Growing criticism of inefficient development aid demanded new planning instruments of donors, including international NGOs (INGOs). A reorientation from isolated project-planning towards holistic country concepts and the increasing rationality of a result-orientated planning process were seen as...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for a third of the countries on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. In the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (ML/TF) Ranking and Risk Assessment Tool, the region performed poorly in terms of resilience to ML/TF, with more than 60% of...

Human activity has transformed the planet at a pace and scale unprecedented in recorded history, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems. Countries have focused their capacities on economic growth, with too little attention to externalities in terms of environmental quality....

The African continent is increasingly becoming a battleground in the race between superpowers for access to critical minerals needed for the 'Green Revolution', such as rare earth minerals (REE). Companies from China, the USA and Russia play a major role. In most cases, critical minerals are...

Since Russia's war in Ukraine, many European countries have been scrambling to find alternative energy sources. One of the answers was to increase imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). By bypassing the use of pipelines from the East by building LNG terminals, the EU opened up a wider variety...

As early as 1991, Ali Mazrui argued that the Red Sea was not suitable for separating Africa from Arabia. For the two were inextricably intertwined through languages, religions (particularly Islam) and identities in both the Sahara and the Red Sea in a historical fusion of Arabism and African...

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Turkey considered only North Africa a substantial part of the Ottoman Empire and neglected sub-Saharan Africa unless vital interests were at stake. However, the apathy of successive Turkish governments changed with the 1998 "Africa Action Plan". Since then, the...

For decades, the history of Sudan, Africa's third largest country with around 46 million inhabitants, has been marked by violent clashes between the northern, Muslim and Arab military elites of the capital Khartoum at the expense of the civilian population. Since Sudan gained independence in...

Money rules the world. But the importance of money is far greater than conventional economic theory and its heroic equations suggest. People have invented their own forms of currency, they have used money in ways that baffle market theorists, they have incorporated money into friendship and...

Brazil’s foreign and trade relations with Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) date back to the Portuguese slave trade. Of the 9.5 million people captured in Africa and brought to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, nearly 4 million landed in Rio de Janeiro, i.e. ten times more than all...