Author: Giza Mdoe

To combat climate change and to mitigate its effects, Africa must adopt modern agriculture technologies, machine innovations and engineering for resilient crop varieties. Modern agriculture technologies help to manage farmers’ risks and even improve product quality which in turn brings about better prices.

Also, when it comes to modern agriculture technologies, there is renewed attention towards value addition, agro-processing and post-harvest management. These factors add to the need for increased investment in agriculture because they all translate to increased income and creation of employment opportunities.

This brings us to the question of funding. Where are countries supposed to get the money to invest in agriculture? To answer this question, African countries, almost all 55 of them, signed the 2003 Maputo Declaration, pledging to dedicate 10% of their annual budget to agriculture, but to date, few have done so.…

Switching from coal to renewable energy is vital for South Africa to stabilize its power output and to create employment. The switch from coal to renewable energy is costly and many African nations are dragging their feet.

The situation is further exasperated by the fact that of recent years, many African nations have been discovering oil and many more are conducting explorations offshore. The potential of changing their economies from the sale of crude oil is far too promising to forgo.

This is a point that will be driven home at the upcoming COP27 in Egypt later this year. Africa will be looking to push the West to provide funding for the renewable energy transition. This time around, the South Africa deal stands as a concrete example that with sufficient funding, the transition is not only doable but plausible and strung with multifaceted benefits including employment.…

Government records show that tourist arrivals in Zanzibar slid down slightly to 42,443 visitors in January 2022 compared to a high of 49,868 visitors in January 2021 and 48,167 visitors in December 2021.

Notably, tourists from Europe continue to dominate the market as they account for 83.0 per cent of the total number of visitors who went to Zanzibar this past January 2022. Here are the percentages per country; Poland dominated the outcome, with a high of 15.4 per cent of all visitors that entered Zanzibar as of January 2022.

Despite the war back home, next in line to visit Zanzibar tourist attractions were tourists from Ukraine who accounted for 13.1 per cent of all tourists that went to Zanzibar as of January. Zanzibar tourist attractions are renowned in the world and attract thousands of tourists every year, however, there is need for increased investment in the sector and that …

Ahead of the US-Africa Summit in December, the Russia-Africa Summit next year and as new geopolitical alliances form, Africa is under great pressure to take sides.

China is increasingly becoming a strong economic powerhouse while Russia is making its own stand. The West finds itself reliving history, scrambling for portions of Africa.

This summer was most fulfilling for me, not because the Earth’s revolution had finally brought the sun to shine on my part of the World, I live in Tanzania, East Africa, its spring and summer all year around.

• Africa is under increasing pressure to take sides in new global alliances
• Africa wants an economic proposal in the upcoming US-Africa Summit
• 2022 witnessed the highest number of diplomats & presidents visiting Africa

No, it was not the weather, the reason my summer was most memorable is that my daughter came to visit from the US. We had excellent family …

Meanwhile, Africa is looking to take pre-emptive action to avert the inevitable food crisis.

The United States has pledged support to help the continent grow and distribute more food. The aid will come through the African Development Bank (AfDB). The Bank is looking to fund a significant increase in food production in an effort to ward off the food crisis wrought by the Russia-Ukraine war.

In May this year, the AfDB set up a US$1.5 billion African Emergency Food Production Facility. It was established with the aim of supporting some 20 million smallholder farmers produce more food and to do so more sustainably.…

The connection bypass road launched by the five presidents of the East African Community (EAC) has set precedence in the importance of neighbouring countries undertaking joint projects to improve transport infrastructure between and amongst themselves.

This point is underlined in the World Bank report; “Patterns of shipping, transshipping, and distribution mean that trade depends not only on the quality of infrastructure in the two trading countries but also of that in key third party countries on the trading network.”

The point is that while two countries can come together to improve transport infrastructure, it is not enough because trade, in many cases, goes much further than the border between two countries.…

The goal of JETP is to help South Africa decarbonise and switch to renewable energy for its power needs as aligned in the country’s Nationally Determined Contribution emissions goals.

Through the program, South Africa will mobilise an initial commitment of $8.5 billion for the first phase of financing, which has now been secured and whose distribution plan will be announced next month in Egypt at the COP27.

“The Partnership is expected to prevent up to 1-1.5 gigatonnes of emissions over the next 20 years and support South Africa to move away from coal and to accelerate its transition to a low emission, climate resilient economy,”  reports the European Commission.…

Pundits advise that the US is better off supporting the African Union’s Agenda 2063 even though the US strategy is exclusive for Sub-Saharan Africa. However, that part of Africa is still accounted for in the continent-wide Agenda 2063. It would bode well for all parties concerned if US support to Sub Sahara Africa served to help the region better place itself in the overall African vision.

There is the matter of friend-shoring as well, Africa feels the US gave Asia a much better deal, more explicit, more concrete, specific and committed than it ever did with the motherland. How will it play out? Will the US-China trade war help Africa secure a better deal from China than the US?

Even though the strategy does mention a willingness to facilitate ‘new geographic groupings’, it is not specific as to what these new alliances are and what they will mean in terms …

• Russia war on Ukraine worsening inflation in Europe
• US offers list of commitments to Asia in friend-shoring deal 
• Africa needs to stand up to get a better friend-shoring deal

Balance of power is shifting globally, fueled by the corona pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, pre-existing trade wars between super powers China and US have only worsened; where does this shift of power and political rift leave Africa.

All the fighting is not good for business, unless of course your business is in military contracts. So many nations are, and understandably so, avoiding conflict regions and diverting their supply chains to friendly countries.

This shift in mode of doing business and the related trade channels has earned itself a title, pundits are calling it friend-shoring. It refers to a situation where friendly countries are forming trade alliances allowing for trade to take place along new routes and in so doing, reshaping …

It is 1985, the US dollar is unbeatable, it is the reigning champion of the World’s heavy weight currencies. The beefed up greenback is knocking out all challengers, it has to be stopped, reasoned economists from the other major World economies.

And so, that year finance ministers from the US, Germany, Japan, France, and the UK all inked an agreement to devalue the dollar, even the US was in on the agreement, laughing to the bank of course.

The decision to ‘intervene’ became known as the Plaza Accord, a joint agreement amongst central banks all around the World (including the US) to tinker with currency markets in a bid to put the dollar in check.

• The US dollar up 17% and rising
• Federal Reserve monetary policy behind rising dollar
• Strong dollar weighs heavy on Africa’s debt servicing

So with the heavy weight dollar playing Muhammad Ali again, almost half a …