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 …
A rush to extract methane from the depths of Africa's Lake Kivu could trigger a huge upwelling of suffocating gas, potentially affecting over 2 million people.
In 1994, thousands of people from the Tutsi community were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbours across Rwanda. Nine years later the killers came home from prison to live side by side again with their victims. The complexities of this homecoming are explored in director Anne Aghion
Zimbabwe's once promising coffee industry faces total collapse due to upheavals linked to President Robert Mugabe's controversial land redistribution policy, a farmers union said on Wednesday. The coffee industry was growing steadily until 2000, when Mugabe embarked on a drive to resettle landless but inexperienced black farmers on white-owned commercial …
Africa's Lake Kivu contains vast quantities of gas, which makes it both dangerous and valuable. Anjali Nayar asks whether it is possible to tap the gas without causing a disaster.
One of the first volumes of what was then known as the ILEIA Newsletter described how farmers in Rwanda were working with new ideas and approaches to rice production, including some used by Asian farmers. Michael Loevinsohn showed how farmers, through their experimentation, had managed to cultivate rice at altitudes …
A vaccine that protects babies against fatal bacterial infections was introduced in Rwanda last week, its first distribution in a third world country. The pneumococcal conjugate vaccine has been sold under the Prevnar brand name in the United States since 2000, and Rwanda will get three million doses
mauritius Outsourcing agriculture Soaring food prices and lack of land have forced Mauritius, a food-importing country, to launch an ambitious initiative. The island nation is growing its food in other African countries where land remains fallow and labour cheap.
A documentary exposing the limits of the work of the International Tribunal for Rwanda has been feted at the 19th Marseille International Documentary Festival. D
A Catholic radio station In Rwanda has come under national scrutiny for allegedly giving scant coverage to commemorations of the genocide in the country last year. A report by the state-funded High Council of the Press on media coverage of the 2007 genocide commemoration week found out that Radio Maria, …
>> Virgin Airlines owner Richard Branson recently claimed to have made history by launching the first biofuel-powered commercial flight from London to Amsterdam. The debatable point is: it took 150,000 coconuts and some babassu palm oil from the Amazon rainforest to power 20 per cent of one of four tanks …
For years the global malaria effort has been asking for more resources.Now the field needs to figure out a systematic strategy for spending the money effectively.
Only 720 mountain gorillas remain in the wild, all of them in the misty hills of central Africa. Efforts to protect the critically endangered mountain gorilla received a big boost on Wednesday when Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo agreed to cooperate on a 10-year conservation plan …
Many in Rwanda are incensed at the bbc for allowing genocide revisionists to use the network's programme to "mock' victims of their crimes. The bitter reactions follow a 30-minute interview in which the president of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, Ignace Murwanashyaka, claimed there was no genocide. The …
A new pact signed in Nairobi recently by the Great Lakes countries of Africa aims to protect and assist the displaced in the region. This is the first legally binding regional instrument specifically dealing with internally displaced persons. The pact signed by the three lake countries
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 …
Despite environmental pressure against the use of chemical fertilisers, the deadly substances continue to be used unabated across the globe. At the end of the 20th century an average of 91 kgs of fertilisers were used for every hectare of cropland
Wildlife experts said that the volcano, which had erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is not likely to directly affect the rare gorillas of the Virunga Mountains. It would, however, devastate the chimpanzees and other wildlife in the forest around the volcano. "The ecological integration in the whole region …
