Some of the results of the imaginative response to the crisis have been the virtual ubiquity of households–and even individuals–holding several jobs (formal and informal) at the same time; the proliferation of small-scale commerce; and the relatively higher levels of success of female-headed households than male-headed households (among lower-income families).25 In Abidjan, the largest city (popul. [...] As Mamadou Diouf describes the movement, Set/Setal is the mobilization of human effort for the purpose of cleansing in the sense of sanitation and hygiene, but also in the moral sense of the fight against cor- ruption, prostitution, and delinquency. [...] The ratio between the lowest and the highest region is in the order of 1:182, while the ratio between per-capita income in sub-Saharan Africa and that of the “high income” countries based on World Development Report figures for 1993 is 1:44.41 In the very poorest countries, very few services can be supplied to urban dwellers by local governments, regardless of the degree or effective- ness of dece. [...] The policy repertoire of the new millennium encompasses stories of associational life, images of decentral- ized governance, mandates of community will, and the ideals of “heroic entrepreneurship.”1 In a world able to reimagine and remake itself, academic scholars and policymakers have become the organizers of democracy and governance, the purveyors of social energy. [...] But this is work in the context of a violent economic restructuring that has scorched labor markets and has left the urban poor at the mercy of the market and now the market in the form of the state.
- Pages
- 156
- Published in
- Canada
