Category: The Conversation – Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Dereje Melese Liyew, Lecturer, Political Science, Debre Markos University,

Ethiopia launched a national dialogue process in 2022 to address deep political divisions and help steer the country towards stability.

In theory, such dialogues can help societies move beyond war, rebuild trust and agree on new political rules. This has happened in countries such as Kenya, Tunisia and Yemen.

Ethiopia’s process involved setting up a national dialogue commission. It stated it wanted to build national consensus, strengthen nation building and support democratic transition.

The working mandate of the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission has been extended twice. First for six months in February 2025 and then for eight months in February 2026.

However, the dialogue is not on the right track. I have researched Ethiopia’s political landscape and peace efforts for nearly a decade, and in a recent paper, I examined why the dialogue process is facing a crisis.

I found that Ethiopia’s national dialogue is struggling due to legitimacy deficits, limited inclusion and weak process design. Four years after the process launched, it has produced limited tangible outcomes.

National dialogues are most effective when they are broadly inclusive, trusted by key actors and conducted in a relatively stable political environment.

Ethiopia’s current context raises doubts on all three fronts.

The process has excluded influential political and armed actors. Opposition groups and civil society actors have also raised concerns about the commission’s independence from the ruling party. Ongoing conflicts further undermine the conditions needed for sustained negotiation.

These issues risk undermining the dialogue before it delivers meaningful results. This matters because national dialogue was meant to resolve Ethiopia’s political disputes peacefully. If it fails, the country risks missing a chance to manage conflict without violence.

Inclusivity

Inclusiveness is a defining feature of successful national dialogues. Key political forces, including armed groups, must see the process as a legitimate forum for negotiation.

In Ethiopia, several influential actors are absent.

Armed groups such as the Oromo Liberation Army, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the Amhara Fano have not been part of the process. Yet these groups are central to ongoing conflicts in Oromia, Tigray and Amhara regions. Holding a national dialogue while major armed confrontations continue – and without the participation of those directly involved – raises practical and political concerns.

Some opposition parties and civil society groups have also complained of inadequate consultation during the preparatory phase.

Exclusion weakens ownership. Without ownership, implementation becomes unlikely.

Trust

A national dialogue is usually convened during political crises or transitions. Its purpose is to bring together political forces, civil societies and non-state armed groups to negotiate fundamental questions about the state.

Ethiopia’s political tensions are rooted in unresolved questions about state structure, identity, historical narratives, the constitution and the balance between unity and self-determination.

A genuine dialogue could provide a platform to address these foundational disputes. However, the way the process has been designed and implemented has generated resistance.

One of the most contested issues has been the selection of commissioners.

The 11 members of the commission were appointed by parliament. Critics argue that the ruling party, which holds a majority of seats, dominated the process. Several opposition parties questioned the way the commission was set up.

When major political actors doubt the neutrality of conveners, the credibility of the entire process suffers. In divided societies, even the perception of bias can discourage participation.

In Ethiopia’s case, some opposition leaders have described the dialogue as a government-driven project rather than a nationally owned process. That perception alone is a serious obstacle.

There is also deep societal mistrust. Public confidence in political institutions – including parliament, courts and security institutions – has declined in recent years.

Dialogue requires a minimum level of trust before it can change anything.

Instability

National dialogues can occur during fragile transitions. But they rarely succeed in the middle of active and expanding armed conflicts.

Ethiopia continues to experience violence in multiple regions. In Tigray and parts of Amhara and Oromia, insecurity limits even basic state functions. Under such conditions, it’s difficult to set an agenda and get broad participation.

Ethiopia’s position in the Horn of Africa adds another layer of complexity.

Tensions linked to its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and shifting alliances involving Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia have heightened regional rivalries. Gulf States have also expanded their influence in the region.

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Read more:
Egypt-Ethiopia hostilities are playing out in the Horn – the risk of new proxy wars is high

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National dialogues are domestically driven. However, external geopolitical competition can shape internal dynamics through diplomatic pressure, economic leverage or security alignments. A fragile domestic process becomes even more vulnerable in such an environment.

Experiences with national dialogues from Sudan, South Sudan and Kenya offer mixed lessons for Ethiopia.

In Sudan, dialogue initiatives lacked genuine political openness and failed to create an environment for talks. In South Sudan, there were questions about government interference, and key opposition actors weren’t included. Kenya’s 2008 dialogue, by contrast, succeeded in halting violence and led to constitutional reform. This was largely because it included major political rivals and was supported by mediation that was accepted.

The core lesson is consistent: inclusion, neutrality and timing matter.

Is a reset necessary?

Some Ethiopian scholars and political actors argue for pausing and rethinking the dialogue.

In my view, a reset should involve:

• re-examining how commissioners are selected to ensure the process is seen as fair

• expanding engagement with opposition parties and civil society

• exploring ways to include or at least negotiate with influential armed groups

• taking parallel steps to reduce violence and build confidence.

A national dialogue is not a magic solution. It cannot, on its own, resolve deep ideological disagreements. But it can help manage them if the process is widely seen as legitimate.

If Ethiopia’s dialogue continues without addressing concerns over trust, inclusion and ongoing conflict, it risks becoming another missed opportunity in the country’s long political transition.

The stakes are high. A credible process could help stabilise the political landscape. A flawed one may deepen scepticism and polarisation.

Dereje Melese Liyew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ethiopia’s national dialogue was meant to heal the nation, but divisions are deepening – https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-national-dialogue-was-meant-to-heal-the-nation-but-divisions-are-deepening-278321

Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Laura Lambert, Senior Researcher, Leuphana University

An estimated 542 million Africans lack identity cards and potentially face statelessness. Without a legal identity, they can be excluded from basic human rights like education, healthcare and protection.

Most African countries have tried to rectify this by adopting a digital identity system to provide “legal identity for all, including birth registration” according to the Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 by 2030. Digital identity systems use databases to store biometrics and personal identity information together.

These systems claim to abolish identity fraud and corruption, because the identity is permanently fixed in the database and cannot easily be tampered with. In practice, however, creating and maintaining the system relies on many intermediaries. Chiefs, legal personnel, local authorities, teachers, employers, document brokers, family and friends all participate in enrolling, updating and certifying identities. These intermediaries make the system vulnerable to manipulation. But without them, hardly a legal identity could be established.

Within a transnational research project on digital identification, I have done ethnographic research with some of these intermediaries in Sierra Leone. I argue that they act as “brokers of citizenship”. They support people in becoming citizens by establishing an understanding of who is a citizen and what it means to be a citizen in terms of rights and duties.

In Sierra Leone, they have helped more than six million undocumented citizens to be included in the digital civil register and obtain a legal identity. My research in Sierra Leone illustrates that intermediaries have a crucial role in achieving the goal of citizenship for all.

Leave no one behind

Digital identity projects pursue the “one person, one identity” rule. They promise to create a permanent, secure and unique official identity for everyone based on linking a person’s biometrics to a permanent digital government database. Secure ID cards or birth certificates are then delivered based on these data entries.

But the process to obtain this official identity is a challenge for many people in Africa and more broadly the global south. People without sufficient recognised documents like birth certificates have difficulties in proving their identity. Minority ethnic groups, migrants, refugees and borderland communities struggle to prove their citizenship. Those excluded from citizen documents thus risk further exclusion from getting the new digital identities.

ID services are often distant and expensive. In rural populations especially, there is a need to travel far to registration centres. Rolling out digital identification to people in remote areas needs equipment, electricity, connectivity and tech-savvy staff. In Sierra Leone, the new digital ID card for citizens costs 165 Leones (about US$8). It is seven times more expensive than the old paper card.

Despite the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals to “Leave No One Behind” and provide digital identity for everyone, many Africans indeed risk being left out. Intermediaries are crucial for remedying these gaps.

Making identities official

Sierra Leoneans without sufficient documents to register for a digital identity can approach a “justice of the peace”. These usually retired men and a few women are appointed by the government to document oaths. Citizens can swear an oath about their identity to this official or his or her clerks. Against a small informal fee paid by the client, they document the claims about their name, date and place of birth on a form, a so-called “affidavit”. My research shows that this renders the identity claim of the client official.

Citizens can then use these affidavits to get biometrically enrolled at the responsible state office, the National Civil Registration Authority. Officials at the state office told me they widely trusted the declared information: “What you put on it is what we now believe in.” They appreciated this work of the justice of the peace, because otherwise undocumented people would be “disenfranchised” and risk becoming stateless.

As a colonial legacy, justices of the peace exist in many countries worldwide. There’s a risk they can exclude people based on discriminatory understandings of citizenship drawing on race, ethnicity or indigeneity for determining belonging. But they have played a crucial role in the inclusion of underdocumented people as citizens in digital identity projects.

Bridging the state and marginalised citizens

Justices of the peace do not only formalise identities. They are a bridge between the administration and marginalised citizens.

The Sierra Leonean justices of the peace are selected by the president of the republic for their good character and authority in their community as long-term civil servants, pastors, imams or chiefs. They hold a lot of authority and knowledge on the state and the administration.

In contrast to their status, many of them operate from a small table right in the bustle of urban informality. This is crucial for being accessible to marginalised citizens who might be fearful of contact with the administration. They might know little about its workings and experience civil servants as condescending or even authoritarian. They share information with citizens on how the administration works and give them advice on how they should act when they want to get the ID card.

Inclusivity needs intermediaries

In contrast to their promise, digital identities do not abolish intermediaries. Instead, they rely on the intermediaries’ work for identifying people and orienting them in the process. In addition to the justices of the peace, many other relatives, chiefs and state officials get involved in people’s identification. Although their involvement may make the system vulnerable to manipulation, intermediaries will remain important in the years ahead to remedy the civil registration gaps in Africa.

The work of these intermediaries has far-reaching consequences for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 and for bringing citizenship into being.

Laura Lambert receives funding from HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council (101039758).

– ref. Sierra Leone’s digital ID push: how local brokers help citizens gain legal identity – https://theconversation.com/sierra-leones-digital-id-push-how-local-brokers-help-citizens-gain-legal-identity-276336

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Franck Ghomsi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nansen Tutu Centre, University of Cape Town

For over three decades, satellites orbiting Earth have measured the height of the ocean surface with remarkable precision. These measurements are crucial because changes in ocean height are one of the clearest indicators of how our planet is responding to climate change. Rising ocean surfaces signal warming temperatures, melting ice and shifting ocean currents.

These all directly affect coastal communities through flooding, erosion and habitat loss. Even a small rise in the baseline sea level means that normal tidal cycles and storm surges reach further inland. This can turn high tides into damaging flood events.

Many people assume ocean levels are uniform, like water sitting flat in a bathtub. In reality, the ocean surface is surprisingly uneven. Winds push water in certain directions. Ocean currents redistribute heat. Temperature differences cause water to expand or contract. Even variations in Earth’s gravity field create bumps and dips in the sea surface. All these factors combine so that sea level can vary by tens of centimetres from one region to another.

When we say sea level has risen, we’re comparing it to a stable reference level, the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface.

I’m an oceanographer and geophysicist who specialises in these measurements. My research team and I analysed ocean height measurements collected by radar instruments on orbiting satellites from 1993 to 2024, for all waters surrounding Africa.

Our analysis revealed that African seas have risen by approximately 11.26cm since 1993. This process is driven by warming waters and melting ice.

African sea levels are rising by approximately 3.54 millimetres each year, which exceeds the global average of 3.45 mm/yr. Perhaps more troubling is that the pace of rise is speeding up, especially in African waters. This acceleration is a long-term trend driven by ongoing ocean warming and ice sheet melting, and it persists regardless of whether any individual year features an El Niño or a La Niña. The ocean continues to absorb heat and receive meltwater from ice sheets year after year, and it is this relentless accumulation, not any single climate cycle, that drives the long-term acceleration.

Africa’s 38 coastal nations are home to over 200 million people living near the shore. Rising seas threaten these communities with flooding, coastal erosion, and saltwater contamination of drinking water and farmland. Rising and warming seas also disrupt fisheries that millions of Africans depend upon for food and livelihoods.

Dramatic changes

We analysed 32 years of records and isolated the long-term trends from short-term influences like the El Niño weather pattern. We also examined ocean temperature and salinity data from the surface down to 300 metres depth to determine how much of the sea level change was caused by the ocean warming and expanding versus gaining additional water mass.

Our study revealed something remarkable about the 2023 to 2024 period. The El Niño event, which every so often spreads warm water across parts of the Pacific Ocean and alters weather patterns around the world, combined with other climate phenomena. Together, they created the largest sea level spike ever recorded in African waters, reaching an anomaly of 27mm.

The most dramatic changes are occurring in specific regions. The ocean does not respond to warming and climate variability uniformly. Local factors, including the strength and direction of ocean currents, the depth of warm surface layers, the influence of nearby climate patterns like the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the shape of the coastline and seafloor, all combine to make certain areas far more sensitive to change than others.

The Western Indian Ocean, including waters around Mozambique, Madagascar and the Comoros Islands, shows the highest acceleration of sea level rise at 0.16 mm/yr² with a trend of 3.88 mm/yr.

The Eastern Central Atlantic, encompassing the Gulf of Guinea and waters off west African nations like Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, follows closely at 3.90 mm/yr. These regions are experiencing both the fastest rise and the sharpest acceleration, making them priority areas for monitoring and adaptation.

Impact of El Niño

The western Indian Ocean and the tropical Atlantic were already abnormally warm in 2023-2024, with sea surface temperatures well above their long-term averages. This created a higher baseline from which El Niño could push up temperatures, and therefore sea levels.

Unusual wind patterns suppressed the normal process of upwelling. This is when winds push surface water aside, allowing colder, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean to rise to the surface. The result was that heat was trapped at the surface instead of being mixed downward and replaced by cooler water. The ocean layers did not mix well.

The result was striking. Thermal expansion alone (warmer water) accounted for over 70% of the exceptional sea level rise during this event, reaching nearly 30mm across the African marine domain. Ocean heat content quadrupled compared to the 2015-2016 El Niño.

The 2023-2024 period contributed 2.34cm of rise, representing 19% of the total increase since 1993 in just two years.

Because sea levels have been steadily climbing for decades, the starting point before each new extreme event is already higher than it used to be. The Western Indian Ocean surged by 3.87cm in one year alone – nearly one third of its total rise since 1993.

What drives rising sea levels

Two main factors drive sea level rise globally. First, as ocean water warms, it expands. Second, melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica add water mass to the oceans. Both are consequences of human caused climate change.

This rise is not a natural cycle. While sea levels have fluctuated throughout Earth’s history, the current rate of rise is far faster than anything seen in thousands of years, driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The human cost of rising seas

Major cities face mounting dangers. Lagos, with over 20 million residents, sits on low lying land increasingly vulnerable to flooding. Dar es Salaam in Tanzania faces similar risks. Small island developing states like the Comoros and Seychelles are particularly exposed.

The “normal” water level today is centimetres higher than it was 30 years ago. Each new event builds on an ocean that is already swollen from decades of warming.

And when upwelling doesn’t happen, fish populations decline and the communities that depend on them lose food and income.

What needs to happen next

Addressing this crisis requires action on multiple fronts. Most fundamentally, global carbon emissions must be drastically reduced to slow ocean warming. Without achieving carbon neutrality by mid century, Africa risks exceeding 2°C of warming by 2100.

Adaptation is equally urgent. African nations need expanded ocean monitoring networks to track changes and provide early warnings. Coasts need protection through sea walls, restored mangroves and improved drainage.

The West Africa Coastal Areas Management Program, a World Bank supported regional effort, is a promising model. It aims to help countries manage erosion, flooding and pollution through investments in infrastructure, nature based solutions, and policy coordination.

Protecting Africa’s coasts requires combining oceanographic science with community level planning to build resilience against an uncertain ocean future.

Franck Ghomsi is a researcher at the Nansen-Tutu Centre for Marine Environmental Research in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and the Geodesy Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Cartography in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He receives funding from Schmidt Sciences, LLC, and support from Canada’s C150 Research Program (Grant No. 50296).

– ref. Sea levels around Africa are rising faster than the global average: what’s behind this alarming trend – https://theconversation.com/sea-levels-around-africa-are-rising-faster-than-the-global-average-whats-behind-this-alarming-trend-276888

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Amani Karisa, Associate Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

A child’s success at school doesn’t depend only on teachers and classrooms. Studies show that when parents engage with schools – by attending meetings, supporting learning at home and working with teachers – children tend to do better academically and socially.

In many African countries, fathers hold decision-making and financial authority within families. This gives them strong influence over children’s schooling.

But when a child has a disability – such as Down syndrome, epilepsy, autism or other conditions that significantly affect learning and daily functioning – a father’s involvement often shifts in complex ways.

Research from Kenya and other African settings shows that children with disabilities already face barriers to school access, continuity and support.

What is less well understood is how fathers engage with their education, and how ideas about masculinity, responsibility and disability shape that involvement.

Much of the existing research on parental involvement focuses mainly on mothers or treats parents as a single category. Fathers’ roles are often assumed rather than examined directly.

Our research set out to address this gap. My colleagues and I are education and disability researchers based in Kenya and South Africa. We looked at how a father’s involvement in the education of school-aged children with intellectual disabilities is constructed and negotiated in Kenya.

We studied a public special school at the coast that serves children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities. Like many such schools, it functions as a place of learning and a support hub for many low-income families navigating stigma, poverty and limited services.

We wanted to find out how fathers, mothers, teachers and learners themselves describe fathers’ roles, and what counts as involvement from their point of view.

The goal was to identify practical patterns: what a father’s involvement looks like in reality, what limits it and where opportunities exist to strengthen it. We found that many fathers see their main role in their child’s education as financial provision, such as paying school fees, rather than attending school meetings or events.

Social expectations also shape fathers’ visibility at school, with some avoiding engagement in spaces associated with intellectual disability. Work pressures in low-income settings further limit participation.

Our study also found that teachers’ assumptions about fathers’ disengagement can unintentionally reinforce their absence. However, when fathers do engage, their influence is often decisive because they are decision makers in many households.

Our findings challenge the assumption that fathers are simply absent or uninterested. They show instead that involvement often takes less visible forms that are shaped by economic pressures, social norms and school practices.

Recognising these patterns can help schools and policymakers design more effective ways to engage fathers and support children with intellectual disabilities.

The research

Our core evidence comes from case study research conducted in Kenya. Participants included fathers, mothers, teachers and learners with disabilities.

We collected data through individual interviews, focus group discussions and document reviews of school records and parent meeting notes. This allowed us to identify recurring patterns, not just individual opinions.

We extended the analysis by placing these findings within the broader Kenyan social and policy context of fatherhood, education and disability.

The findings cannot be assumed to represent all families. But they do reveal consistent mechanisms that likely operate in similar settings.

What to know about a father’s involvement

1. Many fathers see their main education role as financial provision

Across participants, one pattern was consistent: fathers strongly identified with the role of provider. Paying school fees, transport costs and buying uniforms and supplies was widely viewed – by fathers, mothers and teachers – as legitimate educational involvement.

Even when fathers rarely attended school meetings or events, they were still described as “involved” if they financed schooling. In contrast, mothers were expected to handle direct school contact and daily follow-up.

This means schools that define involvement only as physical presence may misread how the role of fathers is understood.

2. Masculinity norms shape how visible fathers are at school

Many teachers we spoke to linked the low attendance of fathers at school events to masculinity pressures. They suggested that some fathers avoided being publicly associated with a child with intellectual disability because disability was seen socially as weakness or imperfection that could damage male status.

Importantly, this interpretation came mostly from teachers. Fathers themselves framed their absence more often in terms of work and provider duties.

3. ‘Work demands’ are real – but also sometimes a shield

Fathers often explained non-attendance at meetings by pointing to unstable or casual labour conditions – missing a day’s work could mean losing income or even a job. In low-income settings, this constraint is credible.

But our research also found that fathers’ attendance was still low even when meetings were scheduled with advance notice or on weekends. Some teachers and mothers saw “work” as a socially acceptable explanation for fathers to protect their masculine identity.

Both readings can be true at once: economic pressure is real, and identity protection is also operating.

4. Teachers’ expectations can unintentionally push fathers away

Another finding is more uncomfortable for schools. Some teachers held strong prior beliefs that fathers of children with disabilities are uncaring or in denial. These assumptions shaped how, and how often, they contacted fathers.

Where teachers mainly communicated through mothers, fathers became even less engaged with the school. This confirms the original expectation.

5. When fathers are engaged, their influence is high

Where fathers did engage, their impact was often decisive. Their support accelerated school placement, fee payment and follow-through on school recommendations.

Teachers reported that when fathers backed a decision, implementation at home was easier. This suggests that increasing father engagement has practical effects on children’s educational stability.

What it means

The findings suggest that father involvement should be approached differently in disability education.

• Schools should broaden what counts as involvement. Financial provision, decision support and consent are forms of engagement, even when fathers are not physically present. But schools should also create father-inclusive contact strategies. These include direct invitations, flexible meeting formats, and communication channels that do not rely only on mothers.

• Teachers need to examine their own gender assumptions, so as to build relationships with fathers.

• Policy messaging that links father involvement with protection, dignity and future stability may be more effective than messages around attendance.

• Civil society organisations and family support programmes should design father-focused engagement spaces where men can discuss disability and schooling without stigma pressure.

It is too simple to label fathers as absent or resistant. In our study, fathers’ involvement was not missing – it was different.

Amani Karisa receives funding from Echidna Giving, Gates Foundation and International Development Research Centre.

– ref. Do dads of disabled children do enough? Kenya study points to misunderstood ways of caring – https://theconversation.com/do-dads-of-disabled-children-do-enough-kenya-study-points-to-misunderstood-ways-of-caring-274745

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Lisa Sachs, Director, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Columbia University

The effects of climate change are no longer a future risk for Africa. They are a present crisis.

Floods are destroying infrastructure that took decades to build. Droughts are collapsing harvests and displacing communities. Extreme heat is eroding labour productivity and straining health systems. Coastal communities are losing ground to rising seas and storm surges.

The case for massive investment in adaptation and resilience is overwhelming. In the infrastructure, agriculture, water systems, and coastal protections that help communities survive a climate that has already changed. But adaptation only buys limited time. Only deep, rapid cuts to the greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet can prevent those impacts from escalating beyond the reach of any response.

The global response to this dual challenge has been woefully inadequate, with particularly devastating consequences for the countries that contributed least to global warming yet are most profoundly affected.

First, despite continued pledges to increase adaptation finance, the financing gap remains massive. Africa is receiving less than US$14 billion per year in adaptation finance against an estimated need of more than US$100 billion. And more than half of what does flow arrives as interest bearing loans.

Second, the growing attention to adaptation has crowded out the increasingly urgent imperative of deep decarbonisation. Investing in decarbonisation has become more, not less, urgent as global warming reaches the 1.5°C threshold, with emissions still rising. Deep decarbonisation is the only way to stop climate-related risks from rising to unmanageable levels.

Resilience becomes increasingly ineffective as emissions and temperatures continue to rise. We cannot adapt to many extreme events, or their impacts on food systems, livelihoods and health. Tipping points are irreversible.

Third and most profoundly, the global financial architecture is failing Africa on multiple levels simultaneously, with cascading impacts for both mitigation and adaptation. Investing in decarbonised energy and transport systems and in building resilience to the increased impacts of climate change requires access to long-term affordable capital.

Yet Africa remains trapped in a cycle of perceived risk and access only to limited and expensive financing. This has made it prohibitively difficult to finance critical investments, exacerbating African countries’ vulnerability, increasing perceived risk, and raising the cost of capital. Debt sustainability frameworks, credit rating systems, multilateral lending practices, and global market rules and conventions reinforce each other. They constrain access to capital that is needed for critical climate-related investments, channelling capital away from the places and sectors that need it most.

Understanding how those failures interact is essential to fixing them.

For two decades at Columbia University, as my colleagues and I have worked with governments and partners around the world, we have seen these failures play out directly. In the investment decisions that don’t get made and the infrastructure that doesn’t get built. We have watched risks mount, even as the pathways to decarbonisation were known. Already, we are seeing mounting risks and liabilities. There are increased liabilities, more profound trade-offs, and accumulated borrowing from future generations to cover losses today.

The single most important imperative is to lower the cost of capital for African borrowers, both sovereign and non-sovereign, to invest in modern, decarbonised infrastructure and in resilience at scale, for the benefit of the region and the world.

Fundamentally, this means reformed debt sustainability frameworks, liquidity mechanisms, risk assessments and credit ratings. Sovereigns, project developers and investors should also align around coherent, rigorous least-cost energy system modelling, so that investment pipelines are integrated with economy-wide planning.

Then strategic risk-allocation mechanisms at every level of the system, complementing fundamental reforms at the global level, will allow private capital to flow to hundreds of viable projects across the continent.

Failures on the mitigation front

Only mitigation – the deep decarbonisation of the world’s energy, transport, land and industrial systems – reduces the drivers of climate change. All other financing – for resilience, insurance and disaster recovery – manages the consequences of unmitigated climate risk. It does not reduce the underlying hazard.

That we are failing to decarbonise the world’s economy rapidly and at scale is inexcusable. We have the technology, capital and known pathways to achieve rapid deep decarbonisation. Tremendous technological gains mean that the economics increasingly support low-carbon solutions across the built environment, mobility and energy systems.

Energy consumers that have been passive offtakers can now act as storage on grids, stabilising energy demand, lowering system costs, creating new revenue streams, and lowering costs for downstream consumers. Distributed energy systems allow distinct locales to pool and share their energy, so that system disruptions have more limited impacts. Energy generated from the wind and sun are not subject to political capture or fossil fuel price volatility, the only means of truly securing energy security and economic sovereignty.

The current frameworks and institutions for global decarbonisation were built for a different era. Net-zero plans and mitigation targets obscure the way in which energy systems have transformed, expanding opportunities and enabling emissions reductions through systems optimisation.

Rather than insisting on net zero plans and mitigation commitments, we need:

• rigorous technical analyses to identify least-cost pathways to decarbonised, optimised energy systems, considering how integration across sectors and regions unlocks efficiencies and reduces cost

• coordination among diverse actors to support technological diffusion across interconnected systems

• risk-sharing mechanisms to manage the financing risks that deter private capital at the early stages of transition.

The world is also failing Africa in particular. Africa holds 60% of the world’s best solar resources.

Some 600 million people on the continent still lack access to electricity. Modern infrastructure, properly planned and coordinated, represents an extraordinary development opportunity; energy system investments will power industrial growth, digital connectivity, health and education.

Yet Africa receives just 2% of global clean energy investment, a tiny fraction of the financing needed to build clean energy and mobility systems at scale.

This mismatch reflects the profound bias of the international financial system.

A broken international financial system

The cost of borrowing determines whether an energy system is financeable, and especially whether it is more competitive than fossil-based energy. In Africa’s power sector, the average cost of borrowing to build clean energy infrastructure is 15%-18% on average, compared to 2%-5% in Europe and the United States. At these high costs of capital, clean energy infrastructure is simply not financeable.

Those borrowing costs do not reflect genuine investment risk. They reflect a compounding set of structural constraints and misperceived risks.

GDP per capita is de facto the most decisive determinant of a country’s creditworthiness. A low-income country has virtually no path to investment-grade status regardless of its growth trajectory, governance quality, or returns on public investment.

As of late 2025, only three of 34 rated African countries held investment-grade status. Not a single low-income country held that status.

The IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework compounds the damage. Based on their institutional methodologies, the IMF and World Bank discourage the long-term public borrowing that African governments need to invest in infrastructure, human capital and climate resilience.

Recent European Central Bank research shows how these failures add up. Climate disasters directly raise sovereign borrowing costs. The ECB analysis shows that the effect is largest and most persistent in developing countries.

A major storm can push bond yields up by more than 140 basis points in an emerging economy, versus roughly 66 in a typical advanced economy. This means the cost of borrowing rises sharply at precisely the moment a country most needs resources to recover and rebuild. Financial breathing room shrinks precisely when climate impacts demand the greatest response.

The ECB analysis further shows that countries with slow energy transitions face a growing transition risk premium. The slower one transitions, the more costly it is to borrow. But the trickle of financing for clean energy in Africa is itself the result of high borrowing costs. So African countries are penalised for facing high borrowing costs for not having adequate public resources to build resilience to the climate impacts they did not cause.

Diagnose and target risk

The structural determinants of this problem are well understood. African governments must be able to access affordable, long-term capital to build clean energy and mobility systems, to invest in resilient cities, agriculture and coastlines, and to develop the institutions, health systems and education on which everything else depends.

That requires credit rating methodologies that stop treating poverty as a self-fulfilling proxy for default risk. And a debt sustainability framework that stops discouraging the public investment African economies need to grow. African countries that can make these critical investments at scale will grow far faster than the world’s wealthy economies. The international financial architecture must reflect that – urgently, before adaptation becomes an increasingly inadequate response to risks we had every opportunity to contain.

Lisa Sachs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Climate finance has failed Africa twice over – how to fix it – https://theconversation.com/climate-finance-has-failed-africa-twice-over-how-to-fix-it-278117

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Abdoulaye Ndiaye, ensiengnant-chercheur, New York University

Senegal is facing a serious debt crisis. The IMF estimated the country’s debt at 132% of GDP at the end of 2024. Debt servicing costs are projected at 5.5 trillion CFA francs (about $9.1 billion) this year, eating up a growing share of tax revenue.

A restructuring of the debt seems necessary but Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko has ruled out this option. Instead, government has announced the shutdown of 19 agencies to save an estimated 55 billion CFA francs (about US$97.95 million) over three years.

A recent report examines the main implications of two options: trying to repay the debt at all cost or defaulting. In an interview with The Conversation Africa, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, one of the authors of the report, breaks down what each path could mean for the country.

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How did Senegal’s debt crisis come about?

In September 2024, the new government announced that it found irregularities in debt reports. In response, the IMF froze its US$1.8 billion credit facility for Senegal in October 2024.

A few months later, in February 2025, Senegal’s Court of Auditors, the country’s supreme auditor of public finances, found that the deficit had been underestimated by 5.6% of GDP per year between 2019 and 2023. As a result, the debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 74% to 100%. Between March 2025 and October 2025, despite several visits to the country, the IMF program remained on hold.

The government later published a revised 2025 budget and medium-term outlook. It then estimated the debt at 120% of GDP. A month later, an IMF visit was extended by two weeks. Tension between the IMF and the Senegalese government became public. As a direct consequence, government bonds collapsed. Under pressure, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko pledged to do everything in his power to avoid default.

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What does Senegal’s current strategy rely on?

Repaying at all costs means making two assumptions. The first is achieving massive budget consolidation in record time. In simple terms, it’s like running a marathon at sprint speed. Going from a primary deficit of roughly 14% of GDP in 2024 to a 2% surplus is something few countries have achieved. This usually requires a big natural resource windfall, as was the case in Antigua and Barbuda.

The second gamble is hoping key players, including the IMF, will agree that Senegal’s debt is sustainable and keep lending during this hard times.

To cover its current deficit and repay its debts due between 2026 and 2028, the government needs to raise 15 trillion CFA francs (US$25 billion).

If not the IMF, who could lend to Senegal and at what cost?

The IMF is the most suitable institution to support countries in crisis. Its programs are designed for these situations. They unlock other low-cost loans and offer zero-interest lending to low-income countries. Our analysis suggests that’s unlikely.

Under its own rules, the IMF can only approve a programme if its debt analysis shows the debt is sustainable.

If the IMF cannot lend, others might step in. For example, Egypt and Kenya] got loans in 2024 from emerging lenders like the United Arab Emirates despite doubts about their solvency. But this support comes at a price. The riskier the loan, the tougher the conditions, including painful privatisations.

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Crise de la dette: les quatre leviers qui peuvent aider le Sénégal à éviter la restructuration

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Does Senegal have other options?

A third option would be to rely on regional financial markets. In 2025, regional banks lent to Senegal over 4 trillion CFA francs (US$6.7 billion) . They could continue to do so, but probably not as much. If they do, they would squeeze lending to the private sector and, above all, could expose the banking sector to increasing risk.

This strategy of paying back the debt at all cost might work. But it’s a big gamble. It carries two serious risks – either the fiscal adjustment fails, or no lender steps forward.

How can Senegal negotiate with creditors without hurting future investments?

Another path is negotiating with creditors under the G20’s Common Framework. This process was devised to reduce debt owed by developing countries to bilateral creditors. This option is not easy either. That said, Ghana and Ethiopia moved faster than Zambia in negotiating with creditors?.

The international community should treat Senegal as a test of possible cooperation. China and France together hold about 70% of Senegal’s bilateral debt. They should clearly show their support by committing to fixing the debt as quickly as possible.

Dealing with private creditors adds another layer of complexity. Their primary goal is to minimise losses which tends to make negotiation’s lengthy and adversarial. If the restructuring involves reducing or rescheduling payments, the country’s bond would usually be rated as “in default” by credit agencies, taking a temporary hit to its financial reputation. Default is not the end of the road. Countries can regain access to financial markets after a default. The key is making the debt cut deep enough to restore sustainability.

International institutions should step in with new loans. This would help Senegal keep investing despite its limited access to international markets. Finally, to minimise economic costs, debts denominated in CFA francs should be excluded from the restructuring scope to avoid destabilising the regional monetary zone.

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Read more:
Comment le Sénégal peut financer son économie sans s’endetter davantage

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What is the best path forward?

In any case, the lessons of this crisis must go beyond Senegal. Debt transparency and banking oversight across the region need to be strengthened. As European countries did during the Greek crisis in 2010, the West African Economic and Monetary Union will have to reform and build additional safety nets.

Experience shows that delaying a default is costly. It is better to negotiate early to reduce the impact on exports and growth. Both options – repaying and restructuring – are challenging, and can cause serious damage to the economy. Our analysis shows that without access to large amounts of cheap money, trying to repay would be more dangerous and more costly than restructuring.

Restructuring carries short-term costs mostly during the negotiation period of two to three years. A failed repayment would bring much deeper and more lasting damage to economic stability. That outcome should be avoided.

This article was commissioned in French and later translated.

Abdoulaye Ndiaye does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Senegal’s crisis: why debt restructuring may be the least bad option – https://theconversation.com/senegals-crisis-why-debt-restructuring-may-be-the-least-bad-option-276663

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Suleman Lazarus, Visiting Fellow, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science

For a young man growing up in Ghana or Nigeria, few dreams burn brighter than becoming a professional footballer. Icons like Michael Essien (Ghana), Jay-Jay Okocha (Nigeria) and Nwankwo Kanu (Nigeria) didn’t just win trophies. They escaped poverty, provided for their families, and earned the respect of entire communities.

Football, in much of west Africa, isn’t just a sport. It is a promise.

This promise has led to an elaborate trafficking scheme that claims many young, African victims every year. Victims are lured with promises of football trials, academy placements or opportunities in Europe, only to end up in exploitative conditions in Nigeria. They may be confined, stripped of their documents, and forced to solicit money from relatives, while their devices are used in further fraud schemes run by traffickers.

I am a criminologist who has also researched the socio-cultural dynamics of online offending and victimisation for over a decade. In a recently published paper I examined how deceptive football recruitment can be a form of trafficking.

The paper focused on the case of 76 young Ghanaian footballers who were trafficked to Nigeria for fake trials in 2025 (before being rescued). I examined how digital tools, legal loopholes and emotional appeals were used to entrap the victims.

I concluded that this case was unlikely to be exceptional but part of a wider, emerging form of exploitation in which traffickers weaponise young people’s sporting ambitions through digital deception. That conclusion draws not from this case alone, but from a wider body of research showing how football ambitions can be channelled through exploitative recruitment networks, deceptive intermediaries, and precarious migration pathways.

The key argument is that football migration, cyber-enabled fraud, and human trafficking cannot be treated as separate domains of research. Treating them in isolation has harmful consequences, because this fragmentation creates the very blind spots traffickers exploit. I suggest that prevention requires coordinated regulation, athlete protection, digital monitoring, and stronger oversight from sport and regional bodies.

I also challenge the policy framework that treats sport aspiration and cybercrime in west Africa as separate domains.

Hijacked dreams

The 76 young Ghanaian men were trafficked to Nigeria under the guise of football trials and academy placements.

Recruiters used Facebook posts, WhatsApp messages and targeted digital ads to present themselves as legitimate scouts, complete with the language, branding and rituals of real sports agencies.

When the victims arrived, the reality was very different. Their phones and identity documents were confiscated. They were confined to overcrowded compounds and cut off from the outside world. They were then coerced into contacting their own relatives and fabricating stories about training fees and travel costs to extract money from families back home. Their phones – and the trust embedded in their contact lists – were turned into instruments of fraud.

Some were pressured to recruit their peers, turning the scheme into something resembling a coercive multi-level marketing operation. Eventually, authorities intervened and the victims were rescued.

But the damage – financial, psychological and social – had already been done.

Why football makes such effective bait

To understand why this works, you have to understand what football means in this context. For young men with limited access to education or formal employment, football represents a socially sanctioned path out of precarity. Families invest emotionally and financially in these dreams. To be offered a trial with a club in another country is not just an opportunity. It is a validation of everything a family has hoped for.

Traffickers understand this intimately. They don’t need to drag victims across borders by force. They simply need to make an offer that feels too real, and too meaningful, to question. The coercion comes later, once victims are far from home, stripped of documents and dependent on their captors.

This is a shift from more familiar trafficking patterns. Unlike the well-documented trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation, this case involved young men trafficked between two African countries for what researchers call “forced criminality” – being made to commit fraud against their own communities.

Blind spot in policy and research

Sport-enabled trafficking barely registers in anti-trafficking policy or academic research. Most frameworks still focus on sexual exploitation, domestic servitude and irregular migration to Europe.

Intra-African trafficking, particularly through digital deception and aspirational manipulation, remains largely invisible.

There is also a structural problem. In both Ghana and Nigeria, cybercrime enforcement and anti-trafficking responses operate in separate silos. But this case shows how those two worlds overlap: digital recruitment, physical confinement and coerced online fraud are all part of the same operation.

Treating them as distinct policy problems means traffickers can exploit the gaps between them.

Research shows that some Nigerian cybercriminals move to Ghana to expand and protect their operations. The free-movement protocols of the Economic Community of West African States, designed to promote regional integration, also play an inadvertent role. With minimal border checks between Ghana and Nigeria, traffickers can move victims across borders with ease and near impunity.

What needs to change

Policymakers have been cautious about linking football to trafficking, partly because football is widely seen as a source of hope, prestige and opportunity in many communities. But that reluctance is itself a vulnerability.

Several things need to happen.

Firstly, Ghana and Nigeria must improve cross-border intelligence sharing and coordinate enforcement, specifically around sports-linked fraud.

Secondly, awareness campaigns need to reach not just young men, but their families – the people who unwittingly provide the emotional and financial fuel that traffickers exploit.

Thirdly, digital platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, which serve as the primary recruitment channels, must take more responsibility for flagging fraudulent sports content.

Fourth, broader institutional reforms are also necessary. Ecowas, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) and national sports ministries must strengthen agent licensing, regulate intermediaries more rigorously, and embed athlete-protection measures into football governance.

The 76 Ghanaians trafficked to Nigeria are not an anomaly. They are a warning. Where football dreams are powerful, they will be exploited, unless the systems around sport, migration and digital life are brought into alignment.

Football has lifted many young men out of poverty across west Africa. That possibility is worth protecting. But protecting it means being honest about how the dream itself can be turned against the dreamers.

Dr Suleman Lazarus is affiliated with the Police Foundation. This article was written in an independent academic capacity and does not represent the views of the author’s institutional affiliation.

– ref. Human traffickers are using football dreams to lure young Ghanaian men to Nigeria – how to stop it? – https://theconversation.com/human-traffickers-are-using-football-dreams-to-lure-young-ghanaian-men-to-nigeria-how-to-stop-it-277536

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Miki Flockemann, Extraordinary Professor of literature, University of the Western Cape

South African-born literary scholar Dennis Walder recently published an evocative life story called Amid the Alien Corn: A Son’s Memoir. In it, he tracks how, even as a child, he became aware that his mother Ruth was withholding something of herself, and her past, from him. This disquiet comes to a head after her death.

The book paints a rich and entertaining description of Walder’s childhood and young adulthood. He grew up near Cape Town in the 1940s and 1950s with his Namibian-born, German-speaking mother and estranged Swiss-born father. But, as you read, this shifts to a single-minded quest to get to the bottom of the contradictory accounts Ruth has given of her past.

After completing a degree at the University of Cape Town in the early 1960s, Walder decided to leave apartheid South Africa, vowing never to return. In 1981, he was nevertheless drawn back to interview renowned playwright Athol Fugard for a book, and to take stock of what was happening in the country.

In fact, Amid the Alien Corn is patterned by departures and returns between South Africa, the UK, Namibia and Germany. It offers fascinating glimpses into the social and political landscapes Walder moved between. In South Africa, there were interactions with members of the almost forgotten African Resistance Movement. There are also vividly described encounters with cultural figures, among them Gibson Kente and Nadine Gordimer.

But it’s his mother that’s at the heart of much of this beautifully written book. As a scholar of South African literature, I was impressed by the complexity it achieves. The reader is drawn into Walder’s search for the truth about Ruth’s life, but he also warns us:

Nostalgia poisons your ability to understand your place in your own narrative, therefore in history too, while drawing you in.

This idea, that emotion-laden memories might hide the truth about one’s life story and its place in history, is what I consider one of the most rewarding aspects of the memoir.

Beyond a memoir

The book’s prologue begins with Walder’s journey to Cape Town in 1992 when he was 50, to bury Ruth. He moves between his own coming-of-age experiences and his attempts to uncover information about Ruth and her parents, who moved to Namibia in the early 1900s from Germany. In the process, Walder makes us aware of how personal histories are connected with wider events.

The cover is dominated by a striking black and white photo of Ruth, who appears to exude self-sufficiency, even determination. She has an enigmatic not-quite smile and holds the viewer’s gaze. This easy first impression is soon unsettled by references to her fragility, her often contradictory accounts of past events. Her “tight smile” indicates a determination to keep words unspoken.

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As Walder later reminds us, the French philosopher and scholar Roland Barthes describes family photographs as offering only “fugitive knowledge”. Our interpretations of what we see depicted are unreliable.

At the same time, the title (from English poet John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale), invokes the biblical Ruth, a figure of exile, loss, displacement and unbelonging.

This sense of unbelonging is shared by an intellectually precocious and sensitive young Walder. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin while growing up in apartheid South Africa and its oppressive race laws.

Family secrets

Walder’s quest to know more about Ruth’s past leads him and his wife Mary MacLeod to the archives and to genealogy researchers who trace family origins in Windhoek, Cape Town, Bad Liebenstein and Berlin.

Without compromising, he grapples with the possibility that his search might uncover his family’s complicity with colonial history.

His task is made all the more difficult by Ruth’s evasiveness. She recalls the family history selectively. She falsely claims her father Albert Liebenstein was an only child, as was she. Like the Stolperstein monuments (literally stones that you stumble across) in German cities to commemorate the places where holocaust victims and survivors last lived, Walder’s pursuit leads to unexpected discoveries and living relatives he hadn’t been aware of.

He notes his unease at the growing sense that Ruth’s memories, as told to him or imagined, are becoming his own, uninvited. Taking on Ruth’s memories is a way of mourning a mother he felt he did not really know or understand.

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Ruth’s presence after death lingers in places like the grand Villa Lanwers in Windhoek, owned by her father when he was a successful tradesman. Now listed as a heritage house, it becomes a site of memory he feels it is “a duty not to forget” on her behalf.

His grandmother Margarethe’s grave in Windhoek becomes the site of another burial. The couple place a headstone there in memory of Ruth and her mother and father.

Yet there are also bitter realities here, given that the mass graves of the indigenous Herero and Nama inhabitants executed by German colonisers during the century’s first genocide were not dignified with burial rites.

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It would be a spoiler to tell what Walder discovers. But the reason Ruth kept her secret remains unclear by the end. One could speculate that it was to protect her family, or herself, or that she simply tried to erase a personal history that felt too difficult – or even too shameful – to live with.

Whatever the “truth” of her silence may be, the son’s memoir is, if not a record, a memorial to Ruth’s life. But the book’s dedication, “For the Forgotten”, takes in a much wider sweep of humanity, across time and place. It prompts readers to reflect on similar silences within their own and other families.

Miki Flockemann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Memory is not to be trusted: a South African memoir traces the search for a family secret – https://theconversation.com/memory-is-not-to-be-trusted-a-south-african-memoir-traces-the-search-for-a-family-secret-276198

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Christian Moretti, Senior Researcher, Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

The cost of electric vehicles (EVs) has long looked like a barrier to adoption in Africa. Most researchers didn’t expect battery power to become affordable enough to replace petrol or diesel on the continent before 2040.

But falling battery costs, surging global EV production and abundant solar resources are changing that view.

Our new research shows that EVs, particularly when paired with off-grid solar charging, may be cheaper than petrol- or diesel-powered cars in many African countries in the not-so-distant future. However, several factors are still limiting up-take. We argue that financing is a big one.

We are researchers working on energy policy, life-cycle assessment and low-carbon technologies at ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI. With African university partners, we’ve spent the past two years examining whether African countries can proceed directly to electric mobility, bypassing older technology. This study came out of the need for context-specific evidence to assess whether EVs can play a meaningful role in the region’s transport future. This could improve local air quality and also transform the emissions trajectory of one of the world’s fastest-growing transport sectors.

The main challenge is not whether electric mobility makes sense technically for the African context – it does – but rather, how to make financing work at scale.

High interest rates, risk premiums and limited access to long-term credit still make electric vehicles unaffordable for most Africans. But in lower-risk countries such as Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa, the financing conditions today are already close to making costs the same for electric and fossil fuel cars.

Our research shows that if an EV is purchased with cash upfront, excluding taxes, in certain scenarios it would be cost-competitive already today.

There is a need for focused research into scalable financing solutions to unlock accelerated growth of EVs in Africa. We outline four potentially relevant points for researchers, African policymakers and international finance institutions.

Financial de-risking alongside indirect public subsidies

Africa’s EV market is growing fast, reaching US$17.4 billion in 2025 and expected to hit US$28 billion by 2030, despite currently being less than 1% of the total on-road vehicle fleet.

Our research looks at the total cost of ownership competitiveness of EVs across 52 African countries in six passenger vehicle segments: small and medium two-wheelers; small, medium, and large four-wheelers; and a minibus segment. We also looked at three timeframes: 2025, 2030 and 2040.

We found that, for more than half the countries examined, financing costs would need to fall by 7-15 percentage points for EVs to reach cost parity with conventional vehicles by 2030. That drop can reduce lifetime financing expenses by thousands of dollars, often enough to shift a vehicle from being unaffordable to firmly within reach.

Technology risk is no longer the problem: EVs are now commercially mature and widely used around the world and increasingly in Africa.

Country-specific risk is more the problem. It reflects several perceived or actual investment risks such as macroeconomic or institutional instability, currency volatility, or unfamiliarity with EV business models among lenders, which results in elevated purchase prices.

Indirect subsidies such as tax or import duty exemptions for EVs are helpful and popular in many African countries.

But to accelerate and sustain EV adoption, countries may also need tools that transfer financial risk from private lenders to public actors. This could lower the overall price of the vehicle.

Among these tools could be credit guarantees, concessional loans and blended finance structures. In practice, this means governments or other public financial institutions would absorb part of the risk associated with EV loans. This would make lenders feel more comfortable to finance EVs. By absorbing some risk, these instruments could lower interest rates to levels that make EVs more affordable – speeding up adoption and shortening the window where public subsidies are needed.

EVs as financial assets

EVs are well suited to de-risking. Cars and charging systems are standardised assets with predictable cash flows. Loans can be bundled and securitised, meaning individual vehicle loans are pooled together and converted into tradable financial products. A similar thing happens with mortgages, but not with most infrastructure projects. In this sense, EV financing could be simpler and more scalable than traditional development finance.

Packaging thousands of small EV loans into investable products could attract pension funds, insurers and impact investors – capital pools far larger than traditional development aid.

Multilateral development banks play a critical role here, not as primary lenders but as market makers. By helping structure financial products, setting standards and offering partial guarantees, they can crowd in private capital at scale.

Public financing to reinforce private sector momentum

Private companies are already proving that electric mobility can work in lower-risk African markets.

In Kenya and Rwanda, firms offering battery-swapping, leasing and pay-as-you-go models for electric two- and three-wheelers are expanding rapidly. These business models reduce up-front costs for consumers and generate operating data that builds confidence among investors.

The opportunity now is to secure public funding to build on these early successes. Private firms can bundle vehicle loans and charging assets into regional portfolios, spreading risk across countries and customer segments. Once these portfolios are established, public actors, like development banks or climate funds, could scale them, particularly in higher-risk markets. They could help to, for example, build pan-African EV financing platforms that channel capital smartly across high and low risk environments.

EV policies and country-specific financing conditions

Financial de-risking efforts for EVs in Africa must be developed along with broader EV policy. Clear, predictable national policy frameworks can reduce investment uncertainty and directly lower financing costs.

Kenya’s National Electric Mobility Policy is a leading example. In addition to offering incentives to increase EV adoption, the policy strengthens regulatory frameworks and supports expansion of charging infrastructure. It encourages local EV manufacturing and assembly too, potentially helping to create opportunities for green economic growth.

This does not mean every country needs aggressive EV mandates tomorrow. Within the continent, there are strong cross-country differences in both financing needs and policy environments for e-mobility. Some countries may require more public intervention than others.

Effective policy measures may include:

• temporary import duty exemptions

• targeted purchase incentives for lower-income buyers

• fuel tax reforms

• clear strategies for phasing out high-polluting used vehicles.

Policies should be time-bound and regularly reviewed, avoiding long-term fiscal burdens as EV prices fall naturally.

Targeting incentives towards smaller, mass-market vehicles can also improve equity. This would ensure that public support benefits first-time buyers rather than wealthier households.

The evidence is clear, Africa does not need a technological breakthrough to electrify passenger transport. What it needs is cheaper capital and supportive policy environments for accelerated EV adoption.

Christian Moretti acknowledges funding from the ETH Mobility Initiative.

Bessie Noll acknowledges funding from the ETH Mobility Initiative.

– ref. Electric vehicles could soon be cheaper than petrol cars in Africa – if financing barriers fall – https://theconversation.com/electric-vehicles-could-soon-be-cheaper-than-petrol-cars-in-africa-if-financing-barriers-fall-275732

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Fanny Georges, enseignant-chercheur, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3

His name is Khabane Lame, but he is known worldwide as Khaby Lame. Born in Dakar, Senegal, he is the most followed content creator on TikTok.

He became famous for video clips in which he reacts to absurd “life hack” videos with a blank, slightly annoyed face, showing the hack wasn’t needed.

At the time of writing he has over 160 million followers: a world record achieved without uttering a single word. In January he sold his brand rights for nearly US$1 billion.

But there’s another dimension to his story that the western media rarely mention: Khaby Lame is a practising Muslim and a hafiz, a Muslim devotee who has memorised the entire Quran. This after being sent to a Quranic school near Dakar at the age of 14.

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The tension between the sacred body of the hafiz and the commercialisation of the influencer’s digital life makes his journey a rich case study.

For me, as a researcher of digital identity, his online career also raises questions about turning personal data into digital assets.

From the suburbs of Turin to the top of the global stage

Khaby Lame’s story reads like a modern-day myth. Not because it’s hard to believe, but because it mirrors the core narratives of digital modernity. It starts with hardship, goes through a period of creative isolation and ends with global recognition.

This is what the French thinker Roland Barthes called “mythical speech”, a story that seems natural and simple, but is actually shaped by deeper forces and structures.

In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Khaby Lame lost his job as a factory worker. He was stuck at home and locked down in social housing in the suburbs of Turin, Italy, where his parents had moved when he was a baby.

Out of this hardship he made a simple decision: he started filming short videos. Just 17 months later, he reached more than 100 million followers on TikTok. He was the first content creator based in Europe to reach that milestone.

His story reflects the promise often promoted by TikTok that the platform can lift anyone up. All you need, it suggests, is a mobile phone, and talent will quickly be rewarded with global fame.

This should be celebrated. But the myth of instant success also needs a closer look. Behind every viral rise lie smart decisions, hard work, and the powerful, and often unpredictable, role of the platfom’s algorithm.

Comic tradition

What sets Khaby Lame apart from almost all the creators before him is the semiotic system (of signs and symbols) he invented – or rather reactivated. He brought back an old comic tradition.

Many compare him to British comedy actor Charlie Chaplin. Others see echoes of US comedian Buster Keaton. Both were masters of Hollywood’s silent slapstick comedy.

Khaby Lame revives the codes of 1930s Hollywood silent comedy cinema: mime, meaningful glances, no dialogue, and burlesque sketches (short theatrical scenes) that convey messages. But the Chaplin connection ends there, as the two men inhabit their bodies in radically different ways.

Chaplin’s films carry emotional weight, driven by social and political themes. His character, the tramp, is a poor wanderer pushing back against an unfair industrial world.

Khaby Lame’s style is closer to Keaton’s. He says nothing. He simply shows how unnecessary and complicated these internet quick fixes are. His absolute impassivity in the face of the absurd is what Keaton perfected with his famous “great stone face”.

But while the comic structure is similar, their relationship to their bodies is not. Throughout his life, Keaton remained completely indifferent to religion or metaphysics in any form.
Khaby Lame is the opposite. He is a hafiz. The separation of his digital identity from his physical person is notable.

Wordless humour allowed him to build a global audience because there are no language barriers, just as silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin became global icons a century ago.

TikTok’s algorithm favours content that anyone can understand instantly. Chaplin needed a movie theatre, Khaby Lame needs only a phone and an algorithm. The mechanics are similar. The way it spreads has completely changed.

Digital identity

In January 2026, Khaby Lame’s carefully crafted expressive persona took on a new status. It became a financial asset. He sold his company, Step Distinctive Limited, for US$975 million to Rich Sparkle, a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong. The agreement includes the transfer of rights to use his image, voice and behavioural models to create an artificial intelligence-powered digital twin.

This digital twin will produce multilingual content, including material for advertising and promotions. Companies will be able to run commercials in several countries without Khaby being physically present. According to Rich Sparkle, this could help generate over US$4 billion in annual sales, especially through livestream e-commerce (a format already dominant in Asia), broadcast simultaneously around the world.

This transaction marks a turning point. Digital identity no longer merely represents a person. It becomes an asset that can be separated from the individual who created it. Now, a creator is no longer a brand ambassador, but a brand in its own right. In theory, Khaby Lame’s digital being is now legally separate from Khaby Lame himself.

The digital twin is, in this sense, the Buster Keaton body that digital platform capitalism has always dreamed of – impassive, reproducible, available across all time zones.

Signature gesture

Khaby Lame’s signature gesture is to place both palms open and turned upward. This seems simple and easy to understand, a light and humorous sign of of disbelief. But the gesture carries deeper meanings.

In Islamic tradition, as in many African cultures, this same gesture is linked to dua, the act of raising one’s hand in supplication to God. What millions of viewers read as a comic signature is also a spiritual practice.

Yet Khaby Lame’s digital double is not simply an image. It can act in his name. It can speak with his voice. It can repeat his familiar gestures. This is no longer simple representation. It is a form of transferring his way of expressing himself onto a digital system.

The same open hands, the same expressive gaze, the same voice that once recited the suras of the Quran in a school in Dakar are now the attributes of a commercial transaction valued at nearly a billion dollars.

There is an ethical question in handing over his active identity to financial markets.

An ethical question

For many young Africans, especially in Senegal, Khaby Lame embodies the possibility that digital spaces are territories where Africans can succeed, where the hierarchies inherited from colonial history can, at least symbolically, be overturned.

But the deal raises a difficult question: what does it mean to sell your digital self in a world where Black and African bodies have been used and profited from for centuries without consent and fair compensation?

Is this a win or a new form of exploitation? Can the financial benefits balance the transfer of his identity?

More African creators are building global audiences every year. That means these questions will become harder to ignore. Who owns a creator’s digital twin once it’s sold? Who set the rules for its use?

Khaby Lame is not just a social media success story. He is a revelation of the future and, perhaps unwittingly, a pioneer.

Fanny Georges does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Khaby Lame is the world’s most followed TikToker: the story of a Senegalese-born star who sold his identity – https://theconversation.com/khaby-lame-is-the-worlds-most-followed-tiktoker-the-story-of-a-senegalese-born-star-who-sold-his-identity-276910