Inefficient firewood and charcoal usage contributes massively to global greenhouse gas emissions and causes four million mortal diseases a year. Relative to other climate protection measures, public investments in the dissemination of improved biomass cooking stoves provide a very effective low cost measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More than three billion people in developing countries rely on inefficient cooking stoves fuelled by firewood and charcoal.

The idea for this book first originated in 2012 when writing a paper for a workshop for the University of Dar es Salaam Mwalimu Nyerere Chair on Development. More recently, it has been driven by the fact that, despite making some progress, the country continues to struggle in the seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty, disease, aid dependency, the dearth of infrastructure and corruption. These are challenges that policy-makers and the government grapple with day in day out.

We investigate the effect of remittances from migrated family members on informal inter-household transfers, an issue that has received limited attention in the literature. Using rich panel data from urban Ethiopia, we show that receiving international remittances increases the value of private domestic inter-household transfers, whereas receiving domestic remittances does not have any e ect.

This paper examines dependence on environmental resources and impacts on household welfare among the indigenous San and Mier rural communities neighbouring Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa. Data on the various household income types, including environmental income, were collected through a structured survey of 200 households. Environmental income constituted 20% of the total income. The poorest income quintile showed the highest relative dependence on environmental income (31%), though absolute environmental income increased with total income.

Previous studies of poverty in developing countries have to a great extent focused on the characteristics of the household head and used these as proxies for the underlying ability of the household to generate income. This paper uses five rounds of panel data to investigate the persistence of poverty in urban Ethiopia, with a particular focus on the role of intra-household heterogeneity in occupations.