The prevalance of large scale, foreign-owned farm projects has courted controversy, but just why has Africa failed to capitalise on its natural advantages in agriculture?
The post-globalised landscape remains Balkanised by semantic divisions. The terms used in contemporary discourse come loaded with preconceptions of risk and opportunity, of threat and reassurance. Nowhere is more a victim of this than Africa.
Falling demand from global industry and ongoing operational issues have pegged back miners’ expansion plans and caused many to mothball mines in Africa
The European Commission has reached an agreement with the government of Egypt over cooperation in the energy sector. The deal, signed in December by Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Benita Ferrero-Waldner and Andris Piebalgs, commissioners for external relations and neighbourhood policy and for energy, respectively, includes market reforms and a closer integration of the EU’s energy markets with Egypt’s, technological cooperation, network development and initiatives in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Violent clashes in the Nigerian city of Jos in Plateau State, in November have heightened concerns over the country’s ethnic and religious divide. Sparked by a political dispute over vote-rigging in a local election, fighting between the city’s Muslim and Christian populations killed at least 400 people.
Former president of Botswana Festus Mogae was awarded the second Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership in a ceremony in Alexandria, Egypt. Mr Mogae was cited for his successes in expanding the Botswanan economy and in reducing the country’s HIV/Aids rate.
United States president-elect Barack Obama has named his foreign policy team. Amongst the appointments are his rival in the Democratic primaries Hilary Clinton, who will become secretary of state, and Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who will be Mr Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.
The world’s less developed countries are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, according to Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Speaking at the opening ceremony of a United Nations conference in Poznan, Poland in December 2008, Mr Pachauri said, “the differential nature of climate change impacts and the existence of other stresses leave the poor of the world particularly vulnerable.” Citing an IPCC report, he said that rain-fed agriculture yield in some African countries could be reduced by 50 percent by 2020.
International environment organisation Greenpeace has opened its first two offices on African soil in Johannesburg, South Africa and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. A third site is planned in Dakar, Senegal, for launch in 2009.
A valiant attempt to identify the opportunities in Africa’s huge and diverse consumer markets, Vijay Mahajan’s Africa Rising: How 900 million African consumers offer more than you think, is a revealing primer for businesses hoping to gain a foothold on the continent.
New health minister Barbara Hogan has publicly broken from South Africa’s past denial of its Aids problem and detailed a new approach to tackling the disease. Her comments, made on World Aids Day in December 2008, come after a Harvard Medical School report estimated that 330,000 people have died in the country due to institutional failure to act on the epidemic.
Mozambique hopes to become a self-sufficient producer of rice within three years, the country’s agriculture minister Soares Nhaca has said. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research in Maputo, in December 2008, he said that the government plans to increase production by investing in infrastructure development.
Rupiah Banda inherits a legacy of sound economic policy and political stability. But he faces stiff challenges in managing Zambia’s economy and international relationships before presidential elections in 2011.
Zimbabwe’s continuing political power struggle has once again reached an impasse. Despite a humanitarian crisis and ongoing negotiations, there are few signs of a permanent settlement.
A lack of clarity in its mandate means that, despite the deployment of 17,000 troops, the UN mission to the DRC has failed to protect civilians caught up in the recent fighting.
Just imagine how different the world would be if, back in Microsoft’s earliest days, Bill Gates had been unable to find anyone to invest in him or if a decade ago the same had happened to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as they tried to get the business going from the garage of a suburban home in California.
Thirteen years ago, the world’s attention was fixated on an obscure clearing deep in the heart of the Congo rain forest known as Tingi Tingi. Tens of thousands of refugees, retreating Zaire government forces and interahamwe militias who had sparked Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, sought safety there from pursuing rebel forces.
When critics characterise China’s engagement in Africa as nothing but a scramble for resources that disguises a more nefarious agenda, Beijing rightly counters that its ties are more complex in aspiration and content.
In his new offices just over a mile from Downing Street, Tony Blair cuts a far more relaxed figure now than in the final days of his 10 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is just shy of 18 months since Mr Blair left Parliament with the words: “I wish everyone, friend or foe, well – and that is that, the end.”
Barack Obama’s election has granted the US a reprieve from the harsh judgements levelled at his predecessor by many Africans, but faced with trouble at home, can the new administration meet Africa’s expectations for change?
The dire state of Nigeria’s power sector continues to slow the growth of sub-Saharan Africa’s second biggest economy. Promised reforms have been slow in coming, leading some to suggest ever more radical solutions.
A growing acceptance of personal debt as a way of meeting spiralling aspirations is driving the penetration of retail financial services into sub-Saharan markets.
The phenomenal growth of the African cellular market readjusted many perceptions of business on the continent. Now fresh initiatives hope to bring competitive, affordable broadband to the previously fibre-dark coast of East Africa.
For my latest book, Africa Rising, I traveled extensively across Africa over the span of three years. This was no ordinary trip. Africa is known as a place of great beauty and intrigue, but I was on a different type of safari – a ‘consumer safari’ – a term I learned from Unilever executives in Zimbabwe.
