The Africa editor of The Economist talks to Lizzy Donnelly of Chatham House on Boko Haram. I mostly agree with her, mainly because she made sure to express the uncertainties about Boko Haram, the disagreement among ‘Nigeria watchers’ and ‘analysts’ on the group, and the fact that there is so much that is not known… Read More »
From Bloomberg: Energy companies operating in Senegal will drill three offshore wells next year as the West African nation vies to join a growing group of regional crude producers, according to the state-owned oil company,Petrosen. Senegalese officials held talks with more than 10 oil companies this year in attempts to lure investors to its energy industry, said Joseph Medou, Petrosen’s geologist,… Read More »
Just got this in the mail: Stipendium: 3 doctoral scholarships (Bonn) in research project on land use and climate change adaptation/ West Africa The three doctoral candidates will work on the following research subjects: 1. Historical relations between demography and land use in West Africa 2. Decision‐making within rural households in West Africa 3. The… Read More »
This is a guest post by Keith Hart (cross-posted). It is partly in response to Benson Eluma’s piece here on Achebe and Hart. You can leave your comments here or at Hart’s blog. Benson’s post refers to my previous one, Africa’s hope, which in turn took off from Chinua Achebe’s NYT oped piece. I will not… Read More »
As donations, pieces of clothing bear imprints of the aspirations of their donors, and as purchased commodities, they are invested with the desires of their consumers. This article describes a particular configuration of the international trade in secondhand clothing. The trade links Western homes with West Africans families in an intricate web; its history also… Read More »
From NEXT: A study by the USAID on the West Africa Trade Hub has revealed that the region’s transport costs is the highest in the world and remains so because the trucking market in the region is highly regulated. “The regulationof the industry deter competition that would go a long way toward reducing transport costs”… Read More »
… is the title of a recently published book by Kate Meagher of LSE’s Department of International Development, my friend and fellow student of African trade networks and informal economy. Nicolas van de Walle writes in Foreign Policy about the book: Within development circles, conventional wisdom has it that successful manufacturing sectors often develop in low-income… Read More »
Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk… Read More »
The region, an established transit point for Latin American cocaine to big Western markets, has also become a drug processing site amid rising addiction rates, and drug-related violence will follow, they told a drug summit over the weekend. “A flourishing illicit trade in the hands of organised crime is obviously a threat to the rule… Read More »
In a group interview in September, 18 disgruntled truck drivers in Cotonou, Benin, vented their frustrations to two Trade Hub consultants: driving freely from Cotonou to Ouagadougou was impossible without harassment, they said. They sometimes spend three days at borders where customs officials hold up paper work when they refuse to pay bribes; meanwhile, their… Read More »