Category: Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Michael Oluwatosin Bodunrin, Associate professor, University of the Witwatersrand

For centuries, useful metals have been developed by starting with one core element and adding small amounts of other elements. Steel, for example, is composed primarily of iron; carbon is added in varied amounts to produce different grades of steel. Bronze is made up of copper and tin. These mixtures are known as alloys.

Africa already supplies several of the metals used in alloys. Yet the continent captures far less value from designing and manufacturing advanced materials than from mining the ores that make them possible. For example, the continent supplies about three-quarters of the world’s manganese, 70% of cobalt, and nearly one-fifth of global copper production, but earns less than 1% of the value created through manufacturing clean energy technologies that use these minerals.

In effect, Africa exports wealth in its rawest form and imports value in its most advanced form. Correcting this imbalance requires a shift from raw mineral exports to domestic processing, refining, advanced materials production and manufacturing. It would enable African countries to retain a greater share of economic value while accelerating industrialisation, fostering innovation, and promoting sustainable development.

A big advance in metallic materials research provides an opportunity to change the story. It focuses on high-entropy alloys, an emerging class of metallic materials that have the potential to transform Africa from a “dig-and-ship” economy to a leader in material design for hydrogen storage applications. Hydrogen storage is a clean energy issue.

Instead of one prime metal, high-entropy alloys mix many elements (typically more than three) in equal or unequal portions. These materials, when optimised, are often stronger, more resistant to heat and corrosion, and last longer than most regular alloys. For example, what’s known as Cantor alloy and its variants are very tough and resist corrosion. Their mechanical properties improve at cryogenic (very cold) temperatures, making them promising candidates for certain applications.

The scientific challenge is to predict which combinations produce useful properties. Our interdisciplinary research team brings together expertise in materials science and engineering, chemical engineering and computational materials modelling, with experience in energy materials research. We have been looking at high-entropy alloys as a solution for an urgent modern problem: how to store and transport hydrogen safely in clean energy supply chains.

We’ve reviewed computational studies to better understand how alloy composition affects hydrogen storage. Our findings show how computational techniques can speed up the identification of good hydrogen storage materials by discovering interesting metal combinations before testing them in experiments.

The goal is to store hydrogen and release it in ways that can be applied in vehicles.

Hydrogen storage in clean energy

Hydrogen is considered a clean energy carrier since it produces low emissions when used. Global hydrogen demand was about 100 million tonnes in 2024. It has potential to grow further in the coming decades. But storing hydrogen has many challenges. It needs space and there are safety constraints. One of the methods to store hydrogen is as a solid, where hydrogen atoms are absorbed into a metal or alloy and later released when needed.

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Read more: Green hydrogen is a clean fuel, but South Africa’s not ready to produce it: energy experts explain why

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The major advantage in this metal hydride storage is that you can store more energy in less volume, more safely, than other methods. Literature shows that high-entropy alloys can be designed to absorb more hydrogen with high stability through multiple cycles of absorbing and releasing hydrogen. They can operate at near-ambient temperatures and pressure.

Relying only on experiments to develop high-entropy alloys for hydrogen storage is impractical, however. With so many possible combinations of elements, testing each resulting alloy in the laboratory would consume lots of time and resources.

Herein lies the importance of computational materials science. Researchers can model the behaviour of atoms within a material before it is created by using techniques like density functional theory. This uses the laws of quantum physics and high-performance computing to predict the behaviour of materials at the atomic scale.

These models can forecast an alloy’s stability, structure formation and hydrogen binding strength. They allow scientists to design materials before putting them in the furnace. This method lowers costs, speeds up discovery and opens up opportunities for new avenues for research and technological innovation without large-scale experimental equipment.

By gathering current knowledge and identifying research gaps, our work provides a roadmap for the future use of high-entropy alloys for hydrogen storage.

Africa’s natural advantage and challenges

Africa is particularly well-positioned to benefit. Titanium, vanadium, chromium and manganese are just a few of the elements that are now mined throughout the continent and are used in high-entropy alloys.

However, mineral wealth alone does not ensure advanced manufacturing. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) notes that sub-Saharan Africa still carries out little higher-value mineral processing. It faces constraints including finance, know-how, infrastructure, energy systems, transport networks and processing capacity.

The opportunity here is clear: African nations should focus on how to turn these resources into high-value alloys rather than exporting them in their raw form. This could boost industrial development and economic benefits. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to invest in research infrastructure, provide access to high-performance computing, and foster more cooperation between the private sector, government and academic institutions.

– A new class of metals could transform Africa’s clean energy economy – scientists explain
– https://theconversation.com/a-new-class-of-metals-could-transform-africas-clean-energy-economy-scientists-explain-282572

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Opeoluwa Adeosun, Researcher, Department of Economics, Obafemi Awolowo University

Conflicts in Africa vary in scope and intensity. They range from large-scale civil wars to territorial disputes, localised insurgencies, inter-communal violence, political instability, armed conflict and terrorism. The continent has earned the reputation of being the world’s bloodiest.

These conflicts can be felt across country borders. I am an economist whose research has focused on inclusive growth, debt sustainability, geopolitical risk, economic policy and climate-related uncertainties. In a recent paper I looked at whether conflict had an effect on government debt among countries sharing geographical borders in regions of Africa.

The research sampled 38 countries from western, central, eastern and southern Africa using data from 2000 to 2022. I applied the Spatial Durbin model, which looks at how local and nearby factors affect an outcome in one place.

The study examined how conflict is linked to government debt across neighbouring African countries. Instead of looking at each country on its own, it considered how events in one country can affect its neighbours. This made it possible to identify both the effects within a country and the effects across borders.

The findings show that debt is shaped not only by domestic conditions but by developments in nearby countries. Conflict generates cross-border spillovers, raising the debt level in geographically proximate countries. Military spending by neighbouring countries amplifies the spillovers.

These findings are important because they show that no country’s economy is isolated. Even if a country is peaceful and stable, its financial position can be weakened by conflict in a neighbouring country through refugee flows, disrupted trade and humanitarian costs.

The results also suggest that regional instability can have a greater impact on government debt than domestic conditions alone. Countries may need to borrow more even when they are not directly involved in conflict.

Mapping the ripple effects of conflict

To see how conflict is associated with debt across borders, I used a specialised mapping technique that links countries based on their shared borders. The research analysed historical data from the World Bank and a conflict database for the selected countries and period.

This made it possible to measure three things:

• the direct impact of conflict on a country’s debt within its own borders

• the indirect effect of conflict in one country on a neighbour’s debt

• the total effect, summing up the direct and indirect effects.

Examining 38 countries in different regions ensured that different kinds of conflicts were accounted for. For instance, conflicts in central Africa are often linked to weak governments, political instability and tensions between ethnic groups. In west Africa, conflict related to competition for natural resources and land is more typical.

The composition and structure of debt are not the same either. In francophone West African Economic and Monetary Union countries, the level of debt is high due to their reliance on foreign borrowing and their historical dependence on France for external financing.

In east Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda have borrowed large amounts to finance roads, railways and other infrastructure projects. As a result, east Africa recorded the highest average debt level among the regions studied.

Southern Africa has experienced fewer large-scale wars. But some countries, including Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, have faced local conflicts and political violence. South Africa relies more on borrowing from its own financial markets, making it less dependent on foreign lenders.

Because neighbouring countries are closely connected through shared borders, trade and regional institutions such as the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community, the effects of conflict often spread from one country to another. The results varied across regions.

The impact

In western Africa, the direct and indirect effects of conflict on debt are significant. Indirect spillover effects are substantial in triggering higher debt levels in a neighbour. For example, instability in the western Sahel and Lake Chad Basin made governments borrow more to manage the fallout.

Domestic conflict, such as the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, drives debt accumulation through local destruction, fiscal pressure and the cost of militarisation. The region is also susceptible to indirect effects. For example, instability in Mali has created a fiscal burden for neighbours such as Niger and Burkina Faso.

Refugee movements, humanitarian emergencies and disrupted trade routes create fiscal pressure, leading to debt accumulation, even when countries are not directly involved in the conflict.

For example, there’s spillover from South Sudan to Uganda, where the cost of hosting refugees and providing public services has placed a heavy strain on the host country’s budget.

Conflict also erodes revenue. Insecurity weakens tax compliance and state capacity to provide public goods. This narrows the domestic resource base, culminating in debt. Illicit value chains generate money for armed groups, prolonging violence and intensifying government debt.

Trade disruptions, border closures, damaged infrastructure and conflict-related uncertainty deplete trade flows, lower customs revenues, and disrupt supply chains.

Military spending amplifies the indirect spillover effects of conflict on debt in western Africa. Neighbouring countries may have to prevent insurgent incursions and maintain internal security. Security costs can add to debt levels.

I further found that risk perceptions regarding regional risk may increase sovereign debt premiums for countries in a region – not just the country where the conflict or debt is. Creditors will demand higher risk premiums from the neighbouring countries. Even relatively stable countries within the region pay high interest rates by association.

What needs to be done

The findings highlight the need for interventions:

• regional financial safety nets, reducing the need for excessive and costly borrowing

• regional peace programmes and cross-border security cooperation on conflict prevention

• coordinated fiscal stabilisation strategies

• regional defence cooperation to reduce militarisation.

– Refugees, lost trade and security costs: how conflict in one African country drives up debt for its neighbours
– https://theconversation.com/refugees-lost-trade-and-security-costs-how-conflict-in-one-african-country-drives-up-debt-for-its-neighbours-288952

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Karin Barber, Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology, University of Birmingham

In Lagos in the 1910s and 1920s a new market of readers was emerging who wanted to express themselves in their own languages. Despite the dominance of colonial English print culture, entrepreneurs increasingly started using printing presses for mainstream Yoruba-language newspapers, books and pamphlets.

A new book by cultural anthropologist Karin Barber explores what was printed, and also how and why. We asked her about her study.

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What’s the history of the printing press in Lagos?

Lagos was a thriving commercial port on the coast of west Africa well before the imposition of British colonial rule in 1861. The printing press was brought to the region by Christian missionaries in the mid-1800s. At the inland mission station at Abeokuta, the Church Missionary Society published translations of Christian texts, and pioneered the first Yoruba newspaper, Iwe Irohin, from 1859 to 1867.

But in Lagos, the press was in the hands of independent entrepreneurs, not missionary organisations, from the beginning. The first Lagos printing press was established in 1862 and others quickly followed. Most of what they printed up to the early 1900s was in English, read only by a small, highly educated elite.

This was because after colonisation, English had become the language of government, administration, secondary education and international commerce as well as Christian worship. And the core of the early elite were “returnees” who had been liberated from the slave trade, converted to Christianity, and educated in English before making their way back to their Yoruba homeland. For some, English came more easily than Yoruba.

Some of the elite did have an interest in Yoruba literature, and in the late 19th century the Lagos presses published several books in Yoruba: proverbs, riddles, divination poetry and popular oral poetry, which members of the educated elite collected and wrote down. But this was a very small part of the Lagos print output of the time.

In the 1910s, however, a new potential readership had emerged – people who had attended elementary school and were literate in Yoruba, the language of everyday life for the majority of Lagos citizens.

They provided a new market and a new audience for a local, Yoruba-language print culture. Growing opposition to colonial policies made ordinary people eager to engage in political commentary and debate, while the flourishing oral street culture of Lagos primed them to enjoy new Yoruba-language genres in print.

What kind of material was being printed in Yoruba and why?

In the 1910s there was a major expansion of the Yoruba print sphere with the publication of a number of remarkable books on the history of Yoruba cities including Lagos, Abeokuta and Ibadan.

Then in the 1920s there was an explosion of newspaper production, in both English and Yoruba. Five Yoruba weekly papers were launched one after the other, starting with Adeoye Deniga’s Eko Akete in 1922. This was a small format, 8-page paper (soon expanding to 16 pages). It featured editorials, news snippets, political and social commentary, a serialised history of Lagos, small and full-page adverts, topical poems and songs, letters to the editor and much else.

Most of the news in the Yoruba-language papers was local, though the editors did reprint or summarise articles from the British press. They were read mainly by people who had been to elementary school and were literate in Yoruba but less so in English. All the Yoruba papers also carried English segments to attract readers not fluent in Yoruba. And they even reached non-literate people who would ask friends and neighbours to read parts of the paper aloud to them.

The print explosion was not confined to newspapers. Yoruba-language books and pamphlets on local history, religion, social issues and poetry poured out.

You call it an experimental era?

Yes, this was an experimental era for Yoruba print. There was the potential new readership, more familiar with oral forms of expression than written ones. There was the heated politics in which radical members of the elite such as Herbert Macaulay, now known as “the father of Nigerian nationalism”, allied with the Lagos traditional ruler and the market women and others to launch campaigns against the colonial government’s policies.

There was religious and social change, as immigrants from the hinterland flooded in. New forms of Islam and Christianity sought to gain a foothold, and traditional deference to elders and male heads of households seemed to be fading.

All this combined to make the Yoruba-language print entrepreneurs try out ways of addressing and capturing a new, varied and sometimes volatile readership. Most of the newspaper items talked directly to the reader and used witty and innovative allusions to popular sayings, songs and narratives.

They combined written genres familiar in the English-language press with genres drawn from Lagos street life, such as topical and satirical songs, anecdotes and oral history.

This mixture inspired new genres, such as the famous narrative The Life-story of Me, Segilola, told in the voice of an ageing “good-time girl” looking back on her scandalous past with a mixture of repentance and glee. It appeared in the form of weekly letters from Segilola to the editor of the weekly newspaper Akede Eko, I.B. Thomas (who actually wrote it himself) over nine months in 1929-30.

A newspaper was also an ideal space to try out new styles of writing, because much of the material appeared in series, such as advice columns to young women, or satirical dialogues between characters representing (in disguise) well-known figures in Lagos society. If one series didn’t catch on it could be quietly dropped.

But it wasn’t only the newspapers that were experimental: the books and pamphlets of this period were also doing something new. An important stimulus to experimentation was bilingualism. Yoruba and English texts coexisted in print, and copied and quoted each other all the time.

What do you hope readers will take away?

I hope readers will get a sense of the vitality of the print culture pioneered by Yoruba entrepreneurs. This was not a scene of great authors and international recognition – that came later, thanks, in part, to these efforts.

In the late 1930s, D.O. Fagunwa would introduce a new style of Yoruba-language fiction set in rural villages and magical forests. His rich, rolling, “deep” Yoruba became an inspiration for subsequent writers. There would be an upsurge of Yoruba-language writing after Nigerian Independence in 1960, resulting in one of the richest and most extensive African-language literary traditions in the continent.

The Lagos writers of the 1910s and 20s were less celebrated, and much of what they wrote has been forgotten. But they were part and parcel of everyday life in a rapidly transforming city and the way they wrote captured its vitality and its impulses and idioms.

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Read more: Why West Africa’s pidgins deserve full recognition as official languages

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They made creative use of popular street culture to establish a new print world. This was an early moment in an ongoing history of invention. The experiments with genre and language continue: today, you can hear English, Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin being creatively mixed in popular music genres such as Afrobeat, fuji and rap, as well as in Nollywood films and fiction blogs.

This history suggests that while British colonialism imposed English as Nigeria’s official language, it had no way of controlling what people did with it, even at the height of colonial rule. And it also shows that Yoruba-language creativity, far from being part of some unchanging “traditional culture”, was actually the main driver of textual innovation and experimentation in the print sphere and beyond.

– How Lagos pioneers built a vibrant Yoruba print culture in the 1920s – at the height of colonialism
– https://theconversation.com/how-lagos-pioneers-built-a-vibrant-yoruba-print-culture-in-the-1920s-at-the-height-of-colonialism-289082