If there was one safe bet over the course of 2026, it was that treasury yields would rise alongside a move up in oil futures contracts. Over the past month, that ended, and according to Jeffrey Rosenberg, senior portfolio manager of the Systematic Alternatives ETF (IALT) at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, the breakdown…
At a nearby grocery store run by Paschur Castelly, who left Haiti 20 years ago, most of the shelves are empty, except for those stocking religious candles and framed pictures of Catholic saints popular with this devout community. “I can’t purchase new merchandise because I don’t have people coming in,” he said. “So, our communities,…
Year-end approaching, and the merchandise brief isn’t done? You’re not out of options. But the way you approach the brief needs to change. October is certainly not too late to order branded corporate gifts before year-end. It is, however, the point where your deadline starts having a much bigger say in what is realistically possible….
For years, the race to build ever-more powerful artificial intelligence followed a well-worn Silicon Valley principle: move fast and break things. Then, in a series of cascading events over a 10-day stretch, the largest AI labs found themselves reeling as their own creations threatened to break humanity itself. An Anthropic researcher quit the firm, warning…
In July 2003, African leaders gathered in Maputo and made an important collective commitment. Agriculture would no longer be treated as a neglected sector of African development. Under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, commonly known as CAADP, governments pledged to allocate at least 10 per cent of national budgetary resources to agriculture and rural…
John Iliffe, the distinguished scholar renowned for his life’s work in African history, died on 20 August 2026 at the age of 87. He shed light on big themes in Africa’s history. His 12 books were scrupulously researched, many of them being pioneering works that set out new areas of scholarship. He taught hundreds of…
Somaliland has spent three decades asking the world to trust a specific story about itself: a peaceful, democratic state exercising real authority over the territory it claims, with institutions worthy of recognition. The 2023 war in Las Anod tested all four of those claims — peace, democratic legitimacy, authority over the territory, institutional credibility —…
South Africa’s spectrum landscape is shifting. If you operate a network, provide satellite services or are simply keeping track of where South African connectivity is headed, here is what has changed, when it changed and why it matters. Livia Dyer, Karl Blom, partners & Humayra Hajat, senior associate at Webber Wentzel, explain how South Africa’s…
The prolonged disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how vulnerable Africa’s economies are to geopolitical shocks. Fuel prices have remained elevated, squeezing economies that depend heavily on petroleum imports from the Middle East. These include Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. This vulnerability also puts at risk the continent’s…
Uganda says modern outbreak science has changed what investigators can know. Is it time to rethink the 42-day rule? When Uganda’s Ministry of Health announced on July 28, 2026, that the country had declared the end of its latest Ebola outbreak, something unusual happened. There was no public congratulatory statement from the World Health Organization’s…
