Africa

The second iteration of India's Congress Party-led federal coalition has augmented its diplomatic, strategic and commercial thrust into Africa in pursuit of hydrocarbons, minerals, agricultural land and markets. By selecting Shashi...

At the India-Africa Hydrocarbon Conference in Delhi on 8 December, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna preached the benefits of 'a close alignment on major international issues and an abundance of socio-political...

World Bank President Robert Zoellick's plan to bring the Asian hyper-economies into the international development community is now bearing fruit. On 3 December, Zoellick told London's Financial Times that Chinese Commerce...

In comparison to the festivities of 2006, the 8-9 November Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC IV) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, was a much less hyped-up affair. It was...

China proclaimed that it had accomplished its goals of doubling aid and meeting the eight goals established at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation held in Beijing in 2006,...

The Sharm El-Sheik Action Plan sets out China-Africa cooperation goals for 2009 to 2012. Chinese officials emphasised that the 2006 Beijing Forum on China-Africa Cooperation was more a...

Conventional wisdom has it that the Chinese economic juggernaut is sweeping across the African continent, devastating already weak manufacturing sectors. Yet in many countries, statistics show a far...

India is launching its own mini-offensive in the electricity sector, following Chinese-style financing and contracting practices. On 29 October, New Delhi announced a new US$263 million credit line...

A US$2 million deal by a major Vietnamese rice exporter points to the corruption found on both side of the Africa-Asia commodities trade. Unlike Thailand, where the private...

A new European Commission was named on 17 November and most of its members who will deal with African affairs are from countries with no ties to the...

After Mohammed ibn Chambas takes over as Secretary General of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group in Brussels on 1 March 2010, he will have to fight hard...

Arms traders are getting around Europe's sanctions on Guinea and playing games with the embargo on Côte d'Ivoire, and Belgium sells weapons to Libya, hub of the arms...

The world's financial experts and institutions disagree on how seriously the global financial crash has affected developing economies or how quickly they may recover. In Africa, the International...

The lucrative commercial and political networks between France and Africa have survived a remarkable month in the French courts but more embarrassing cases are coming soon. On 27...

A faint self-congratulatory whiff of a 'great depression averted' wafted through the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Istanbul, Turkey, on 4-5 October....

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which made the one-billion prediction, says sub-Saharan Africa faces serious political, economic and social challenges. Twenty years of population growth at almost...

A key donor of funds for reproductive health is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Its work was hampered by the global gag rule until, as...

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s five-country trip to Africa on 2-9 September showed the extent of diplomatic ground which Israel has lost over the past three decades, since the...

For the first time in Kenya's history, Parliament has voted to reject a presidential order, duly noted in the official Gazette. At stake is the survival both of...

President Denis Sassou-Nguesso has spent nearly US$6 million on lawyers and lobbyists in the United States in the past three years. He wants Congress to pass legislation...

France hopes to diversify its trade with Africa and also to hold on to its traditional influence in its former African empire. This tricky balance is reflected in...

Bouygues: Went to Africa in the 1960s; by 2008, Africa operations had a turnover of over 1.6 billion euros (US$2.3 bn.), led by infrastructure subsidiary Colas (E707 million)...

As in so many areas the expectations are that President Barack Obama's Africa policy will be a break with the past. In some respects, the President's decision to...

After years of marginalisation and under-staffing, the African Affairs bureau of the State Department is beginning to attract strong interest from the other regional bureaux. The first key...

The world of oil trading is as remarkable for its profits as for its opacity, some of its largest businesses having an annual turnover of several hundred billion...

Glencore: The company does not name its chief executive. The firm began in 1994 when the United States’ commodities trader Marc Rich (who secured a pardon for tax...

African governments sense a new toughness in Washington’s Africa policy, a month before President Barack Obama’s state visit to Ghana on 10-11 July, officials have told Africa...

Three important African allies of French President Nicolas Sarkozy could find their French assets under scrutiny after Juge d'Instruction Françoise Desset ruled on 6 May that an anti-corruption...

As the international financial crisis intensified last year, some African governments thought they could avoid the worst by strengthening their trade and investment ties with Asia. Denial has...

Amid the gloom lie some positives. African economies now have on average 5.7 months of reserves to cover imports, policy frameworks are sounder, government ministries are better staffed....

On the first day of 2009, Hassan Mayow, a journalist working for Somalia's Radio Shabelle, was shot dead by government troops in Afgoye, 30 kilometres outside the capital....

Sub-Saharan Africa is not famous for technological innovation but a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates that mobile telephone use has grown twice as quickly there...

The row in Africa over migration weakens progress towards the African Union's aims of the free movement of people, goods and services across the continent, says Albert Ouédraogo,...

Bankers in Dar es Salaam last week predicted a catastrophic downturn in African economies unless serious measures were implemented. These would have to include substantial packages for Africa's...

The legacy of Françafrique - the opaque network of commercial and political ties between Paris and its African allies - continues to haunt French President Nicolas Sarkozy's government,...

The financial crisis has had one indisputable effect: it has put the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund back in business in Africa. Suddenly there is no...

South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, despised by African National Congress President Jacob Zuma's bedrock supporters on the party's left and populist wings, is busy making himself indispensable....

Africa advisor at the Elysée Bruno Joubert will be awaiting a ruling by Paris's parquet on the admissibility of a civil case against Gabon's President Omar Bongo Ondimba,...

Untitled Document Indian companies are behind three now somewhat troubled bids to take over the choicest assets in the African telecoms business: Bharti's US$23 billion merger with MTN, Essar's takeover of...

Tokyo's pledges to double aid to Africa and offer US$4 billion in concessional loans are in question following the landslide election of the Democratic Party of Japan on 30 August....

Aggressive investment by the China Investment Corporation, which manages nearly US$300 billion of Beijing's $2.1 trillion in foreign reserves, is leading to a boom in Africa-focused investments. In...

Strategic minerals are back in fashion and - along with oil and gas - at the centre of geopolitical rivalries between industrial economies in Asia and the West. New technologies...

All modern economies face the challenge of securing access to strategic minerals: cobalt, used to make superalloys; rare earth metals like neodymium, which is used in the manufacture of hybrid automotive...

African trades unionists are stepping up their criticism of the Chinese companies in countries like Algeria, Nigeria and South Africa. In mid-August the Congress of South African Trade Unions called on...

African Labour Research Network investigators found that many factory inspectors at Kenya's Labour Ministry took bribes from Chinese and other companies to overlook bad practices. Despite reports that in Malawi, workers...

Chinese officials are discussing ways to use some of their country's $2.1 trillion in foreign reserves to finance what could be the world's biggest development aid programme, as Western economies are...

Opposition politicians in Delhi are pressing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Congress Party government for a full investigation into allegations of corrupt deals worth 25 billion rupees (US$520 million) in rice exports...

The world's biggest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal, is cutting back sharply on its operations in West Africa, which were part of a plan to provide about two-thirds of the company's iron ore....

More signs are emerging that China is being drawn inexorably into Africa's internal politics and is being compelled to take sides in wider geopolitical disputes. This time, the trigger was the...

Japan is to add another US$4 billion in new concessional loans to Africa over the next five years, outpacing the spending of the China-Africa Development Fund, according to Koji Yonetani, the...

China is taking advantage of the global economic crisis to restructure its mining industry. A 4 trillion renminbi (US$586 billion) stimulus plan, announced late last year, encompasses sector-specific reform measures put...

While China's leading dam-builder Sinohydro was busy dealing with complaints from Western non-governmental organisations about its refusal to engage with local populations, an East African NGO shut down one of Sinohydro's...

The October 2007 merger between the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world's largest bank, and Standard Bank, South Africa's largest, is finally showing its potential. After a lacklustre start,...

For the next few decades, the Indian Ocean will be the setting for competition between three great powers: the United States adjusting to an increasingly multipolar world, and the rising military...

China sees India more as a stumbling block than a competitor for its ambitions in Asia. Professor Han Hua, a South Asia specialist at Beijing University, said that China lacks...

China would not be taking up tracts of land in Africa to meet its domestic food requirements insisted Beijing's Deputy Agriculture Minister Niu Dun in April, but reports on the...

On 7 May, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a long-delayed white paper on foreign aid confirming what Taipei's allies are keenly aware of: Taiwan's foreign aid has dropped...

Taiwanese diplomacy faces an awkward commercial challenge. Stripped of the warm words and diplomatic ambiguities, it is clear that Taipei's biggest trading partners no longer recognise Taiwan as an independent state...

Although China's exports have fallen by more than a quarter from last year's levels, the Export-Import Bank of China is busier than ever financing trade with Africa, Latin America and...

Africa and China escaped the worst direct effects of the global slowdown last year, Africa because its banks were not integrated into international credit markets, and China because its banks were...

The man who was Japanese Prime Minister in 2007-08, Yasuo Fukuda, was in Botswana on 21-22 March for the follow-up meeting of the Tokyo International Conference on African...

Before China, there was Japan, say Kenyans. The Japanese aid model is built largely around supplying technical expertise rather than direct budget support. Japanese experts in agriculture, energy and education are...

On top of the Madagascar saga, South Korea's loss of oil acreage in Nigeria in February is the biggest of several setbacks for Korean companies in Africa in recent months (AAC...

Ireland's Tullow, which has quickly outgrown out its minnow status, enters April stronger, having raised US$2 billion in debt financing and energetically dismissing speculation that it would consider selling...

Finance ministers will come under heavy pressure at the G-20 meeting on 2 April in London to crack down on tax havens and the banking secrecy regimes that...

The effects of the global slowdown on African economies have been generally overlooked. The World Bank has responded with its advocacy of more regional integration and infrastructure development, and a proposal...

Beijing is investing 45 billion yuan (US$6.6 bn.) in expanding its Xinhua News Agency and launching a 24-hour English language television news station. The plans envisage more cooperation with African media...

Like every other major economy, China is reassessing its priorities, and worrying about unemployment and falling market demand. Beijing's policymakers will therefore concentrate more on domestic economic growth...

Over the next five years, New Delhi expects India's trade with Africa to reach US$100 billion - despite the global economic slowdown. In an upbeat analysis of relations with Africa,...

Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou's new diplomatic strategy of rapprochement with China is making waves from the Taiwan Strait to distant African shores. Agreements have been signed between the two sides' semi-official...

Tokyo's promises to double aid to Africa by 2012 are being tested by international financial pressure on Japan's already feeble economy - and by domestic political troubles. Prime Minister Taro Aso...

Most of the impetus for Japanese companies in Africa will be coming from state agencies. The Japanese International Cooperation Agency wants to test its newly expanded powers and wider funding base,...

Cambodia's diplomatic reach in Africa is extremely limited but its rice exports are expanding fast despite questions about their quality. With a record surplus of over 2.8 million tonnes in 2008,...