The Year of the Nile Basin: Putting Water at the Heart of Regional Transformation COMMENT | Dr Deo-Guide Rurema | World Water Day, on March 22 every year, is about focusing attention on the importance of water. This year’s celebration coincides with The Year of the Nile Basin, as declared by the …
Read More »COMMENT: Miss Curvy pageant
Why the proposal to use naturally endowed, nice-looking women to promote tourism is an assault on women | Brenda Boonabaana & Amos Ochieng | Uganda’s Minister of State for Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, Godfrey Kiwanda Ssubi recently launched the “Miss Curvy Uganda” pageant at a hotel in Kampala. At the …
Read More »Poverty reduction rests on trade
With today’s trade tensions, it is easy to lose sight of the progress made from economic integration | Caroline Freund and Robert Koopman | Just when poverty-reduction efforts around the world were already slowing, recent forecasts indicate that the global economy is heading into a period of deepening uncertainty. …
Read More »COMMENT: A new paradigm for plastics
Momentum should be on a new global framework to reduce the production and consumption of plastic | Lili Fuhr and Jane Patton | We have long known that the accumulation of plastic in the world’s landfills and oceans represents a growing environmental risk. More recently, we have come to understand …
Read More »COMMENT: Africa’s digital generation gap
Governments have only just awoken to the digital economy but are stifling not supporting startups Project Syndicate | Perseus Mlambo | Africa is the youngest place in the world. But because African heads of state tend to be older – with an average age of 62 – they are out of …
Read More »COMMENT: New enemies of intellectual freedom
When politics determines who can teach and what to study, knowledge ceases to be a civil right Project Syndicate | Andrea Pető |The World War I exhibit at the House of European History in Brussels offers visitors an arresting sight. In a simple yet dramatic gesture, the museum has …
Read More »The Rwanda-Uganda conflict
How Kampala has mismanaged her relations with Kigali and why Rwanda closed her border THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Let me do what politicians always do – claim they run for office due to popular demand. Many people have been asking me to comment on the heightened …
Read More »Foreign aid fuels African media’s pay problem
Development agencies fork out vast sums to sway African journalists to ensure coverage will be positive COMMENT | Prue Clarke | At a recent press conference, a small group of Liberian journalists made a courageous admission: they confessed they were all “on the take.” To supplement salaries as low …
Read More »Understanding Uganda’s economic stagnation
A comparative look at Museveni’s economic performance against other long-serving leaders in the region COMMENT | Alan M. Collins | The word “stagnation” often follows the word “economic”, followed by period, decline, and unemployment according the British National Corpus, which collects samples of spoken and written English. In the same …
Read More »East African real estate investors discover the working class
COMMENT | SAMUEL KARIUKI | The last 20 years of real estate boom in East Africa has changed our building landscape and inventory, as it quite rightly should have done. Our starting point was a region that was short of every kind of building, from housing, to shops, through …
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