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...
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...
The Kenyan government continues the legal fight to close Dadaab—the largest refugee camp in the world. Claims by the Kenyan government that the Dadaab refugee camp on the border with Somalia has become a recruiting ground for terrorists have been behind the push to shut down the camp....
Despite high-profile efforts to accelerate the development of Tanzania’s liquid natural gas assets, there remains no clear timeline for completion. Tanzanian President John Magufuli ordered officials to accelerate work on a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in August 2016, but the...
Gambian security chiefs have put their professionalism and loyalty to the constitution in question. The relevance of the military and other security institutions in a democratic state has never been questioned. It is a concern that was raised 2,500 years ago by Plato and subsequent scholars....
Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in parliament worldwide. According to the latest Global Gender Gap Report published in October 2016 by the World Economic Forum, Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in parliament worldwide—64% of seats in the Rwandan parliament are occupied...
Will there be a peaceful transition of power in The Gambia? It’s clear that Adama Barrow, the president-elect of The Gambia, has the support of most African nations and the wider international community. His inauguration—scheduled for January 19—marks a watershed moment for the Gambian...
The incoming Trump administration is likely to turn isolationist and dial down engagement with Africa, allowing the Chinese to fill the resulting vacuum. November has proved to be eventful. Apparently, South African President Jacob Zuma’s leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) is...
An island on Lake Kivu provides a sanctuary from war in the region. It only takes one hour to reach the island of Idjwi by speedboat that sails between two of the main cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) South Kivu region, Goma and Bukavu. The lush green landscapes and relaxed,...
For Somalia to achieve peace and democracy, state-building must be the new federal government’s cornerstone policy. Somalia was supposed to have a new parliament in August, followed shortly thereafter by parliamentarians voting in a new president on September 10. This imperfect system has...
African leaders get together and come up with a declaration that emphasizes the development of rural areas so that Africans stop fleeing to cities and other continents. The end of the commodity boom has hit places like Africa and Latin America hard. In April, the International Monetary Fund...
