This volume reviews Africa's past experiences of social policy, with an eye on the future. Contributions examine a range of social policy issues around healthcare, education, the labour market and social welfare, and highlight important conceptual and policy issues for rebuilding Africa.

This volume reviews Africa's past experiences of social policy, with an eye on the future. Contributions examine a range of social policy issues around healthcare, education, the labour market and social welfare, and highlight important conceptual and policy issues for rebuilding Africa.

This work provides a complete up-to-date guide and introduction to the increasingly important role of social policy in the context of development processes and practice.

Although international development discourse considers the state as a crucial development actor, there remains a significant discrepancy between the official norms of the state and public services and the actual practices of political elites and civil servants. This text interrogates the variety of ways in which state policies and legal norms have been translated into the set of practical norms which make up real governance in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the concept of practical norms is an appropriate tool for an ethnographic investigation of public bureaucracies, interactions between civil servants and users, and the daily functioning of the state in Africa. It demonstrates that practical norms are usually different from official norms, complementing, bypassing and even contradicting them. In addition, it explores the positive and negative effects of different aspects of this ‘real governance’. This text will be of key interest to academics, students and researchers in the fields of development, political science, anthropology and development studies, African studies, international comparative studies, implementation studies, and public policy.

Despite the recent growth of research on social problems facing the people of sub-Saharan Africa, there remains a critical lack of conceptual, epistemological, and empirical research and documentation. This sophisticated new book attempts to fill that gap by synthesizing, interpreting, and extending the existing literature on conditions that constitute serious impediments to socio-economic development in Africa. It provides an original and up-to-date survey of key problems ranging from poverty and inequality to violence and crime. The contributors, all of whom have lived or worked in Africa, show how social problems emerge, how they are defined, and how various actors attempt to deal with them. This timely book provides a much needed analysis of the major issues and debates regarding the dynamics of social problems in the African context. Social Problems in Africa is broken into four parts. The first introduces readers to the nature of social problems in general and provides a framework for analyzing and understanding social problems in an African context. Part II, on culture, human rights and democracy, examines these crucial aspects of social problems in Africa, as well as issues such as language and colonialism. Part III focuses on poverty and inequality, while conflict and violence is the focus of Part IV. Together, the chapters in this volume provide the most comprehensive and systematic approach to the issues available, bringing much-needed attention to the problems in Africa from the perspective of scholars who have lived and worked there.

Examines the political dimensions of economic policy making in the 1970s and 1980s.

This report summarises the results of work at the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet/Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) on the impact of structural adjustment implementation on the economies, states and societies of sub-Saharan Africa. It consists of two essays and an appendix listing research projects which have been/are being carried out under the auspices of NAI. The first essay raises a series of conceptual and methodological questions in the context of a presentation of some of the main empirical results obtained from extended field work carried out during the course of 1992 and 1993 in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The second essay presents the three main themes - private trading networks and structures, the changing political economy of land, and popular forms of social provisioning - that constitute the core of the second phase of NAI's structural adjustment research and, in so doing, provides a review of aspects of the adjustment literature. This report is, therefore, an attempt both at stock-taking and agenda-building as part of a wider quest for deepening our understanding of the structures and processes of socio-economic change associated with the crisis and adjustment years in contemporary Africa