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...
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A roundup of the latest news, stats, and analysis of COVID-19’s impact in Africa. View our data tracker and sign up for our weekly newsletter. This week, we look at progress on a malaria vaccine, the not-so-good records broken at the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings, Africa’s role in a new vision of global finance, and more.
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Default tip of the iceberg: Hunger and blackouts are the immediate symptoms of global economic fallouts, which will see growth stall at 3.6% in 2022...
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...
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Seismic waves: Russia’s war in Ukraine is going to weaken the economies of 143 countries this year — that’s 86% of the world — driven by rising food and energy prices. Likening the war to “seismic waves” rolling over the global economy, the IMF lowered its global growth projections from an estimated 6.1% in 2021 to 3.6% in 2022 and 2023 (and 3.8% for sub-Saharan Africa in 2022, see chart below). This could lead to greater risk of violence from heightened economic tensions in...
In the South African townships of Gqeberha, communities confront challenges on their way to success. They encounter high unemployment rates, lack of access to quality education, and a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. And these challenges are exacerbated due to COVID-19.
The Eastern Cape, the province home to Gqeberha, has the highest unemployment rate in South Africa, a staggering 47.1%. Unlike its Western Cape neighbor, the Eastern Cape is a rural region. It’s far behind in the country’s fight for equal...
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Breaking news (and norms): The IMF endorsed the creation of the Resilience and Sustainability Trust as a new mechanism to recycle its emergency pandemic-recovery funds, or Special Drawing Rights. This landmark innovation should enable low-income countries to access much-needed cash to help mitigate the economic impacts of COVID-19 (and now the war in Ukraine). But there’s a big “if”: Rich countries need to contribute SDRs to the trust. The IMF is hoping to raise at least $45 billion. African leaders have...
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...
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Hunger emergency: Amidst a historic drought threatening 13 million people in East Africa with severe hunger, the rise in grain, fertilizer, and fuel prices resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine is exacerbating an already dire problem. A gas shortage persists in some parts of Kenya despite government interventions. The cost of wheat has risen 80% over the past six months, causing the price of bread in Sudan to roughly double. Median food inflation across Africa is 10.6%. Fertilizer...
Job creation for today’s youth is essential to creating a better tomorrow. But as more and more young people enter the job market, many African governments are not doing their part to ensure that they have secure jobs.
That’s where our Jobs Now Africa campaign comes in. Keep reading to learn more.
The need for jobs
In Africa, about 2.3 million jobs are lost every year due to obstacles that are avoidable. If the right policies were in place to facilitate business...
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Bounce back bias: Low-income countries’ GDP would have been more than 5% higher in 2021 if they had been able to access vaccines at the same rates as high-income countries. The vaccination of one additional person out of every 100 would have boosted global GDP by 0.10%, according to modeling by the UNDP. While the COVID-19 vaccines have helped high-income countries economically, the growth outlook for low-income countries continues to trend downwards and is 10 times lower than that of upper-middle-income countries.
History...