Bwakali

  I watched that Lusaka handshake and felt the weight of history. President Hakainde Hichilema stood beside Sheikh Mansour bin Jabor bin Jassim Al Thani as Al Mansour Holdings announced nineteen billion dollars for Zambia. The headline promise is 1.5...

I grew up watching the board, not just the pieces. In Africa, we were often told to celebrate when one of our pawns reached the eighth rank and became a queen. Yet in the real game that shaped our...

I grew up knowing that on the Swahili coast, real conversations begin with a tiny cup. We call it kahawa tungu. Many elders also say kahawa chungu. Either way, it is the same thing: strong, unsweetened, cardamom-kissed coffee that...

I keep coming back to a single graph. It shows the number of Africans living on less than $2.15 a day. More than 460 million people. That is one in three Africans. And yet this is the same continent...

Israel’s reopening of its embassy in Lusaka after more than half a century is more than a diplomatic ribbon-cutting. It is a signal that Jerusalem is steadily rebuilding a footprint across Africa that has risen and fallen since the...

I want to tell you a story about Africa’s money, but not the kind of money that Africans count in markets or stash in mobile wallets. This story is about the money that slips offshore, the money siphoned up...

The Price of a Headline A careless headline in London can drain billions from Africa. A New York op-ed about instability in an African election translates into higher borrowing costs for governments across the continent. The math is brutal: perception...

In the flickering glow of a single lamp, a young Ibrahim Traoré sat in his parents' modest home in Kéra, Bondokuy in Burkina Faso’s agricultural west. His father was a nurse while his mother was a housewife. His two...

In mid-2022, there were 1.9 million job vacancies in Germany, an all-time high in the country's history. Meanwhile 1.9 million Kenyans are suffering from depression. A large part of this depression is driven by a lack of jobs. On...

Not long ago, Qatar was a country boxed in by its neighbors. The 2017 Gulf blockade was supposed to squeeze it into submission. Instead, it forced Doha to reinvent itself as a global mediator and investor, a state that...