Blue Lines
The overwhelming vote, backed by African and European delegations, at the World Health Organisation assembly on 18-20 May for coronavirus vaccines to be classed as global public goods – universally available under pooled patents – boosts organisations suc...
Blue Lines
More than 20 African countries were due to hold elections in 2020. But electioneering is difficult and organising polls fraught with problems against a backdrop of lockdown measures to control the coronavirus pandemic.Ending the lockdown is the only way t...
Blue Lines
Concerns are deepening that authoritarian regimes in Africa are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to crack down on oppositionists and bolster surveillance of dissidents. Activists are under attack in Uganda, where one of opposition leader Bobi Wine's p...
Blue Lines
So far, Africa has not seen the death tolls that have become daily reality in Europe and North America, but the scale of the damage to its economies from the coronavirus pandemic is becoming clearer.On 15 April, the International Monetary Fund forecast th...
Blue Lines
In Europe, the coronavirus has brought the command economy back into fashion. Without similar financial resources, African governments will struggle to follow suit in subsidising businesses and wages and converting factories to make ventilators and protec...
Patrick Smith
Coverage this week is dominated by the economic and political effects of the coronavirus pandemic in Africa, starting with South Africa and Nigeria. We're publishing an extra feature today on the response of the region's policymakers and the international...
Patrick Smith
As the effects, direct and indirect, of the coronavirus pandemic course across Africa, we want you to know that our correspondents on the ground will be producing detailed reporting on the medical, political and security developments as well as the econom...
Blue Lines
We are all democrats now, at least up to a point. That point has been reached in a raft of West and East African states where the regional economic groupings were meant to be upholding higher standards of accountability and governance. The Economic Commun...
Blue Lines
It is a tragic paradox that African states, with experience of managing epidemics, are better placed than many other countries to contain the spread of Covid-19 nova coronavirus. Yet Africa is likely to be the region hardest hit by the indirect economic e...
Blue Lines
If African leaders were confused by the US government's attitude towards their countries and continent, they were surely left none the wiser by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who visited Senegal, Ethiopia and Angola on a whistle-stop tour of the continen...
