Study finds that soft rather than technical skills are more effective in getting rural youth jobs.
GettyImages
A mismatch between the skills employers want and what young people have is the major cause of youth unemployment in South Africa. Soft skills are key.
Oleg Elkov/GettyImages
China’s population decline and intensive ageing will offer opportunities and risks to African countries.
All of South Africa’s wheat production takes place during the winter months.
GettyImages
A third of South Africa’s farming income depends on irrigation. Disruptions in power supply put huge chunks of the country’s agricultural fortunes at risk.
The raging conflict in Khartoum could negatively affect trade flows through Port Sudan to the rest of the world.
Getty Images
Sudan’s current conflict will have economic, social and political ripple effects across a number of countries
Protestors in Lagos rally against plans to remove the fuel subsidy in 2012.
Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images
Fuel subsidy removal can benefit workers and poor Nigerians, if the process is carefully managed and implemented.
Cash is still king in Nigeria.
Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images
Nigeria’s Central Bank didn’t have an adoption strategy for its digital currency. It was a missed opportunity.
Many children help out on family farms in Africa.
Nana Kofi Acquah/Flickr
Children working on family farms is often mistaken for harmful child labour.
The opening of a hydro-electric dam on the Nile River at Merowe, north of Khartoum, in 2009.
Ashraf Shazly/Afp via GettyImages
The Sudanese crisis is the culmination of three decades of contentious energy politics among rival elites.
A substantive amount of irrigation in Kenya is being implemented quietly by self-motivated farmers.
Shutterstock
Kenya’s irrigation development is more advanced than official records show because they exclude what some farmers are doing.
A worker leans on a collapsed pylon in Pretoria on April 12, 2023. Ageing infrastructure exacerbates the country’s energy supply crisis.
Michele Spatari/AFP via Getty Images
South Africa faces the possibility of record electricity shortages and catastrophic scenarios such as a complete grid collapse.
A farmer watering his crops in Namong, Tone district, Togo.
Photo by: Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The relationship between small-scale irrigation and food security, diet quality, and nutrition is growing.
Shutterstock
Debt forgiveness isn’t the answer. History is replete with examples of countries that are serial defaulters.
shutterstock.
Most farmworkers were not even aware that the farm they worked on was Fairtrade certified.
Getty Images
Slow growth of exports and tourism and a resurgence of global inflation have created dollar shortages in some African economies.
Ghana’s e-levy has hit traders in the country’s informal sector the hardest.
Christophe Gateau/picture alliance via Getty Images
Domestic resource mobilisation cannot be achieved by over-taxing the livelihoods of the most vulnerable workers in the informal sector.
Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Thirty years ago the World Bank recognised that its position was untenable. It put in place mechanisms to make the bank more accountable to ordinary people.
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The industry has the potential to create jobs, alleviate poverty and help reduce the extreme inequality in South Africa
Shutterstock
Confidence in banking is hard-earned and easily shocked. This makes individual banks and the banking sector susceptible to knock-on effects from other institutions.
A corner shop in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Small businesses could benefit from sharing resources, like electricity.
Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
By sharing resources and equipment, SMEs could reduce operational costs and increase their resilience in the face of power cuts.
Shutterstock
South Africa’s laws designed to protect whistleblowers need urgent reform.
People queue outside a bank in Lagos on February 22, 2023. Nigeria was hit with a scarcity of cash after the central bank began to swap old Naira notes for new bills.
Patrick Meinhardt / AFP
There are at least five errors that marred the currency redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria, most of which could have been avoided.
The entrance to South Africa’s coal-fired Tutuka power plant operated by Eskom.
Marco LongarI/AFP via Getty Images
Nothing will save Eskom in its present configuration.
Foreign aid drives development in cities such as Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa.
Photo by: Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Gender parity in the top echelons of donor organisations is key, given that Africa’s cities rely on international aid for development.
Shutterstock
Asia’s much touted low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing model increases gender discrimination.
Wine remains among South Africa’s major agricultural exports.
Getty Images
South Africa’s focus should be on maintaining smooth relations with critical export markets while searching for new ones.