![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Malawi-Mutharika-2026.jpg?resize=720%2C576&ssl=1\")
In a dramatic step that showed how war in the Middle East and rising oil prices are squeezing Africa, Malawi’s central bank sold 590 kilograms of gold (more than 18,000 troy ounces) from its reserves in April 2026 so the country could import fuel, fertilizer and medicine amid a severe foreign exchange shortage.
\n\n\n\nWhile that looked like a desperate move to raise about USD 78 million in a hurry, it was a win for artisanal mining in the country, which borders Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia. The Reserve Bank of Malawi bought the gold over time from local miners under a special program, a spokesman told the Nation newspaper. And the bank plans to replenish its reserves by buying more of the precious metal unearthed by Malawians. Across Africa, countries are looking to scrappy, local miners for gold, gems and minerals in high demand for green energy, AI and military uses.
\n\n\n\nAntoinette Kalinde, an expert on mining, processing, sourcing for markets and policy frameworks, recently completed a study for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Malawi on artisanal and small-scale mining as the country seeks to gain more value from this segment. Malawian President Peter Mutharika issued a ban on raw mineral exports shortly after taking office in October 2025.
\n\n\n\nEven in Malawi, there’s now a focus on big mining, with investments cropping up, one quite close to the capital Lilongwe. Some of these are for graphite, niobium, rare earths and other of these so-called critical minerals. Given these grand investments, you would think artisanal mining wouldn’t be getting much money and attention.
\n\n\n\nFor a long time, artisanal and small-scale mining was treated as an informal, marginal, even an illegal activity. But that framing is starting to shift for a few key reasons. First, the global demand for minerals, especially those linked to energy transition and technology, has made it impossible to ignore where the significant portion of supply is actually coming from. In many cases artisanal, small-scale mining – let’s call it ASM – is already contributing meaningfully to production, particularly in gold and gemstones.
\n\n\n\nIn Malawi, for example, with the Kasiya mine, we know that there have been artisanal miners mining rutile quartz, which is the basis of the rutile graphite mine that is being touted now. A lot of our actual knowledge of where gemstones are comes from artisanal miners. The government and the development partners are recognizing that ASM is not just a fringe sector, it’s a major rural employer. In Malawi alone the estimate is about 40,000 people directly involved in ASM activity, not to mention their dependents and the people who depend on that [mining] indirectly.
\n\n\n\nAre we talking about people who go out and do this in their spare time or during the weekend, because they’re also farming and doing other things, or are we talking about people doing this mining most of their working hours?
\n\n\n\nI would put those in two categories. You’ve got the gold miners who are mostly mining full-time, throughout the year. It’s a bit more difficult and more expensive in the dry season, depending on the area they are in. If the rivers are perennial, they have to rely on purchasing the water to do all the washing, and if the river is constant, they will mine all year round.
\n\n\n\nGemstones often occur in areas where people have farms. So those guys are likely to mine after planting season. During the rainy season they’ll do the mining side of things along the nearest streams as the gems roll to the lowest points and then after that there’s harvest and they’ll till and they’ll probably mine again before the rains start. But that depends on whether they would have purchased the land or have negotiated with the owners of the land.
\n\n\n\nAlso, there are cooperatives that have been mining for years. There are artisanal miners and then those miners, who are closer to small-scale toward medium-scale miners, who are more constant miners. Because of the large spectrum of ASM miners, the regulations don’t fit for everybody. This was reviewed and the Ministry of Mines has been formulating a national artisanal policy, which is currently in draft.
\n\n\n\nLet’s talk about your study for the government. What did you discover?
\n\n\n\nThe constraints on SMEs in the mining sector and what’s stopping them from growing – market access, financing and formalization. In market access, the smallest miners tend to stay at the mine because they don’t want other miners to take over. They will rely on middlemen to purchase from the mine and bring the gold or gems to the nearest market. The market is segmented by output capacity, popularity of mining area and capacity to purchase of the buyers. Therefore, those miners that produce small amounts sell pointers, that means zero point 1, point 2, point 3 grams.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PHOTO-2026-06-09-19-04-29-1.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
A middleman will come and buy that and aggregate to maybe a gram and several more grams. From the gram buyers then you get to the tens of grams, that’s another level of buyer as well. There’s a whole chain from the mine to, for example, the Malawi Reserve Bank minerals purchasing arm, the Export Development Fund or EDF, which is the resident buyer for gold and sapphires, rubies, aquamarines and a garnet type called rhodolite.
\n\n\n\nWill the bank hold those gemstones or get those polished and sold into the market, to monetize that asset?
\n\n\n\nThat’s the plan. They were collecting and I think they did take some to fairs but since the president’s directive on mandatory local beneficiation or local processing of raw materials and minerals, the central bank has now been put in a position where it has to organize polishing and cutting of those gemstones before they are sold.
\n\n\n\nHow much gold has the central bank purchased from these small miners?
\n\n\n\nIn the last couple years, it came to 530 kilograms. And that’s capturing not even 10 percent of potential output. The EDF said it bought from as few as eight of over 60 mining sites. The Reserve Bank actually pays about 103 percent of the world price. They pay a premium for gold just to make sure it doesn’t leave the country.
\n\n\n\nThat’s gold, but are these miners really involved with critical minerals? Artisanal miners are not mining copper, they’re not mining graphite, are they? Minerals going to the electric vehicle industry or solar and wind power, tech or other uses?
\n\n\n\nSome are mining graphite. You’ve got over 40,000 people in ASM in Malawi. Let’s say 5 percent of those 40,000 are mining rutile quartz. And that gives you about 2,000 people who are doing that activity. If they come out with five, 10 kilos a week, that aggregates to a lot, if they can be organized.
\n\n\n\nWhat are some of the financing constraints for these miners?
\n\n\n\nAlmost 90 percent of the artisanal miners studied have no access to formal financing. And that’s not because they didn’t have access to collateral, but because the financing model for banks doesn’t really fit the artisanal mining cycle. Also, they don’t meet a lot of requirements for bookkeeping.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Tanzania-ASM-miners-with-machinery-edit-1024x806.jpeg?resize=720%2C567&ssl=1\")
If miners were allowed to legally use machinery that can be used at the ASM level that is not considered too large but is also safe enough, it would encourage growth in the sector and possibly bookkeeping and bank lending cycle alignment. However, the current Mines and Minerals Act doesn’t allow ASM actors to use machinery larger than a jackhammer, it prohibits mechanized equipment. And there’s not enough information and technology on safe mining practices in schools and publicly available. We had quite a few accidents last year in different artisanal mining sites due to earth collapsing – cave-ins.
\n\n\n\nThe idea is to simplify licensing and align it to the realities of ASM on the ground and encourage the creation of strong cooperatives. Because the cooperatives actually provide a valuable monitoring aspect. The members keep each other in check in terms of environmental restoration requirements, even paybacks for the financing and the lending.
\n\n\n\nYou want something like Tanzania where you have trading hubs so that there are transparent markets and you can minimize the middlemen stretching from the mine to the sales place. These are sort of one-stop shops. They have all relevant government offices represented including the revenue authority, immigration, mines department, environmental agency.
\n\n\n\nEvery office involved in the mine sector is in one building. Anybody who wants to buy gold knows where to go. They know that they’re going to meet several miners who will be selling gold directly to buyers. As soon as that transaction happens, the gold authority – the Tanzania Mining Commission – takes their royalties, the Tanzania Revenue Authority takes their taxes. The levies are paid. The seller offloads his gold. It’s tested. It’s verified. The buyer buys gold in a safe environment. This enhances traceability [to the source amid supply-chain concerns about social and environmental impacts].
\n\n\n\nAre these changes happening elsewhere?
\n\n\n\nBurkina Faso is adopting a similar model. And then there are countries like Rwanda working strongly on cooperatives and increasing traceability of gold artisanal mining works. There’s an opportunity and there’s real potential for improvements in the sector – better regulation, facilitation, traceability and capture points for gold that would otherwise leave our borders illegally.
\n\n\n\nThis would allow for miners to earn more, for the government to collect more revenue and for the sector to become safer and more sustainable.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: AI-generated photo illustration of miner by Afrologi.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once seen as marginal and even illegal, African artisanal mining is surging as critical minerals demand climbs and central banks stash away more gold.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":2030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443716,57443816,57443740,57443730],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-green-economy","tag-malawi","tag-mining","tag-tanzania","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Artisanal-gold-photo-illustration-Nano-Banana.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Artisanal-gold-photo-illustration-Nano-Banana.jpg?fit=2549%2C1536&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Africa’s small miners dig into boom\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
It will be years before trains roll across the Angola border bound for the Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito after whistling through Zambian mining hubs from Copperbelt to neighboring North-Western Province. Yet the wheels are turning on one of Africa’s most-watched projects as action shifts from maps and conference chatter to engineering, land acquisition – and financing.
\n\n\n\nThe financial scale and human impact are starting to emerge for the 340-mile stretch of the Lobito Corridor in Zambia, the heart of the initiative. Development and construction of the rail line and purchase of rolling stock will cost USD 3 billion to 5 billion, a range that will narrow once engineering and procurement progresses, says the Nigeria-based developer, Africa Finance Corporation. Plans call for construction to wrap up in 2030.
\n\n\n\nAn environmental and social impact assessment filed with the Zambian Government by Africa Finance also reveals that Lobito could uproot almost 3,000 households, or roughly 14,000 people who live in the path of the rail and trade corridor.
\n\n\n\n“Overall, the project is more likely to proceed than not,” says Stephen Nduvi, a Kenyan public policy analyst focused on regional integration. “The key question is no longer whether the corridor has strategic relevance, but whether stakeholders can mobilize the capital and institutional coordination needed to translate political ambition into physical infrastructure.”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Lobito is a geopolitical, economic and social transformation project rolled into one. It’s also a major attempt at African integration often touted in speeches yet prolonged in practice. The United States, European Union and Italy have publicly committed to turn the Lobito concept into reality, chiefly to create an Atlantic-facing mineral supply chain outside China’s control while diversifying the regional economy.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia have agreed to create a master plan and joint investment platform to stir up moneyed interest.
\n\n\n\n“This platform will support transport and logistics infrastructure that directly links the corridor to industrial yards, production zones and processing hubs, while also crowding in investment in agribusiness, energy, urban development and small and medium-sized enterprises,” Zambia’s Ministry of Finance and National Planning said following a recent coordination meeting in Angola.
\n\n\n\nAt a Luanda forum in May 2026, the EU helped match investors with bankable projects in agribusiness and transport logistics within the Angolan section of the Lobito Corridor.
\n\n\n\nAfrica Finance aims to lock down financing by the end of 2027, according to Reuters. In a push toward that goal, the U.S. Government’s development finance arm is loaning Lobito Atlantic Railway USD 553 million while the Development Bank of Southern Africa adds about USD 200 million, for upgrades to the crucial rail operation to and from the Lobito port visited by President Joe Biden in 2024.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Lobito-Biden-with-Angola-Zam-DRC-leaders-DEC2024-by-Cameron-Smith-WH.jpg?resize=720%2C500&ssl=1\")
Of special interest to leaders in Angola, Zambia and the DRC, whose copper and cobalt mining region forms part of the corridor, is whether Lobito becomes more than a minerals and transport play and stimulates agriculture, renewable energy and exports. Zambian officials promote this “land-linked” approach as the way to unlock Lobito’s true value. Angola is stepping up efforts to increase farm output across its vast, arable land. The DRC is working on better mineral trade logistics.
\n\n\n\nMuch has changed in the past 18 months. A late 2024 journey across the entire Zambian route, from Chingola, a city in the epicenter of copper mining, to sleepy Mwinilunga District in the northwestern corner of the country, where a trickle of water in a forest births the Zambezi River, revealed widespread ignorance about Lobito.
\n\n\n\nMayors and planning teams recounted hearing about Lobito from the news and visits by officials from the capital Lusaka yet couldn’t say what they would contribute or how the corridor might reshape their communities. Along the Angola border, however, work was under way on a Lobito crossing point into a Zambian chiefdom. And early investors were snapping up parcels of farmland.
\n\n\n\nDisplacing residents is always a fraught issue, and Lobito’s brain trust is still working out how resettlement would be carried out across a geography spanning hundreds of miles. The project has budgeted USD 7 million for relocation and resettlement compensation, or about USD 2,400 per household, and USD 1.5 million for “livelihood restoration activities.” The social impact assessment pledges to follow international guidelines and set up a way for residents to file and resolve complaints.
\n\n\n\nIn recent months, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema and his top ministers have talked up Lobito, whose hype could influence domestic politics. The president is up for re-election in August 2026, with voters sizing up the country’s economy after severe drought, an energy crunch and a debt crisis. International Monetary Fund forecasters say Zambia’s economy will grow more than 4 percent in 2026 for the first time since 2023.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Zambia-HH-at-Kaoma-road-groundbreaking-OCT2025.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
Lobito responds to the need for infrastructure that Zambians cited in a 2024 Afrobarometer survey when asked to list government priorities. Another Zambian wish: better health care, a source of international friction.
\n\n\n\nLobito is building speed just as relations between Zambia and the United States seem to be derailing. In a scathing departure speech on April 30, 2026, U.S. Ambassador Michael Gonzales accused Zambian government officials of tolerating widespread corruption, allowing billions of dollars of “dirty money” to flow to East Asia untaxed, and covering up the long-term health toll for Zambians from the collapse of a tailings dam at a Chinese copper mine. Gonzales said that accident spilled “carcinogenic heavy metals” into the Kafue River ecosystem, according to the text of his remarks.
\n\n\n\nThe Zambian government called the envoy’s assertions “deeply regrettable” and said stalled talks over a “critical minerals” agreement relate to “the insistence of preferential treatment of U.S. companies” over access to Zambia’s mineral wealth and making health aid conditional on a minerals deal. Gonzales grumbled that his team couldn’t get Zambian officials to pick up the phone.
\n\n\n\nU.S. diplomats have hammered out agreements with 20 other African countries for public health aid conditional on benchmarks for improved care, access to long-term health data and investments by those countries. The sharing of data has sparked a backlash in some countries, and Zambia said data demands are another sticking point.
\n\n\n\nGonzales accused Zambian governments of failing to invest USD 7 billion in American aid since 2000 to create durable health service delivery. “When we paused funding to review our assistance programs last year, so much of Zambia’s health system began to crumble almost overnight,” he said, blaming Zambian leaders for looking away while “officials diverted government funds to their own pockets.”
\n\n\n\nAs America spars with Zambia, artificial intelligence has entered the Lobito picture. Jacob Helberg, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic affairs, told a congressional hearing that his office is reviewing how America’s Pax Silica partners, including Japan, South Korea, Britain and Israel, could bring “new technologies” into Lobito and other trade corridors, “delivering speed, scale and certainty” to global suppliers.
\n\n\n\nPax Silica is a U.S.-led initiative to build “the AI ecosystem of tomorrow” encompassing advanced manufacturing and “minerals that feed” the AI industry, according to the State Department.
\n\n\n\nA study released in May 2026 by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an Oslo-based watchdog that counts Zambia as a member, cautioned that many factors must align to achieve the Lobito vision. “The Corridor could support local content, supplier development and downstream processing, but outcomes will depend on governance and policy decisions,” along with electricity, financing, infrastructure and industrial capacity, EITI said.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Angola-Lobito-DEC2024.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
In 2023, the Angolan arm of Portugal’s Mota-Engil Group won a 30-year concession to operate Lobito Atlantic Railway from Angola to the DRC. The greenfield Lobito rail line planned for Zambia will extend into Angola to connect to this line at Luacano.
\n\n\n\nA key issue is how much cargo these trains will carry. Estimates included in the Africa Finance assessment show that by 2041, about 859,000 tons of Zambian copper would travel on the route, less than a third of the country’s target output by the early 2030s. Zambian grain exports and petroleum imports are among other major volumes projected for Lobito.
\n\n\n\nBesides commercially viable freight volumes, Nduvi says, “coordination among the participating countries on customs procedures, regulations and railway operations will be critical to ensuring that the corridor functions as an integrated transport system.”
\n\n\n\nLobito faces competition from Namibia to the south. A road-and-rail route is being upgraded from Kolwezi in the DRC through Kalumbila District in Zambia, the hub of westward expansion of gold, copper and nickel mining, and onward to the Namibian port at Walvis Bay. That could cut transit times from mines to port from almost two weeks to five days. The Lobito rail option to Lobito from Kolwezi takes seven days.
\n\n\n\nTo revitalize the Namibia route, a USD 326 million partnership among the Zambian Government and companies including copper miner First Quantum Minerals is building a 230-mile toll road in western Zambia, from Mutanda in Kalumbila to Kaoma in Western Province. The Barotse Highway Limited Toll Concession seeks to improve a route that jolts drivers with potholes and stretches of rugged, hard-packed earth. An upgrade promises to smooth the region’s prospects.
\n\n\n\n“I could see what this would mean to our economy – growth and more growth” and jobs for young people, business opportunities, government revenue and even a less perilous journey for pregnant women racing to a clinic, President Hichilema said at the construction groundbreaking.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Investors interested in the Lobito Corridor should seek out Zambia’s district and provincial social and economic development plans (often posted online) to size up sectoral needs and government priorities along the route. Traditional leaders, or chiefs, influence land use and broader development in the region that Lobito will traverse. The chiefs’ affairs office in the North-Western Province administrative hub in Solwezi, Zambia, can help set up meetings with chiefdoms.
\n\n\n\n(Featured image: Barrick’s expanding Lumwana copper mine in Zambia’s North-Western Province.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lobito Corridor, Africa's closely watched, cross-border minerals-trade and investment effort outside China's orbit, is moving toward reality at a cost of as much as USD 5 billion in Zambia - and could displace thousands of people in its 340-mile path.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443713,57443712,57443794,57443740,57443671,57443684,57443765],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-angola","tag-drc","tag-lobito-corridor","tag-mining","tag-top","tag-united-states","tag-zambia","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Zambia-Lumwana-mine-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Zambia-Lumwana-mine-edit.jpg?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Lobito chugs toward reality\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
You may see rising global investment in Africa’s growth as the metric to care about, yet how well Africa itself captures that momentum may be more telling.
Some countries are hardly selling into Africa, while others, such as Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, are robust players. If you add imports to the export flows in this graphic, you find that two-way intra-African trade amounted to just 15.3 percent of total trade in 2024, according to the African Export-Import Bank.
South Africa is the biggest contributor, accounting for one-fifth of total trade on the continent. West Africa – lifted by strong performance from Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Nigeria – is the second-largest intra-African trading region, after southern Africa.
Countries are building more efficient border posts to move truck traffic through faster. And future trade corridors such as the planned linkage among the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Angola, named after the port of Lobito on the Atlantic Ocean, represent pathways for more robust regional commerce.
Amid enthusiasm for the fledgling Africa free-trade area, the stark data shows that Africa has a long way to go in boosting commerce across borders. That’s a starting point – and an opportunity, with an estimated 1 billion more Africans arriving by mid-century.
(Feature image: A shipment of Kenyan tea heads to Ghana, home to the secretariat of the emerging African Continental Free Trade Area. Photo by AfCFTA.)
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/LI-Africa-Trading-with-Africa-infographic.jpg?resize=720%2C895&ssl=1\")
Africa trading with Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
On a recent visit to Zambia’s Nsumbu National Park, gazetted in 1972 along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika, I found myself in a conversation that felt simultaneously ancient and urgently contemporary.
\n\n\n\nOur guide, Thandiwe Mweetwa, a wildlife biologist and landscape integration manager who had tracked lions in South Luangwa National Park hundreds of miles away when I was tracking carnivores in Liuwa Plain National Park far to the west near Angola, was leading my colleague and me through consultations with the Chomba Wa Kasaba community. These people have lived within the park’s boundaries not as an encroachment, but as a legal reality baked into the park’s founding: communities settled on the southern boundary along the Lufubu River.
\n\n\n\nAs we walked, the talk turned to coexistence, and Thandiwe drifted into a story from her South Luangwa years. Not long ago, she said, community members walking through the Nsefu sector to reach Mfuwe would pass lions resting in tree shade. The lions would watch as people dug into the sides of streams for drinking water, then, once the people had moved on, would use those same holes to drink. It is a story of quiet, unremarked coexistence: no drama, no tragedy, just two species navigating shared space across centuries of adaptation.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Africa’s biodiversity spills well beyond gazette lines, yet declaring new parks no longer happens by administrative stroke. How policy, finance and practice treat the landscapes, and the people, outside and within existing boundaries will decide whether the continent’s protected-area systems drive recovery or manage decline.
\n\n\n\nBetween independence in 1964 and the end of his presidency in 1991, Zambia’s founding leader Kenneth Kaunda declared or consolidated almost all the country’s 20 national parks, the backbone of one of Africa’s most significant conservation systems. His vision was inseparable from a broader political project for sovereignty, national identity and what he called Zambian humanism, the belief that development must be rooted in human dignity and communal values.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet the instrument he used, the hard-edged national park, inherited largely from colonial game reserve logic, carried within it a structural tension he perhaps did not fully resolve. Parks meant boundaries. Boundaries meant exclusions. Communities that had fished the Lufubu, hunted the Kafue floodplains, or settled the Lower Zambezi valley for generations found themselves, overnight, inside a legal category that criminalized their most basic livelihood acts.
\n\n\n\nIn Lower Zambezi National Park, where I worked from 2004 to 2010, you could still find places like so-called Old Village, where broken pottery lay half-buried and polished earth marked abandoned house floors, silent testimony to the people moved so that wildlife could remain.
\n\n\n\nThis is not, in hindsight, a repudiation of Kaunda’s vision. The conservation paradigm of his era, one shared by post-colonial leaders across Africa, saw protected areas as instruments of modernity, sovereignty and environmental stewardship. The tragedy is not that he drew lines. It is that the lines, once drawn, hardened in ways that neither he nor anyone else fully anticipated.
\n\n\n\nWe now live in a world where declaring a new national park is extraordinarily difficult, and probably should be. The legal architecture of free, prior and informed consent; environmental and social impact assessment; community rights frameworks; and scrutiny through bodies like the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) means that the swift administrative stroke Kaunda could deploy in 1972 is simply no longer available.
\n\n\n\nThis is democratic progress, yet it surfaces a profound strategic problem: if formal protected-area expansion is largely off the table, how do we protect the biodiversity that exists outside, and critically, within park boundaries in a world of accelerating climate change and population growth?
\n\n\n\nMy field experience across landscapes such as the Liuwa Plains and Lower Zambezi tells a consistent story: parks are nodes, not systems. In Lower Zambezi, the agricultural expansion and deforestation-linked charcoal-making pressures rolling off the plateau do not stop at the park boundary. They reshape what is possible inside it.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Zambia-Lower-Zambezi-National-Park-elephants-edit-by-Global-Alliance-of-National-Parks.jpg?resize=720%2C426&ssl=1\")
In Liuwa, the wildebeest migration moves through a matrix of floodplains and seasonal grasslands that no gazette line can contain, and when the surrounding hydrology shifts or competing land uses intensify, the boundary does not hold the ecology in place. It merely marks where the pressure stops being managed. What happens outside the fence ultimately determines what survives inside it. If biodiversity finance, holistic approaches to human and animal welfare and other emerging frameworks are to be meaningful, they must govern landscape-level processes well beyond the gazette line, or they will always be managing decline rather than enabling recovery.
\n\n\n\nNsumbu’s Chisanse area, where the community is permitted to fish for a defined season each year, points toward a different logic entirely. It is not a park concession or a compromise. It is a recognition that human use and ecological health are not inherently in opposition, provided the terms of use are negotiated, monitored and adaptive.
\n\n\n\nThe same insight animated Kaunda’s later thinking. In May 1986, he personally launched the Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project, Zambia’s first major experiment in returning meaningful management authority and benefit to communities living alongside wildlife. His government formally established the Administrative Management Design for Game Management Areas as national policy soon after. Together with Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program, started in 1989, these are widely regarded as the foundational communal-land natural resources management initiatives based in Southern Africa communities.
\n\n\n\nThe man who had declared Nsumbu in 1972 was, 14 years later, formally questioning the very logic of the hard boundary he had helped institutionalize. Kaunda understood, even then, that the boundary was a starting point, not a permanent solution.
\n\n\n\nWe are now at an inflection point that Kaunda could not have imagined yet might have welcomed. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022; the emergence of biodiversity, climate and sustainable finance; the rise of One Health approaches that treat human, animal and ecosystem wellbeing as inseparable; and the broader architecture of nature-based finance are attempting something fresh.
\n\n\n\nThese approaches try to make the relationship between nature and society legible, economically and ecologically. Rather than reducing nature to a commodity, they make visible the value that communities, landscapes and ecosystems generate and sustain.
\n\n\n\nThe recurring anthrax outbreaks among hippos in the Luangwa Valley, pathogens moving from concentrated dry-season pools through carcasses into scavengers, livestock and people, are reminders that ecological health, animal health and human health were never separate ledgers, even when our institutions treated them as such.
\n\n\n\nBiodiversity finance is the clearest test case. The risk, of course, is that it replicates the errors of the hard boundary in financial form, imposing external valuation frameworks on communities whose relationship with their landscape is not transactional, but relational, spiritual and generational.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Zambia-Lake-Tanganyika-village-by-Jassiel-Msoka-edited-1024x768.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
The Chomba Wa Kasaba community did not stay on the southern bank of the Lufubu because someone offered them a payment for ecosystem services. They stayed because it is home. The question, for biodiversity finance and for every framework that follows it, is whether it can reward stewardship that was never framed as stewardship, but simply as living.
\n\n\n\nThis is why the emerging generation of conservation practitioners, people like Thandiwe, working as landscape integration managers rather than simply wardens or ecologists, represents something important. The title itself is telling. Integration, not exclusion. Landscape, not park. The frame has shifted, even if the institutions have not fully caught up.
\n\n\n\nAs the world marks an international day for biodiversity, three weeks after Kenneth Kaunda Day in Zambia on April 28, his most durable conservation legacy is the question he ultimately could not answer: How do you protect nature in a way that also protects, and supports, the people who live with it?
\n\n\n\nAction options: Africa has better tools now than in Kaunda’s time. Community rights frameworks, adaptive management protocols, landscape-scale biodiversity monitoring and emerging finance mechanisms that can, in principle, channel resources to frontline stewards. What we have not yet resolved is the deeper political question: who gets paid for maintaining biodiversity, whose knowledge defines what is being maintained, and on whose terms is the relationship between people and parks renegotiated?
\n\n\n\nZambia’s protected-area network was built in a remarkable decade of post-independence confidence. Its future will be built, must be built, in a spirit of honest negotiation between that inheritance and the lived realities of the communities that have, in many cases, been its quiet custodians all along. The lions at the waterhole were not waiting for a management plan. They already had worked it out.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: A greater kudu runs across an airstrip in Zambia’s North Kafue National Park, where the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) is working to protect the country’s only black rhino population, by Daniel Rosengren / FZS.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Africa's post-colonial leaders championed national parks as symbols of sovereignty and stewardship, yet the model no longer serves the needs of people or biodiversity.","protected":false},"author":144169655,"featured_media":1883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443695,57443694],"tags":[57443815,57443813,57443716,57443702,57443765],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blue-green","category-societies","tag-biodiversity","tag-conservation","tag-green-economy","tag-tourism","tag-zambia","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Zambia-greater-kudu-NLuangwa-NP-by-Daniel-Rosengren-FZS-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Zambia-greater-kudu-NLuangwa-NP-by-Daniel-Rosengren-FZS-edit.jpg?fit=5318%2C3095&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"The price of wildlife boundaries is rising\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Africa optimists are hyping the potential for the continent to overcome bad habits, accelerate collective action and reap billions of dollars in eager investments for infrastructure and consumer-facing businesses. The data says the path sub-Saharan Africa is taking won’t reach that destination, according to a new analysis by the International Monetary Fund.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: In the past three years, real GDP per capita grew about 1.4 percent a year across sub-Saharan Africa. At that sluggish rate – less than half the pace in emerging markets and developing economies as a whole – it would take about a half-century for income per capita to double. In the meantime, Africa’s working-age population is poised to grow by more than 600 million in the next quarter-century, according to the World Bank, which calls this “the largest and fastest demographic shift in the world.”
\n\n\n\nThe IMF, which serves as the world’s lender of last resort, says Africa needs a “reset” in its economic aspirations. Growth spurts linked to public spending binges and the China-fueled commodities boom that fizzled about a decade ago can’t deliver what African economies need.
\n\n\n\n“The public sector-led growth model is now spent,” IMF economists Grace Li and Nikola Spatafora said this week. “With debt high, borrowing costly and aid falling, the state can no longer be the main engine of growth. The region needs more private investment, backed by broad, business-friendly reforms.”
\n\n\n\nThose changes would target governance, business regulation and the openness of markets. The payoff: perhaps a 20 percent lift in output within a decade as investment, productivity and labor force participation climbs. Those are factors African policy makers can control. What they must overcome: a war outside Africa that has driven up the price of oil, food and fertilizer.
\n\n\n\nThe Iran war that started in late February 2026 with coordinated attacks by Israeli and U.S. forces led to retaliation by Iran across the Gulf region and the interruption of ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the Indian Ocean for energy supplies.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/USS-George-HW-Bush-in-Arabian-Sea-MAY2026-by-centcom-1024x683.avif\")
African Development Bank economists agree with the IMF on the need for investment-fueling reforms – and add another goal: achieving 7 percent average annual growth for a decade to shake up Africa’s economic trajectory, citing evidence from change in East Asia. That is a lofty target for an African economy struggling with debt, weak job growth and geopolitical shocks. Sub-Saharan Africa is generating GDP expansion around 4.5 percent today, with only a few countries close to or exceeding 7 percent growth, including Benin, Ethiopia, Guinea, Rwanda and Uganda.
\n\n\n\n“Predictable regulations, efficient and transparent foreign exchange market operations, and streamlined approval processes will help sustain investor confidence and attract long-term capital inflows, including private sector participation and blended finance solutions,” the bank said in a January 2026 report. “These efforts should support the emergence of national and regional industrial champions capable of driving value addition, technological upgrading, export competitiveness and innovation.”
\n\n\n\nThe AfDB sees GDP growth per capita in Africa reaching a 2.3 percent pace in 2027. Yet the bank notes that rate is roughly half the 4.5 percent growth needed “to drastically reduce poverty and improve livelihoods.”
\n\n\n\nAt the World Governments Summit held in Dubai in February 2026, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan said consistent policies and regulatory changes “have created a more predictable and attractive investment environment” in the East African country. Hassan pointed to registered investment projects climbing toward 1,000 today from 250 in 2018, worth almost USD 12 billion.
\n\n\n\nGovernance and risk mitigation have helped Mozambique get liquified natural gas projects back on track, Prime Minister Maria Benvinda Delfina Levi told the conference. France’s TotalEnergies, which is at the forefront of USD 20 billion in investments to extract Mozambique’s near-offshore natural gas riches, resumed work on the project this year after a five-year pause due to a security breakdown in the northern region. Rwandan forces intervened to support Mozambique’s efforts to restore order amid attacks and kidnappings led by an offshoot of Islamic State.
\n\n\n\nISIS-Mozambique, also known as Ansar al-Sunna, has about 300 fighters and recruits “disaffected youth” in Cabo Delgado province, according to a U.S. intelligence overview. The militia has attacked civilians, government officials, security forces and aid workers, and has carried out assaults on police stations, schools and health facilities. In 2021, it captured and held the town of Palma for four days, killing dozens of people as energy-project workers took shelter. That led TotalEnergies to halt work on the gas project.
\n\n\n\nAction options: For investors, seeking out countries where governments are committed both on paper and in visible action to creating favorable conditions for business is key. Egypt and South Africa are the top-ranked African economies in the 2026 Kearney FDI Confidence Index, one of several measures of ease of doing global business.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva meets Rwandan entrepreneurs in 2023.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Africa needs a “reset” in its economic aspirations, the IMF says. Growth spurts linked to public spending binges and the China-fueled commodities boom that fizzled about a decade ago can’t deliver the broad prosperity African economies need.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692],"tags":[57443682,57443741,57443780],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","tag-economy","tag-imf","tag-investment","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMF-chief-with-Rwanda-green-entrepreenurs-2023.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMF-chief-with-Rwanda-green-entrepreenurs-2023.jpg?fit=732%2C518&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Africa hits a growth wall\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Trevor Hublin was Benin country director for the U.S. Agency for International Development as field operations ended around the world last year. Romuald Wadagni, elected as president in April, will assume office on May 24, 2026. Ahead of his inauguration, the International Monetary Fund praised Benin’s “strong reform drive” and highlighted the “need to manage socio-political and security challenges” in the Ohio-sized nation of 15 million people.
\n\n\n\nWhat should we expect from Benin’s new leader Romuald Wadagni, educated at Harvard with years of experience at the international accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, including in France, America and the Democratic Republic of Congo?
\n\n\n\nA lot of continuity with the outgoing government of President Patrice Talon. After all, Wadagni was Talon’s economy minister for his entire presidency, from 2016 to this year, and was the architect for Benin’s impressive economic reforms and economic growth, which is one of the highest in Africa, having achieved 7.5 percent GDP growth in 2025.
\n\n\n\nWhether we’re talking private or institutional investors, Benin has a very good track record in attracting foreign direct investment. And Wadagni knows how to do that through good macroeconomic management, through good fiscal restraint, ease of business policies. We should expect him to continue to have a heavy hand in steering the economy. Benin remains a poor country, ranked 173rd out of 193 countries and self-governing areas in the United Nations Human Development Index.
\n\n\n\nHe’s got work to do with poverty levels still at 36 percent. He needs to increase broad-based economic opportunity for Beninese citizens. I suspect that he will work hard to increase the productivity of the agricultural sector.
\n\n\n\nOn top of economic management and the focus on continued growth, he’s going to try to get on top of insecurity in the north of Benin, where he likely will have his biggest challenge. Because when we talk about insecurity at the hand of violent extremist groups coming from the Sahel region, Benin needs cooperation with the neighboring countries: Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Niger, yet only has the ability to coordinate effectively with Nigeria and has no communication, has broken off relations with its key neighbor Niger.
\n\n\n\nNevertheless, with the reinforced army presence up north, we should see more concerted action on his part to get on top of the high levels of violence at the community level – again, furthered by violent extremist groups – and stabilize the countryside as much as possible behind advances by the security forces, focusing on development needs.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-with-US-special-forces-2023-edit-1024x598.jpg?resize=720%2C420&ssl=1\")
Finally, will Wadagni loosen current severe restrictions on civil liberties on the political opposition and media in Benin? Over the past 12 years, the country has descended the ranks of democratic states and has become much more authoritarian, one party effectively leading the country and with civil liberties curtailed and key opposition politicians arrested by Talon. If Benin’s democratic environment remains closed, it could herald instability with the public in the future.
\n\n\n\nWadagni clearly thinks in terms bigger than Benin. Do you see him trying to scale up Benin’s ambitions or building regional economic connections?
\n\n\n\nYes. I expect him to come into the presidency with a bullish economic and investment agenda. What he is going to try to do and he has promised – you heard this on the campaign trail – is to maintain economic growth at 7 percent levels in the coming years. That would be an incredible achievement, putting Benin at the forefront of economic growth anywhere in Africa.
\n\n\n\nHe knows exactly what he’s going to need to do: Continue to build investor confidence, continue to raise, through foreign direct investment and through investor-friendly policies, investment in growth areas in the agriculture sector, in light industry, in tourism.
\n\n\n\nBenin is a small country. It’s only a $25 billion gross economy. So, he will need to continue to attract investment as well as favorable lending. And positively there, Benin’s got a great reputation through its sound macroeconomic management, including a budget deficit estimated at less than 3 percent of GDP in 2025. Fitch just gave Benin a B-plus credit rating and raised its outlook from stable to positive, which for lenders means Benin will be a good place to continue to lend to, and that will boost Wadagni’s forthcoming country development program.
\n\n\n\nThat program is going to focus heavily on infrastructure development, electrification, water and sanitation system development, port development, logistics – really trying to strengthen Benin’s reputation as a logistics hub for coastal West Africa. Benin actually has better macroeconomic financials than neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, which has a much bigger economy.
\n\n\n\nHe’s going to try to focus on things like workforce development and to integrate young Beninese workers into new economic sectors that he hopes to stimulate, such as the digital sector, agroeconomic value chain and light industry.
\n\n\n\nBenin is Africa’s biggest cotton producer. What’s the impact of that on its economic choices and how the country’s politics work?
\n\n\n\nIn 2025, Benin did move up in terms of rankings in Africa to first place on total output in the cotton sector with a yield exceeding 630,000 tons. So that placed Benin ahead of its major competitor, which has been Mali. Benin’s magic in terms of cotton production has been to invest in the fundamentals of sustained growth year in, year out.
\n\n\n\nWhen we look at where Benin was a decade ago, the country produced about 150,000 tons a year of cotton. It has steadily increased yields through those years, which has been underpinned by several things: investment in mechanization, investment in seed quality, the governance of the sector, particularly in properly managing the territory and the farmable land for cotton.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-cotton-by-Cotton-Benin.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
What’s also making Benin special in cotton is that they are moving deliberately away from just production and farming into value addition and processing. In terms of metrics, in Benin over 12 percent of the total national output in cotton in the past year was being processed in textile facilities in Benin, particularly with the majority located in the country’s Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone, where cotton spinning and textile garment manufacturing happens.
\n\n\n\nNigeria showed off a big brother relationship with Benin by repelling a coup attempt last year. Did that action have bigger implications in terms of helping the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, restore policing of regional stability after the string of overthrows in the Sahel?
\n\n\n\nOn December 7, 2025, Benin was hit by a coup attempt. And at the time, there was a lot of fear that Benin would become another statistic, drawing on the coups that had happened in the Sahel region – Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – and elsewhere in the region over the past decade. And that didn’t happen. Benin activated ECOWAS’s response mechanisms and was able to get immediate military support from Nigeria in terms of decisive action in helping to thwart the coup attempt via aerial bombardments and air strikes. They got help from Nigeria, but they also got help from Côte d’Ivoire, another major regional power.
\n\n\n\nIt did show that ECOWAS was capable of standing up for its own member states in thwarting coup attempts and maintaining security. Again, this was not all as a result of Benin’s intervention. France was active during this crisis in terms of mobilizing support, particularly from Nigeria. But the thwarting of the coup has served to buttress a better degree of confidence in ECOWAS.
\n\n\n\nBenin’s military has suffered losses from the spillover of insurgent violence in the Sahel. Are the coastal states in West Africa still vulnerable or are we seeing any hopeful signs?
\n\n\n\n2025 marked the worst year in terms of violent attacks and civilian casualties in Benin. It is very linked to patterns of regional violence sponsored, fomented by violent Islamist extremist groups that have their bases primarily in Burkina Faso but also Nigeria and Niger. The main terrorist group that threatens Benin is al-Qaeda and its regional affiliate known as JNIM. For this terrorist group, Benin has really since 2019 been regarded as a point of transit for the flow of weapons and resources, sustaining their insurgency and terrorist activities in the wider region.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Pendjari-national-park-edit-1.jpg?resize=720%2C451&ssl=1\")
Benin forms the link between Nigeria in the east and Burkina Faso in the west. When we talk about illegal commerce – fuel smuggling, the smuggling of cattle or other black market economic sustainment methods – Benin occupies a very strategic place geographically and economically for al-Qaeda. That is why the two most northern departments, Alibori and Atakora, which abut two major national parks, find themselves in a tough position. For several years, that has served as a base area for insurgent groups to permit them to control the region between the Sahel and the northern parts of coastal West Africa.
\n\n\n\nAl-Qaeda has not recruited heavily from within Benin compared to other countries. They draw the majority of their fighters from Sahelian countries. They haven’t established a firm anchor in the communities yet, which gives the Beninese government opportunities to reestablish governance, control and state legitimacy.
\n\n\n\nWith France in retreat in West Africa, where does a country like Benin turn for support for economic guidance and capital for its development?
\n\n\n\nBenin is one of France’s closest allies anywhere in Africa, particularly in French-speaking West Africa. And that will continue during the presidency of Wadagni. He has long personal connections to France, he was educated in France, so he’s not going to change that relationship with France for support. Rather, what we’re going to see is continued work to diversify support for Benin. For example, Benin has courted investment and good relations with countries in the Middle East and the Islamic world.
\n\n\n\nAs well, we will see Benin continue to try to build relationships with the United States, other countries in Europe, and certainly among its neighbors such as Ghana, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
\n\n\n\nBased on your time in Benin, how would you advise investors to approach the country?
\n\n\n\nThis is a great country to invest in because of its sound macroeconomic fundamentals and its business-friendly environment. Your first stop as an investor is to contact the Beninese investment promotion agency, Agence de Promotion des Investissements et des Exportations (APIEX), which serves as a primary gateway for foreign investors. In Benin, to register a business really takes about one day now. Permitting is relatively easy. Approvals for licenses happen quickly.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-GDIZ-park.jpg?resize=720%2C514&ssl=1\")
The other thing that you should expect, especially for investors in agro-business sectors, is to become aware quickly of the country’s premier industrial free-trade zone, the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone. Since 2022, and under the leadership of Wadagni, Benin has set up a 1,600-hectare special economic zone to transform raw agricultural materials – particularly cotton, cashews and fruit – into value-added, refined and processed materials ready for export. The firm that manages the zone is known as Arise, and they have received high marks.
\n\n\n\nTourism is a big interest of the government, particularly in southern Benin, historical tourism along the coast. Benin now has many festivals celebrating its unique cultural heritage. New hotel resorts, including the first international five-star hotel chain with Sofitel hotels, have now opened in the capital city Cotonou. Business law is supported, and you have commercial courts in operation that facilitate adjudicating disputes. You’re going to have a very investor-friendly environment to take advantage of out there.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: Wadagni by Presidency of Benin.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Romuald Wadagni, the new president of Africa's biggest cotton grower, will pursue a bold plan to diversify a surging economy, says an expert on Benin.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":1798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443688,57443810,57443742,57443722,57443811,57443671,57443812],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-agribusiness","tag-benin","tag-france","tag-nigeria","tag-ports","tag-top","tag-west-africa","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Wadagni-2024-by-Benin-Presidency-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Wadagni-2024-by-Benin-Presidency-edit.jpg?fit=765%2C478&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Benin readies a ‘bullish’ agenda\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Emmanuel Macron jogged through the streets of early-May Nairobi with Kenyan marathon god Eliud Kipchoge gliding alongside. As the French president navigated a quiet stretch of the bustling Kenyan capital, his relaxed bearing heralded a fresh start for France’s often turbulent relations with Africa.
\n\n\n\nAfter years of being shunned by coup-happy and democracy-loving West African countries alike, France has found a new home in Africa.
\n\n\n\nMacron’s emergent BFF is William Ruto, Kenya’s president, who hosted a summit in Nairobi May 11-12, 2026, to tout a partnership reboot between the French and countries France once ruled and those the British claimed – and even the Belgians. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a conference star attraction, was there, as was Senegal’s youthful leader Bassirou Diomaye Faye. The boss of southern Africa’s hottest economy, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, also traveled to Nairobi.
\n\n\n\nAmong leaders also on hand: Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama and neighboring Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres touched down, too, as the world body turns Nairobi into its Africa headquarters.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: The Africa Forward Summit sealed France’s eastward shift, which quietly accelerated in the past three years. In 2023, Air France-KLM opened its Africa headquarters in Nairobi. The next year, the French foreign minister started his African tour in Kenya. French development financing is backing a hydropower project in Tanzania, France’s TotalEnergies is developing Uganda’s oilfields and Mozambique’s rich natural gas reserves. And France is supporting Ruto’s ambition to make Kenya a hub for pharmaceutical manufacturing.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps most welcome for Parisian purists: French is now an official language of the East African Community, a political and economic grouping, thanks to the entry of the sprawling Democratic Republic of Congo, which brought a sliver of Atlantic coastline as a bonus.
\n\n\n\nIn an era when American development grants have shrunk with the shutdown of USAID (though roughly USD 4 billion is still available each year for public health in Africa), Macron came to East Africa loaded with goodies. He announced USD 16.4 billion in French public and private investment in energy, artificial intelligence and agriculture, joined with USD 10.5 billion in African money. That’s almost a 60-40 split, which fits with the spirit of the French strategic reset. No more dictating to African peoples, Macron insisted. The way forward is ensemble.
\n\n\n\n“France’s presence in Africa has been shaken over the last 25 years,” Macron said at the closing of a business forum during the summit. “That is normal and quite right. Why has it been shaken? Because for too long, too many people, both, it has to be said, in big companies and in government bodies, saw Africa as their back yard. They would say: ‘we are French, everything is open to us.’ That is over.”
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kenya-France-summit-MAY2026-edit.jpg?resize=720%2C550&ssl=1\")
Macron and Ruto signed agreements on French support for commuter rail, digital connectivity and the development of nuclear power. The French company CMA CGM will invest USD 820 million to modernize Kenya’s Mombasa port on the Indian Ocean.
\n\n\n\nUnlocking Africa’s wealth is a theme the Kenyan leader sounded as Africa tries to reduce a debt mountain amassed during the pandemic and attract more investment. “Africa today holds more than 4 trillion dollars in long-term domestic savings, including over 1 trillion in pension and insurance assets, and more than 500 billion dollars in central bank reserves,” Ruto told the summit.
\n\n\n\nA joint statement called on governments to step up revenue raising at home, in part by shrinking the untaxed informal economy and fighting tax evasion. Deepening local capital markets by improving financial guarantees can help “crowd in” long-term investors, the governments advised.
\n\n\n\nChallenges in connecting Africa’s disparate markets also got attention. “If you’re a Kenyan SME and you want to pay a Senegalese supplier, it takes a correspondent bank and the dollar to do it,” a young French fintech entrepreneur working in West Africa told Macron at a youth forum. “It is not a problem of will, it is not a problem of talent, it is a problem of critical infrastructure.” The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, he noted, is emerging to solve this problem.
\n\n\n\nThe summit wasn’t all about business. Security came up, though subtly. Macron spoke of a “reworked security arrangement that is respectful of the sovereignty of each African country.” With French forces ousted from bases across West Africa, a revised approach is all but certain. About 800 French military personnel landed in Mombasa in March 2026 as part of a training exercise, symbolic of closer defense ties between Kenya and France.
\n\n\n\nIn December 2024, Kenyan national security officials informed Ruto’s Cabinet about a draft defense cooperation agreement with France and received approval for its execution. The agreement outlines potential cooperation in maritime security, intelligence, peacekeeping, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. Kenya’s parliament approved the arrangement in April 2026.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/UN-Guterres-in-Nairobi-MAY2026-edited.jpg?resize=720%2C417&ssl=1\")
At the summit, the leaders issued a “Nairobi Declaration” on peace and security in Africa, affirming their commitment to “a renewed global governance” with a UN Security Council more responsive to African interests, the elimination of mercenaries on the continent, and “the centrality of the African Union” in addressing crises.
\n\n\n\nWith extensive international media coverage and thousands of attendees, Macron succeeded in promoting France’s geographic switch in Africa. “Karibuni nyumbani,” Ruto offered in Swahili after expressing the same in French to Macron as he smiled from the audience: Welcome home.
\n\n\n\nAction options: France’s alignment with Kenya signals that East Africa is emerging as a favored destination for European investors. The combination of tech infrastructure, emerging energy and transport linkages and high-growth economies affords first-time Africa investors an appealing entry point.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Ruto shows off his ball handling skills as Macron and Senegal’s Faye look on, by Kenyan Presidency.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Nairobi summit resets France's position in Africa after setbacks in West Africa and forges a new partnership for investment and collaboration.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443688,57443809,57443742,57443716,57443679,57443671],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-agribusiness","tag-east-africa","tag-france","tag-green-economy","tag-kenya","tag-top","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Macron-and-Ruto-11MAY2026.jpeg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Macron-and-Ruto-11MAY2026.jpeg?fit=1280%2C854&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"France shifts east in Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
NASA’s celebrated Artemis II mission, which looped around the moon with four astronauts in a key step toward returning to the lunar surface with a long-term presence, adds momentum to America’s quest to build a lucrative space economy. A few African countries are lining up with that vision, which could be worth tens of billions of dollars.
\n\n\n\nWhen Senegal’s young leader visited President Donald Trump last year, they bantered about golf and investment. Yet few noticed what came next. At NASA headquarters two weeks after President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s White House meeting, Senegal’s space agency chief Maram Kairé signed the Artemis Accords, making Senegal the fourth African government to join Trump’s space relations framework.
\n\n\n\n“Senegal’s adherence to the Artemis Accords reflects our commitment to a multilateral, responsible and transparent approach to space,” Kairé said. In August 2024, Senegal had sent its first satellite into orbit from a U.S. military base in California aboard a rocket built by South African native Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
\n\n\n\nWhile Trump’s America First policies have fractured terrestrial alliances, the mercurial American leader favors collaboration off the planet. Countries have rallied to the Artemis Accords since the start of the space policy in October 2020, during Trump’s first presidential term. Sixty-one countries have climbed aboard, including Angola, Nigeria and Rwanda.
\n\n\n\n“We’re trying to create a regulatory environment that is minimally burdensome and receptive to innovation, and we’re aiming to keep the United States as the flag of choice for the global space community to do business,” said Gabriel Swiney of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce, in a briefing with reporters a week before the Artemis II mission lifted off on its approximately 700,000-mile round trip. Swiney was an architect of the Artemis Accords.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/NASA-Artemis-Glover-06APR2026.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
What’s at stake: In a December 2025 executive order aimed at bolstering “American space superiority,” Trump set a target of USD 50 billion in extra investment in “American space markets” by 2028. That is the year NASA aims to put American astronauts back on the moon and begin setting up a lunar outpost by 2030. In the long-term vision, this presence opens the way for a complex and risky voyage to Mars years or decades later.
\n\n\n\nThe executive order also called for “strengthening ally and partner contributions to United States and collective space security, including through increased space security spending, operational cooperation, basing agreements, and ally and partner investments in America’s space industrial base.”
\n\n\n\nSouth Africa is building a deep space communication antenna at Matjiesfontein, about 50 miles northeast of the wine country outside Cape Town. Matjiesfontein will form part of NASA’s global Lunar Exploration Ground Segment communication and navigation network, according to SANSA, South Africa’s space agency. Along with ground stations in the United States and Australia, the facility will support human and robotic craft operating as far as 2 million kilometers from Earth or 1.2 million miles, five times farther than the moon.
\n\n\n\nNamed after the Greek goddess of wild nature, twin sister of Apollo, Artemis is the brand for NASA’s back-to-the-moon program. In their lunar flyby, four astronauts – Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen – completed the farthest human space trip ever and the first into lunar orbit since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
\n\n\n\nIn their spacecraft dubbed Integrity, the astronauts saw and photographed areas of the dark side of the moon never observed and witnessed a spectacular solar eclipse and meteors striking the lunar surface.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/NASA-Artemis-Orion-and-moon-06APR2026-1.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
“With Artemis II complete, focus now turns confidently toward assembling Artemis III and preparing to return to the lunar surface, build the base, and never give up the moon again,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on April 10, 2026, shortly after the Artemis II capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, safely returning the crew.
\n\n\n\nThe non-binding Artemis principles are meant to build on the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Coalition members agree to peaceful cooperation in space, transparency in space plans, sharing of scientific data, providing emergency help in space, and avoidance of “harmful interference.”
\n\n\n\nWhile Artemis sounds cosmic and benign, this diplomatic mission forms part of a geopolitical game poised to reach beyond our planet. Trump is attempting to sideline China and Russia and create an American-led order for the coming scale-up of space business. Geopolitics is giving way to cosmopolitics.
\n\n\n\nValda Vikmanis, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Space Affairs, said, “we want to ensure that foreign space laws, policies, and regulations allow for stronger commercial ties with the United States rather than placing unhelpful regulatory burdens on U.S. companies.” The U.S. official registered concern that the proposed European Union Space Act “poses a very serious threat of stifling” efforts to forge a robust space industry.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Senegal-Artemis-Accords-JUL2025-by-Keegan-Barber-NASA.jpg?resize=629%2C460&ssl=1\")
Writing for The Strategist site of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, aerospace expert Philip Citowicki said the Artemis Accords enhance the governance needed to prevent instability as the moon becomes part of “humanity’s economy.” He noted that companies have broken the government monopoly that defined an earlier era. “Soon they’ll run space stations in low earth orbit,” Citowicki said. “Orbital services, lunar logistics and space-derived data have become investable in the order of billions of dollars.”
\n\n\n\nAction options: Africa’s Artemis joiners may be getting a jump on their peers in the emerging space economy and perhaps seeding tech industries at home that will feed into this bonanza. Nineteen African countries have launched 68 satellites as of 2025, according to Spacehubs Africa. Who’s next from the continent to ride Trump’s cosmopolitics rocket?
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Earth rises above the lunar surface during Artemis II flyby, by NASA.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The success of NASA's Artemis II moon mission could boost Africa's involvement in the America-led international coalition to build a lucrative space economy.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443696,57443693],"tags":[57443713,57443722,57443721,57443719,57443808,57443684],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-tech","tag-angola","tag-nigeria","tag-rwanda","tag-south-africa","tag-space-economy","tag-united-states","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/NASA-Artemis-earthrise-APR2026-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/NASA-Artemis-earthrise-APR2026-edit.jpg?fit=1707%2C1108&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Artemis moonshot opens way for Africa\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
After a terrorist insurgency scrambled Mozambique’s schedule for delivering its natural gas riches to global markets, the far-off war in Iran is making the southern African country’s energy popular again. Other African producers are gaining attention, too.
\n\n\n\nWith Persian Gulf exports of liquified natural gas (LNG) from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates bottled up by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz due to Iranian drone, missile and boat-swarm attacks, gas supplies in Africa look comparatively risk-free.
\n\n\n\nThe energy industry observer OilPrice said African producers “could ultimately emerge as the long-term winners” from the Middle East war that began in late February 2026 when Israel and the United States attacked Iran. OilPrice said: “The ongoing disruption has handed African energy producers a distinctive structural advantage, thanks to being largely insulated from the conflict’s geography,”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at Stake: Moves are happening fast amid what the International Energy Agency – a club of major energy-producing and consuming nations – calls the biggest disruption to fuel supplies in history. The European Union’s commissioner for energy and housing cautioned member governments at the end of March 2026 to prepare for “a potentially prolonged disruption of international energy trade.” Already, Italy and Spain are seeking more gas from Algeria.
\n\n\n\nLucky timing is helping. Just days before the Iran war started, Algeria and Niger set aside political differences and resumed development of a trans-Saharan pipeline that will take gas from Nigeria to Europe in a few years. In mid-March, the Italian energy company ENI announced gas discoveries from drill sites about 10 miles and 50 miles off the coast of Libya near the country’s largest offshore gas field, Bahr Essalam. The proximity of the find, estimated to be more than 1 trillion cubic feet of gas, “will enable rapid development” by connecting to existing offshore facilities, the company said.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Libya-gas-exploration-rig-used-by-ENI-by-Saipem.jpeg?resize=720%2C515&ssl=1\")
Meanwhile, Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company has opened bidding for offshore gas exploration licenses, including the drilling of 17 exploratory wells and initiating seismic surveys in the eastern Mediterranean.
\n\n\n\nChina, which buys LNG from Qatar and the U.A.E., is turning to North Africa for future energy, and not just hydrocarbons. The Hormuz clog affects only about 6 percent of China’s total gas supply; China can tap pipeline gas from Russia and Central Asia and domestic sources, according to S&P Global. Africa will plus up supply. In July 2025, Algeria’s Sonatrach and China’s Sinopec signed a memorandum of understanding for gas exploration. The African Energy Chamber, an industry group, praised the deal as a “strong example of cross-border collaboration that balances international expertise with African resource leadership.”
\n\n\n\nAlso significant is Chinese investment in renewable energy projects in Morocco, which has become China’s “green-energy bridgehead” in Africa, involving green aluminum, green hydrogen, solar and wind projects, according to Chuchu Zhang, a Middle East political economy expert at China’s Fudan University.
\n\n\n\n“By exposing the fragility of Gulf dependence, the conflict has propelled Beijing toward a more resilient, diversified, and greener energy posture” in which North Africa “is becoming a new fulcrum for China’s energy resilience,” Zhang wrote last week in a commentary for the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps the most unlikely emerging partnership springs from another conflict. Ukraine is seeking gas from Mozambique in exchange for helping the country secure its energy-producing region. The war with Russia has disrupted Ukraine’s domestic gas production.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ukraine-Qatar-Zelensky-MAR2026-edit-1024x735.jpg?resize=720%2C517&ssl=1\")
“Ukraine is interested in additional energy supplies,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, according to a statement from his office after he spoke with Mozambique’s President Daniel Chapo on March 23. “Mozambique is interested in Ukraine’s experience and technologies to strengthen its internal security and protect people from terror.”
\n\n\n\nYet the dramatic shift in the global energy market may not generate a windfall for Africans where underlying government policies have gone awry. Mozambique’s failure to confront its deteriorating finances is putting at risk more than USD 50 billion in international investment, mainly for LNG energy megaprojects, the World Bank has warned as costly domestic debt skyrockets in the country.
\n\n\n\nMozambique’s public debt is in “distress” and “unsustainable,” an IMF-World Bank assessment has concluded. The culprit is rising wages for the country’s 357,000 civil servants, according to the bank. A worst-case fiscal crunch “would also require that a significant share of projected LNG revenues through 2042 be diverted to cover accumulated fiscal imbalances instead of financing strategic development priorities,” World Bank analysts said in the assessment.
\n\n\n\nThe implications of this “disorderly adjustment” include undermining living standards in a country where almost two-thirds of people live in poverty. A decade ago, less than half of Mozambicans were counted as poor. Poverty is deep and entrenched in rural areas, while the capital Maputo and its province are prosperous by comparison. And the financial problem could weaken the government’s capacity to deliver essential public services.
\n\n\n\nThe World Bank’s dire assessment contrasts with French energy giant TotalEnergies’ announced decision in January to resume full operations to tap the massive natural gas fields just off the far northern coast near Tanzania. The project was halted for five years due to a relentless insurgency by fighters affiliated with Islamic State, who have engaged in numerous attacks and kidnappings for ransom.
\n\n\n\nThe security crisis prompted Rwanda to send as many as 6,300 soldiers to assist Mozambique in securing Cabo Delgado Province, where natural gas megaprojects are unfolding.
\n\n\n\nIn mid-March 2026, Rwanda’s foreign minister said on X that the country would pull out of Mozambique if “our work and achievements are not appreciated” and “sustainable funding” isn’t found for the operation. Olivier Nduhungirehe complained that Rwandan soldiers had made “the ultimate sacrifice” to stabilize the region, yet are “being constantly questioned, vilified, criticised, blamed or sanctioned by the very countries that greatly benefit from our intervention in Mozambique.”
\n\n\n\nThe threat came a few days after the United States imposed financial penalties on Rwandan military officials in connection with alleged violations of a peace accord championed by Donald Trump for the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where minerals coveted for U.S.-backed energy and tech supply chains are in play. Rwanda said the sanctions unjustly target its military and misrepresent the conflict situation.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Trump-DRC-Rwanda-04DEC2025.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
Another factor: The European Union isn’t planning to extend funding for the Rwandan mission beyond May 2026, Bloomberg reported in March, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. “By threatening to withdraw from Cabo Delgado, Rwanda is pressuring the U.S. not to tighten sanctions and the EU not to withdraw funding,” the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies said.
\n\n\n\nJust weeks before this geopolitical tension erupted, the lead investor in Mozambique’s energy ambitions sounded optimistic, after years of security dangers. The resumption of the gas project “reaffirms the confidence of international partners in Mozambique’s energy, institutional and human potential,” CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in a January 29 statement after meeting with Mozambique’s Chapo. Another energy heavyweight, ExxonMobil, is developing the Rovuma LNG project in Mozambique.
\n\n\n\nTotal is the largest partner and operator of the USD 20 billion Mozambique LNG joint venture that includes Japan’s Mitsui oil and gas company. Japan will be a major customer for the gas, whose output is set to start in 2029. Pouyanné said the project will generate 3,000 local construction jobs, more than USD 4 billion in contracts to companies in Mozambique and support 7,000 farmers and fishermen through a related foundation.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Energy producers in Africa will get an unexpected economic lift and governments should gain more fiscal revenue amid elevated world oil and gas prices. That could feed into improved public services and demand for health, education, water and other investments.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Mozambique’s Chapo and Rwanda’s Kagame meeting last year, via X.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid the Iran war's energy disruptions, Europe and China are rushing to secure natural gas supplies from safer African producers, from Algeria to Mozambique.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443720,57443706,57443737,57443716,57443751,57443806,57443758,57443807,57443722,57443739,57443721,57443671,57443690],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-algeria","tag-china","tag-egypt","tag-green-economy","tag-italy","tag-libya","tag-morocco","tag-mozambique","tag-nigeria","tag-oilandgas","tag-rwanda","tag-top","tag-war","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mozam-Rwanda-Chapo-with-Kagame-via-X-edited.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mozam-Rwanda-Chapo-with-Kagame-via-X-edited.jpg?fit=1090%2C736&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"War in Gulf ignites rush for Africa’s gas\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
As the Persian Gulf region endures sustained kinetic conflict and faces lingering tensions even if bombs, missiles and explosive drones vanish, Africa’s major cities are models of operational calm and continuity, effectively decoupled from northern volatility.
\n\n\n\nAfrican metropolises such as Nairobi begin workdays with a notable absence of threats from the sky, as the region about 2,000 miles north of East Africa, sweeping in Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Iran, is coping with an expansive theatre of war. In this drama, a geographic safe distance has become a strategic asset.
\n\n\n\nAs northern flight paths become less tenable, Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines are siphoning market share, capturing traffic diverted from the North America-Asia-Europe corridors. Kenya’s flights are operating at almost 100 percent capacity as bookings shift. The airline’s acting chief executive, George Kamal, told reporters that “the gains are coming from Europe, from the U.S. and Asia. Those routes are contributing positively, very positively, to our network now.”
\n\n\n\nThe disruption of flight operations at Dubai International Airport (DXB) in mid-March 2026 following an Iranian drone attack on critical fuel infrastructure there and strikes on a major port and oil storage elsewhere in the U.A.E. pierced the bubble of security that has defined the Gulf’s high-profile urban hubs. Rising from the desert about 40 years ago, these cities are stacked with gleaming office buildings, soaring hotels and residential towers, high-end shopping, art, golf and Caribbean-like beach escapes for families. Their vulnerability is a psychological catalyst for regional de-risking.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at Stake: As the perceived safety of traditional crossroads like Dubai and Abu Dhabi erodes, Africa is undergoing a rapid rebranding as a global haven. This shift may reshape the framework of global connectivity, beginning with the redirection of international air travel and extending to energy supplies, fertilizer and the security of water and infrastructure.
\n\n\n\nAir hubs function as the primary economic engines and signals for regional stability. The U.A.E. has deployed its global brand into the skies for decades as Emirates, a premier long-haul airline for the globally savvy elite. (Emirates’ flight number for its route from Dubai to London is 007, paying homage to the world’s most famous cinematic spy, James Bond.)
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Emirates-A380.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
When these global brands are affected by war fighting and airspace closures, transport flows and supply chains abruptly shift.
\n\n\n\nEthiopian Air is picking up extra bookings from as far away as South Africa. “For many South Africans planning trips abroad, the usual travel map has been redrawn almost overnight,” the Cape Town-based travel site Getaway reported. “Routes that once felt predictable now come with uncertainty, and travellers are adjusting quickly.”
\n\n\n\nFor Ethiopian, Africa’s largest passenger and cargo carrier, the timing of the war coincides with the start of construction of its planned global mega-hub 25 miles outside Addis Ababa in Bishoftu. Slated for full operation in the 2030s, this facility is designed to anchor Africa’s role as the primary global alternative to the volatile Gulf – able to handle more than 200 aircraft at a time and more than 1 million passengers each week.
\n\n\n\nThere’s plenty of passenger traffic for Ethiopian, Kenya and other African airlines to snap up. Intra-Africa air travel will be the fastest-growing market in the world from 2024 to 2050, as demand rises at a 4.9 percent compound annual growth rate, followed by the Africa-to-Asia-Pacific market, according to the International Air Transport Association.
\n\n\n\nThis reconfiguration of the skies is a precursor to a broader realignment of energy and commodity flows, as the global economy seeks routes that bypass traditional maritime chokepoints. In this crisis, that is the narrow passage called the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran on one side and the U.A.E. and other energy exporters on the other.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Strait-of-Hormuz-graphic-via-NASA-image.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1\")
Kenya’s rarely used northern port of Lamu near Somalia “is geared up for a spike in vessel calls” due to the war, which should “inject fresh momentum into regional trade and strengthen the Port’s position as a leading transshipment hub in the region,” the Kenya Ports Authority said. At least one vessel unable to reach the Gulf has arrived with thousands of Japanese cars.
\n\n\n\nAfrican countries have scrambled to secure oil and fuel supplies yet are less vulnerable than many Asian economies. In 2025, China received 4.6 million barrels of crude via the strait daily, India got 2.1 million barrels and the rest of Asia 6.2 million barrels, according to the International Energy Agency. Another hit for Asia: a cut-off of up to 27 percent of liquified natural gas imports, mainly from the U.A.E. and Qatar.
\n\n\n\nIn contrast, Africa received only 200,000 barrels of crude daily in 2025 from Gulf producers exporting through the strait yet got three times more volume in oil products. While African oil usage is far smaller than Asia’s, reserves are much lower too. And the energy price surge will feed inflation into African economies.
\n\n\n\nThe global economy has breached the USD 100-a-barrel psychological threshold that signals systemic crisis. With 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil trade bottled up by Iranian attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, the necessity for energy sovereignty has reached a tipping point.
\n\n\n\nFor Africa, this energy crunch will help drive a transition toward becoming a green energy superpower, insulating the continent from shocks that batter industrialized Asia and Europe.
\n\n\n\nEthiopia provides the blueprint for this macroeconomic realignment. By banning the importation of fossil-fueled vehicles, the country is forcing a transition to an electric vehicle economy powered by abundant hydropower including from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest dam, on the Nile River. This harnessing of the Nile’s energy, complemented by solar and wind investments, could create a competitive advantage: a manufacturing and logistics base with lower vulnerability to global energy volatility.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Ethiopia-Bishoftu-Airport_concourses-2026.jpg?resize=720%2C406&ssl=1\")
Africa’s dual approach to energy entails the massive scaling of hydropower, solar, geothermal and wind energy to achieve domestic independence. Meanwhile, large hydrocarbon discoveries are being developed in Namibia, Senegal, Mozambique, Uganda and other countries to balance the clean energy transition. (Not all is effortless on this front, as Mozambique shows: for five years, a militant Islamist insurgency halted a $20 billion French-led project to develop a massive offshore natural gas discovery. TotalEnergies resumed operations in January 2026.)
\n\n\n\nThe drive for energy independence also is linked to the industrial requirements of food security, specifically the production of fertilizers.
\n\n\n\nThe Strait of Hormuz remains a critical vulnerability for global nutrition, as it serves as the gateway for one-third of the world’s fertilizer transported on the oceans. Because natural gas is the fundamental feedstock for nitrogen and phosphate production, the ongoing conflict has induced a nutrient supply shock.
\n\n\n\nAfrica is countering this risk through localized industrialization, moving to secure its own agricultural inputs and mitigate global supply chain disruptions. Dangote Group, led by Nigerian tycoon Aliko Dangote, is driving the shift. While Dangote’s sprawling, USD 2.5 billion Nigeria facility is already an exporter to the United States and is picking up orders during this Middle East conflict, a second major complex is planned for Ethiopia.
\n\n\n\nThese facilities represent the building of Africa’s fertilizer sovereignty. What’s more, the shift toward “green ammonia,” produced by renewable energy rather than natural gas, is on the horizon. Kenya’s collaboration with a Chinese company to use geothermal energy for making fertilizer, highlights the trend.
\n\n\n\nAnother contrast has emerged between the two regions: While oil built the rich economies of the Gulf, desalinated water keeps those countries alive. The Gulf’s reliance on turning seawater into drinking water makes its survival a soft target for conflict. Iranian attacks have targeted this vital water infrastructure.
\n\n\n\nIn contrast, Africa’s long-term water security is rooted in underground resilience. The continent holds massive and largely untapped aquifers that are inherently more defensible and sustainable. Current instability may accelerate the transition from rain-reliant agriculture vulnerable to climate change-induced drought, to irrigation systems tapping these reserves.
\n\n\n\nAction Options: As the power centers of the Gulf face a period of sustained volatility and risks to infrastructure, Africa is emerging as a secure, reliable and essential pillar of global stability. Building up green energy, sustainable agriculture and services related to a surge of air travel are likely to be growing needs. This is a long-term strategic pivot as the world redraws its maps of risk and opportunity.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Dubai by Selim/Pixabay)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf, Africa demonstrates stability and resilience, attracting diverted air traffic and easing shocks to energy and fertilizer supplies with homegrown capacity. This geopolitical shift positions Africa as a global haven amid regional volatility.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443688,57443805,57443708,57443716,57443679,57443722,57443804,57443719,57443671,57443732,57443690],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-agribusiness","tag-air-travel","tag-ethiopia","tag-green-economy","tag-kenya","tag-nigeria","tag-oil","tag-south-africa","tag-top","tag-trade","tag-war","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Dubai-Selim-Pixabay.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Dubai-Selim-Pixabay.jpg?fit=1280%2C854&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Iran war turns Africa into global haven\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
From luxury shoes crafted from worn-out car tires in South Africa to school furniture made from recycled waste in Ghana, a quiet shift is under way.
\n\n\n\nAcross Africa’s urban townships and high-density suburbs, recycling ventures and waste-to-value start-ups are creating new pathways into work for young people shut out of traditional job creators such as manufacturing, mining and public service.
\n\n\n\nOne such entrepreneur is Charlene Muguti, 29-year-old co-founder of Mckingtorch Zimbabwe, a youth-led enterprise creating clever value from discarded materials. Its products range from women’s sandals to trash bins built from stacked plastic bottles. “When I started, I was addressing issues such as poor waste management, illegal dumping, limited awareness of recycling and climate change,” Muguti says. “But now I have gone beyond that, creating green jobs for myself and others.”
\n\n\n\nAfrican youth unemployment is often reduced to depressing statistics: millions without jobs, shrinking formal markets, and economies struggling to absorb new graduates. Yet beyond spreadsheets and policy briefs, something dynamic is taking shape. At the intersection of climate action and economic survival, young Africans are building businesses that reimagine what work can look like in a warming world.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at Stake: Africa’s green jobs transition depends on whether the continent can leverage its minerals, youthful population and renewable potential to build inclusive industrial economies or remain a raw materials supplier in a new era of green extraction. The outcome will shape not only employment and economic sovereignty, but also Africa’s ability to adapt to climate change.
\n\n\n\nThis scrappy green economy could create as many as 3.3 million jobs in Africa by 2030, according to FSD Africa, a British-backed development finance investor based in Kenya that is trying to bring more capital into green growth.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Namibia-solar-school-edit.png?resize=574%2C426&ssl=1\")
FSD Africa reckons that solar energy could account for 57 percent of the jobs created, largely because off-grid solar systems are relatively easy to install, widely accessible, and quicker to deploy compared to other energy sources. Namibia’s Green Solar Academy offers a five-day course that promises to help students “master the sun in one week,” moving from basic to advanced installation skills.
\n\n\n\nJobs in climate-smart agriculture – making farming more resilient to weather shocks and stresses – could comprise 12 percent of the tally as countries modernize food systems. Aquaculture and poultry farming employment could generate 6 percent of the green growth by 2030 as food demand grows with surging populations. Waste management and recycling could match that job creation as cities expand, creating opportunities in collection, processing and reuse.
\n\n\n\nThe jobs will arise in fast-urbanizing countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. These countries could see more than a fifth of the forecast green work expansion in Africa.
\n\n\n\nIn Zimbabwe, where power cuts are routine and electricity costs remain high, solar energy has become a necessity and income source. When Tanyaradzwa Sonja Nago’s father passed away from cancer, she took over the solar business at 19, learning on the job. Now 22, the Harare entrepreneur says she was “determined to make it work, because I believe in green energy and its benefits for the environment.”
\n\n\n\nMakafui Awuku, the founder of Mckingtorch Ghana, is transforming discarded plastic waste into school furniture, a model he shared with Mckingtorch Zimbabwe’s Muguti and replicated in Zambia, tackling two problems at once: mounting urban waste and shortages of durable school fixtures in poorer districts. Health risks also inspired action. “I am asthmatic and react to plastic burning,” Awuku says, “so I was looking for solutions to help myself and others with similar health challenges.”
\n\n\n\nYoung engineers and artisans design, mold and assemble products locally, keeping value within communities and reducing imports. Awuku says the company employs 15 workers, has created 40 other jobs and keeps 500 volunteers busy in Ghana and other countries.
\n\n\n\nElsewhere, the drive toward green employment is unfolding at an even faster pace. In 2024, Ethiopia became the first country to ban the import of petrol- (gasoline) and diesel-powered cars to cut fuel import costs, reduce subsidies, and accelerate a shift to electric mobility. In October 2025, the ban expanded to trucks. The fossil-fuel squeeze could deliver green jobs in electric vehicle assembly, battery servicing, charging and renewable energy infrastructure.
\n\n\n\nIn South Africa’s low-income urban communities, recycling and waste-to-value initiatives are providing another entry point. Youth-led start-ups train and fund peers to turn waste into usable products such as footwear and fuel.
\n\n\n\nMalibongwe Xaba, general manager of the Green Youth Network in South Africa, says the organization began with “Green Mondays” to raise awareness around environmental issues and motivate university students to pursue studies, explore green skills and careers – and get special financial aid. Over the years, the network has worked with more than 50,000 young people across southern Africa and as far away as Kenya and Tanzania. “We expose youth to green opportunities, share skills in the green sector, support youth green entrepreneurs, and ensure young people are counted and included,” Xaba says.
\n\n\n\nAcross Ghana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, where formal employment opportunities remain limited, young people collect discarded bottles and packaging and sell them to recycling hubs that turn the waste into usable raw materials. What was once informal scavenging is becoming a business.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/South-Africa-waste-collection-ILO-edit.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
While many Africans are officially counted as employed, most work in informal and low-productivity jobs, according to the International Labor Organization. And this is before an expected population wave. Sub-Saharan Africa could account for 90 percent of global population growth by 2050, which would translate into a projected increase in the working-age population of more than 600 million people, according to a World Bank analysis. This unprecedented expansion means the region would need to create 25 million jobs on average every year to mid-century.
\n\n\n\nWhile green jobs are emerging, access remains uneven. Many initiatives depend on donor funding that may vanish. Access to finance is limited, with young entrepreneurs struggling to secure affordable loans. Regulatory frameworks can be vague around waste management contracts or feed-in tariffs for renewable energy. In Zimbabwe, currency instability complicates pricing and procurement. In Ghana and South Africa, competition with established companies can squeeze small operators out of municipal contracts.
\n\n\n\nTafadzwa Shumba, a planning, monitoring and evaluation adviser at SNV Netherlands Development Organisation in Zimbabwe, says green jobs address youth unemployment by creating entry pathways into sectors with growing demand for energy reliability, waste services and circular value chains.
\n\n\n\nYoung entrepreneurs require access to practical, certified technical skills in areas such as solar installation and maintenance, waste handling and recycling or upcycling operations, he says. Beyond technical know-how, there is a critical need for health, safety and standards compliance training, particularly in higher-risk trades and waste value chains.
\n\n\n\n“The biggest barrier is access to funding,” Xaba says. “There is also a lot of red tape, strict rules and compliance requirements. These things make it hard for young people to access funding and sometimes stop innovation before it even starts.”
\n\n\n\nAction Options: For policymakers and development partners, investing in youth-focused technical training, micro-financing and simplified licensing could accelerate green job growth. Investors and private sector actors could explore partnerships with township-based recyclers and renewable energy start-ups to build scalable supply chains. For young people, acquiring basic technical skills in solar installation, waste sorting or sustainable agriculture can provide entry points into a rapidly expanding sector.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: A worker in Ghana installs roof tiles made from plastic waste.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facing environmental threats and economic survival, young Africans are building green businesses that could create jobs for millions amid a rising employment crisis. Linda Mujuru reports on these inventive entrepreneurs.","protected":false},"author":144169654,"featured_media":1485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692],"tags":[57443708,57443802,57443716,57443803,57443748,57443719,57443787,57443776],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","tag-ethiopia","tag-ghana","tag-green-economy","tag-recycling","tag-solar","tag-south-africa","tag-youth","tag-zimbabwe","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Green-jobs-roof-in-Ghana-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Green-jobs-roof-in-Ghana-edit.jpg?fit=1186%2C705&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Green start-ups scrap downbeat jobs story\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
America is wheeling and dealing in African mining countries – yet not for the “critical” minerals that drive U.S. interest in Africa these days. Instead, the public health of around 150 million Africans is at stake.
\n\n\n\nIn late February 2026, U.S. diplomats locked down three more public health aid deals under Donald Trump’s America First Global Health Strategy. The largest memorandum of understanding was signed with the Democratic Republic of Congo, for USD 1.2 billion over five years – 300 million to be paid by the DRC government. The deal calls for creating a national disease-outbreak response, strengthening community health workers and scaling up neonatal rapid diagnostic tools in the sprawling country of about 113 million people.
\n\n\n\nThese health MOUs show that America has sorted its prized African partners into two buckets: those with valuable minerals and those such as Kenya and Ethiopia that have little to offer in extractive profits yet are strategic, friendly, fast-growing economies (courted by China) and can’t be ignored. Twenty African countries have signed MOUs, amounting to almost USD 20 billion – 38 percent committed by the countries.
\n\n\n\nThe DRC is Africa’s largest producer of copper, holds at least half the world’s cobalt and is loaded with other shiny treasure including lithium and gold. Under a Trump-brokered peace agreement with Rwanda last year that’s intended to quell an insurgency in eastern Congo, American investors got preferential access to DRC mining and prospecting deals.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/DRC-Tshisekedi-Trump-2025.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1\")
That agreement is shaky. The U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions office imposed financial penalties on Rwanda’s military and four senior officials in March 2026, accusing them of “blatant violations” of the peace deal by aiding the M23 militia in capturing territory and mining areas in eastern Congo, actions that have killed and displaced civilians.
\n\n\n\nThe United States also cited M23’s takeover of Uvira, a town on Lake Tanganyika near the DRC-Burundi border, shortly after the peace accord signing as evidence of widening violence in violation of the peace drive. Rwanda said the sanctions unjustly target its military and misrepresent the conflict situation.
\n\n\n\nIn Kenya, some fear the true gold extracted from its health deal with America might be data. Kenya’s high court has suspended the USD 2.5 billion agreement with the United States over legal challenges brought by the Consumer Federation of Kenya and a Kenyan senator. The federation said the deal violates Kenyan data protection laws and would give the United States access to extensive public health information. The senator said the Kenyan government has made an unfunded commitment of USD 850 million that sidesteps legislative oversight.K
\n\n\n\nUnder the Kenya agreement, signed in Washington in December by Secretary of State Marco Rubio with Kenyan President William Ruto present, the United States will spend up to USD 1.6 billion during the next five years on public health in Kenya to go with the Kenyan contribution.
\n\n\n\nAfter three months of talks, Kenya agreed to assume more responsibility for its public health care. Purchases of commodities – typically drugs, testing kits and other supplies – will shift to Kenyan control over five years. Frontline health workers now paid with U.S. funding will move to the Kenyan government payroll. And Kenya has pledged to scale up its health data system “to ensure key programmatic data” for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, polio and disease outbreaks “can be tracked at scale over the long-term,” according to a U.S. statement.
\n\n\n\n“This gesture of goodwill by President Trump on behalf of the American taxpayers reinforces our ongoing mobilization of domestic resources by Kenyans and actors and stakeholders in Kenya to the health sector,” Ruto said at the signing ceremony. “And I assure you that every shilling and every dollar will be spent efficiently, effectively and accountably.”
\n\n\n\nThe data controversy seems to have caught the attention of the U.S. Congress. In the 2026 appropriations for diplomacy and international assistance finalized in January 2026, lawmakers asked the State Department for a strategy to transition U.S. spending and programs on HIV/AIDS to host-country ownership, including “a plan to safeguard personally identifiable information of patients within electronic medical records, laboratory systems, and surveillance systems required by new country agreements.”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at Stake: In the aftermath of Trump’s shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which operated in dozens of African countries, the United States is trying to reassert its influence in public health as it works to secure industrial minerals. American investments totaling more than USD 100 billion in Africa in the past two decades, mainly to ease the impact of AIDS and curb the spread of HIV – yet also to reduce child mortality and build up technical skills – have translated into substantial influence in many countries.
\n\n\n\nMany of the recent deals have come in economies where the U.S. is seeking minerals needed for clean energy, artificial intelligence and military uses. While copper, cobalt and lithium often grab attention, more esoteric minerals mined in Africa, such as gallium, germanium and niobium, also are sought for U.S. and allied supply chains.
\n\n\n\nIn West Africa, Guinea signed a five-year, USD 142 million deal that the U.S. said, “establishes a clear transition toward Guinea’s independent health system management by 2030.” Medical labs meeting international standards and stepped-up malaria surveillance are what’s promised. Guinea will contribute about USD 51 million, and America 91 million.
\n\n\n\nGuinea hosts Africa’s largest mining investment, the Simandou iron ore project controlled by Rio Tinto, which says there’s about 1.5 billion tons of high-grade ore under mountains in southeastern Guinea. Rio Tinto is also involved with the government in building rail and port facilities to export this mother lode.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Guinea-Simandou-credit-Rio-Tinto.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1\")
Nearby Burkina Faso (gold, lithium, manganese) inked a similar deal with America to fight AIDS and malaria and boost response to disease outbreaks. The U.S. committed to invest up to USD 147 million in the next five years, while Burkina Faso – led by fashionista Captain Ibrahim Traoré – intends to boost its spending by USD 107 million in what the State Department called a show of “significant national ownership of its health system.”
\n\n\n\nThis deal has larger significance, as the U.S. statement hinted, saying the agreement “reinforces regional health security in the Sahel.” Burkina Faso is the epicenter of Islamist militant violence in the vast Sahel, an arid belt across north-central Africa, so any effort to bolster stability is a positive step – and might signal further U.S. involvement.
\n\n\n\nAction Options: The health deals keep America engaged across Africa and might open doors for U.S. companies. The U.S. Congress is requiring the State Department to submit a strategy for expanding market access for U.S. pharmaceuticals and medical devices and equipment. The products would be related to child survival, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and “global health security” in low- and middle-income countries. Lawmakers want the plan to reduce regulatory, procurement and distribution barriers for American products.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Kenya’s President William Ruto watches the deal signing in Washington in December 2025 by Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs Musalia Mudavadi and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, via Kenya Presidency on X.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America under Trump has sorted its prized African partners into two buckets: those with valuable minerals and those such as Kenya and Ethiopia that have little to offer in extractive profits yet are strategic, friendly, fast-growing economies (courted by China) and can’t be ignored. ","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443696,57443694],"tags":[57443798,57443723,57443800,57443712,57443797,57443799,57443679,57443684],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-societies","tag-aids","tag-burkina-faso","tag-data","tag-drc","tag-guinea","tag-health-care","tag-kenya","tag-united-states","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Kenya-Rubio-health-deal-DEC2026-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Kenya-Rubio-health-deal-DEC2026-edit.jpg?fit=2004%2C1121&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Africa embraces Trump health aid deals\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
It will be years before trains roll across the Angola border bound for the Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito after whistling through Zambian mining hubs from Copperbelt to neighboring North-Western Province. Yet the wheels are turning on one of Africa’s most-watched projects as action shifts from maps and conference chatter to engineering, land acquisition – and financing.
\n\n\n\nThe financial scale and human impact are starting to emerge for the 340-mile stretch of the Lobito Corridor in Zambia, the heart of the initiative. Development and construction of the rail line and purchase of rolling stock will cost USD 3 billion to 5 billion, a range that will narrow once engineering and procurement progresses, says the Nigeria-based developer, Africa Finance Corporation. Plans call for construction to wrap up in 2030.
\n\n\n\nAn environmental and social impact assessment filed with the Zambian Government by Africa Finance also reveals that Lobito could uproot almost 3,000 households, or roughly 14,000 people who live in the path of the rail and trade corridor.
\n\n\n\n“Overall, the project is more likely to proceed than not,” says Stephen Nduvi, a Kenyan public policy analyst focused on regional integration. “The key question is no longer whether the corridor has strategic relevance, but whether stakeholders can mobilize the capital and institutional coordination needed to translate political ambition into physical infrastructure.”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: Lobito is a geopolitical, economic and social transformation project rolled into one. It’s also a major attempt at African integration often touted in speeches yet prolonged in practice. The United States, European Union and Italy have publicly committed to turn the Lobito concept into reality, chiefly to create an Atlantic-facing mineral supply chain outside China’s control while diversifying the regional economy.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia have agreed to create a master plan and joint investment platform to stir up moneyed interest.
\n\n\n\n“This platform will support transport and logistics infrastructure that directly links the corridor to industrial yards, production zones and processing hubs, while also crowding in investment in agribusiness, energy, urban development and small and medium-sized enterprises,” Zambia’s Ministry of Finance and National Planning said following a recent coordination meeting in Angola.
\n\n\n\nAt a Luanda forum in May 2026, the EU helped match investors with bankable projects in agribusiness and transport logistics within the Angolan section of the Lobito Corridor.
\n\n\n\nAfrica Finance aims to lock down financing by the end of 2027, according to Reuters. In a push toward that goal, the U.S. Government’s development finance arm is loaning Lobito Atlantic Railway USD 553 million while the Development Bank of Southern Africa adds about USD 200 million, for upgrades to the crucial rail operation to and from the Lobito port visited by President Joe Biden in 2024.
\n\n\n\nOf special interest to leaders in Angola, Zambia and the DRC, whose copper and cobalt mining region forms part of the corridor, is whether Lobito becomes more than a minerals and transport play and stimulates agriculture, renewable energy and exports. Zambian officials promote this “land-linked” approach as the way to unlock Lobito’s true value. Angola is stepping up efforts to increase farm output across its vast, arable land. The DRC is working on better mineral trade logistics.
\n\n\n\nMuch has changed in the past 18 months. A late 2024 journey across the entire Zambian route, from Chingola, a city in the epicenter of copper mining, to sleepy Mwinilunga District in the northwestern corner of the country, where a trickle of water in a forest births the Zambezi River, revealed widespread ignorance about Lobito.
\n\n\n\nMayors and planning teams recounted hearing about Lobito from the news and visits by officials from the capital Lusaka yet couldn’t say what they would contribute or how the corridor might reshape their communities. Along the Angola border, however, work was under way on a Lobito crossing point into a Zambian chiefdom. And early investors were snapping up parcels of farmland.
\n\n\n\nDisplacing residents is always a fraught issue, and Lobito’s brain trust is still working out how resettlement would be carried out across a geography spanning hundreds of miles. The project has budgeted USD 7 million for relocation and resettlement compensation, or about USD 2,400 per household, and USD 1.5 million for “livelihood restoration activities.” The social impact assessment pledges to follow international guidelines and set up a way for residents to file and resolve complaints.
\n\n\n\nIn recent months, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema and his top ministers have talked up Lobito, whose hype could influence domestic politics. The president is up for re-election in August 2026, with voters sizing up the country’s economy after severe drought, an energy crunch and a debt crisis. International Monetary Fund forecasters say Zambia’s economy will grow more than 4 percent in 2026 for the first time since 2023.
\n\n\n\nLobito responds to the need for infrastructure that Zambians cited in a 2024 Afrobarometer survey when asked to list government priorities. Another Zambian wish: better health care, a source of international friction.
\n\n\n\nLobito is building speed just as relations between Zambia and the United States seem to be derailing. In a scathing departure speech on April 30, 2026, U.S. Ambassador Michael Gonzales accused Zambian government officials of tolerating widespread corruption, allowing billions of dollars of “dirty money” to flow to East Asia untaxed, and covering up the long-term health toll for Zambians from the collapse of a tailings dam at a Chinese copper mine. Gonzales said that accident spilled “carcinogenic heavy metals” into the Kafue River ecosystem, according to the text of his remarks.
\n\n\n\nThe Zambian government called the envoy’s assertions “deeply regrettable” and said stalled talks over a “critical minerals” agreement relate to “the insistence of preferential treatment of U.S. companies” over access to Zambia’s mineral wealth and making health aid conditional on a minerals deal. Gonzales grumbled that his team couldn’t get Zambian officials to pick up the phone.
\n\n\n\nU.S. diplomats have hammered out agreements with 20 other African countries for public health aid conditional on benchmarks for improved care, access to long-term health data and investments by those countries. The sharing of data has sparked a backlash in some countries, and Zambia said data demands are another sticking point.
\n\n\n\nGonzales accused Zambian governments of failing to invest USD 7 billion in American aid since 2000 to create durable health service delivery. “When we paused funding to review our assistance programs last year, so much of Zambia’s health system began to crumble almost overnight,” he said, blaming Zambian leaders for looking away while “officials diverted government funds to their own pockets.”
\n\n\n\nAs America spars with Zambia, artificial intelligence has entered the Lobito picture. Jacob Helberg, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic affairs, told a congressional hearing that his office is reviewing how America’s Pax Silica partners, including Japan, South Korea, Britain and Israel, could bring “new technologies” into Lobito and other trade corridors, “delivering speed, scale and certainty” to global suppliers.
\n\n\n\nPax Silica is a U.S.-led initiative to build “the AI ecosystem of tomorrow” encompassing advanced manufacturing and “minerals that feed” the AI industry, according to the State Department.
\n\n\n\nA study released in May 2026 by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an Oslo-based watchdog that counts Zambia as a member, cautioned that many factors must align to achieve the Lobito vision. “The Corridor could support local content, supplier development and downstream processing, but outcomes will depend on governance and policy decisions,” along with electricity, financing, infrastructure and industrial capacity, EITI said.
\n\n\n\nIn 2023, the Angolan arm of Portugal’s Mota-Engil Group won a 30-year concession to operate Lobito Atlantic Railway from Angola to the DRC. The greenfield Lobito rail line planned for Zambia will extend into Angola to connect to this line at Luacano.
\n\n\n\nA key issue is how much cargo these trains will carry. Estimates included in the Africa Finance assessment show that by 2041, about 859,000 tons of Zambian copper would travel on the route, less than a third of the country’s target output by the early 2030s. Zambian grain exports and petroleum imports are among other major volumes projected for Lobito.
\n\n\n\nBesides commercially viable freight volumes, Nduvi says, “coordination among the participating countries on customs procedures, regulations and railway operations will be critical to ensuring that the corridor functions as an integrated transport system.”
\n\n\n\nLobito faces competition from Namibia to the south. A road-and-rail route is being upgraded from Kolwezi in the DRC through Kalumbila District in Zambia, the hub of westward expansion of gold, copper and nickel mining, and onward to the Namibian port at Walvis Bay. That could cut transit times from mines to port from almost two weeks to five days. The Lobito rail option to Lobito from Kolwezi takes seven days.
\n\n\n\nTo revitalize the Namibia route, a USD 326 million partnership among the Zambian Government and companies including copper miner First Quantum Minerals is building a 230-mile toll road in western Zambia, from Mutanda in Kalumbila to Kaoma in Western Province. The Barotse Highway Limited Toll Concession seeks to improve a route that jolts drivers with potholes and stretches of rugged, hard-packed earth. An upgrade promises to smooth the region’s prospects.
\n\n\n\n“I could see what this would mean to our economy – growth and more growth” and jobs for young people, business opportunities, government revenue and even a less perilous journey for pregnant women racing to a clinic, President Hichilema said at the construction groundbreaking.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Investors interested in the Lobito Corridor should seek out Zambia’s district and provincial social and economic development plans (often posted online) to size up sectoral needs and government priorities along the route. Traditional leaders, or chiefs, influence land use and broader development in the region that Lobito will traverse. The chiefs’ affairs office in the North-Western Province administrative hub in Solwezi, Zambia, can help set up meetings with chiefdoms.
\n\n\n\n(Featured image: Barrick’s expanding Lumwana copper mine in Zambia’s North-Western Province.)
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Trevor Hublin was Benin country director for the U.S. Agency for International Development as field operations ended around the world last year. Romuald Wadagni, elected as president in April, will assume office on May 24, 2026. Ahead of his inauguration, the International Monetary Fund praised Benin’s “strong reform drive” and highlighted the “need to manage socio-political and security challenges” in the Ohio-sized nation of 15 million people.
\n\n\n\nWhat should we expect from Benin’s new leader Romuald Wadagni, educated at Harvard with years of experience at the international accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, including in France, America and the Democratic Republic of Congo?
\n\n\n\nA lot of continuity with the outgoing government of President Patrice Talon. After all, Wadagni was Talon’s economy minister for his entire presidency, from 2016 to this year, and was the architect for Benin’s impressive economic reforms and economic growth, which is one of the highest in Africa, having achieved 7.5 percent GDP growth in 2025.
\n\n\n\nWhether we’re talking private or institutional investors, Benin has a very good track record in attracting foreign direct investment. And Wadagni knows how to do that through good macroeconomic management, through good fiscal restraint, ease of business policies. We should expect him to continue to have a heavy hand in steering the economy. Benin remains a poor country, ranked 173rd out of 193 countries and self-governing areas in the United Nations Human Development Index.
\n\n\n\nHe’s got work to do with poverty levels still at 36 percent. He needs to increase broad-based economic opportunity for Beninese citizens. I suspect that he will work hard to increase the productivity of the agricultural sector.
\n\n\n\nOn top of economic management and the focus on continued growth, he’s going to try to get on top of insecurity in the north of Benin, where he likely will have his biggest challenge. Because when we talk about insecurity at the hand of violent extremist groups coming from the Sahel region, Benin needs cooperation with the neighboring countries: Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Niger, yet only has the ability to coordinate effectively with Nigeria and has no communication, has broken off relations with its key neighbor Niger.
\n\n\n\nNevertheless, with the reinforced army presence up north, we should see more concerted action on his part to get on top of the high levels of violence at the community level – again, furthered by violent extremist groups – and stabilize the countryside as much as possible behind advances by the security forces, focusing on development needs.
\n\n\n\nFinally, will Wadagni loosen current severe restrictions on civil liberties on the political opposition and media in Benin? Over the past 12 years, the country has descended the ranks of democratic states and has become much more authoritarian, one party effectively leading the country and with civil liberties curtailed and key opposition politicians arrested by Talon. If Benin’s democratic environment remains closed, it could herald instability with the public in the future.
\n\n\n\nWadagni clearly thinks in terms bigger than Benin. Do you see him trying to scale up Benin’s ambitions or building regional economic connections?
\n\n\n\nYes. I expect him to come into the presidency with a bullish economic and investment agenda. What he is going to try to do and he has promised – you heard this on the campaign trail – is to maintain economic growth at 7 percent levels in the coming years. That would be an incredible achievement, putting Benin at the forefront of economic growth anywhere in Africa.
\n\n\n\nHe knows exactly what he’s going to need to do: Continue to build investor confidence, continue to raise, through foreign direct investment and through investor-friendly policies, investment in growth areas in the agriculture sector, in light industry, in tourism.
\n\n\n\nBenin is a small country. It’s only a $25 billion gross economy. So, he will need to continue to attract investment as well as favorable lending. And positively there, Benin’s got a great reputation through its sound macroeconomic management, including a budget deficit estimated at less than 3 percent of GDP in 2025. Fitch just gave Benin a B-plus credit rating and raised its outlook from stable to positive, which for lenders means Benin will be a good place to continue to lend to, and that will boost Wadagni’s forthcoming country development program.
\n\n\n\nThat program is going to focus heavily on infrastructure development, electrification, water and sanitation system development, port development, logistics – really trying to strengthen Benin’s reputation as a logistics hub for coastal West Africa. Benin actually has better macroeconomic financials than neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, which has a much bigger economy.
\n\n\n\nHe’s going to try to focus on things like workforce development and to integrate young Beninese workers into new economic sectors that he hopes to stimulate, such as the digital sector, agroeconomic value chain and light industry.
\n\n\n\nBenin is Africa’s biggest cotton producer. What’s the impact of that on its economic choices and how the country’s politics work?
\n\n\n\nIn 2025, Benin did move up in terms of rankings in Africa to first place on total output in the cotton sector with a yield exceeding 630,000 tons. So that placed Benin ahead of its major competitor, which has been Mali. Benin’s magic in terms of cotton production has been to invest in the fundamentals of sustained growth year in, year out.
\n\n\n\nWhen we look at where Benin was a decade ago, the country produced about 150,000 tons a year of cotton. It has steadily increased yields through those years, which has been underpinned by several things: investment in mechanization, investment in seed quality, the governance of the sector, particularly in properly managing the territory and the farmable land for cotton.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s also making Benin special in cotton is that they are moving deliberately away from just production and farming into value addition and processing. In terms of metrics, in Benin over 12 percent of the total national output in cotton in the past year was being processed in textile facilities in Benin, particularly with the majority located in the country’s Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone, where cotton spinning and textile garment manufacturing happens.
\n\n\n\nNigeria showed off a big brother relationship with Benin by repelling a coup attempt last year. Did that action have bigger implications in terms of helping the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, restore policing of regional stability after the string of overthrows in the Sahel?
\n\n\n\nOn December 7, 2025, Benin was hit by a coup attempt. And at the time, there was a lot of fear that Benin would become another statistic, drawing on the coups that had happened in the Sahel region – Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – and elsewhere in the region over the past decade. And that didn’t happen. Benin activated ECOWAS’s response mechanisms and was able to get immediate military support from Nigeria in terms of decisive action in helping to thwart the coup attempt via aerial bombardments and air strikes. They got help from Nigeria, but they also got help from Côte d’Ivoire, another major regional power.
\n\n\n\nIt did show that ECOWAS was capable of standing up for its own member states in thwarting coup attempts and maintaining security. Again, this was not all as a result of Benin’s intervention. France was active during this crisis in terms of mobilizing support, particularly from Nigeria. But the thwarting of the coup has served to buttress a better degree of confidence in ECOWAS.
\n\n\n\nBenin’s military has suffered losses from the spillover of insurgent violence in the Sahel. Are the coastal states in West Africa still vulnerable or are we seeing any hopeful signs?
\n\n\n\n2025 marked the worst year in terms of violent attacks and civilian casualties in Benin. It is very linked to patterns of regional violence sponsored, fomented by violent Islamist extremist groups that have their bases primarily in Burkina Faso but also Nigeria and Niger. The main terrorist group that threatens Benin is al-Qaeda and its regional affiliate known as JNIM. For this terrorist group, Benin has really since 2019 been regarded as a point of transit for the flow of weapons and resources, sustaining their insurgency and terrorist activities in the wider region.
\n\n\n\nBenin forms the link between Nigeria in the east and Burkina Faso in the west. When we talk about illegal commerce – fuel smuggling, the smuggling of cattle or other black market economic sustainment methods – Benin occupies a very strategic place geographically and economically for al-Qaeda. That is why the two most northern departments, Alibori and Atakora, which abut two major national parks, find themselves in a tough position. For several years, that has served as a base area for insurgent groups to permit them to control the region between the Sahel and the northern parts of coastal West Africa.
\n\n\n\nAl-Qaeda has not recruited heavily from within Benin compared to other countries. They draw the majority of their fighters from Sahelian countries. They haven’t established a firm anchor in the communities yet, which gives the Beninese government opportunities to reestablish governance, control and state legitimacy.
\n\n\n\nWith France in retreat in West Africa, where does a country like Benin turn for support for economic guidance and capital for its development?
\n\n\n\nBenin is one of France’s closest allies anywhere in Africa, particularly in French-speaking West Africa. And that will continue during the presidency of Wadagni. He has long personal connections to France, he was educated in France, so he’s not going to change that relationship with France for support. Rather, what we’re going to see is continued work to diversify support for Benin. For example, Benin has courted investment and good relations with countries in the Middle East and the Islamic world.
\n\n\n\nAs well, we will see Benin continue to try to build relationships with the United States, other countries in Europe, and certainly among its neighbors such as Ghana, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
\n\n\n\nBased on your time in Benin, how would you advise investors to approach the country?
\n\n\n\nThis is a great country to invest in because of its sound macroeconomic fundamentals and its business-friendly environment. Your first stop as an investor is to contact the Beninese investment promotion agency, Agence de Promotion des Investissements et des Exportations (APIEX), which serves as a primary gateway for foreign investors. In Benin, to register a business really takes about one day now. Permitting is relatively easy. Approvals for licenses happen quickly.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing that you should expect, especially for investors in agro-business sectors, is to become aware quickly of the country’s premier industrial free-trade zone, the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone. Since 2022, and under the leadership of Wadagni, Benin has set up a 1,600-hectare special economic zone to transform raw agricultural materials – particularly cotton, cashews and fruit – into value-added, refined and processed materials ready for export. The firm that manages the zone is known as Arise, and they have received high marks.
\n\n\n\nTourism is a big interest of the government, particularly in southern Benin, historical tourism along the coast. Benin now has many festivals celebrating its unique cultural heritage. New hotel resorts, including the first international five-star hotel chain with Sofitel hotels, have now opened in the capital city Cotonou. Business law is supported, and you have commercial courts in operation that facilitate adjudicating disputes. You’re going to have a very investor-friendly environment to take advantage of out there.
\n\n\n\n(Feature image: Wadagni by Presidency of Benin.)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Romuald Wadagni, the new president of Africa's biggest cotton grower, will pursue a bold plan to diversify a surging economy, says an expert on Benin.","protected":false},"author":144169649,"featured_media":1798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443694],"tags":[57443688,57443810,57443742,57443722,57443811,57443671,57443812],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-societies","tag-agribusiness","tag-benin","tag-france","tag-nigeria","tag-ports","tag-top","tag-west-africa","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Wadagni-2024-by-Benin-Presidency-edit.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Benin-Wadagni-2024-by-Benin-Presidency-edit.jpg?fit=765%2C478&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Benin readies a ‘bullish’ agenda\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Emmanuel Macron jogged through the streets of early-May Nairobi with Kenyan marathon god Eliud Kipchoge gliding alongside. As the French president navigated a quiet stretch of the bustling Kenyan capital, his relaxed bearing heralded a fresh start for France’s often turbulent relations with Africa.
\n\n\n\nAfter years of being shunned by coup-happy and democracy-loving West African countries alike, France has found a new home in Africa.
\n\n\n\nMacron’s emergent BFF is William Ruto, Kenya’s president, who hosted a summit in Nairobi May 11-12, 2026, to tout a partnership reboot between the French and countries France once ruled and those the British claimed – and even the Belgians. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a conference star attraction, was there, as was Senegal’s youthful leader Bassirou Diomaye Faye. The boss of southern Africa’s hottest economy, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, also traveled to Nairobi.
\n\n\n\nAmong leaders also on hand: Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama and neighboring Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres touched down, too, as the world body turns Nairobi into its Africa headquarters.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at stake: The Africa Forward Summit sealed France’s eastward shift, which quietly accelerated in the past three years. In 2023, Air France-KLM opened its Africa headquarters in Nairobi. The next year, the French foreign minister started his African tour in Kenya. French development financing is backing a hydropower project in Tanzania, France’s TotalEnergies is developing Uganda’s oilfields and Mozambique’s rich natural gas reserves. And France is supporting Ruto’s ambition to make Kenya a hub for pharmaceutical manufacturing.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps most welcome for Parisian purists: French is now an official language of the East African Community, a political and economic grouping, thanks to the entry of the sprawling Democratic Republic of Congo, which brought a sliver of Atlantic coastline as a bonus.
\n\n\n\nIn an era when American development grants have shrunk with the shutdown of USAID (though roughly USD 4 billion is still available each year for public health in Africa), Macron came to East Africa loaded with goodies. He announced USD 16.4 billion in French public and private investment in energy, artificial intelligence and agriculture, joined with USD 10.5 billion in African money. That’s almost a 60-40 split, which fits with the spirit of the French strategic reset. No more dictating to African peoples, Macron insisted. The way forward is ensemble.
\n\n\n\n“France’s presence in Africa has been shaken over the last 25 years,” Macron said at the closing of a business forum during the summit. “That is normal and quite right. Why has it been shaken? Because for too long, too many people, both, it has to be said, in big companies and in government bodies, saw Africa as their back yard. They would say: ‘we are French, everything is open to us.’ That is over.”
\n\n\n\nMacron and Ruto signed agreements on French support for commuter rail, digital connectivity and the development of nuclear power. The French company CMA CGM will invest USD 820 million to modernize Kenya’s Mombasa port on the Indian Ocean.
\n\n\n\nUnlocking Africa’s wealth is a theme the Kenyan leader sounded as Africa tries to reduce a debt mountain amassed during the pandemic and attract more investment. “Africa today holds more than 4 trillion dollars in long-term domestic savings, including over 1 trillion in pension and insurance assets, and more than 500 billion dollars in central bank reserves,” Ruto told the summit.
\n\n\n\nA joint statement called on governments to step up revenue raising at home, in part by shrinking the untaxed informal economy and fighting tax evasion. Deepening local capital markets by improving financial guarantees can help “crowd in” long-term investors, the governments advised.
\n\n\n\nChallenges in connecting Africa’s disparate markets also got attention. “If you’re a Kenyan SME and you want to pay a Senegalese supplier, it takes a correspondent bank and the dollar to do it,” a young French fintech entrepreneur working in West Africa told Macron at a youth forum. “It is not a problem of will, it is not a problem of talent, it is a problem of critical infrastructure.” The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, he noted, is emerging to solve this problem.
\n\n\n\nThe summit wasn’t all about business. Security came up, though subtly. Macron spoke of a “reworked security arrangement that is respectful of the sovereignty of each African country.” With French forces ousted from bases across West Africa, a revised approach is all but certain. About 800 French military personnel landed in Mombasa in March 2026 as part of a training exercise, symbolic of closer defense ties between Kenya and France.
\n\n\n\nIn December 2024, Kenyan national security officials informed Ruto’s Cabinet about a draft defense cooperation agreement with France and received approval for its execution. The agreement outlines potential cooperation in maritime security, intelligence, peacekeeping, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. Kenya’s parliament approved the arrangement in April 2026.
\n\n\n\nAt the summit, the leaders issued a “Nairobi Declaration” on peace and security in Africa, affirming their commitment to “a renewed global governance” with a UN Security Council more responsive to African interests, the elimination of mercenaries on the continent, and “the centrality of the African Union” in addressing crises.
\n\n\n\nWith extensive international media coverage and thousands of attendees, Macron succeeded in promoting France’s geographic switch in Africa. “Karibuni nyumbani,” Ruto offered in Swahili after expressing the same in French to Macron as he smiled from the audience: Welcome home.
\n\n\n\nAction options: France’s alignment with Kenya signals that East Africa is emerging as a favored destination for European investors. The combination of tech infrastructure, emerging energy and transport linkages and high-growth economies affords first-time Africa investors an appealing entry point.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Ruto shows off his ball handling skills as Macron and Senegal’s Faye look on, by Kenyan Presidency.)
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After a terrorist insurgency scrambled Mozambique’s schedule for delivering its natural gas riches to global markets, the far-off war in Iran is making the southern African country’s energy popular again. Other African producers are gaining attention, too.
\n\n\n\nWith Persian Gulf exports of liquified natural gas (LNG) from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates bottled up by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz due to Iranian drone, missile and boat-swarm attacks, gas supplies in Africa look comparatively risk-free.
\n\n\n\nThe energy industry observer OilPrice said African producers “could ultimately emerge as the long-term winners” from the Middle East war that began in late February 2026 when Israel and the United States attacked Iran. OilPrice said: “The ongoing disruption has handed African energy producers a distinctive structural advantage, thanks to being largely insulated from the conflict’s geography,”
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at Stake: Moves are happening fast amid what the International Energy Agency – a club of major energy-producing and consuming nations – calls the biggest disruption to fuel supplies in history. The European Union’s commissioner for energy and housing cautioned member governments at the end of March 2026 to prepare for “a potentially prolonged disruption of international energy trade.” Already, Italy and Spain are seeking more gas from Algeria.
\n\n\n\nLucky timing is helping. Just days before the Iran war started, Algeria and Niger set aside political differences and resumed development of a trans-Saharan pipeline that will take gas from Nigeria to Europe in a few years. In mid-March, the Italian energy company ENI announced gas discoveries from drill sites about 10 miles and 50 miles off the coast of Libya near the country’s largest offshore gas field, Bahr Essalam. The proximity of the find, estimated to be more than 1 trillion cubic feet of gas, “will enable rapid development” by connecting to existing offshore facilities, the company said.
\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company has opened bidding for offshore gas exploration licenses, including the drilling of 17 exploratory wells and initiating seismic surveys in the eastern Mediterranean.
\n\n\n\nChina, which buys LNG from Qatar and the U.A.E., is turning to North Africa for future energy, and not just hydrocarbons. The Hormuz clog affects only about 6 percent of China’s total gas supply; China can tap pipeline gas from Russia and Central Asia and domestic sources, according to S&P Global. Africa will plus up supply. In July 2025, Algeria’s Sonatrach and China’s Sinopec signed a memorandum of understanding for gas exploration. The African Energy Chamber, an industry group, praised the deal as a “strong example of cross-border collaboration that balances international expertise with African resource leadership.”
\n\n\n\nAlso significant is Chinese investment in renewable energy projects in Morocco, which has become China’s “green-energy bridgehead” in Africa, involving green aluminum, green hydrogen, solar and wind projects, according to Chuchu Zhang, a Middle East political economy expert at China’s Fudan University.
\n\n\n\n“By exposing the fragility of Gulf dependence, the conflict has propelled Beijing toward a more resilient, diversified, and greener energy posture” in which North Africa “is becoming a new fulcrum for China’s energy resilience,” Zhang wrote last week in a commentary for the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps the most unlikely emerging partnership springs from another conflict. Ukraine is seeking gas from Mozambique in exchange for helping the country secure its energy-producing region. The war with Russia has disrupted Ukraine’s domestic gas production.
\n\n\n\n“Ukraine is interested in additional energy supplies,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, according to a statement from his office after he spoke with Mozambique’s President Daniel Chapo on March 23. “Mozambique is interested in Ukraine’s experience and technologies to strengthen its internal security and protect people from terror.”
\n\n\n\nYet the dramatic shift in the global energy market may not generate a windfall for Africans where underlying government policies have gone awry. Mozambique’s failure to confront its deteriorating finances is putting at risk more than USD 50 billion in international investment, mainly for LNG energy megaprojects, the World Bank has warned as costly domestic debt skyrockets in the country.
\n\n\n\nMozambique’s public debt is in “distress” and “unsustainable,” an IMF-World Bank assessment has concluded. The culprit is rising wages for the country’s 357,000 civil servants, according to the bank. A worst-case fiscal crunch “would also require that a significant share of projected LNG revenues through 2042 be diverted to cover accumulated fiscal imbalances instead of financing strategic development priorities,” World Bank analysts said in the assessment.
\n\n\n\nThe implications of this “disorderly adjustment” include undermining living standards in a country where almost two-thirds of people live in poverty. A decade ago, less than half of Mozambicans were counted as poor. Poverty is deep and entrenched in rural areas, while the capital Maputo and its province are prosperous by comparison. And the financial problem could weaken the government’s capacity to deliver essential public services.
\n\n\n\nThe World Bank’s dire assessment contrasts with French energy giant TotalEnergies’ announced decision in January to resume full operations to tap the massive natural gas fields just off the far northern coast near Tanzania. The project was halted for five years due to a relentless insurgency by fighters affiliated with Islamic State, who have engaged in numerous attacks and kidnappings for ransom.
\n\n\n\nThe security crisis prompted Rwanda to send as many as 6,300 soldiers to assist Mozambique in securing Cabo Delgado Province, where natural gas megaprojects are unfolding.
\n\n\n\nIn mid-March 2026, Rwanda’s foreign minister said on X that the country would pull out of Mozambique if “our work and achievements are not appreciated” and “sustainable funding” isn’t found for the operation. Olivier Nduhungirehe complained that Rwandan soldiers had made “the ultimate sacrifice” to stabilize the region, yet are “being constantly questioned, vilified, criticised, blamed or sanctioned by the very countries that greatly benefit from our intervention in Mozambique.”
\n\n\n\nThe threat came a few days after the United States imposed financial penalties on Rwandan military officials in connection with alleged violations of a peace accord championed by Donald Trump for the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where minerals coveted for U.S.-backed energy and tech supply chains are in play. Rwanda said the sanctions unjustly target its military and misrepresent the conflict situation.
\n\n\n\nAnother factor: The European Union isn’t planning to extend funding for the Rwandan mission beyond May 2026, Bloomberg reported in March, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. “By threatening to withdraw from Cabo Delgado, Rwanda is pressuring the U.S. not to tighten sanctions and the EU not to withdraw funding,” the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies said.
\n\n\n\nJust weeks before this geopolitical tension erupted, the lead investor in Mozambique’s energy ambitions sounded optimistic, after years of security dangers. The resumption of the gas project “reaffirms the confidence of international partners in Mozambique’s energy, institutional and human potential,” CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in a January 29 statement after meeting with Mozambique’s Chapo. Another energy heavyweight, ExxonMobil, is developing the Rovuma LNG project in Mozambique.
\n\n\n\nTotal is the largest partner and operator of the USD 20 billion Mozambique LNG joint venture that includes Japan’s Mitsui oil and gas company. Japan will be a major customer for the gas, whose output is set to start in 2029. Pouyanné said the project will generate 3,000 local construction jobs, more than USD 4 billion in contracts to companies in Mozambique and support 7,000 farmers and fishermen through a related foundation.
\n\n\n\nAction options: Energy producers in Africa will get an unexpected economic lift and governments should gain more fiscal revenue amid elevated world oil and gas prices. That could feed into improved public services and demand for health, education, water and other investments.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Mozambique’s Chapo and Rwanda’s Kagame meeting last year, via X.)
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As the Persian Gulf region endures sustained kinetic conflict and faces lingering tensions even if bombs, missiles and explosive drones vanish, Africa’s major cities are models of operational calm and continuity, effectively decoupled from northern volatility.
\n\n\n\nAfrican metropolises such as Nairobi begin workdays with a notable absence of threats from the sky, as the region about 2,000 miles north of East Africa, sweeping in Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Iran, is coping with an expansive theatre of war. In this drama, a geographic safe distance has become a strategic asset.
\n\n\n\nAs northern flight paths become less tenable, Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines are siphoning market share, capturing traffic diverted from the North America-Asia-Europe corridors. Kenya’s flights are operating at almost 100 percent capacity as bookings shift. The airline’s acting chief executive, George Kamal, told reporters that “the gains are coming from Europe, from the U.S. and Asia. Those routes are contributing positively, very positively, to our network now.”
\n\n\n\nThe disruption of flight operations at Dubai International Airport (DXB) in mid-March 2026 following an Iranian drone attack on critical fuel infrastructure there and strikes on a major port and oil storage elsewhere in the U.A.E. pierced the bubble of security that has defined the Gulf’s high-profile urban hubs. Rising from the desert about 40 years ago, these cities are stacked with gleaming office buildings, soaring hotels and residential towers, high-end shopping, art, golf and Caribbean-like beach escapes for families. Their vulnerability is a psychological catalyst for regional de-risking.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s at Stake: As the perceived safety of traditional crossroads like Dubai and Abu Dhabi erodes, Africa is undergoing a rapid rebranding as a global haven. This shift may reshape the framework of global connectivity, beginning with the redirection of international air travel and extending to energy supplies, fertilizer and the security of water and infrastructure.
\n\n\n\nAir hubs function as the primary economic engines and signals for regional stability. The U.A.E. has deployed its global brand into the skies for decades as Emirates, a premier long-haul airline for the globally savvy elite. (Emirates’ flight number for its route from Dubai to London is 007, paying homage to the world’s most famous cinematic spy, James Bond.)
\n\n\n\nWhen these global brands are affected by war fighting and airspace closures, transport flows and supply chains abruptly shift.
\n\n\n\nEthiopian Air is picking up extra bookings from as far away as South Africa. “For many South Africans planning trips abroad, the usual travel map has been redrawn almost overnight,” the Cape Town-based travel site Getaway reported. “Routes that once felt predictable now come with uncertainty, and travellers are adjusting quickly.”
\n\n\n\nFor Ethiopian, Africa’s largest passenger and cargo carrier, the timing of the war coincides with the start of construction of its planned global mega-hub 25 miles outside Addis Ababa in Bishoftu. Slated for full operation in the 2030s, this facility is designed to anchor Africa’s role as the primary global alternative to the volatile Gulf – able to handle more than 200 aircraft at a time and more than 1 million passengers each week.
\n\n\n\nThere’s plenty of passenger traffic for Ethiopian, Kenya and other African airlines to snap up. Intra-Africa air travel will be the fastest-growing market in the world from 2024 to 2050, as demand rises at a 4.9 percent compound annual growth rate, followed by the Africa-to-Asia-Pacific market, according to the International Air Transport Association.
\n\n\n\nThis reconfiguration of the skies is a precursor to a broader realignment of energy and commodity flows, as the global economy seeks routes that bypass traditional maritime chokepoints. In this crisis, that is the narrow passage called the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran on one side and the U.A.E. and other energy exporters on the other.
\n\n\n\nKenya’s rarely used northern port of Lamu near Somalia “is geared up for a spike in vessel calls” due to the war, which should “inject fresh momentum into regional trade and strengthen the Port’s position as a leading transshipment hub in the region,” the Kenya Ports Authority said. At least one vessel unable to reach the Gulf has arrived with thousands of Japanese cars.
\n\n\n\nAfrican countries have scrambled to secure oil and fuel supplies yet are less vulnerable than many Asian economies. In 2025, China received 4.6 million barrels of crude via the strait daily, India got 2.1 million barrels and the rest of Asia 6.2 million barrels, according to the International Energy Agency. Another hit for Asia: a cut-off of up to 27 percent of liquified natural gas imports, mainly from the U.A.E. and Qatar.
\n\n\n\nIn contrast, Africa received only 200,000 barrels of crude daily in 2025 from Gulf producers exporting through the strait yet got three times more volume in oil products. While African oil usage is far smaller than Asia’s, reserves are much lower too. And the energy price surge will feed inflation into African economies.
\n\n\n\nThe global economy has breached the USD 100-a-barrel psychological threshold that signals systemic crisis. With 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil trade bottled up by Iranian attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, the necessity for energy sovereignty has reached a tipping point.
\n\n\n\nFor Africa, this energy crunch will help drive a transition toward becoming a green energy superpower, insulating the continent from shocks that batter industrialized Asia and Europe.
\n\n\n\nEthiopia provides the blueprint for this macroeconomic realignment. By banning the importation of fossil-fueled vehicles, the country is forcing a transition to an electric vehicle economy powered by abundant hydropower including from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest dam, on the Nile River. This harnessing of the Nile’s energy, complemented by solar and wind investments, could create a competitive advantage: a manufacturing and logistics base with lower vulnerability to global energy volatility.
\n\n\n\nAfrica’s dual approach to energy entails the massive scaling of hydropower, solar, geothermal and wind energy to achieve domestic independence. Meanwhile, large hydrocarbon discoveries are being developed in Namibia, Senegal, Mozambique, Uganda and other countries to balance the clean energy transition. (Not all is effortless on this front, as Mozambique shows: for five years, a militant Islamist insurgency halted a $20 billion French-led project to develop a massive offshore natural gas discovery. TotalEnergies resumed operations in January 2026.)
\n\n\n\nThe drive for energy independence also is linked to the industrial requirements of food security, specifically the production of fertilizers.
\n\n\n\nThe Strait of Hormuz remains a critical vulnerability for global nutrition, as it serves as the gateway for one-third of the world’s fertilizer transported on the oceans. Because natural gas is the fundamental feedstock for nitrogen and phosphate production, the ongoing conflict has induced a nutrient supply shock.
\n\n\n\nAfrica is countering this risk through localized industrialization, moving to secure its own agricultural inputs and mitigate global supply chain disruptions. Dangote Group, led by Nigerian tycoon Aliko Dangote, is driving the shift. While Dangote’s sprawling, USD 2.5 billion Nigeria facility is already an exporter to the United States and is picking up orders during this Middle East conflict, a second major complex is planned for Ethiopia.
\n\n\n\nThese facilities represent the building of Africa’s fertilizer sovereignty. What’s more, the shift toward “green ammonia,” produced by renewable energy rather than natural gas, is on the horizon. Kenya’s collaboration with a Chinese company to use geothermal energy for making fertilizer, highlights the trend.
\n\n\n\nAnother contrast has emerged between the two regions: While oil built the rich economies of the Gulf, desalinated water keeps those countries alive. The Gulf’s reliance on turning seawater into drinking water makes its survival a soft target for conflict. Iranian attacks have targeted this vital water infrastructure.
\n\n\n\nIn contrast, Africa’s long-term water security is rooted in underground resilience. The continent holds massive and largely untapped aquifers that are inherently more defensible and sustainable. Current instability may accelerate the transition from rain-reliant agriculture vulnerable to climate change-induced drought, to irrigation systems tapping these reserves.
\n\n\n\nAction Options: As the power centers of the Gulf face a period of sustained volatility and risks to infrastructure, Africa is emerging as a secure, reliable and essential pillar of global stability. Building up green energy, sustainable agriculture and services related to a surge of air travel are likely to be growing needs. This is a long-term strategic pivot as the world redraws its maps of risk and opportunity.
\n\n\n\n(Feature photo: Dubai by Selim/Pixabay)
\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf, Africa demonstrates stability and resilience, attracting diverted air traffic and easing shocks to energy and fertilizer supplies with homegrown capacity. This geopolitical shift positions Africa as a global haven amid regional volatility.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":1542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696],"tags":[57443688,57443805,57443708,57443716,57443679,57443722,57443804,57443719,57443671,57443732,57443690],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","tag-agribusiness","tag-air-travel","tag-ethiopia","tag-green-economy","tag-kenya","tag-nigeria","tag-oil","tag-south-africa","tag-top","tag-trade","tag-war","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Dubai-Selim-Pixabay.jpg","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Dubai-Selim-Pixabay.jpg?fit=1280%2C854&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"Iran war turns Africa into global haven\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
Great reads can enrich your learning about economic and political change and investments and inform your travels across Africa. This curated list of essential nonfiction books on Africa will help you gain a deeper understanding of African societies and economies, crucial history and key heroes and villains. You’ll find best sellers possibly already on your shelf, yet also lesser known gems that deserve a bigger audience. Tell us about your favorites and other books that top your reading list and perhaps should sneak onto ours.
\n\n\n\nDark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). This is the ultimate road trip for the celebrated American travel writer, as he ventures across some of Africa’s most challenging terrain (including remote and rugged parts of Ethiopia I’ve traversed), navigates baffling cultures and bumps into fond memories from his youthful days as a teacher in Uganda. Follow it up with Theroux’s sequel sojourn from Cape Town, South Africa, to Luanda, Angola: The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Sharp, funny and full of insights, even for those of us who have spent years slogging across Africa.
\n\n\n\nThe Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor, by Martin Meredith (Public Affairs, 2014). For thousands of years, outsiders have coveted Africa’s natural treasures, starting with gold, ivory and copper. Grain from North Africa fed the Romans. Humans, too, became a prize. Enslaved Africans by the millions crossed the Atlantic to produce sugar and cotton, building the economies of the New World while enriching Europeans. Meredith, a British journalist with long experience in Africa, offers an essential survey of its wealth and pursuers. This is a tale of adventurers, despots and thieves with themes alive in our time. (Pair this with Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence (Public Affairs, 2005). The first half-century of Africa’s independence era is such a rollicking, scandalous and often mind-blowing saga of power-mongering outrages that you’ll think these tales must be fiction.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Great stories that will greatly inform your business and travel.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Mandela-at-ILC-in-1990-by-ILO-edit.jpg?resize=720%2C478&ssl=1\")
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela (Little Brown, 1994). A trip to South Africa’s Robben Island in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Town on Mandela’s 93rd birthday delivered an emotional high point in my early Africa travels. The island prison is where the activist-lawyer and other foes of apartheid, the system of racial separation imposed by white nationalists, spent years toiling in the blinding rays of a bleached-white quarry. Robben Island also became an informal political academy where South Africa’s multiracial, democratic future took shape. Mandela, freed in 1990 (I heard him speak in Atlanta a few months later, electrifying a packed stadium), became president in 1994 in South Africa’s first democratic election. This is the story of his journey from a fugitive to prisoner to inspiration of the world.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Understanding modern Africa’s transformative leader gives you talking points anywhere, especially in the “rainbow nation,” South Africa.
\n\n\n\nMonsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, by Robert Kaplan (Random House, 2010). If Kaplan is right, the 21st century will play out around the ocean that the past century mostly ignored. And it is very much an African ocean. From the East African coast to Oman, across to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and down into Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, in Kaplan’s telling, is the arena of every hope and danger. Africa is reconnecting to the Indian Ocean realm, reflected in the increasing political and economic interest of India and Indonesia in the growing markets of sub-Saharan Africa. Turn to Kaplan’s keen eye and immersive writing to understand how Africa fits into this epic shift.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Kaplan exposes crucial cultural connections to help you glimpse the future of Africa.
\n\n\n\nThe Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, by Meave Leakey, with Samira Leakey (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). Africa birthed humanity, and the area around Lake Turkana in arid northern Kenya is where the evolutionary drama of our ancestors unfolded across a billion days. Few people know this terrain better than legendary paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey, who spent decades with husband Richard and Kenyan colleagues making landmark fossil discoveries. Starting from her arrival in 1965 as a young researcher, Leakey brings this enthralling quest to life in crisp and often deeply personal prose.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Sediments is a thrilling, informative journey into Africa’s role in human origins.
\n\n\n\nThe Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth, by Tom Burgis (Public Affairs, 2015). A new era is dawning for Africa’s mining powers such as Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo as global demand surges for green-energy mineral wealth, ranging from copper, cobalt and nickel to “rare earth” terbium and niobium, all destined for electric vehicles, wind turbines and even artificial intelligence. With skill, luck and responsible political will, the story could play out far better than Africa’s savage extractive exploits in the past century. Burgis, writing as a Financial Times correspondent in Africa, uncovers how transnational elites from mining companies to lawyers to African power brokers plundered impoverished countries suffering from the “resource curse” of abundant oil, gold and industrial minerals. (Also consider Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s Press, 2023) on the human suffering required to extract an essential metal for electric-vehicle batteries and other technologies.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Exposes what has gone on behind the curtain – and what needs to change.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Barrick-HH-expansion.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1\")
Unbowed: A Memoir, by Wangari Maathai (Turtleback Books, 2007). This Kenyan crusader was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. Maathai started an up-from-the-dirt campaign in 1977 called the Green Belt Movement to reverse deforestation and encourage rural women to plant trees and think about their lives and communities in ecological terms. Maathai, who died in 2011, saw tree planting as an expression of democracy, the rights of women and international solidarity. As the Nobel Committee put it: “She thinks globally and acts locally.”
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Maathai reveals the power of African women to shape social change.
\n\n\n\nAfrica Since 1940: The Past of the Present, by Frederick Cooper (Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2019). You need a benchmark modern history of Africa, and Cooper delivers. The American historian based at Columbia University chooses the Second World War as a more meaningful starting point for understanding contemporary Africa than the independence era two decades later. That makes sense, because the war stirred embers of change that ignited in the 1950s, when African political liberation gained ground. As battered colonial overlords Britain and France faltered, the U.S. began to grasp the reach of its postwar superpowers.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Enjoy an informed perspective on the years when American influence blossomed.
\n\n\n\nInside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter, by Zohra Drif (Just World Books, 2017). When France granted independence to almost all its African colonies in 1960, President Charles de Gaulle was still locked in a brutal war to keep Algeria. First published in French in 2013, this is the account of the young Algerians who fought the French, told from the perspective of Drif and her female comrades. Their resistance was portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers. France’s defeat in Vietnam and the independence struggles of Tunisia, Morocco and Madagascar showed Drif and her politically aware friends in the 1950s that “France was not invincible.”
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Understand French colonialism in Africa through the eyes of Muslim women.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Battle-of-Algiers-Djamila-Bouazza-22-ans.jpg?resize=698%2C720&ssl=1\")
White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, by Susan Williams (Public Affairs, 2021). The British academic sleuth reveals how U.S. covert action during the Cold War reconstituted colonial-style influence over nations including Congo after Britain, France and Belgium relinquished direct rule. White Malice is a sequel of sorts to Who Killed Hammarskjold?: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa (Hurst and Co., 2011), Williams’ ground-breaking investigation into the weird and shocking death of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammerskjold in a 1961 plane crash a few miles short of the airport in today’s Ndola, Zambia, then British-ruled Northern Rhodesia. The crash, which reeks of foul play, came during a diplomatic mission at the height of a Cold War standoff in mineral-rich, neighboring Congo and remains officially unsolved.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: While America promoted itself as a champion of African liberation and democracy, Cold Warriors had different ideas.
\n\n\n\nKing Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). This best seller has become the go-to account of colonial atrocities against Africans, focused on the devious plundering of Belgium’s King Leopold II. While the monarch portrayed himself as a benefactor of impoverished Africans, courageous European crusaders led by Edmund Morel, an English shipping-line employee of “nearly superhuman energy,” uncovered the truth: Leopold was enslaving the Congolese to steal rubber and ivory and killing millions in the quest. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold’s “Congo Free State” was an epicenter of horrors that, once exposed, galvanized a global response, including from celebrities of the day such as the American writer Mark Twain. Hochschild recovers this epic story for our time and conscience.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Hochschild humanizes a shocking and essential story with indelible portraits of the heroes and villains.
\n\n\n\nBorn in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard French (Liveright, 2021). The former New York Times correspondent recasts Africa from sideshow to the main stage of history during the past five centuries as the “Atlantic world” emerged. Among the fascinating accounts within is how the tiny island of Sao Tomé off the west-central African mainland near present-day Nigeria and Gabon served as Portugal’s testing ground for what would become the most consequential, lucrative and brutal economic model of that era: the enslavement of Africans to toil on sugar plantations in the Americas.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: French connects the historical dots and illuminates the path to today’s Africa.
\n\n\n\nThe Sex Lives of African Women: Self-Discovery, Freedom, and Healing, by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah (Astra House, 2022). The self-described pan-African feminist author from Ghana introduces women seeking a joyful approach to sexual liberation while navigating a world of cultural traps. “African women grapple with the trauma of sexual abuse, and resist religious and patriarchal edicts in order to assert their sexual power and agency,” Sekyiamah writes. “They do this by questioning and resisting societal norms while creating new norms and narratives that allow them to be who they truly are.” Based on conversations with women from 31 countries and infused with the spirit of her blog, “Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women,” here is modern Africa pulled from the shadows.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: A revealing look at a profound social topic often treated as taboo.
\n\n\n\nDo Not Disturb, by Mikaela Wrong (Public Affairs, 2021). Post-genocide Rwanda has earned deserved acclaim for its push toward innovation and higher living standards. From drones ferrying blood supplies, to a satellite in space that monitors water and farming, and the African campus of a famed American engineering university, Carnegie Mellon, Rwanda impresses as a can-do nation. Less known is how the government led by Paul Kagame treats political foes and former colleagues deemed disloyal. Wrong, a journalist who has exposed corruption in Kenya and the last days of a kleptocratic dictator in Zaire (Congo), dissects the murder in South Africa of Rwanda’s exiled former spy chief. Along the way, Wrong endures a cyberattack and hides her laptop in a laundry basket out of fear for the long arm of Rwanda. (To understand Kagame’s vision for his country, see A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, by Stephen Kinzer (Trade Paper Press, 2008), a former New York Times correspondent.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Offers an unflinching view of the flip side of Rwanda’s much-hyped transformation.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Kenya-stamp-1963-Jomo-Kenyatta.jpeg?resize=582%2C490&ssl=1\")
Facing Mount Kenya, by Jomo Kenyatta (Vintage Books, 1965). Before he was Kenya’s independence leader and first president, Jomo Kenyatta studied anthropology in London under Bronislaw Malinowski, a giant in the field. This is Kenyatta’s classic account of his people, the Gikuyu (Kikuyu) who live around their spiritual totem, Kere-Nyaga, what today we call Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-tallest peak. Kenyatta, whose son Uhuru (Freedom) served as Kenya’s fourth president, offers one of the most readable and revealing portraits of an indigenous African culture before the arrival of Europeans. First published in 1938, this intimate guide explains how the Gikuyu managed land and governed themselves, conducted business and educated their children in knowledge of the world and social customs of the community, from family ties to the sex life of young people.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Absorb yourself in the rich heritage of Kenya’s most influential people.
\n\n\n\nWhat Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule, by Max Siollun (Hurst, 2021). That “Nigeria” was a name suggested in 1897 by Flora Shaw, a famous colonial-affairs newspaper editor in London, tells you something about the unnatural journey of this amalgam of a country, Africa’s most populous. (Shaw later married colonial administrator Frederick Lugard, who did much to assemble Nigeria’s uneasy cultural hodgepodge.) The British Empire’s violent rule and manipulation of African peoples is coming into focus thanks to deeply researched reappraisals of benign colonial portrayals. Siollun, an historian, adds to this fresh scholarship with an acclaimed look at the economic exploitation, indigenous resistance, and influence of missionaries in the 60 years or so that Britain lorded over this land. (You’ll also want to grab the excellent Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), a deep dive into history, power, ecology, social conflict and corruption.)
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: This nuanced Nigerian perspective gives you more to ponder than the society dramas pumped out by Nollywood.
\n\n\n\nDictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, by Paul Kenyon (Head of Zeus, 2018). A BBC documentary filmmaker captures bizarre tales of Africa’s post-colonial leaders in this lively account that the Financial Times called a “grimly fascinating” narrative. “Suddenly indigenous rulers were in control of the precious resources that had previously been in the hands of London, Madrid, Lisbon and Paris,” Kenyon writes. “Most were unprepared for governance.” The treasure was gold, diamonds, oil, copper and even cocoa, the key ingredient of chocolate. For each, Kenyon delves vividly into the situation “before the dictators,” then zeroes in on the countries implicated: for oil, he looks at Nigeria, Libya and Equatorial Guinea, a tiny, Spanish-speaking nation ruled by a single family, where the UN says 70 percent of people live in poverty.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: These stories from Africa’s era of official thievery surpass fiction.
\n\n\n\nThomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa, by Brian J. Peterson (Indiana University Press, 2021). Among the most fascinating leaders that Africa has produced in the past 50 years is Sankara, who came to power in 1983 in Upper Volta, a former French colony he renamed Burkina Faso, meaning “Land of Honest People.” Sankara pursued a radical, pro-poor agenda that supported the rights of women, replenished forests and demanded that officials reveal their finances. Peterson’s definitive account draws on diplomatic cables and interviews with more than 100 of Sankara’s friends, family members and comrades. Alas, Sankara met a fate that visited many African leaders in that period: violent overthrow – and death at age 37 at the hands of his friend Blaise Campaoré, who ruled for 27 years.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: A standout biography of an African leader still revered across the continent.
\n\n\n\nBlack Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999). America’s harsh encounter with post-Cold War Africa begins in Somalia with the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. After victory over Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Kuwait in 1991, America’s military descended into the madness of urban warfare with Somali warlords, amid an international peacekeeping operation meant to rescue Somalia from famine. The fierce clash killed 18 soldiers and more than 500 Somalis and made America skittish about committing forces elsewhere on the continent. Bowden’s intense account became an action movie in 2002 and won two Academy Awards.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: A classic look at the limits of American power in unfamiliar places.
\n\n\n\nThe Oxford Handbook of the African Sahel, edited by Leonardo A. Villalon (Oxford University Press, 2021). Have you heard of the Sahel, yet aren’t quite sure what or where it is? Villalon, a University of Florida scholar of African studies, marshals a team of experts to tell you more than you ever dreamed about this semiarid, seductive and coup-prone region between the Sahara Desert and the tropical savannas to the south. Futurists see this area as full of potential in renewable energy, to name just one dream. Weighing in at 832 pages and 3.5 pounds (1.5 kilograms), with a triple-digit price to match, this feast of essays spans politics, climate-change impacts, governance challenges and social and cultural changes across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. Don’t set foot deep in the Sahel without it.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Heft this volume for insights into an opaque yet increasingly important region.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IMG_1414.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1\")
Namib: The Archeology of an African Desert, by John Kinahan (University of Namibia Press, 2020). While not a conventional travel guide, this exceptional book is one you’ll want to tote around on trips to southwestern Africa or simply enjoy from your comfy chair. Kinahan deftly mixes science with scenery, painting a vivid picture of a million years of human endurance and connection in this desert domain. In this sense, Kinahan tells a universal story of resilience – one he knows well from decades of field research across this vast terrain. With stunning drawings of ancient rock art that complement his graceful though never confounding narrative, Kinahan has created a classic account of deep-time Africa.
\n\n\n\nWhy Buy: Humans are incredible and here’s why.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These 21 essential nonfiction books on Africa will help you gain a deeper understanding of African societies and economies, crucial history and key heroes and villains. Curated for travelers, investors and entrepreneurs, these are the great reads on Africa.","protected":false},"author":144169648,"featured_media":389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57443692,57443696,57443694],"tags":[57443720,57443704,57443723,57443712,57443705,57443679,57443726,57443722,57443721,57443725,57443724,57443719,57443671],"series":[57443673],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economies","category-geopolitics","category-societies","tag-algeria","tag-books","tag-burkina-faso","tag-drc","tag-history","tag-kenya","tag-namibia","tag-nigeria","tag-rwanda","tag-sahel","tag-somalia","tag-south-africa","tag-top","series-afrologi","fallback-thumbnail"],"episode_featured_image":"https://cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png","episode_player_image":"https://i0.wp.com/cms.afrologi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/please-generate-a-wildly-whimsical-storybook-image-using-iconic-african-4.png?fit=1024%2C768&ssl=1","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"stitcher":{"key":"stitcher","url":"","label":"Stitcher","class":"stitcher","icon":"stitcher.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https://cms.afrologi.com/feed/podcast/afrologi","embedCode":"21 best books on Africa for you\n"},"yoast_head":"\n
I would add The Bright Continent by Dayo Olopade (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Olopade calls for a shift in our thinking about Africa, challenging us all to recognize that Africans have the best understanding of how to solve their own problems & create opportunity.
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