Dr. John Alpha Arufandika: Why Africa Needs AI That Speaks Its Own Languages
Dr John Alpha Arufandika, founder of Aptiva AI and winner of the 2025 LIST Emerging Technologies Impact Award, is building secure, private AI in fourteen Southern African languages. African businesses are adopting artificial intelligence at speed, and most of it is...
Dr. John Alpha Arufandika: Why Africa Needs AI That Speaks Its Own Languages
Dr John Alpha Arufandika, founder of Aptiva AI and winner of the 2025 LIST Emerging Technologies Impact Award, is building secure, private AI in fourteen Southern African languages. African businesses are adopting artificial intelligence at speed, and most of it is...
Somali border markets show how checkpoints shape trade
Trade corridors in the Somali borderlands cannot be understood only through roads, customs posts and official tariffs. New PeaceRep research argues that checkpoints themselves function as economic and political institutions that shape the movement of goods and people...
AI demand raises the stakes for Congo’s coltan supply chain
The expansion of artificial intelligence is creating a new layer of demand risk around one of eastern Congo’s most contested minerals. Coltan is processed into tantalum, which is used in capacitors that manage power in electronics and high-performance computing...
Nissan’s Tekton launch tests an import-led South Africa strategy
Nissan’s launch of the Tekton SUV in South Africa is more significant than a new-model introduction. It is the first clear market test of the company’s strategy after ending local vehicle production, selling its Pretoria plant to Chery and shifting toward an...
Dr. John Alpha Arufandika: Why Africa Needs AI That Speaks Its Own Languages
Dr John Alpha Arufandika, founder of Aptiva AI and winner of the 2025 LIST Emerging Technologies Impact Award, is building secure, private AI in fourteen Southern African languages. African businesses are adopting artificial intelligence at speed, and most of it is...
Somali border markets show how checkpoints shape trade
New PeaceRep research shows how Somali border checkpoints operate simultaneously as trade infrastructure, revenue systems and sites of political power across the Horn.
AI demand raises the stakes for Congo’s coltan supply chain
Growing demand for AI and data-centre hardware could increase pressure on tantalum supply chains already exposed to conflict-linked coltan from eastern Congo.
Nissan’s Tekton launch tests an import-led South Africa strategy
Nissan’s Tekton launch tests whether an established automotive brand can remain commercially relevant in South Africa after ending local vehicle production.
Botswana’s diamond strategy joins a wider African producer bloc
Botswana’s participation in the Beijing Declaration links producer economics to Chinese consumer demand, making diamond marketing part of a wider industrial strategy.
Botswana–Oman Deals Span Minerals, Oil Storage and Solar
Botswana and Oman have signed agreements on joint mineral exploration, oil storage and renewable power. Why the breadth of the package is the real story.
Industrial parks: Value-chain infrastructure, or just serviced land
Industrial parks are sold as value-chain infrastructure, but a fenced plot with power and a road is only real estate until firms cluster and a supply chain forms inside it.
Made in Africa, sold to China: why zero tariffs are only the doorway
China has thrown the door open to African goods. Walking through it with finished products, rather than raw ore, is the harder task that no tariff schedule can do for the continent.
China’s vanishing factory jobs: Africa’s chance, if it can catch them
The World Bank has floated 85 million manufacturing jobs leaving China as wages rise. Whether Africa captures a meaningful share is a question of readiness, not destiny.
Diamniadio: Senegal’s bet that a Chinese garment line can build an industry
Senegal spent about US$44m on a park outside Dakar and pinned 23,000 jobs on it. The first anchor tenant is a Chinese factory sewing T-shirts for the American market.
Huajian in Ethiopia: A Shoemaker as the Test Case for Industrial Linkage
A Chinese shoe firm exporting Ethiopian-made footwear to the US and Europe is the model linkage story – and the clearest evidence of how hard local sourcing actually is.
Private Chinese Parks: Ethiopia’s Export Bet, Built Largely by Outsiders
Ethiopia’s drive to become Africa’s top manufacturer leans on private, often Chinese-owned zones. They have delivered factories and exports – and a dependence on foreign developers to build them.
Eastern Industrial Zone: A Chinese Park Counted in Jobs, Not Just Square Metres
A Chinese-built park 35km from Addis Ababa was meant to seed 20,000 local jobs. By late 2017 it had created roughly 10,000 – a real number, and a measure of the distance left to travel.
Power as Productivity: Why Africa’s Energy Gap Is a Jobs Problem First
Energy access is usually counted in households connected. The sharper measure is what unreliable power does to the firms and workers who already have a line.
Green Triad: How Hydropower, Wind and Solar Anchor a New China-Africa Bargain
Beijing frames its African energy work as a single green transition. The record shows three very different technologies, doing very different jobs, in very different places.