Search results for ""The Nordic Africa Institute""

In the past, the transition from childhood to womanhood was immediate and direct, and menarche was a sign of initiation and readiness to marry. Nowadays girls find themselves trapped between customary expectations and the claims of modernization. This title by the Teenage Girls and Reproductive Health Study Group at the university of Dar es Salaam presents empirical studies of the situation of teenage girls in Tanzania.

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Are there ways and means of measuring democracy and "good governance"? The contributions to this Discussion Paper present attempts to do this by means of surveys on democratic attitudes in Mozambique and Namibia respectively, as well as by exploring the degree of commitment to and violation of human rights in a comparative perspective in Namibia and South Africa. They illustrate attitudes by offering empirical evidence of the preferences and views of local people, as well as by examining the track record of a human rights culture. In doing so, by going beyond a level of theoretical analysis, they offer concrete evidence of attitudes prevalent among both individuals and state agencies in societies of Southern Africa.

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Finland's special characteristics as a Nordic, non-aligned welfare state gave it the resources and motivation to support liberation movements - in spite of restrictions arising from trade interests and a reluctance to jeopardise the country's neutral image. The study shows that, although it is not an easy task, in a democracy ordinary, dedicated people can, over time, influence political decision making at its most closed and guarded area, foreign politics.

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This anthology aims at increasing the understanding of current management practices in Africa, and the challenges faced in building institutions. Two main themes run throughout the title: one is the character of African organisations with their strengths and weaknesses, while the other is the experience of close cooperation with an African organisation. Together the authors create a picture of institutional development work in Africa and its enormous complexity.

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This book describes and documents the development of Danish support to national liberation in Southern Africa and the two-sided humanitarian and political character of this support. It is based on previously restricted Danish ministry records and on NGO archives and interviews.The Nordic countries were unique in the Western world in their support to individuals, organisations and refugees, struggling to end institutionalised colonialism and racism and alleviate their humanitarian consequences. Nordic support was humanitarian and civilian, and to a large extent was given to refugees and to education. Increasingly, it came to involve national liberation movements and financial support to their civilian activities, at a time when these movements were politically and militarily struggling against the regimes in their countries-including the government of Portugal, a NATO military partner of Norway and Denmark.Danish support developed differently from that of the other Nordic countries. Official support was never given directly to liberation movements. Rather, Danish NGOs were employed to advise on Danish allocations and to distribute these allocations and carry out activities, using their own capacity or through their international networks. In the field of sanctions, Denmark shifted from a policy of awaiting a UN Security Council decision to imposing unilateral trade sanctions as the first Western country to do so, and the book analyses the political developments behind this.The study seeks to determine the events, rationales, arguments and decisions that led to the various forms of Danish support. Key questions are how Danish support was established as a purely humanitarian facility that later developed into supporting also the liberation movements, and how boycott was first considered to be an issue for the individual but eventually became national, official policy.

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The contributions to this Discussion Paper were prepared for a workshop on "Africa in the new millennium" held in Stockholm in May 2001. The idea of the workshop was not to counter "negative" perceptions of Africa with "positive" ones. Nor was it to arrive at finalised ideas or prescriptions for governments or the continent as a whole. The aim was to raise important questions, which may help contextualise and deal with the problems facing the continent. It was an attempt to go below the surface of immediate crises and open up a debate around Africa and its international relations. It is hoped that publication of these papers will encourage further debate, and contribute towards realising the goal of African recovery.

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This title is the outcome of a conference on common security and civil society in Africa. The contributions seek to go beyond the "war of images" to imagine a different and more secure future. They are concerned with five different themes: economic and social change; prevention of violent conflicts; the causes of conflict; political security, and the international politics of development partnership.

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Many scholars from the Southern African region and the Nordic countries contributed to a conference in Harare, Zimbabwe in Septemer 21-23, 1988, arranged at the initiative of the Southern African Research Association (SADRA) and the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies (SIAS). The conference theme was "Regional Co-operation in Southern Africa with a Post-Apartheid Perspective". The main objective was to initiate research co-operation between Nordic and Southern African researchers. The papers form the main part of these proceedings and cover a wide area of topics, from regional co-operation in the field of information and the role of non-governmental organizations, to shipping structures, industrial development, and analyses of Nordic aid to the SADCC region, as well as the regional policy of South Africa. The proceedings also include conclusions from the discussions on future research co-operation and lists of topics identified by the conference as relevant for common research.

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Zambia is highly dependent on copper exports, which makes the country very vulnerable to fluctuations in its price. From independence in 1964 until the mid-1970s Zambia had reasonable growth, largely resulting from on good revenues from copper exports, but it remained a highly dualistic economy. In the 1970s the country was hit by oil-crises and by a copper-bust, which dramatically changed the fortunes of the country. Since the government assumed that the fall in copper prices was a temporary setback, they chose to avoid serious adjustment measures, and instead borrowed money on the international financial markets. It is from this period onward that Zambia's large debt was built up. From 1983 the government initiated some stabilisation and structural adjustment measures, with very limited success. This study first discusses the structural problems Zambia and the policies of adjustment that have been tried. It then uses a computable general equilibrium model to analyse the impact of various strategies with regard to external resource transfers. It compares the impacts of foreign loans or grants to the private and the public sectors, as well as the impact of a turnaround of the country's fortunes with regard to its external terms of trade. The results of the policy analysis show that the scope for growth is highly dependent on the tightness of the external resource constraint. Of course, many of the growth constraints are domestic in nature, but a relaxation of the foreign exchange constraint will also make it easier to address the domestic policy problems. With the debt burden that Zambia carries, debt service tends to dominate the policy-making machinery.

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This study follows the textile industry through periods of oil boom, structural adjustment and liberalization. The focus is on the successful institutionalization of the trade union based labour regime.'

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A study about conflicts between men and women in contemporary Kisii, Kenya. The author argues that male identity, sense of worth and prestige have been more deeply affected by socio-economic change than that of female identity. The study emphasizes the need to examine in depth changing African social contexts within collapsing traditional structures.

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Examines how regional integration can resolve the crises of the Greater Horn of Africa, exploring how it can be used as a mechanism for conflict resolution, promoting the economy and tackling issues of identity and citizenship. The Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) is engulfed by three interrelated crises: various inter-state wars, civil wars, and inter-communal conflicts; an economic crisis manifested in widespread debilitating poverty, chronic food insecurity and famines; and environmental degradation that is ravaging the region. While it is apparent that the countries of the region are unlikely to be able to deal with the crises individually, there is consensus that their chances of doing so improve markedly with collective regional action. The contributors to this volume address the need for regional integration in the GHA. They identify those factors that can foster integration, such as the proper management of equitable citizenship rights, as well as examining those that impede it, including the region's largely ineffective integration scheme, IGAD, and explore how the former can be strengthened and the latter transformed; explain how regional integration can mitigate the conflicts; and examine how integration can help to energise the region's economy. Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Penn State University; Redie Bereketeab is a researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden.

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