Every shortcut a tech company takes is a loan. That’s the whole idea behind “technical debt”, a phrase programmer Ward Cunningham coined more than 30 years ago and the smartest bit of financial language software ever borrowed. In my last column, I argued that we sell products before we build them. This is what happens…
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — The global HIV response stands at a defining moment, with health leaders warning that decades of progress are at risk as international funding declines and prevention programmes are scaled back across some of the world’s hardest-hit countries. Although new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths have fallen to their lowest levels…
Roughly one in two smartphones sold in Africa is made by a company most buyers have never heard of. Transsion, a Shenzhen-based manufacturer, owns the Tecno, Infinix and Itel brands, which together accounted for about 48% of African smartphone shipments in 2025 – more than 40 million of the 84.4 million handsets shipped on the…
Members of the Church of England Synod have approved a proposal for more training on neurodiversity and to establish a new network of ‘Neurodiversity Champions’ throughout its dioceses, based on the model of their current disability advisers network. On July 10, the Church of England shared that ‘Neurodivergent people, who include autistic people, people with…
China has become one of Africa’s largest development financiers. Since 2000, Chinese and other state-backed institutions have committed more than US$180 billion in loans to African countries. The money has been used to finance roads, railways, power stations, ports, water infrastructure and industrial projects. Agriculture has also become part of this expanding partnership. Food systems…
The world is getting a live demonstration of what happens when a fifth of its oil is forced through a single, contested waterway. Since late February, Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has slashed tanker traffic and rattled global energy markets, with Brent crude trading at around US$82/barrel this week. The internet, it turns…
South African executives are rapidly bypassing the experimental phase of AI pilots, moving quickly through the fundamentals and favouring more aggressive deployments of generative AI and machine learning tools across financial services, telecommunications and retail. The appetite shows up in the rankings, too. According to the Ataraxis Global Outsourcing AI Readiness Index, South Africa ranks…
Physicists have a term for systems that look simple but behave badly: the three-body problem. With two bodies in space, gravity is predictable. Add a third, and the system turns chaotic. Tiny changes cause big swings. Stability becomes rare and fragile. That is exactly where Africa’s health sovereignty agenda sits today. The African Union Strategic…
TrendAI’s Zaheer Ebrahim South African organisations are already failing to patch conventional systems on time. The AI agents now being deployed across enterprise environments are about to make that gap significantly harder to close. That’s the warning from Zaheer Ebrahim, solutions architect at TrendAI AMEA (Asia, Middle East and Africa), who said patching is the…
A new interactive report by residential solar energy specialist Wetility shows clear disparities in the reliable supply of electricity across South Africa’s municipalities, with outages lasting about two hours in some areas and more than 18 hours in others. The data demonstrates that South Africa’s energy infrastructure has issues at multiple levels, meaning solving the…
