The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
With Burundi, a small east African country, emerging from a 13-year-long civil war, more than 400,000 refugees have started returning home. Its newly elected government now faces the daunting task of land allocation, which could plunge the country back into civil war. Burundi experienced a mass exodus in 1972, following …
In 1999 an American historian, John Hunwick, came upon a cache of old documents in a family library in Timbuktu, Mali. The discovery was seminal. It revealed that Africa had a sophisticated literary culture. This went against the grain of historical writing then: Africa's history was thought of as all …
Southern Africa is a region facing multiple stressors, including chronic, recurrent food insecurity and persistent threats of famine. Climate information, including seasonal climate forecasts, has been heralded as a promising tool for early-warning systems and agricultural risk management in southern Africa. Nevertheless, there is concern that climate information, for example …
• China refuted a recent US National Academy of Sciences report, which notes that a new strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus has emerged in southern China. • Argentine President Nestor Kirchner has asked the World Bank to halt loans for the controversial pulp mill in neighbouring Uruguay, until …
The un Food and Agriculture Organization and the Mauritania Locust Centre are now busy testing a clean biological agent to wipe out locusts: a deadly threat in Africa. The active material of the product, called Green Muscle, is a mushroom found in Niger in 1989. The mushroom method works slowly, …
china has promised massive financial aid to Africa. At a two-day meet in Beijing, attended by 35 of the 53 African nations, Chinese president Hu Jintao pledged to double China's aid to Africa from its 2006 level by 2009. Speaking at the conference's opening on November 4, he promised us …
weather forecasters will now need to track atmospheric dust to predict hurricanes. Dust may dampen hurricane fury, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying a link between Atlantic hurricanes and thick clouds of dust that periodically rise from the Sahara Desert and blow off Africa's western coast. A strong …
Following the diagnosis of four cases of yellow fever in Ivory Coast, who has called for an immediate vaccination programme in the country. According to who, about 20 per cent of the population is likely to get the disease, with half of them dying, if there is a yellow fever …
Who is now pushing for the use of pesticide ddt ( dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane ) in its malaria control programme , which the industrialised countries like the us banned 30 years back. Following the recommendation, meant particularly to target developing countries like Africa, the us government has said it is prepared to …
Satellite observations suggest vegetation encourages rainfall in Africa. A study led by P M Cox, a scientist with UK's Natural Environment Research Council, says vegetation accounts for around 30 per cent of annual rainfall variation in Africa's Sahel region. For the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (Vol …
South Africa, Namibia and Angola have signed an agreement that enables them to utilise the marine and coastal resources of the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem (bclme), along Africa's southwest coastline. The Benguela Current Commission Agreement, the first of its kind in the world, also facilitates the understanding, conservation and …
Farmers of Malawi, a country in southeast Africa, have warned the government to tread carefully before endorsing the European Union's (eu's)economic partnership agreement. In a statement, the Malawian farmers union said that signing the new eu trade deal will undermine development and increase poverty. The union has also urged governments …
A plan to launch a 24-hour pan-African tv news channel is nearing completion. The channel, to be known as a-24, was proposed early this year to counter the negative coverage of Africa by Western media, who often paint the continent as backward and afflicted by poverty, disease, war and debt. …
A small office in Nairobi's Wilson Airport provides succour to ailing people in the bush. The African Medical and Research Foundation's (amref's) Control Centre is where the flying doctors operate from, taking off when an emergency beckons. The office has a row of telephones, a fax machine and a computer. …
• Greenpeace's newest ship, Esperanza is out at sea. It will sail from the Azores to Antarctica, informing people on the way about the crisis faced by oceans. The expedition's primary focus is creating a global network of ocean parks, marine reserves. • The US's climate scientists have given An …
on may 12, Syngenta South Africa Ltd, a subsidiary of the Swiss agrochemical Syngenta, made public its application with the South African authorities for allowing import of its genetically modified (gm) maize, Event 3,272, for use in the production of ethanol. This is the first gm application for commercial approval …
The us recently called for a free-trade agreement with 37 African countries, saying it will fuel economic growth in Africa. us officials proposed this in Washington on June 9, 2006, at the fifth meeting of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (agoa), a trade forum involving African nations and the …
To document and compare the magnitude of inequities in child malnutrition across urban and rural areas, and to investigate the extent to which within-urban disparities in child malnutrition are accounted for by the characteristics of communities, households and individuals.
