Analysis

In August 2019 Melange Coffee Roasters, a family-owned Ethiopian coffee processing company inaugurated a new plant in Addis Ababa. With an investment of 1.37 million USD, the plant immediately began exporting processed, powdered packages of Ethiopia’s world-renowned coffee to China and South Africa. ...

COVID-19 has infected more than 100,000 people in at least 77 countries, disrupting global manufacturing supply chains and causing a slowdown in key service sectors such as tourism, transport, and recreation. While the virus will cause exports from Cameroon to China and Italy to fall, policymakers must ...

From Ethiopia to Kenya and soon Tanzania, thousands of kilometers of new railways are coming online. And if Tanzanian President John Magufuli is successful, Dar es Salaam will emerge as the hub of a hugely ambitious regional railway network that will stretch across half a dozen countries. ...

When oil trading started today in Asia, sellers moved quickly to unload their positions prompting a "cataclysmic collapse" that saw prices plunge by a stunning 31%, the single largest price drop in almost 30 years. The sell-off ...

Now that the COVID-19 infection rate in China is steadily declining and the government appears to be gaining some measure of control over the outbreak, officials in Beijing are now turning their attention to getting the domestic economy going again and to re-shaping ...

In 2006, the Chinese government began a program of delivering agricultural aid to Africa through establishing Agriculture Technology Demonstrations Centers (ATDC), aimed at stimulating local development and also promote Chinese commercial and diplomatic interests in Africa.  Some of these ATDCs have been beneficial, but many others are ...

One day, hopefully soon, scientists will find a cure for COVID-19 and things will start to get back to normal. Planes will start to fly, ports will reopen and people on both sides will try to get back to where they were just a couple of months ...

Two of East Africa's largest newspapers, The East African and Daily Nation (both incidentally owned by the same Nation Media Group) issued blistering critiques of how the region's governments are handling the worsening COVID-19 crisis. Kenya is a particular flashpoint, where ...

Coming off the N4 motorway near the small town of Marikana in South Africa’s platinum landscape, one almost immediately encounters the huge Tharisa Minerals mining operation. This gigantic open cast mine was started in 2009 for the production of chromium concentrate and platinum group metals (PGM) and ...

When U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began his Africa trip in mid-February, it was clear that countering China's influence on the continent was at the top of his agenda. Yet from Senegal to Angola, he restrained himself from the hard-hitting ...

Editor's Note: Until recently, China's aid and development programs in Africa and elsewhere around the world were largely financed through the Ministry of Commerce. Then, in 2018, the government announced the creation of the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) with the ambition that it would eventually ...

239 passengers arrived in Nairobi on Wednesday aboard a China Southern flight from Guangzhou. The flight marks a resumption of the airline's direct route after a 15-day hiatus due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in China. The plane's arrival sparked widespread ...