Report presents grassroots women’s approaches to access justice with a focus on land and property rights in Africa. This community empowerment-based research undertaken by the Huairou Commission and its partner groups across 7 African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – showcases women’s rights challenges and effective strategies to improve women’s access to justice. These groups are making an impact through strategies such as community mapping exercises, local-to-local dialogues, and developing community watchdogs and training community paralegals.

Economic, agronomic, and biophysical
drivers affect global land use, so all three influences need
to be considered in evaluating economically optimal
allocations of the world's land resources. A dynamic,
forward-looking optimization framework applied over the
course of the coming century shows that although some
deforestation is optimal in the near term, in the absence of
climate change regulation, the desirability of further

Strong boy-bias and its consequences for
young and unborn girls have been widely documented for Asia.
This paper considers a country in Sub-Saharan Africa and
finds that parental gender preferences do affect fertility
behavior and shape traditional social institutions with
negative effects on adult women's health and
well-being. Using individual-level data for Nigeria, the
paper shows that, compared to women with first-born sons,

A data set of key macro-sustainability
indicators, constructed after several fact-finding missions,
and World Bank methodologies on estimating wealth accounting
are used to study Mauritania's wealth, which is
estimated to be between USD50 and USD60 billion. The
country's produced wealth represents roughly 12 percent
of total wealth, much less than in lower-middle-income
countries; by contrast, natural wealth represents

Urbanization is undoubtedly a key driver
of development -- cities provide the national platform for
prosperity, job creation, and poverty reduction. But
urbanization also poses enormous challenges that one is
familiar with: congestion, air pollution, social divisions,
crime, the breakdown of public services and infrastructure,
and the slums that one billion urban resident's call
home. Urbanization is perhaps the single most important

This paper presents a somewhat novel
approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems.
It develops linked models to capture connections between
resource stocks and flows and the resulting microeconomic
and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed
that is imbedded into a computable general equilibrium (CGE)
model. Incorporating imperfect regulation, the bioeconomic
model characterizes optimal policies, while the CGE model

Cities emerge from the spatial
concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial
concentration is not enough; the economic viability of
cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly
across the urban area. This constant movement within dense
cities creates wealth but also various degrees of
unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative
externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and

Many developing countries display
remarkably high degrees of urban concentration that are
incommensurate with their levels of urbanization. The cost
of excessively high levels of urban concentration can be
very high in terms of overpopulation, congestion, and
productivity growth. One strand of the theoretical
literature suggests that such high levels of concentration
may be the result of restrictive trade policies that trigger

The first paper of this section
(Durand-Laserve) documents how increasing pressures on urban
land and the 'commodification' of shelter and
settlement has increased 'market evictions' of
families holding intermediate tide to property, although
international declarations and pressures have contributed to
reducing 'forced evictions.' The second paper
(Mooya and Cloete) uses the tools of the New Institutional

Guest commentary by Kent Elbow, Independent Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist.

This report is the first to examine
tourism in Africa comprehensively and regionally and the
first to recommend practical, evidence-based measures
enabling the sector s economic and development power. This
gives new impetus to the continent s development progress by
leveraging tourism in pursuit of lasting poverty alleviation
and the creation of significantly more jobs and
opportunities for all Africans.