Ethiopian Airlines is undisputedly Africa’s largest airline by revenue and profit. Yet the state-owned carrier just doesn’t want to dominate the continent’s skies: it’s also looking to boost Africa’s fragmented airspace through increased connectivity, forming strategic alliances, besides launching or reviving new sovereign African airlines.
Ant Financial, the payments and financial services arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is expanding to Africa.
After years of uncertainty, president Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo will not run for re-election.
Ethiopia’s government has regressed to an old habit: shutting down the internet.
After a nine-month absence, the head of Kenya’s biggest telecommunications company is back to work.
The internet, slow and sketchy as it might be, is back in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions.
Looted shops, burnt churches, and chaos reigned in Ethiopia’s second largest region after the government deployed troops there this weekend, bringing a simmering political tension to a head.
The news of the attack was revealed first on Twitter.
Electoral violence, flagrant malpractices, and more recently, fake news: these are some of the issues that have come to define African elections. But for years now, polls across the continent have also added one more defining feature: a plethora of candidates running for president.
The impact of climate change is already putting a massive strain on Africa’s cities, resources, and natural landscape. And as a new study shows, the continent is set to also bear the most economic damage from rising temperatures over the next three decades.
Three Russian journalists were ambushed and killed in the Central African Republic were probing the activities of a private military company with alleged links to the Kremlin, according to The Center for Investigation Management, the Russia-focused media outlet with which they were affiliated.
The officials in suits arrived uninvited at Michael Soi’s studio located in the fringes of the industrial area of Nairobi. They were four men and two women, Chinese, and instantly started rifling through the stacks of artwork in the space and tossing paint cans around.
It was the dread of serving indefinitely in the national service that strengthened Teclit Kesete’s resolve to leave Eritrea. As a student of journalism, it was also the realization that he wouldn’t be able to adequately pursue a bright career in the world’s most censored nation. And if all else went well, it was the fear of arbitrary arrest and detention like some of his friends and family that haunted him the most.
African researchers interested in earth observation will now have a trove of free data to use as part of a new agreement aimed at using satellite technology to support sustainable development.
Residents of Kenya’s biggest slum Kibera started their week on a bleak note: government cranes and bulldozers demolishing homes, schools, and businesses in certain sections of the slum to make way for a new $20m dual-carriageway in the capital Nairobi. Over 30,000 dwellers were rendered homeless in the process on Monday (July 23), a move Amnesty International Kenya said, “betrays the public trust and violates our laws.”
The changes are nothing short of seismic, proof that nothing remains the same forever.
Africa just recorded the highest rate of modern-day enslavement in the world.
Sudan was once Africa’s largest country: its vast region extending from the edge of the Sahara in the south, embracing the confluence of the Blue and White Nile at its capital, and straddling the Red Sea along its northeastern border. And much like its expansive geographic contours (somewhat curtailed since South Sudan’s 2011 independence), the Sudan’s artistic and musical influence held a central position in Africa, and especially along the “Sudanic Belt,” which stretched from Djibouti and Somalia in the east through to Mauritania in the west.
Ethiopian Airlines dubbed it the “bird of peace”: a brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliner carrying 315 people that crossed from Ethiopian into Eritrean airspace for the first time in this century.
It’s a small geographic move across borders for Kenya’s Safaricom but potentially, it is a giant step that could transform the story of mobile money and financial inclusion in Africa.
Automated bots are increasingly muddying election cycles in Africa, disrupting conversations, distorting facts, and bringing into focus the changing dynamics of politics in the continent.
First, it was “gossip” that supposedly pushed Uganda’s government to introduce a tax on social media use. Several weeks later, the country’s 72-year-old president Yoweri Museveni changed tack, saying officials were introducing the levy to increase domestic revenues. But the ultimate target of this decision wasn’t lost on Ugandans, who understood it for what it was: an attempt to muzzle their growing freedoms online.
The recent diplomatic bonhomie between Ethiopia and Eritrea is both equally stunning and unbelievable. This weekend, president Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea flew to Addis Ababa to cement the thawing of relations between the two nations after decades of hostility. Along with prime minister Abiy Ahmed, Isaias was greeted by flag-waving crowds, received a horse and a camel as gifts, and attended a concert where they preached love and peace. On Monday (July 16), Eritrea’s embassy was officially reopened in the Ethiopian capital.
Up until 1993, Eritrea was not even a nation. But since then, the Horn of Africa country has been in the news for all the wrong reasons: for its repressive, one-party state; for its forced conscription and “slave labor”; for the exodus of its people across the Sahara and the Mediterranean and into Europe and Israel; and for the government’s exploitation of the diaspora through coercion and tax levies.
