Kenya’s mobile money revolution
Mobile-phone-based, person-to-person payment and money transfer systems are innovative—but are they really good for poverty reduction and development?
Politics
Towards a working-class environmentalism for South Africa
It's going take a fully democratic anti-capitalist movement to fight climate change. The case of South Africa shows how long we have to go.
Try being a woman playing soccer in Sudan
The guardians of women's femininity and virtue and their use of public space come up against a women's football team in the Sudanese capital.
Troubling times in Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso's security crisis and its new status quo of permanent military intervention will test the resilience of its political institutions.
African migration and the charade of ‘return to safety’
The UNHCR and African Union's policy of returning migrants to their countries of origin, suggests that Africans should be grateful to just stay alive, and are only—theoretically—entitled to anything beyond that on their own continent.
The façade of liberal democracy
To actively combat rightwing extremism, we need to leave behind the fiction that liberals will inoculate western societies from fascism.
The poverty of poor economics
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics experiment on the poor, but their research doesn't solve poverty.
Eyes on the Prize
Does the peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea—now rewarded with a Nobel Prize—bring the kind of cooperation between the two countries that it aspired to do a year ago?
The place of race in Cuba
Cuba achieved more for Afro-Cubans in 50 odd years than in the 400 years before that. However, socialism did not resolve the question of racism on the island.
No country for poor men
Rwanda is juking its development statistics as the international community turns a blind eye to the human rights abuses of Paul Kagame's authoritarian rule.
Self-devouring growth
In Africa, the consequences of the growth-at-all costs model are starting to reveal themselves, and they're not pretty.
Is the nation state the best we got?
What lessons can we draw from 1960s and 1970s anticolonialism and pan-Africanism to rethink the nation state today?
Mugabe and the tradition to not speak ill of the dead
What is the proper way for young Zimbabweans to remember Robert Mugabe's legacy?
The making of Mugabe’s intolerance
How an autocratic strain of pan-Africanism of the early 1960s shaped Robert Mugabe.
Do we really need prisons and police?
Can policing deliver justice in South Africa? The short answer to that question has been, decidedly, no.
The problem with microcredit in Africa
The microcredit industry is not a driver of development and poverty reduction, but quite the opposite: it is an "anti-developmental" intervention.
We all the way live
Live TV broadcasts of political rallies, funerals and press conferences, may be more decisive than social media in shaping mass debate in South Africa.
The emptiness of an ending
With Mugabe's death, might there be space for a new self-definition as a nation in Zimbabwe, as a broad family of nationals, with a shared national project?
Nativism and narrow nationalism in South African politics
The question of who belongs in South Africa, stains any project that aims to build a more equal and inclusive society.
Jour des morts
Comment le vol de cadavres au Gabon reflète la politique du pays.