Rural African communities are largely characterised by high levels of unemployment and poverty, low skills levels and a heavy reliance on natural resources. Increasing populations, together with the impacts of climate change, are putting pressure on natural resources and the issue of sustainable land use is becoming critically important. Ecotourism is one possible sustainable land use which can also assist with both local socioeconomic development and biodiversity conservation.

Rising prices of fossil fuels, together with apprehension about the environmental harm created by them, have resulted in increasing efforts to search for alternative energy sources such as biofuels. Biofuels production is still a debatable issue regarding the opportunities it creates and the challenges it poses.

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.

Recent economic growth in Tanzania has not been matched by a corresponding reduction in poverty when compared with similar episode of growth in countries such as Uganda, Ghana, etc. This has raised heated debate, whereby some analysts argue that problem lies on the GDP is compiled, and other on the validity of Household Budget Survey (HBS) data. This paper contributes to that debate by  analyzing the distribution of upper tail observation using he Generalized Pareto Distributions show that HBS 2007 is characterized by extreme values of per capita expenditure when compares to 2001.

Using data spanning 15 years, we study subjective and consumption poverty in urban Ethiopia. Despite rapid economic growth and declining consumption poverty, subjective poverty remains largely unchanged.

This is a PhD dissertation by Haileselassie Medhin and containing seven self-contained papers:

Tourism in southern Africa is based on the region’s wildlife and nature assets and is generally environmentally sustainable, but the extent to which it contributes to other aspects of sustainable development — overall income generation or poverty eradication — is less well explored.