Taxing matters: local views from Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Rwanda

The Panos Network, a partnership of eight institutes in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Europe and the Americas, has produced an illuminating series entitled Tax Matters, looking at how tax is being implemented in four countries, what effect they are having, and what local people think about them.

Click here for perspectives from street hawkers in Kenya, from citizens in Accra, Ghana, from Rwanda, where the government is trying to replace foreign aid with local taxation and is trying to bring the informal sector into the tax bracket, and from Uganda, in a piece entitled "Mobile phone tax - a cash cow or a barrier to development?"

It is a rich and useful set of perspectives, highlighting through anecdote and analysis some of the challenges facing developing countries, and some of their poorest entrepreneurs, as governments try to spread the tax net more widely.