As Cote d’Ivoire prepares for elections next year, the peace and progress of the past eight years could be at risk. Despite an attempt at security sector reforms, the same failures of governance that caused months of post-election violence in 2010, just three years after the end of the Ivorian civil war, could lead to another crisis in 2020. Just three years after the end of its civil war in 2007, Cote d’Ivoire fell back into conflict when President Laurent Gbagbo rejected the internationally recognized electoral victory of his opponent, Alassane Ouattara, and refused to cede power. Within a span [...]
When I landed in Johannesburg early last week, the newspapers that greeted me all carried alarming, front-page spreads about a fresh spree of violence against foreigners in South Africa’s biggest cities. There were shocking photos of foreign-owned shops that had been looted, and accounts of how non-South Africans were accosted and beaten. To capture it all, the bold headline of one tabloid simply screamed, “Anarchy.” News like this, of course, can never be welcome, but the timing of this wave of xenophobic violence seemed particularly awful for a country that is badly struggling both economically and politically. This was all [...]
Africa’s technology sector jumped into the global spotlight earlier this year when Jumia, an e-commerce platform that started in Nigeria in 2012 and is often referred to as “the Amazon of Africa,” became the first African start-up to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Jumia’s success underlines the increased prominence of start-up culture and technology entrepreneurs across Africa. For this week’s Trend Lines interview, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Bitange Ndemo, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi and former official in Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communication, for a discussion on Africa’s digital renaissance. [...]
