Long reads on African history, governance, economics, culture, and what comes next.
The African Development Bank's Desert to Power initiative, announced in 2018 with a target of 10 GW of solar generation across the Sahel by 2030, has been one …
The standard development economics framing of African agriculture is a productivity story: yields per hectare are below world averages, therefore the policy task is to raise yields. Hybrid …
The community health worker (CHW) is one of the most evidence-supported interventions in twenty-first-century public health. The Bangladesh BRAC model, scaled from the late 1970s onward, demonstrated that …
The Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit (DART) opened Phase 1 in May 2016 along the Morogoro Road corridor, the second operational BRT in mainland sub-Saharan Africa after Lagos. …
Pfumvudza — Shona for 'a new season' — is the conservation-agriculture protocol the Zimbabwean Ministry of Agriculture promoted hard from 2020 onward as the answer to a decade …
The Algiers Metro opened in 2011 after 30 years of stop-start construction. The Casablanca tramway opened in 2012. Both are the largest urban rail systems in their respective …
Ghana's National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has, since its 2003 launch under President Kufuor, included a partial integration with the registered herbalist sector through the Ghana Federation of …
Entreprise du Métro d'Alger (EMA), the Algerian state-owned operator of the Algiers metro, has run the system since the 2011 opening under a delegated-management contract with RATP-Dev (the …
The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AA-LRT) opened in September 2015 — the first metro system in sub-Saharan Africa outside Johannesburg's Gautrain. Two lines, 32 kilometres, 39 stations, …
The Lagos Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor opened in 2008 along Ikorodu Road, the first operational BRT in sub-Saharan Africa, and was for a decade a reference case …
The Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) was gazetted by the Nairobi City County Government in August 2017, suspending normal development control over an area of roughly 689 acres …
M-KOPA — founded in Nairobi in 2011 by Jesse Moore, Nick Hughes (of M-Pesa fame), and Chad Larson — pioneered the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar-home-system model that has now …