Rural development

This chapter advances goals 9 and 7 by discussing sustainable solar energy generation and storage for rural sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the ‘circular economy’.

Contributing to SDG 1 and SDG 2, this paper shows that despite progress in reducing extreme poverty, little progress has been made in reducing the number of people living on between $1.25 and $2 a day and it provides updated estimates of rural and urban poverty for regions throughout the developing world. Social protection programmes are a key way for governments to support the poor. Secondly, agricultural input subsidies are a key government tool for boosting agricultural production, especially that of smallholder farmers. This paper is one of the first to examine both social protection and agricultural input subsidies in alleviating poverty.

This study makes important links between SDG 2, SDG 5 and SDG 13 through its examination of how husbands and wives within the same household perceive climate risks and use group-based approaches as coping strategies. The findings indicate that options for adapting to climate change closely interplay with husbands' and wives' roles and responsibilities, social norms, risk perceptions and access to resources. A higher percentage of wives were found to adopt crop-related strategies, whereas husbands employ livestock- and agroforestry-related strategies.