ACET Blog

I participated in the World Economic Forum for Africa in Cape Town, South Africa from May 8th to 10th. This being my first participation at the WEF, I was fascinated by the enormous convening power of the Forum as well as the individual sessions I attended:  (a) Advancing the G20 Outreach: Inclusive Growth and Development; (b) The role of Think Tanks & Research Institutions in Policymaking in Africa; and (c) Global Agenda Councils (GAC) for Africa.

The G20 Outreach session....

True or False? Only one fifth of the population of Sub Saharan Africa has access to electricity compared with one half in South Asia and four fifths in Latin America.
True. It gets worse - Africa’s power costs around US$0.18 per kilowatt-hour on average to produce (about twice as expensive as elsewhere). The World Bank cites that African countries will fail to reach universal access to electricity by 2050. With such dire facts, is there any hope? The Addax Bioenergy project....

In June 2012, Felda Global Ventures, a Malaysian oil palm company, raised more than US$3 billion in what turned out to be the world's second-largest initial public offering this year after Facebook’s. Can Africa’s still-fledging oil palm industry generate similar interests from international investors? And does this model – of raising capital by going public – hold any prospects for financing the transformation of agriculture on the continent? In the then British colony of the Gold Coast,....

By Professor Douglas Gollin[1]
In this essay Douglas Gollin, Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University and Visiting Scholar at ACET makes the point that while Africa’s cities are undergoing remarkable growth, rural areas remain poor and large numbers of farmers continue to produce primarily for their subsistence. But if urban growth is not sufficient to drive an economic transformation in rural areas, then what kind of rural or agricultural transformation is needed? You can ....

By Eugenie Maiga[i] With the recent food crisis in the Horn of Africa and in the Sahel, calls for urgent action and sustainable solutions to food insecurity in Africa have intensified. While many factors like rising commodity prices have contributed to these crises, land degradation stands out as a main catalyst. Indigenous techniques may offer some quick wins. The challenge of fixing the problem of degraded lands in famine prone regions is a huge one. In many parts of Africa, land deg....