Content: Contributors

The Mediterranean Sea has become a graveyard for Africa’s youth. Every day, we see images of what would appear to be a continent racked by conflict and poverty, and people risking – often losing – their lives in an attempt to flee. Yet, Africa has 11 of the 20 fastest growing economies in the world. […]

Mobile technology is the most powerful communications platform throughout the Middle East and Africa, and has the power to transform the delivery of healthcare services. Driven by some of the fastest mobile subscriber growth in the world, cheaper mobile devices, and continued innovation, emerging mobile health solutions are saving lives – an estimated million of […]

Much of the history of the world is about wars. Nations derived their identities through successive wars. The first and second World Wars were carried out with much more destructive weaponry that brought untold sufferings to millions of people. Religions also fought to get their supremacy. With clashes of ideologies, culture and belief systems which […]

The end of May 2015 marks 200 days to the highly anticipated Paris Climate Agreement. The month of May and the first two weeks of June mark busy schedules for global business leaders, climate change negotiators, environment and climate change ministers and leaders of countries. Ministers of environment and climate change met between May 17 […]

Steadily and indisputably, the financial services industry – with which we all interact, whether as borrowers, savers, investors, or regulators – has embarked on a multi-year transformation. This process, slow at first, has been driven by the combined impact of two sets of durable forces. On one hand, top-down factors – regulatory change, unusual pricing, […]

  As we sit down to lunch or dinner on this World Environment Day, it is important to consider this: one-third of all food produced globally each year – 300 million tonnes – is wasted. This waste costs the global economy a staggering one trillion dollars a year. Industrialised regions account for almost half of […]

Ending extreme poverty and building shared prosperity across the developing world are noble goals; but they are also expensive, requiring financing on a scale far greater than what governments in developing countries, their donors, and local financial institutions are able to provide. Consider infrastructure. In Africa alone, delivering basic services like running water, electricity and […]

It is better for the European Union to approach the Mediterranean crisis in a more comprehensive way, rather than in a militarised way, as it is trying to do, argues Yeshiwas Degu – yeshiwasd@yahoo.com – a lecturer of peace and conflict studies at Mekelle University. Involving Africa in the process is vital, he comments.

It is astonishing to see the world globalising more and more with each day. As the saying goes, “the world is turning into a village”. The fact is that it is happening so fast. This puts huge pressure on people since they have to catch up with the changing reality of the days, the hours, […]

Many people are profoundly pessimistic about the Chinese economy’s growth prospects, owing to the emergence of massive debt, excessive investment, overcapacity, and so-called “ghost cities” since the 2008 global financial crisis. But these problems are not new. They have, in various forms, affected China’s economy since 1978, and were evident in East Asia’s other high-performing […]

In a world of weak domestic demand in many advanced economies and emerging markets, policymakers have been tempted to boost economic growth and employment by going for export led-growth. This requires a weak currency and conventional (even sometimes unconventional) monetary policies to bring about the required depreciation. Since the beginning of the year, more than […]

Given the clouds of pessimism sweeping across the world, it is a good time to ask a simple question: is global health improving? Conventional wisdom suggests that the answer is no. Data confirm that the answer is yes. All over the world, people are living longer, fewer babies are dying, hunger is diminishing and more […]

On April 22, the world marked the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, established in 1970 to draw attention to environmental challenges. Never have those challenges been greater or more urgent than they are today. The combination of climate change, erosion of biodiversity and depletion of natural resources is propelling the planet toward a tipping point, […]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are poised to hold their annual meetings, but the big news in global economic governance will not be made in Washington DC in the coming days. Indeed, that news was made last month, when the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy joined more than 30 other […]

I just spent a week in China, where I participated in the Boao Asia Forum, a conference similar to the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. The topic of my panel was what President Xi Jinping has called the Chinese economy’s “new normal”: an era of relatively slower growth, following three […]

It is safe to say that the most consequential geostrategic development of the last two decades has been China’s rise. Yet the West has failed to accord China – not to mention the other major emerging economies – the degree of influence in today’s global governance structures that it merits. This may be about to […]

Over the last decade, Africa’s governments have increasingly come to rely on Eurobonds to finance their budgetary priorities. Issuance of these securities – which are denominated in foreign currencies – soared in the wake of the global financial crisis, as many Sub-Saharan countries tapped the international bond market for the first time. The opportunity that […]

Thousands of years of cultural influence that isolated women from political and economic spheres and forced them to accept lower social status, seem also to make women’s struggle unachievable, at least in the near future. This is because the attitudes of both men and women to each other are institutionalised and therefore slow to change. […]

Current disaster-risk levels are alarming. The cost of damage to commercial and residential buildings worldwide is averaging 314 billion dollars each year, with the private sector bearing as much as 85pc of that price tag. At the same time, a new United Nations report shows that annual investments in disaster-risk reduction of six billion dollars […]

Whether in commodities, manufacturing or services, the private sector in Africa has spent decades grabbing the skills they need wherever and whenever they can. Often that means expensive expat salaries, relocations or international structures that focus on adding value away from the continent. At the same time, a 20-year trend of under-investment in higher education […]

Ethiopia faces an urban population explosion. Another 10 million people, possibly more, are expected to move to cities in the next ten years. Today, just one in five Ethiopians live in cities; this will be one in four by 2025. This presents Ethiopia with a golden opportunity to get urbanisation right. With good urban planning, […]

Six and a half years after the global financial crisis, central banks in emerging and developed economies alike are continuing to pursue unprecedentedly activist – and unpredictable – monetary policy. How much road remains in this extraordinary journey? In the last month alone, Australia, India, Mexico, and others have cut interest rates. China has reduced […]

The proliferations of large scale agricultural land investments, following the world food price crisis in 2008, have received significant attention. Tens of millions of hectares of lands have changed hands in Africa alone, following the surge in demand for agricultural lands. Ethiopia, like many developing countries, is one of the countries that attracted attention in […]

The economic geography of the world is changing. The Eurozone faces the specter of another round of stagnation; Japan has slipped into recession; and the United States, despite relatively strong performance in the latter part of 2014, has raised concerns worldwide with its exit from quantitative easing. Meanwhile, emerging economies have continued to perform well. […]

Leaders meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week addressed some critical challenges. One of them is how to realise the bright prospects of African agriculture. Investment in this sector has doubled in the last decade as governments recognise the crucial importance of agriculture to the well-being of the people, social stability and economic growth. Yet for […]