Ever since 1979, Iran has pursued its interests in the Horn of Africa. To Tehran, this volatile and impoverished part of Africa has represented a region where it could gain strategic depth and undermine agendas of countries seeking to weaken and isolate the Islamic Republic.
In East Africa, particularly in the Horn of Africa, several crises are currently overlapping. For some time now, climate events such as droughts have been creating major food supply bottlenecks in addition to fueling conflict and war. These issues are being exacerbated by a locust swarm that...
Presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections will take place in Burundi on May 20. The previous polls in 2015 brought the country to the brink. After the ruling party CNDD-FDD proposed that President Pierre Nkurunziza run for a third term — which was considered unconstitutional by many...
Almost five years ago, all member states of the United Nations signed the 2030 Agenda on sustainable development. This agenda includes 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) on global challenges such as poverty, urbanization and climate action, all featuring targets and indicators to measure...
What happens when Westerners discover and acknowledge a series of identifiable facts? According to Western logic, that body of knowledge puts them in a position to create the tools that will enable them to solve problems. Those tools fall into two broad categories: methods and technology. The...
Malawi is one of the most impoverished nations on the planet. It is experiencing what officials describe as a “population explosion” in a society with inadequate resources. As of 2018, Malawi is the third poorest country in the world with a GDP per capita of only $342, according to the...
Democracy is in crisis across the globe. The problem of understanding what “the people” want or whose authority they will accept has become a dilemma for both the new democracies with their fragile economies that emerged in the period of European decolonization following World War II and the...
World Bicycle Relief, a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes bicycles in rural areas of the developing world, is the 2019 winner of the Lipman Prize. The winner of the 2019 Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize at the University of Pennsylvania is World Bicycle Relief, a...
Investing in African women and girls as full partners in the economic future of Africa makes good business sense. There is little doubt that Africa will witness rapid yet uneven economic and demographic growth in the next 20 years. The continent’s rise can positively affect the global economy by...
Nonprofit myAgro’s novel financing model is transforming the way African farmers pay for their harvests. The winner of the 2018 Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize at the University of Pennsylvania is myAgro, a pioneering mobile layaway saving model that enables smallholder farmers to invest...
With urbanization projects throughout Africa, the development of infrastructure is often incompatible with the needs of the people. The marginalization that Black Panther — the film adaptation of the Marvel comic — decries of black inner cities in the US is about to be recreated in Africa....
A Somali community sick of negative headlines decided to start their own local newspaper and write their own stories. A Somali community in the north of England is using the power of the press to beat the media at its own game. Sick of seeing negative headline after negative headline, they...
Morocco has undergone an incredible transformation to support its intentions of becoming a commercial crossroads between Africa and the West, says former US Ambassador to Morocco Edward M. Gabriel. In January 1998, I arrived in Morocco as the new US ambassador. Arriving at the end of Ramadan, I...
French President Emmanuel Macron wants to give Donald Trump a run for his money. In November 2017, France’s young and new president, Emmanuel Macron, profited from a visit to Africa to launch a new, updated approach to postcolonial conquest. He predicted that French would become the first...
What made 15 African Union members vote against Morocco’s admission? Nearing the one-year anniversary of Morocco’s admission into the African Union (AU), further interpretations can be made concerning the implications of the AU’s majority 39-15 vote. Following Morocco’s historic...
