If you haven’t heard what investors call the “Africa Story”, here it is. Africa south of the Sahara is on a roll. The once debt-ridden disaster zone of the world economy is back on its feet, and fighting. Sub-Saharan Africa is now growing faster than any other region of the world: from bankruptcy to boom […]
Last week a suicide bomber killed himself in a failed attack at the Temple of Karnak in the Egyptian city of Luxor. A day later the attack was claimed by a group claiming to be part of the Islamic State movement, the same group that claimed responsibility for a rocket attack the previous week in Egyptian-controlled […]
Doubtless you have heard of Uber, the online taxi-hailing service. Most likely you have heard of Airbnb. And Snapchat? Probably. Dropbox? Very likely. Spotify? Of course you have. Even if you haven’t used them yet they are sitting there on your smartphone, just waiting for the day when you suddenly find that you want whatever it […]
The Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang was much concerned with life after death. So concerned that by the time he died around 2,200 years ago he had created an 8,000 strong army of servants designed to do his bidding in the afterlife. The ‘terracotta army’ now familiar throughout the world was produced over several decades […]
If all goes according to plan, the next few weeks or months should see many if not most of us made measurably poorer. It’s nothing to do with taxes, crashes, or meltdowns. It’s nothing to do with politics. It’s something that will happen as a result of a well-established routine run by investment banks, financial […]
Four years ago the popular uprisings which optimists called the Arab Spring swept through North Africa. One after another dictatorial governments collapsed while populations danced in the public squares. But there was one striking regional exception. In Egypt’s southern neighbour Sudan which was and is ruled by a sour-faced soldier called Omar Al-Bashir, there was […]
Africa is the fastest-growing continental economy in the world today, thanks in large part to the fact that its population is so young. But one consequence of having a lot of young people is that Africa faces a massive practical problem, the problem of how to educate its millions of poor young people in the […]
