Category: Development

The prominent Kenyan columnist and economic advisor to Saudi Arabia's Monetary Authority, Mohamed Wehliye, published a stark warning to the government in Nairobi that the country's debt is on the verge of spiraling out of control and urgent measures are needed to rein in spending.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta was joined Tuesday by a large delegation of Chinese officials to inaugurate new cargo service on the Mombasa to Naivasha line of the country's new Standard Gauge Railway. This new line is intended to transport goods from ...

Typically, public diplomacy initiatives are carried out either by embassies in different countries or state-led media organizations (VOA, FRANCE 24, etc…). Rarely do governments entrust this kind of outreach to private organizations, or "non-state actors" (NSAs) as they're known in government-parlance.  ...

The growing influence of China in world politics has not gone unnoticed in Washington. In 2018, while presenting the U.S. national defense strategy, which set priorities for the Pentagon, then U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis declared in very clear terms that the United States was entering ...

The Chinese-Kenyan joint venture company that runs operations for the new Standard Gauge Railway company, Afristar, forcefully rebutted recent allegations published last week in The Daily Nation newspaper that claimed that the SGR's Chinese contractor "refused to provide key information protected by the ...

Friday's FT article by correspondent Steve Johnson on the merits of Chinese development financing provoked considerable discussion online this weekend about the key issues raised in the story and how the topic is framed in simple "good vs. bad" terms. ...

A Chinese company has been chosen to construct the much-debated mausoleum for late Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. It is not the first time a Chinese company has been tasked with building shrines for the region’s political leaders.

After I published the story yesterday on the evolution of China's Resource-for-Infrastructure deals in Africa and the emergence of new financing models, known as "Sino-Africa Swap" deals, I wanted to get some additional perspective to find out if this is something that's actually happening or if ...

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta's longheld dream of extending his $4.9 billion Chinese-financed Standard Gauge Railway across East Africa suffered a major setback this week as both Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo both opted to go with Tanzania's SGR for direct access to the port ...

Decades before China embarked on countless Resource-for-Infrastructure deals in Africa, Japan pioneered the model in China as far back as the 1970s. The rapidly industrializing Japanese economy needed oil Chinese oil, minerals and other raw materials and China, one of the poorest countries at the time and ...

Former Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has been the rage recently for his recent Netpreneur Competition that took place two weeks ago in Ghana and more broadly for his declared commitment to supporting African technology entrepreneurs. Ma has been universally praised for his philanthropic venture in Africa. 

For years U.S. and European leaders have been warning their African counterparts about the dangers of taking on too much debt, particularly from China. Now, it appears that some African leaders have had enough of these lectures and they're starting to push back. They're saying that even ...