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Analysis · Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa’s Economic Integration Momentum
Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic growth is gaining momentum, but deeper regional integration, productive transformation, and financial connectivity will determine whether the region can translate that growth into greater influence in the global economy.
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Research report · Middle East & North Africa
Geopolitical Risk Monitor, November 2026
The ten risks most likely to shape security, energy and markets this month: Hormuz and oil, the US midterms, US–China, Russia and NATO, Taiwan, the Horn of Africa, Pakistan and Sudan. A members' report with a risk map, matrix, scenarios and the dates to watch.
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Analysis · Africa
Tanzania Expands Gas Exploration as Vice President Witnesses TPDC Licence Signing Following Major Mnazi Bay Discovery
Four new exploration licences expand TPDC’s role in Tanzania’s gas industry following the announcement of an estimated 223 billion cubic feet at Mnazi Bay.
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Opinion · Africa
Africa, Indo-Pacific and the Emerging Indian Ocean Architecture
As the Indian Ocean transforms into the primary highway for global competition, the strategic alliance between Africa and the Indo-Pacific is rewriting the rules of global trade, maritime security and resource competition.
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Opinion · Africa
The Growth and Welfare Paradox: A Note on the IMF’s High GDP Growth Projections for Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa’s projected economic growth masks persistent challenges in poverty, inflation, employment, and public debt, raising the question of how economic growth translates into people’s welfare.
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Research report · South Asia
The Global Gen Z Protest Wave
Why young people mobilise, how digital platforms shape unrest, and who gains power. A global research report with detailed India, Europe and Nepal analysis.
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Analysis · Middle East & North Africa
Bangkok's Debt Test: Who Pays for the Iran War?
The IMF and World Bank arrive in Bangkok as the Iran war drives up fuel and fertilizer costs. The crisis is not only about supply. It is about which governments still have room to protect their people, and which are being forced to pass the bill on.
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Analysis · Africa
Sudan's Civil War and the Regional Balance of Power
Sudan's civil war is drawing in regional powers whose competing security and economic interests could make a settlement harder to reach.
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Analysis · Africa
The Congo's Cobalt Export Ban Looks Like a Sovereignty Move. Its Own Design Says Otherwise.
This analysis examines whether the DRC’s cobalt export restrictions represent genuine resource sovereignty or primarily expanded regulatory control. It argues that the 2025 quota system largely preserved the dominance of foreign-owned producers because its base allocation relied on historical export shares. While the state gained greater discretion over export rights in 2026, the clearest fiscal benefit still comes through existing mining royalties, rather than a substantial redistribution of cobalt rents.
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Analysis · Africa
The Lobito Corridor Isn't an Alternative to China's Railway. It's China's Railway, Re-engineered for a Western Strategic Era.
The Lobito Corridor is widely described as the West's infrastructure answer to China in Africa's critical minerals race. This analysis finds a more precise pattern: the railway's physical core was rebuilt by Chinese financing and contractors between 2006 and 2015, and what the United States, the European Union and regional development banks have financed since 2022 is the operating concession and modernization of that existing line, not a newly built alternative. The one genuinely new piece, a Zambia-Angola extension, has fallen behind its own timeline, while China has already signed a comparable concession to modernize its own competing corridor.
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Analysis · Africa
The Sahel Didn't Replace France. It Unbundled It.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are often described as having swapped France for Russia. The record shows something narrower: the security layer of France's presence was replaced quickly, through Wagner and Turkish drones, while the development finance, monetary architecture and institutional access that came with it were not replaced at comparable scale by anyone.
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Analysis · Africa
The G20 Common Framework Fixed Who Sits at the Table. It Never Fixed the Clock.
The Common Framework brought China and the Paris Club into one restructuring process for the first time. It left the timeline open-ended, and the IMF and World Bank have since called the missing standstill and deadline design gaps. The delay, not the generosity of each settlement, has been its most underpriced cost.
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Analysis · Middle East & North Africa
The Sandals Gatekeepers: How a Houthi–Horn Axis Could Redraw Red Sea Power
In September the Houthis stopped being an insurgency and became a landlord. With al Shabaab on the opposite shore, the Red Sea faces a dual chokepoint squeeze.
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Analysis · Africa
The UAE Doesn't Buy Africa's Goods. It Buys the Gates.
Emirati influence in Africa is better measured by position than by pledges: ports, gold markets and farmland place the UAE at the points where African goods change jurisdiction or form.
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Analysis · Africa
Egypt Didn't Fix Its Foreign Currency Problem. It Rented a Solution.
The $35 billion Ras El-Hekma deal with the UAE, not structural reform alone, most immediately eased Egypt's foreign-exchange crisis, arriving just as Houthi attacks collapsed Suez Canal revenue.
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Analysis · Africa
The Migration Management Trap: No Victims, No Criminals—Only Managers
Migration is neither a threat nor a tragedy. It is a system of management—and everyone is a manager.
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Analysis · Africa
The Global South's Financial Alternative Isn't the One With BRICS on the Door
Africa's most consequential break from dependence on external financial intermediaries is not the BRICS-led New Development Bank, but the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, a homegrown initiative moving money across African currencies without routing it through a third one.
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Analysis · Africa
Why Gold Can Buy Political Distance and Garments Cannot
South Africa and Lesotho share a currency and a customs union, and absorbed the same American trade shock. The difference between their outcomes is not primarily about politics. It is about what each country sells, and how much of the value of those exports survives when the buyer changes.
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Analysis · Africa
Nigeria's Rating Upgrade Is Partly a War Dividend
Nigeria's sovereign credit rating upgrade is being presented as proof that three years of painful reform have finally paid off. Some of it has. But part of the improvement traces back to an oil price spike tied to a war Nigeria did not start.
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Analysis · Africa
Mozambique's LNG Restart Is a Fiscal Bet on Timing
Mozambique's delayed LNG restart could bring major gas revenues into state coffers just as a global supply wave reshapes prices, buyer leverage and the value of that revenue.
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Analysis · Africa
Mozambique's Mining Law Is a Fiscal Bet on Resource Sovereignty
Mozambique's 15% state mining stake could increase public control over mineral resources, but its success will depend on whether the country can attract the investment needed to turn that stake into actual revenue.
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Analysis · Africa
Who Defines Tunisia's Geopolitical Value? How Its Environment Shapes the State Itself
Tunisia's geopolitical value is not simply imposed by Europe, America or China. It is produced through an unequal exchange in which external demands reshape domestic incentives, and eventually the state itself.
