By Sheena Raikundalia Consider the humble lobster. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was fed to prisoners and indentured laborers – so despised that colonial...
By Michele Moscaritoli Africa’s investment landscape tells a story of striking contradictions. Extractive industries – mining, oil, gas, and the minerals powering the global energy transition...
The continent's trade volumes are climbing. Its production structures are not. That distinction will define Africa's economic future.
By Ziad Hamoui Multilateral Development Banks now account for more than half of Africa’s net financial flows – a 124 percent increase that is fueling one...
By Danilo Desiderio A useful lens for understanding why some regions industrialized faster than others is to look past what they produced and examine instead how...
From Casablanca to Kigali, a continent-wide network of industrial zones is quietly becoming one of the most consequential developments in 21st-century trade.
By Daki Nkanyane The world is sorting itself into camps again. Africa is being asked – sometimes diplomatically, sometimes with barely disguised coercion – to pick...
By Dr. Princess C. Mutisya Africa is routinely described as one of the world’s most compelling investment frontiers. At gatherings from the Africa CEO Forum to...
By Fidel Amakye Owusu In mid-2022, West African heads of state made a pragmatic, if uncomfortable, concession. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) lifted...
By Dishant Shah The continent’s youth bulge is not a development story. It is a structural macro-investment thesis – and the window to act is narrowing....
By Gregory September The IMF’s 2026 global growth projections tell a story of seismic economic shifts – and one African nation’s quiet but consequential arrival. When...
By Kelly Mua Kingsly The numbers tell a peculiar story. Africa’s projected debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 60.8 percent for 2026 – a figure that would be...
By Sheena Raikundalia US President Trump’s decision to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act through December 2026 has sparked jubilation in Nairobi. But beneath the...
By Juwon Akin-Olotu ₦2.2 trillion (US$1.6 billion) allocated for agriculture. Record budget figures. Renewed hope for food security. These were the headlines that dominated Nigeria’s agricultural...
By Fidel Amakye Owusu For decades, Liberia stood as a beacon of stability in West Africa. Then came the late 1980s, when civil war shattered that...
By Dishant Shah The unit economics of manufacturing reveal that low wages mean little without productivity to match. The conventional wisdom about African manufacturing rests on...
By Davida Ademuyiwa Africa’s investment challenge has never been about the absence of opportunity. Nor, contrary to popular perception, has it primarily been about the availability...
By Victory Azimih For centuries, Africa has endured the label “the dark continent” – a phrase that speaks not to any absence of value, but to...
By Des H Rikhotso Southwestern Africa presents a fascinating study in contrasts. Angola and Namibia share a border, similar climates, and abundant natural resources, yet these...
By Dishant Shah Development Finance Institutions have long pledged to “de-risk Africa” for private investment. Yet too often, their efforts stall not on the factory floor...
By Danilo Desiderio The persistent shortfall in domestic savings represents one of the most binding structural constraints on Africa’s long-term growth and economic transformation. Sub-Saharan Africa...
By Ziad Hamoui Official trade statistics capture barely a sixth of West Africa’s actual regional food trade. This massive data gap is undermining food security and...
By Kingsley Moghalu A striking statistic from The Africa Report crystallizes the continent’s fiscal crisis: many of Africa’s poorest countries now spend more on debt service...
By Apollo Buregyeya True economic development demands competence over charisma, and infrastructure over influence. Politicians don’t build nations – they often break them. Captains of industry...
By Apollo Buregyeya The 2024 Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) Statistical Abstract reveals a truth that Uganda’s industrial policymakers have studiously avoided confronting. The country’s cement...
By Lailla Mutajogera More than 80 percent of African migration occurs within national borders – a statistic that deserves far more attention than it receives. From...
By Dishant Shah Cocoa has sweetened balance sheets from Zurich to New York for over a century – but in the very soils where it’s grown,...
By Farouk Mark Mukiibi Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global trade – a figure so persistently low it defies mere coincidence. Conventional wisdom...
By Des H Rikhotso In the heart of Africa lies a nation of staggering contradictions: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo). At once a...
By Fidel Amakye Owusu When Angola finally gained independence from Portugal in 1975 – following decades of anti-colonial struggle and a transformative military coup in Lisbon...
By Davida Ademuyiwa History offers a clear and unambiguous lesson: no nation has ever achieved sustained prosperity without first undergoing an industrial transformation. From 18th-century Britain...
By Dishant Shah On paper, Africa is a geological powerhouse. The continent harbors nearly 30 percent of the world’s known reserves of cobalt, lithium, manganese, rare...
By Farouk Mark Mukiibi Africa is watching the global AI revolution with a mix of hope and hype. From Lagos to Nairobi, policymakers and entrepreneurs speak...
By Danilo Desiderio For decades, a persistent narrative has shadowed Africa’s economic trajectory: the continent exports what it doesn’t consume and imports what it needs. A...
By Davida Ademuyiwa For more than a century, the physical architecture of the African economy was not designed for African prosperity. It was engineered for export...
By Danilo Desiderio As the East African Community (EAC) assumes the rotating chairmanship of the Tripartite Task Force, it has sounded a clarion call for a...
By Godfred Zina In the shifting terrain of global trade, major powers like the United States and China are increasingly influencing the economic trajectory of Africa...
By Paul Nantulya Africa is at the center of rising global demand for critical minerals and metals such as lithium, graphite, cobalt, coltan, manganese, platinum, tantalum,...
By Danilo Desiderio On December 18 2023, the Financial Times published an article that had an international resonance, which argued that Africa cannot grow without increasing...
By Fidel Amakye Owusu Years ago, the discovery of vast natural gas reserves off the coast of Mozambique ignited hopes for a brighter economic future. For...
By Fidel Amakye Owusu When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, many expected international organizations formed during that era...
By Gregory Simpkins Over decades of working on African issues – analyzing governments and economies and working with businesspeople wanting to enter African markets – it...
Burkina Faso has achieved a groundbreaking milestone with the launch of its first electric car, developed entirely by the Burkinabe car manufacturer ITAOUA. This innovative vehicle,...
By Fidel Amakye Owusu The remarkable rise of China and other East Asian nations can, in large part, be attributed to an educated population that was...
Kenya-based start-up, Kuza Freezer, is converting plastic waste, recycling it, and using it to make solar-powered freezers. Kuza Freezer is a youth-led company based in Mombasa,...
While ministers struggle to prop up the cedi, a new wave of industrialists and tech entrepreneurs are providing an economic jump start of their own. Following...
Ethiopia expects to get its first sovereign credit ratings within two weeks, Finance and Economic Development Minister Sufian Ahmed said, paving the way for the country’s...
The government of Burkina Faso is committed to ensuring an open and stable business environment for foreign companies, said President Blaise Compaore, as the West African...
Haiti President Michel Martelly has appointed Haitian businessman Gregory Mevs as the co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on Economic Growth and Investment. Mevs replaces Laurent...
