Whoever wins Kenya’s presidential election in August will have to immediately manage the country’s skyrocketing debt and growing food insecurity. Officials at the Treasury have already sounded the alarm on the huge debt burden in Kenya. Last month, Treasury officials announced that the cost of servicing the national debt has surpassed the government’s recurrent expenditure for the first time in the country’s history.
Treasury figures show that Kenya will spend 1.36 trillion Kenya shillings ($11.8 billion) in debt repayments annually starting in...
Rasna Warah
Humanitarian organizations and religious leaders are criticizing the controversial deal to relocate migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said there were “serious ethical questions” about sending refugees and asylum-seekers abroad, while the Office of the United High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the deal violates international law and international refugee conventions because it outsources refugee assistance to a third country.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on the other hand, defended his government’s policy, saying Rwanda’s...
In the past few years, millions of dollars held in secret accounts abroad have been sent back to some African countries, thanks to tighter international money laundering laws and calls for repatriation of money stolen from public coffers. In 2020, for example, the United States and the self-governing island of Jersey in the English Channel agreed to repatriate more than $300 million to Nigeria, which Nigeria’s military dictator Sani Abacha allegedly stole in the 1990s. Although Abacha, who died in 1998, was...
Nearly 4 out of 10 Kenyans have been unable to pay rent since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report by the Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA). This is a more than five-fold increase from pre-pandemic figures, which showed that less than 1 in 10 Kenyans could not afford to pay rent on time.
A majority (60.8%) of households struggled with rent because of reduced incomes. One-quarter blame layoffs and business closures. More than one-third...
African countries, which are still dealing with the pandemic’s economic effects, are now confronted with another economic shock from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Exports of wheat, fertilizer, and other agricultural products from Russia and Ukraine have been disrupted. This is driving up the prices of these commodities in African countries, making life for ordinary citizens, including farmers, a lot harder.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is severely impacting food security globally, and especially in many African countries that rely on wheat...
The recent military coup in Burkina Faso that toppled President Roch Kaboré highlights a disturbing trend in African politics: a resurgence of unconstitutional means to bring about regime change since the start of the pandemic. In the past two years, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan have all seen military takeovers. And Niger had an unsuccessful coup attempt.
In Sudan, a popular people-driven revolution led to the ouster of military dictator Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. However, the military has undermined the power-sharing...
Last year, Njeri, a hawker in Nairobi, was paying 90 shillings (roughly $0.8) for a packet of maizemeal. Today the same packet goes for 120 shillings, a 30% increase. She is also paying more for non-food items, such as rent and electricity. Njeri’s rent for a single room in Kangemi, an informal settlement, increased by more than 10%, from 4,500 Kenya shillings to 5,000 Kenya shillings (roughly $44) a month, which is nearly a third of her income.
As a...
Many African countries reacted positively to the recent news that the German biotechnology company BioNTech will be building COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing plants in Rwanda and Senegal. Across the continent, insufficient and unpredictable vaccine supplies, poor distribution networks, and infrastructure challenges have hampered mass vaccination efforts. Proponents of vaccine technology transfer to African countries view this development as a positive step to improve vaccination rollouts across the continent.
The pandemic has been a wake-up call for African countries that rely solely on...
As children across Africa return to school this week, they might find a very different landscape to the one they left behind before the pandemic. Classroom sizes in some schools will be smaller due to high dropout rates, especially among adolescent girls.
COVID-19 has shut an entire generation in Africa out of the education system. Millions of children in low- and middle-income African countries will not return to schools as they reopen due to a variety of reasons. That includes...
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) allocated $650 billion worth of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to its members in August, and activists are pressuring rich nations to channel, or recycle, their SDRs to low- and middle-income countries to help them recover faster from the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocates for the recycling of SDRs argue that low- and middle-income countries, especially in Africa, should benefit more from the new SDR allocation as their economies have been badly battered by the pandemic. As a result...