Africa must move away from seeing itself through what it lacks and instead draw on its own institutions, knowledge, communities, wealth and talent to address the continent’s challenges, speakers at the Africa Mindset Reset Forum said on Wednesday, August 26. ALSO READ: What’s holding African integration back? Experts speak out The speakers said Africa’s development…
Africa is home to about two thirds of the world’s uncultivated arable land. It is blessed with an average of 300 days of sunshine annually. At a time when many of the world’s advanced countries are experiencing population stagnation or decline, Africa with 1.6 billion people is the world’s second largest continent. Its population is…
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 Asia Works — argues that these are largely symptoms rather than causes, and that the deeper constraint has been…
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, governance agendas and institutional reform attached to rotating credit agreements. This approach rested, at least in part, on a simple reality: countries in…
This article is translated and adapted from an Arabic article published in Sudanese Online. The ideas reflect arguments presented by the author in his book on agriculture in Sudan. For decades, Sudan has been described as one of Africa’s countries with the greatest agricultural potential. Its vast arable land, diverse climatic zones, water resources, and…
All United Nations member states adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. They cover poverty, health, education, inequality, climate change, peace and other global issues. The goals are now approaching their 2030 deadline. The goals matter because they shape national plans, international cooperation and decisions about development funding. The question of what should…
“Africa’s development cannot be outsourced. Sustainable development must ultimately be financed through domestic resources mobilised by strong and effective institutions,” says Gambia Revenue Authority Commissioner General Yankuba Darboe, who set the tone for the opening of the 7th Heads of Tax Administrations Master Class, at the Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara International Conference Centre in Bijilo…
From Project Bankability to Building Productive and Financeable Economies As the World Bank Group places job creation, private sector mobilization and productive transformation back at the center of its agenda, evaluations by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) engagement in fragile economies invite us to ask a fundamental question: Is…
With fewer than five years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a new UN report says sustained investment and international cooperation have improved billions of lives, but warns that governments must urgently accelerate action if the goals are to be met by their 2030 deadline. The findings come from the 2026 SDG Progress…
Across Africa, large-scale infrastructure projects are transforming economies at an unprecedented pace. Between 2010 and 2022, African ports captured an outsized share of global port investment – $13 billion, concentrated heavily in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, and Ghana. Ports, railways and energy systems are widely framed as the backbone of this growth:…
