NEWS ANALYSIS

  INSURANCE AND MOBILE PHONES: Policymakers across the region need to implement policies and practices that stimulate growth Kampala, Uganda | ISAAC KHISA | The Sub-Saharan African region is set to be the hotbed for mobile phone services as the young population owns more devices in the next six years. …

Maputo, Mozambique | AFP |  Mozambique votes in a general election on Tuesday that some fear could test the country’s fragile peace, after a heated campaign marred by violence and allegations of electoral fraud. The Frelimo party, which has ruled the impoverished southern African nation since independence from Portugal in 1975, is …

For the first time, a reliable count on how many fatalities AMISOM has suffered | PAUL D. WILLIAMS | New evidence has made possible a more accurate estimate of how many African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) personnel have died since the mission deployed in March 2007. My previous report …

In 2016 many spent Shs500m -1bn Kampala, Uganda | RONALD MUSOKE | Money–and a lot of it this time—will be the choice campaigning tool for both incumbents and challengers in the 2021 presidential and parliamentary polls, according to a study by the Alliance for Campaign Finance Monitoring-Uganda. The civil society …

  Uganda’s Who-is-Who live in fear of US travel ban Kampala, Uganda | IAN KATUSIIME | As if U.S. sanctions slapped on President Yoweri Museveni’s former right hand man, Gen. Kale Kayihura for his role as Inspector of General of Police were not bad enough, another top government official, Pius …

Scientists trying to understand what role sex plays Four scientists: Professors Andrew L. Webb, Brayden G. Schindell,   Jason Kindrachuk, and    Jia B. Kangbai have noted one area in the spread of the Ebola hemorrhagic fever that requires further study. It is the Ebola virus’ persistence in the reproductive systems of …

Paris, France | AFP |  Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers. Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue — even if a universal …

Vatican City, Holy See | AFP | Pope Francis creates five new saints on Sunday, including Britain’s Cardinal John Henry Newman — one of the Catholic Church’s most renowned converts — and a nun dubbed the “Mother Teresa of Brazil”. Heads of state from across the world are expected at the …

Washington, United States | AFP |  Joe Biden faces scrutiny over Ukraine, Elizabeth Warren is surging and Bernie Sanders had a heart attack, but recent developments in the Democratic presidential battle are getting minimal attention, swamped by Washington’s impeachment obsession. Most Democratic candidates are pounding the pavement in early voting states …

San Francisco, United States | AFP |  On October 29, 1969, professor Leonard Kleinrock and a team at the University of California at Los Angeles got a computer to “talk” to a machine in what is now known as Silicon Valley. The event gave birth to a network that later became …