More than half of all people living with HIV are women and 80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determines current day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law Sub-Saharan African countries compared to civil law ones...

Monica Sharma and colleagues discuss evidence-based approaches to improving HIV services for men in sub-Saharan Africa.

The skill set of a plastic surgeon, which addresses a broad range of soft tissue conditions that are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, remains relevant in the unmet need for surgical care. Recently, there has being a major paradigm shift from discipline-based to disease-based care, resulting in an emerging component of patient-centered care; adequate access to subspecialty care in plastic and re...

This study investigates the role of wealth in infant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa, hereafter (SSA). Using recent data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), we document the differences that exit within urban and between urban and rural residents in Sub-Saharan Africa based on wealth. Our findings lead us to conclude that there is a statistical significant difference both within urban res...

Commodity price shocks are an important type of external shock and are often cited as a problem for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper quantifies the impact of agricultural commodity price shocks using a near vector autoregressive model. The novel aspect of this model is that we define an auxiliary variable that can potentially capture the definition of a price shock that allows ...

How can we conceptually grasp social policies on the macro level in sub-Saharan Africa? Decommodification and defamilialisation, two key concepts of EspingAndersen’s seminal typology, are not very helpful to distinguish welfare regimes in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, typologies that have been developed for the Global South hardly consider social stratification. In conclusion, there is no typol...

Fertility in sub-Saharan Africa stood at 5.1 births per woman in 2005–10 (United Nations 2011), more than double the replacement level. It is not likely to decline at a fast sustained pace unless a large and growing number of couples is willing and able to use modern contraception. It is true that the ‘unmet need’ for contraception still remains high in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite the wid...

The disadvantaged position of women due to higher poverty incidence and unequal power relationships with men and the wider community has been a source of debate over the past several decades. In many parts of the world (for example, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) women are the main farmers or producers. In Uganda (broadly illustrative of sub-Saharan Africa) 75 percent of agricultural produc...

Growth, History, or Institutions? What Explains State Fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of fragility, even...

The increasing numbers of people with type 2 diabetes is a worldwide concern. It presents an added challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, where diabetes must compete for resources with communicable diseases. A scarcity of financial resources and appropriate staff mean that many people with type 2 diabetes have complications and that those with type 1 diabetes have an extremely short life-expectancy, ...