When protecting local traders turns foreigners into targets↗
On Dennis Pritt Road in Nairobi’s Kilimani district, long queues formed outside the Burundian embassy on 7 September . People were waiting for laissez-passers, temporary travel documents enabling them to return home without valid…
How much is a human worth? Nigeria’s growing kidnapping economy↗
On 21 August, armed men entered a mosque in Dekara village in Niger State while Friday prayers were underway. At around the same time, nearby settlements were also raided. A few days later, a video circulated on social media showing…
Nigeria Is Building an AI Economy. Who Will Protect Nigerians When the Algorithms Get It Wrong?↗
By the time Nigeria puts together all of the policies needed to regulate artificial intelligence, elements of the technology might have already been implemented. In May, Nigeria’s federal government unveiled an open-access, multilingual…
Mineral Beneficiation: A Pipedream of Prosperity in an Unequal Financial Architecture↗
Since 2023, 14 African countries have introduced export restrictions on unprocessed critical minerals, requiring “local beneficiation” – or in-country processing and manufacturing – prior to export, and demanding technology and financing.…
DRC: The INGA Dam Paradox↗
Congo already has electricity it cannot deliver. Inga’s problem is not the dam. Everyone is arguing about who will finance 44 gigawatts. Almost nobody is asking why the 1,775 megawatts already built runs at half output and reaches almost…
Beyond the Fighter Jets: What Algeria’s Deployment to Niger Really Signals↗
Four Algerian Su-30 fighters touched down in Niamey on 30 August 2026, trailed by an aerial refueling aircraft. A day earlier, mutinous soldiers — some drawn from units worn down by heavy losses fighting jihadist groups — had stormed a…
Ebola and Africa’s Preparedness Dividend: From Crisis to Capability↗
Africa is facing its 17 th Ebola outbreak, and this time the continent is meeting it with the most capable response architecture it has ever assembled. The outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was declared on 15 th May 2026,…
Papers, Please: Canon Collins 2026 Essay Shortlisted Finalist↗
This piece was a shortlisted finalist for the Canon Collins 2026 essay competition . The annual competition invites essays that demonstrate thought leadership and offer fresh perspectives on issues affecting southern Africa. Some of my…
Hijra: Movement, Migration, and Islamic Thought↗
The question of why 70,000 Moroccans migrated to the Spanish-governed territories of Ceuta and Melilla within hours on 30 July – ‘Throne Day’, which is one of the most respectable celebrations of the Morocco Kingdom – still lingers in…
Africa’s Assisted Reproductive Technology Boom Needs Public Governance, Not Just Private Investment↗
Across Africa, assisted reproductive technology (ART) is expanding at an unprecedented pace. Fertility clinics are opening in countries where, until recently, couples had little choice but to travel abroad, often to Europe, India, or…
African ArgumentsPan-AfricanSaneze Tshayana, Ana Stevenson, and Monica G. Fernandes1 Sept 2026 Wathint’ abafazi 70 years on↗
The year 2026 marks the 70 th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March against extending the dompas to the black women of South Africa. Every August, the commemoration of Women’s Month highlights the inheritances and unfinished legacies of…
Why Lesotho’s remittance ‘safety net’ was never really its own, and why it is failing again in 2026↗
Lesotho is two years into a national state of disaster: US tariffs have gutted its garment factories, unemployment has passed 30%, and its main trade lifeline is guaranteed for less than a year. To understand how the mountain kingdom keeps…
Who Speaks for Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms?↗
When four members of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms travelled to London in March 2026 to accept the Chatham House Prize on behalf of the movement, the ceremony was widely celebrated as a moment of recognition for one of the most…
No Place to Call Home: Increasing Homophobic & Transphobic Laws in the U.S. & Africa↗
A network of Christian evangelical organizations has spent nearly two decades and tens of millions of dollars fueling a storm of anti-LGBTI+ legislation across Africa . That same network now drafts and bankrolls a parallel wave of…
Beyond Projects: Rethinking Agricultural Investment for Sudan’s Post-War Recovery↗
This essay concludes a three-part series by the author on agriculture in Sudan. Read the previous instalments here and here . A different approach is needed to determine what to invest in, where to invest, who should benefit, how…
Living and Losing the ECOWAS Dream: Borders, Belonging, and Betrayal↗
As I entered Benin, I waited for the air to change. I stood at that threshold with the quiet anticipation of someone expecting a revelation, for the people to look far apart from me, for some element of differentiation, something to…
Africa’s Pension Funds Are Already Allowed to Invest at Home. They Don’t.↗
Reformers keep asking governments to raise the ceilings on where domestic institutional capital can go. The ceilings are nowhere near being reached and one December in Ghana explains why. This article is published on African Arguments…
When AI Explains African Crises, Local Knowledge Is Barely Visible↗
Ask any AI tool about the humanitarian situation in Africa, and you will get all sorts of answers in seconds. Then check closely where those answers come from, and you will be left mesmerised. That very question led me to examine 1,083…
God Forbid a Pan-Africa: Pan-Africanism’s Non-Works↗
God forbid a Pan-Africa. Pan-Africanism is the belief that all Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, are united in solidarity and have shared history, goals, and destiny. And that movement and ideology is one of the reasons…
500,000 children are born with congenital heart disease in Africa. Where are the hospitals to treat them?↗
When Tendai Moyo’s daughter, Rudorwashe Grace, was born in a Zimbabwean hospital, she struggled to breathe, her lips turned blue, and feeding exhausted her. Recognising instantly that her baby was seriously unwell, Tendai repeatedly sought…
Population Density: A Missing Factor in Development — and Why This Is Africa’s Moment↗
Explanations of why Africa has lagged behind tend to reach for the familiar: weak governance, corruption, ethnic conflict, the legacy of colonial borders. Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works — the long-awaited companion to his influential How…
Violence, Profit, and the Economy Sustaining Eastern Congo’s Endless War↗
At a checkpoint between Miba and the Kachanga hill in Fizi territory , soldiers of the Congolese army wave through bicycles loaded with mineral ore, one at a time, charging fifty cents a crossing. At least four thousand bicycles pass…
Sudan: The Unfortunate Alliance↗
On Foreign Interest, the Ideal Militia, and What a Coloniser Prays He Leaves Behind My grandmother never said displacement. She said: we left the house and the water took it. But the water did not take it. The state took it. A state that…
Burhan’s Dialogue Is Not a Path to Stability↗
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has discovered dialogue again. After years of promises, a military coup, emergency rule, war rhetoric and political exclusion, Sudan’s army chief now says he wants a comprehensive dialogue inside the country…
Africa’s Youth Employment Crisis Has a Curriculum Problem↗
When I worked for The Harvest Fund, I sat across from women-farmers who had just completed training in milling, business development, food safety. Competent women. Women who had shown up every day, taken notes, asked questions. And then,…
The Coup Costs More Than the Corruption It Claims to Fix↗
Since 2020, soldiers have seized power in Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso (twice), Niger, and Gabon. In every case, the announcement has followed the same script: corruption has hollowed out the state, civilian government has forfeited…
Malawi’s economic crisis: Can recovery begin?↗
Almost nine months after Malawian President Peter Mutharika returned to power, his administration finds itself grappling with a severe and protracted economic crisis. The government faces the urgent challenge of restoring foreign exchange…
Tanzania’s VAT Refund Revolution: The Quiet Reform That Could Unlock Billions in Private Investment↗
When governments unveil annual budgets, headlines focus on the big numbers: spending, growth and tax collection. But sometimes the real story sits quietly in the technical annexes. Tanzania’s 2026/27 budget, due to take effect from July,…
The Beijing of It All: Africa’s Development Terms Are No Longer Written in Washington or Brussels↗
In the period that followed decolonisation, Africa’s development landscape continued to be shaped by Western partnerships. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, this Western-facing architecture took the form of policy conditionality,…
Walking with the Herd – Why Africa Must Rethink Its Oldest Economy↗
When pastoralists, researchers, policymakers and development practitioners gathered in Marsabit this year to mark the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP-2026) , the conversations went far beyond livestock, drought or…