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Taxing Rental Income: An Analysis of the Outcomes of Legal and Administrative Reforms in Uganda
No full textMore attention is being paid to the role of property-related taxes in generating domestic revenue in African countries. However, rental income taxes – a significant aspect of property-related taxes – are largely overlooked in academic literature. Starting in 2014, in a bid to enhance compliance and boost revenue collection from rental income taxes, the Government of Uganda and Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) introduced various legal and administrative reforms. This paper analyses the impact of these reforms. It relies on analysis of legal reforms, interviews with tax experts in the public and private sector in Uganda, and analysis of anonymised tax administration data from URA. The paper contributes to the literature on taxation of rental income in Africa by making three main observations: it is difficult to tax rental income in a context like Uganda; the methods URA used to expand the taxpayer register made URA prey to the ‘registration obsession’; and there are more changes to the law on taxing rental income than one would expect if the government was experimenting with finding the best methods. Summary of ICTD Working Paper 226 </p
K4DD Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary August and September 2025
No full textThis monthly Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary aims to signpost FCDO and others to the latest relevant evidence and discourse on humanitarian action. It is structured around FCDO humanitarian framework themes:Protect: Protect civilians, IDPs, refugees, marginalised groups including women and girls, and humanitarian access.Prioritise: Prioritise effective humanitarian assistance to people in greatest need.Prevent: Prevent and anticipate future shocks and rebuild resilience in protracted and recurring crises.This summary covers July 2025.</p
Knowledge Translation Platforms: Broker, Intermediary or More? A Scoping Review of Definitions, Functions and Characteristics
No full textKnowledge translation platforms (KTPs), also referred to as intermediaries, play a key role in supporting evidence-informed decision-making. Numerous KTPs exist globally, striving to translate evidence into policy. However, these platforms are described in varying ways, and some KTPs do not explicitly identify themselves as such. This makes identification, recognition and leveraging of KTPs suboptimal. It also hinders opportunities for learning, adapting and scaling of such platforms. This scoping review aimed to synthesize the literature on the variety of definitions, functions and characteristics of a KTP with a view to harmonize these aspects of KTPs and offer a revised framework of functions.</p
The Importance of School Meals Programmes in Fragile and Conflict Affected Settings: Framing the Prospects for Contribution to Peace and Social Cohesion
No full textSchool meals programmes are an important instrument that can address health and nutrition, education, food security and livelihood outcomes, among others, especially for schoolchildren, families and communities in vulnerable situations. When daily life and routines are maintained, school meals can do so systematically as a component of a national social protection system. But they can also be used to prepare for and respond to covariate shocks to provide affected people with equitable access to basic resources and services and safeguard continued investments in human capital development. In this context, it is critical that WFP, as a global leader in school meals, better captures the lessons learned from its programming in fragile and conflict affected settings (FCAS) to bolster the nascent evidence base on school meals in emergencies and their contribution to peace (CtP) and social cohesion, which was identified as WFP’s primary CtP.This paper synthetizes the current evidence available on the topic and aims at informing and supporting WFP’s efforts to better understand and adapt school meals in emergencies, especially in FCAS. Whether in support or on behalf of government’s efforts, the paper explores how school meals can serve not only as a critical safety net in these contexts, but also as a strategic tool to foster CtP and social cohesion.</p
Democracy Contested
No full textWhat has shifted us towards a more autocratic, rather than democratic, world?While there is nothing new about a politically divided citizenry, the current state of democracy strongly calls for an analysis of the diverse motivations of citizens to vote for leaders and parties that have promised outright they would undo democratic institutions.The articles in this issue of the IDS Bulletin look at how people engage with democracy – their basis for voting for certain leaders. The authors discuss the ideas and narratives that underlie the expectations citizens have of what these leaders would deliver in terms of redistribution to enhance the welfare and the recognition of their rights as the voting citizens, at the repudiation of the rights of others.Democracy works where checks and balances through political, institutional, and social accountability institutions work. In liberal democracies, the judiciary is the first line of defence, but when autocrats come to power, they swiftly move to undermine an independent judiciary, concentrate powers in the hands of the executive, and constrain the media and other important freedoms. The contributions in this IDS Bulletin highlight how this has unfolded in the US, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across parts of Africa and Europe. In turn, they also provide insights into what can be done to halt and reverse these dynamics and address feelings of discontent by those who feel left behind by a lack of redistribution. How can left-wing and other political parties that aim to uphold inclusive democratic values reconnect with the constituencies they lost to parties with autocratic tendencies?</p
Democracy in Times of Democratic Erosion: The Case of India
No full textThis article draws on evidence gathered from the India Election Survey 2024, a nationally representative post-poll survey of voter perceptions, to deepen understandings of democratic resilience in contexts of democratic erosion. Drawing on survey findings, it advances the argument that India’s political culture is characterised by the prevalence of an entrenched ‘democratic sentiment’ that makes itself visible in moments of blatant democratic subversion. This ‘sentiment’ played a role in shaping the contours of the 2024 general elections in India. However, the survey also exposed several contradictory impulses in expressions of this sentiment. I theorise this as ‘limited liberalism’. Through this article, I seek to make the case for scholarship on democratic backsliding to pay greater attention to the complex and contradictory liberal impulses in mass politics. This is crucial in order to develop a more nuanced perspective on the challenges to democracy and opportunities for democratic resilience in the contemporary moment.</p
Tracking and taxing Cross-Border Digital Transactions: The Case of VAT in Senegal
No full textThe global expansion of digital services – from streaming, e-commerce, and software, to online education – has created new tax challenges, particularly for developing countries. In Africa, governments have responded by introducing VAT frameworks targeting non-resident suppliers of digital services. These reforms aim to curb revenue leakage, level the playing field for domestic businesses, and adapt tax systems to the digital age.Yet across the continent, there are significant disparities in the design and implementation of reforms. This research compares legal and administrative models across African countries. It further uses Senegal as a case study to analyse both the progress made and the challenges encountered during implementation in light of international good practices. Drawing on international benchmarks from the 2023 VAT Digital Toolkit for Africa, it shows how design choices, e.g., digital registration portals and the absence of registration thresholds, may shape compliance outcomes and administrative burdens.Summary of ICTD African Tax Administration Paper 42.</p
Co-production and Transformative Change: Lessons and Challenges
No full textThis article takes the case of the TAPESTRY project to look at how transformative change can be co-produced between local communities, researchers, community-based organisations and other actors. We lay out the process, challenges and tensions of doing co-produced research with marginalised people in marginalised environments affected by climate-related uncertainties and other crises. We reflect on the strategies needed to ensure that the voices of the most marginalised, who are at the forefront of climate uncertainty, are able to come to the fore and as far as possible in their own terms. We argue that despite significant challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and in tackling existing power relations and social and gender inequities, co-produced research can help lift and give spaces to voices and perspectives that do not normally find their way to the realm of decision making. We demonstrate that critical transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary co-produced research can help reframe marginalised landscapes, and challenge dominant narratives and relations of power. While identifying concrete impacts on the ground can sometimes be difficult, co-production in itself can be a powerful agent of transformative change, leading to iterative learning and new insights among all participants. However, there are limits to how much can be achieved and scaled up in a conventional three- or four-year research project, calling for funders and donors to encourage longer-term engagements that enable local communities to take forward the research evidence and co-produced actions in locally appropriate ways.</p
Rapid Scoping Review: Anti-Rollback Actors and Strategies
No full textThis report presents the findings of a rapid scoping review of queer and feminist organisations and social movements countering roll back in 14 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, and Türkiye). It was conducted for the United Kingdom (UK) Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in 2024. The rapid scoping review maps out the landscape of rollback politics across four key areas: sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI); sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR); gender-based violence (GBV); and women’s public participation and visibility. We also explore how queer and feminist movements and organisations have worked to counter rollback. We outline the gaps in our current understanding of counter-rollback dynamics, and stress the importance of supporting a range of counter-rollback strategies to effectively challenge roll back, and progress towards gender and sexual justice and rights.To read the EPUB file, you must have an eBook reader installed. See the EPUB Download Guidelines for information on accessing EPUB files from IDS OpenDocs on your device. You can also download IDS eBooks for your device directly from Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google, or the British Library from which they will be delivered to you in the usual way from these sites.This PDF was created in July 2025 for compliance with the European Accessibility Act.The EPUB file conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard.</p
K4DD Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary June 2025
No full textThis monthly Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary aims to signpost FCDO and others to the latest relevant evidence and discourse on humanitarian action. It is structured around FCDO humanitarian framework themes:Protect: Protect civilians, IDPs, refugees, marginalised groups including women and girls, and humanitarian access.Prioritise: Prioritise effective humanitarian assistance to people in greatest need.Prevent: Prevent and anticipate future shocks and rebuild resilience in protracted and recurring crises.This summary covers June 2025.</p