The return of Mwalimu
As debates on industrial policy revive, Nyerere’s legacy offers a critical archive of both the promise and limits of socialist development.
economics
When the peacemaker clocks out
Kenya’s shift toward trade-led diplomacy underscores the difficulty of sustaining regional leadership under conditions of fiscal dependence.
Kenya’s goon economy
Across the country’s urban centers, young men are being recruited into political militias that offer quick cash, fleeting power, and little chance of escape.
More commerce than chaos
In Johannesburg’s Jeppe precinct, what looks like disorder is in fact a dense, transnational system of trade, labor, and survival at the heart of the global economy.
The demographic dividend no one wants to pay
Although increasingly celebrated as an asset, Africa’s youth remain locked out of power and decent work.
The debts our parents left us
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya's informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
Whose progress?
A new documentary reveals how Ethiopia’s manufacturing push redistributes land, labor, and opportunity — delivering gains for some while displacing others.
Le paradoxe sénégalais
Comment le Sénégal est-il devenu l'un des viviers les plus prolifiques du football africain, et pourquoi ce succès peine-t-il encore à transformer l'économie du football local.
Guinea’s bet on iron ore
A $20 billion iron ore mega-project is reshaping Guinea’s economy and politics, but communities in Simandou say they still lack water, electricity, and accountability.
Whose transition is it anyway?
Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent — or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.
After the coronation
In Tanzania, the Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains have collapsed.
Energy for whom?
Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.
Back on track
A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid’s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice.
The price of plugging in
Floating power plants from Turkey promise to solve blackouts in the Global South. But easy fixes come with political risks.
The climate finance crisis
As Mozambique faces escalating climate disasters, it is shut out of the very funds meant to protect it.
De-dollarization from below?
As global powers debate alternatives to the dollar, Nigerian traders, Chinese exporters, and everyday crypto users are already reshaping the rules of currency exchange, as the hosts of the Nigerian Scam find out in the latest episode of the AIAC podcast.
Goïta, gift to the insurgents
Despite the popularity of the Sahel's military leaders internationally, most Malians have yet to see improvement to their material conditions at home.
Trump tariffs and US Imperialism
Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape — or destroy — American global power.
Tariffs, Trump, and the Global South
Trump’s trade war is framed as a battle with China — but its fallout is exposing just how little power African economies have in a rigged global system.
Good revolutions talk back
As political discontent rises in Kenya, silencing women’s and queer rights in the pursuit of economic justice risks compromising the movement entirely.