Access to finance has been considered to be one of the important factors in influencing firms’ real activities and in promoting aggregates. However, literature on the relationship between finance and firm-level productivity is almost non-existent for African countries. This paper fills this gap by using cross-sectional firm-level data to estimate the effect of access to finance on labour productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), and the stochastic frontier trans-log model. This study also estimates an instrumental variable model - two-stage least square estimator to address potential endogeneity bias between access to credit and firms’ productivity. The results obtained show that the lack of access to finance, especially overdraft facilities negatively affects the productivity of firms in Africa. Also, smaller firms and sole-proprietorships are mostly affected because they have less access to finance. This study suggests that the development of a balanced financial system should be of topmost priority to policy makers. This ensures that more finance is channelled towards those firms whose productivity depends heavily on the availability of finance irrespective of their characteristics. This would result in firms increasing their investments in productivity-enhancing activities, which would benefit long-term economic growth.

Ending (extreme) poverty in all of its forms everywhere around the world continues to dominate the International Development Agenda (UN 2015). However, while poverty is declining in much of the developing world, data from the World Development Report (WDR) Conflict, Security, and Development reveal that fragile and conflict-affected states are lagging behind. The report points out that 'Poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence over the last three decades. Indeed, with the worlds extreme poor over represented in fragile and conflict-affected ,some authors argue that violent conflict is development in reverse

Similar to most sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Nigeria has a huge infrastructure deficit which considerably limits efforts towards achieving inclusive growth, sustainable development, and poverty reduction. With infrastructure stock estimated at 20-25 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Nigerias infrastructure stock is still significantly lower than the recommended international benchmark of 70 per cent of GDP. The 2014 National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIMP) estimates that a total of US$ 3 trillion of investments, or US$100 billion annually, is required over the next 30 years to bridge Nigerias infrastructure gap. In particular, the Plan estimates that Nigeria will have to spend an annual average of US$ 33 billion infrastructure investments for the period 2014 -2018. This means that Nigeria will have to more than double its spending on infrastructure from the current 2-3 per cent of GDP to around 7 per cent to make appreciable progress in infrastructure development over the next three decades.

Although electricity has been generated in commercial quantities in Nigeria for over a century, the rate of electricity infrastructure development in the county is low and power supply remains inadequate. Prior to reforms, the central challenges of the Nigerian power sector was the vertically integrated monopoly of government in power generation, transmission and distribution. While the reforms was successful in privatizing the generation and distribution segments of the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), the overbearing problems in the sector persists –with privatization only changing the dimensions of the challenges.

Financing remain a major problem across all the segments of the NESI partly due to non-cost reflective tariff. Yet each segment of the NESI also faces its unique challenges. The generation segment is riffed with the problems of energy security and inefficiencies in other segments. The challenges in the transmission segment lies in the lack of modern transmission lines and equipment, gross mismanagement, poor maintenance of available infrastructure and inefficient grid design. Distribution companies face the problem of huge Aggregate Technical, Commercial, and Collection (ATC&C) losses.

In terms of electricity access, 46.09 percent of the Nigerian population remains unconnected to the national grid, representing 83.98 million people. Further, electricity demand is estimated at 24,380 MW as at 2015 compared to NESI’s available generation capacity of 7,139.6 MW. In terms of energy use, Nigeria has the lowest in the world – 80 percent below its energy use based on income levels.

In a bid to tackle aforementioned challenges, the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) set ambitious targets for the country’s energy mix. This should allow Nigeria exploit its potential for coal, solar, wind, biomass, as well as small and large hydroelectric power electric generation, while reducing the prevalence of self-generation, which constitute two-thirds of present energy mix. By 2020, the FGN targets to achieve up to 75 percent access to electricity by connecting 1.5 million households annually. While Nigeria’s energy mix targets are desirable, the prospect of success remain bleak on account of financial constraints, pricing policy and lack of policy coordination.

Improving electricity supply in Nigeria and addressing barriers to achieving the energy mix targets will entail: addressing payment risk, financing power sector investment, as well as improving the pricing and tariff structure, gas pricing and allocation, and market regulation.

This paper examines the determinants of educational achievement in a developing country context, Burkina Faso. We deviate from the extant literature by constructing an aggregate index of school quality from the observable school resources. Also, we account for school choice constraints, faced by children especially in rural areas, as it relates to the geographical inequalities in the distribution of quality schools. These treatments provide an unbiased estimates of the relevance of school resources for academic performance. The empirical approach is based on a two-stage procedure that accounts for supply constraints in school choice.