Since July 2019, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth has been funding a project dedicated to the creation of an Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA), a database designed for collaborative research in English, French and Arabic connecting researchers based in Germany and four African countries. The ICA project pursues individual but interconnected studies revolving around Islamic learning in Africa. Supported by IT specialists, we develop a digital platform that meets the related requirements. The ICA seeks to develop new approaches to the handling of data through establishing an ontology-based digital research environment building on WissKI, a set of modules that extends the content management system Drupal with semantic web technology. The chapter sheds light on the technical implications of our endeavor to connect diverse alphabets and data from various digital and digitized media. The research team members connect their diverse data sets to create synergies between various research foci and interests, ranging from the nexus of Islamic knowledge production, dissemination, and acquisition to the socio-religious, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Islamic learning. The chapter shows how our system allows us to collect and archive different types of data, generate metadata through an ontology, and connect data beyond language barriers. Most notably, our data description method links the data through multilayered and multilingual tags, as well as through comprehensive cross-references, thus constituting an innovative way of data handling that can benefit researchers in Islamic Studies as well as cultural and literary studies more broadly.
This dissertation contributes to the understanding of three pertinent developmental challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, namely education, geography, and trade. More specifically, it presents three independent and self-contained chapters which analyze these factors from a micro-level perspective, in turn. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 re-visits the role of physical geography in economic development. In particular, it employs a large-scale geo-referenced household-level survey covering 28 sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years to analyze the previously established link between coastal access and individual living standards. Analyzing individual-level data allows to expand on the insights from cross-country and cross-regional contexts and also facilitates the analysis of potential channels. The results show that individuals living further away from the coast are significantly poorer, as measured along a breadth of welfare indicators, such as basic consumption (water, food, medical care), possession of various consumer durables, or having paid employment. The chapter highlights the role of human capital, urbanization as well as infrastructural endowments in explaining the identified within-country differences in individual economic welfare. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of education on women's fertility and contributes to a growing literature which analyzes this nexus via quasi-experimental methods. Specifically, it leverages Burundi's Free Primary Education Policy of 2005 to identify exogenous variation in schooling via a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and analyzes the outcomes affected by schooling through an instrumental variable (IV) approach. The results confirm the negative relationship between schooling and fertility observed in other developing settings. However, contrary to extant studies, the chapter provides novel evidence on a differential treatment effect of education. While poor women profit from policy-induced education in terms of increases in literacy, remunerated employment opportunities as well as a reduction in teenage births, none of these effects of additional education are observed for women from the wealthier households of our sample. The evidence of such a marked heterogeneity helps to evaluate under which conditions the literature’s previous findings may generalize. Chapter 4 evaluates the distributional effects of trade liberalization in Africa by combining the spatial considerations of regional market integration with a household-level analysis. The chapter thereby treats the re-establishment of the East African Community (EAC) in 2001 as a regional policy intervention having differential effects on individual households governed by their geo-spatial location within the countries. This prediction is derived from an extension to a canonical New Economic Geography (NEG) developed in the chapter. Contrary to the model’s prediction, the empirical results drawn from a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach do not reveal relative welfare increases in regions closer to internal EAC borders. Rather, the results provide evidence of strengthened agglomeration tendencies in the pre-existing economic hubs of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala, as measured by an increase in consumption and population density.
