there is higher volume of local content in the exploration sub-sector than in the production sub-sector. The study concludes that linkages are determined by both public and private sector policies. The main public policy problem is government failure to translate and implement long-term macro policy vision (Vision 2025) to sectoral policies (the mining sector policy) with appropriate sanctions and incentives. And the main private policy problem is the external suppliers driven outsourcing strategy.