Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Franck Ghomsi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nansen Tutu Centre, University of Cape Town

For over three decades, satellites orbiting Earth have measured the height of the ocean surface with remarkable precision. These measurements are crucial because changes in ocean height are one of the clearest indicators of how our planet is responding to climate change. Rising ocean surfaces signal warming temperatures, melting ice and shifting ocean currents.

These all directly affect coastal communities through flooding, erosion and habitat loss. Even a small rise in the baseline sea level means that normal tidal cycles and storm surges reach further inland. This can turn high tides into damaging flood events.

Many people assume ocean levels are uniform, like water sitting flat in a bathtub. In reality, the ocean surface is surprisingly uneven. Winds push water in certain directions. Ocean currents redistribute heat. Temperature differences cause water to expand or contract. Even variations in Earth’s gravity field create bumps and dips in the sea surface. All these factors combine so that sea level can vary by tens of centimetres from one region to another.

When we say sea level has risen, we’re comparing it to a stable reference level, the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface.

I’m an oceanographer and geophysicist who specialises in these measurements. My research team and I analysed ocean height measurements collected by radar instruments on orbiting satellites from 1993 to 2024, for all waters surrounding Africa.

Our analysis revealed that African seas have risen by approximately 11.26cm since 1993. This process is driven by warming waters and melting ice.

African sea levels are rising by approximately 3.54 millimetres each year, which exceeds the global average of 3.45 mm/yr. Perhaps more troubling is that the pace of rise is speeding up, especially in African waters. This acceleration is a long-term trend driven by ongoing ocean warming and ice sheet melting, and it persists regardless of whether any individual year features an El Niño or a La Niña. The ocean continues to absorb heat and receive meltwater from ice sheets year after year, and it is this relentless accumulation, not any single climate cycle, that drives the long-term acceleration.

Africa’s 38 coastal nations are home to over 200 million people living near the shore. Rising seas threaten these communities with flooding, coastal erosion, and saltwater contamination of drinking water and farmland. Rising and warming seas also disrupt fisheries that millions of Africans depend upon for food and livelihoods.

Dramatic changes

We analysed 32 years of records and isolated the long-term trends from short-term influences like the El Niño weather pattern. We also examined ocean temperature and salinity data from the surface down to 300 metres depth to determine how much of the sea level change was caused by the ocean warming and expanding versus gaining additional water mass.

Our study revealed something remarkable about the 2023 to 2024 period. The El Niño event, which every so often spreads warm water across parts of the Pacific Ocean and alters weather patterns around the world, combined with other climate phenomena. Together, they created the largest sea level spike ever recorded in African waters, reaching an anomaly of 27mm.

The most dramatic changes are occurring in specific regions. The ocean does not respond to warming and climate variability uniformly. Local factors, including the strength and direction of ocean currents, the depth of warm surface layers, the influence of nearby climate patterns like the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the shape of the coastline and seafloor, all combine to make certain areas far more sensitive to change than others.

The Western Indian Ocean, including waters around Mozambique, Madagascar and the Comoros Islands, shows the highest acceleration of sea level rise at 0.16 mm/yr² with a trend of 3.88 mm/yr.

The Eastern Central Atlantic, encompassing the Gulf of Guinea and waters off west African nations like Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, follows closely at 3.90 mm/yr. These regions are experiencing both the fastest rise and the sharpest acceleration, making them priority areas for monitoring and adaptation.

Impact of El Niño

The western Indian Ocean and the tropical Atlantic were already abnormally warm in 2023-2024, with sea surface temperatures well above their long-term averages. This created a higher baseline from which El Niño could push up temperatures, and therefore sea levels.

Unusual wind patterns suppressed the normal process of upwelling. This is when winds push surface water aside, allowing colder, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean to rise to the surface. The result was that heat was trapped at the surface instead of being mixed downward and replaced by cooler water. The ocean layers did not mix well.

The result was striking. Thermal expansion alone (warmer water) accounted for over 70% of the exceptional sea level rise during this event, reaching nearly 30mm across the African marine domain. Ocean heat content quadrupled compared to the 2015-2016 El Niño.

The 2023-2024 period contributed 2.34cm of rise, representing 19% of the total increase since 1993 in just two years.

Because sea levels have been steadily climbing for decades, the starting point before each new extreme event is already higher than it used to be. The Western Indian Ocean surged by 3.87cm in one year alone – nearly one third of its total rise since 1993.

What drives rising sea levels

Two main factors drive sea level rise globally. First, as ocean water warms, it expands. Second, melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica add water mass to the oceans. Both are consequences of human caused climate change.

This rise is not a natural cycle. While sea levels have fluctuated throughout Earth’s history, the current rate of rise is far faster than anything seen in thousands of years, driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The human cost of rising seas

Major cities face mounting dangers. Lagos, with over 20 million residents, sits on low lying land increasingly vulnerable to flooding. Dar es Salaam in Tanzania faces similar risks. Small island developing states like the Comoros and Seychelles are particularly exposed.

The “normal” water level today is centimetres higher than it was 30 years ago. Each new event builds on an ocean that is already swollen from decades of warming.

And when upwelling doesn’t happen, fish populations decline and the communities that depend on them lose food and income.

What needs to happen next

Addressing this crisis requires action on multiple fronts. Most fundamentally, global carbon emissions must be drastically reduced to slow ocean warming. Without achieving carbon neutrality by mid century, Africa risks exceeding 2°C of warming by 2100.

Adaptation is equally urgent. African nations need expanded ocean monitoring networks to track changes and provide early warnings. Coasts need protection through sea walls, restored mangroves and improved drainage.

The West Africa Coastal Areas Management Program, a World Bank supported regional effort, is a promising model. It aims to help countries manage erosion, flooding and pollution through investments in infrastructure, nature based solutions, and policy coordination.

Protecting Africa’s coasts requires combining oceanographic science with community level planning to build resilience against an uncertain ocean future.

– Sea levels around Africa are rising faster than the global average: what’s behind this alarming trend
– https://theconversation.com/sea-levels-around-africa-are-rising-faster-than-the-global-average-whats-behind-this-alarming-trend-276888

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Amani Karisa, Associate Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

A child’s success at school doesn’t depend only on teachers and classrooms. Studies show that when parents engage with schools – by attending meetings, supporting learning at home and working with teachers – children tend to do better academically and socially.

In many African countries, fathers hold decision-making and financial authority within families. This gives them strong influence over children’s schooling.

But when a child has a disability – such as Down syndrome, epilepsy, autism or other conditions that significantly affect learning and daily functioning – a father’s involvement often shifts in complex ways.

Research from Kenya and other African settings shows that children with disabilities already face barriers to school access, continuity and support.

What is less well understood is how fathers engage with their education, and how ideas about masculinity, responsibility and disability shape that involvement.

Much of the existing research on parental involvement focuses mainly on mothers or treats parents as a single category. Fathers’ roles are often assumed rather than examined directly.

Our research set out to address this gap. My colleagues and I are education and disability researchers based in Kenya and South Africa. We looked at how a father’s involvement in the education of school-aged children with intellectual disabilities is constructed and negotiated in Kenya.

We studied a public special school at the coast that serves children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities. Like many such schools, it functions as a place of learning and a support hub for many low-income families navigating stigma, poverty and limited services.

We wanted to find out how fathers, mothers, teachers and learners themselves describe fathers’ roles, and what counts as involvement from their point of view.

The goal was to identify practical patterns: what a father’s involvement looks like in reality, what limits it and where opportunities exist to strengthen it. We found that many fathers see their main role in their child’s education as financial provision, such as paying school fees, rather than attending school meetings or events.

Social expectations also shape fathers’ visibility at school, with some avoiding engagement in spaces associated with intellectual disability. Work pressures in low-income settings further limit participation.

Our study also found that teachers’ assumptions about fathers’ disengagement can unintentionally reinforce their absence. However, when fathers do engage, their influence is often decisive because they are decision makers in many households.

Our findings challenge the assumption that fathers are simply absent or uninterested. They show instead that involvement often takes less visible forms that are shaped by economic pressures, social norms and school practices.

Recognising these patterns can help schools and policymakers design more effective ways to engage fathers and support children with intellectual disabilities.

The research

Our core evidence comes from case study research conducted in Kenya. Participants included fathers, mothers, teachers and learners with disabilities.

We collected data through individual interviews, focus group discussions and document reviews of school records and parent meeting notes. This allowed us to identify recurring patterns, not just individual opinions.

We extended the analysis by placing these findings within the broader Kenyan social and policy context of fatherhood, education and disability.

The findings cannot be assumed to represent all families. But they do reveal consistent mechanisms that likely operate in similar settings.

What to know about a father’s involvement

1. Many fathers see their main education role as financial provision

Across participants, one pattern was consistent: fathers strongly identified with the role of provider. Paying school fees, transport costs and buying uniforms and supplies was widely viewed – by fathers, mothers and teachers – as legitimate educational involvement.

Even when fathers rarely attended school meetings or events, they were still described as “involved” if they financed schooling. In contrast, mothers were expected to handle direct school contact and daily follow-up.

This means schools that define involvement only as physical presence may misread how the role of fathers is understood.

2. Masculinity norms shape how visible fathers are at school

Many teachers we spoke to linked the low attendance of fathers at school events to masculinity pressures. They suggested that some fathers avoided being publicly associated with a child with intellectual disability because disability was seen socially as weakness or imperfection that could damage male status.

Importantly, this interpretation came mostly from teachers. Fathers themselves framed their absence more often in terms of work and provider duties.

3. ‘Work demands’ are real – but also sometimes a shield

Fathers often explained non-attendance at meetings by pointing to unstable or casual labour conditions – missing a day’s work could mean losing income or even a job. In low-income settings, this constraint is credible.

But our research also found that fathers’ attendance was still low even when meetings were scheduled with advance notice or on weekends. Some teachers and mothers saw “work” as a socially acceptable explanation for fathers to protect their masculine identity.

Both readings can be true at once: economic pressure is real, and identity protection is also operating.

4. Teachers’ expectations can unintentionally push fathers away

Another finding is more uncomfortable for schools. Some teachers held strong prior beliefs that fathers of children with disabilities are uncaring or in denial. These assumptions shaped how, and how often, they contacted fathers.

Where teachers mainly communicated through mothers, fathers became even less engaged with the school. This confirms the original expectation.

5. When fathers are engaged, their influence is high

Where fathers did engage, their impact was often decisive. Their support accelerated school placement, fee payment and follow-through on school recommendations.

Teachers reported that when fathers backed a decision, implementation at home was easier. This suggests that increasing father engagement has practical effects on children’s educational stability.

What it means

The findings suggest that father involvement should be approached differently in disability education.

• Schools should broaden what counts as involvement. Financial provision, decision support and consent are forms of engagement, even when fathers are not physically present. But schools should also create father-inclusive contact strategies. These include direct invitations, flexible meeting formats, and communication channels that do not rely only on mothers.

• Teachers need to examine their own gender assumptions, so as to build relationships with fathers.

• Policy messaging that links father involvement with protection, dignity and future stability may be more effective than messages around attendance.

• Civil society organisations and family support programmes should design father-focused engagement spaces where men can discuss disability and schooling without stigma pressure.

It is too simple to label fathers as absent or resistant. In our study, fathers’ involvement was not missing – it was different.

– Do dads of disabled children do enough? Kenya study points to misunderstood ways of caring
– https://theconversation.com/do-dads-of-disabled-children-do-enough-kenya-study-points-to-misunderstood-ways-of-caring-274745

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Lisa Sachs, Director, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Columbia University

The effects of climate change are no longer a future risk for Africa. They are a present crisis.

Floods are destroying infrastructure that took decades to build. Droughts are collapsing harvests and displacing communities. Extreme heat is eroding labour productivity and straining health systems. Coastal communities are losing ground to rising seas and storm surges.

The case for massive investment in adaptation and resilience is overwhelming. In the infrastructure, agriculture, water systems, and coastal protections that help communities survive a climate that has already changed. But adaptation only buys limited time. Only deep, rapid cuts to the greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet can prevent those impacts from escalating beyond the reach of any response.

The global response to this dual challenge has been woefully inadequate, with particularly devastating consequences for the countries that contributed least to global warming yet are most profoundly affected.

First, despite continued pledges to increase adaptation finance, the financing gap remains massive. Africa is receiving less than US$14 billion per year in adaptation finance against an estimated need of more than US$100 billion. And more than half of what does flow arrives as interest bearing loans.

Second, the growing attention to adaptation has crowded out the increasingly urgent imperative of deep decarbonisation. Investing in decarbonisation has become more, not less, urgent as global warming reaches the 1.5°C threshold, with emissions still rising. Deep decarbonisation is the only way to stop climate-related risks from rising to unmanageable levels.

Resilience becomes increasingly ineffective as emissions and temperatures continue to rise. We cannot adapt to many extreme events, or their impacts on food systems, livelihoods and health. Tipping points are irreversible.

Third and most profoundly, the global financial architecture is failing Africa on multiple levels simultaneously, with cascading impacts for both mitigation and adaptation. Investing in decarbonised energy and transport systems and in building resilience to the increased impacts of climate change requires access to long-term affordable capital.

Yet Africa remains trapped in a cycle of perceived risk and access only to limited and expensive financing. This has made it prohibitively difficult to finance critical investments, exacerbating African countries’ vulnerability, increasing perceived risk, and raising the cost of capital. Debt sustainability frameworks, credit rating systems, multilateral lending practices, and global market rules and conventions reinforce each other. They constrain access to capital that is needed for critical climate-related investments, channelling capital away from the places and sectors that need it most.

Understanding how those failures interact is essential to fixing them.

For two decades at Columbia University, as my colleagues and I have worked with governments and partners around the world, we have seen these failures play out directly. In the investment decisions that don’t get made and the infrastructure that doesn’t get built. We have watched risks mount, even as the pathways to decarbonisation were known. Already, we are seeing mounting risks and liabilities. There are increased liabilities, more profound trade-offs, and accumulated borrowing from future generations to cover losses today.

The single most important imperative is to lower the cost of capital for African borrowers, both sovereign and non-sovereign, to invest in modern, decarbonised infrastructure and in resilience at scale, for the benefit of the region and the world.

Fundamentally, this means reformed debt sustainability frameworks, liquidity mechanisms, risk assessments and credit ratings. Sovereigns, project developers and investors should also align around coherent, rigorous least-cost energy system modelling, so that investment pipelines are integrated with economy-wide planning.

Then strategic risk-allocation mechanisms at every level of the system, complementing fundamental reforms at the global level, will allow private capital to flow to hundreds of viable projects across the continent.

Failures on the mitigation front

Only mitigation – the deep decarbonisation of the world’s energy, transport, land and industrial systems – reduces the drivers of climate change. All other financing – for resilience, insurance and disaster recovery – manages the consequences of unmitigated climate risk. It does not reduce the underlying hazard.

That we are failing to decarbonise the world’s economy rapidly and at scale is inexcusable. We have the technology, capital and known pathways to achieve rapid deep decarbonisation. Tremendous technological gains mean that the economics increasingly support low-carbon solutions across the built environment, mobility and energy systems.

Energy consumers that have been passive offtakers can now act as storage on grids, stabilising energy demand, lowering system costs, creating new revenue streams, and lowering costs for downstream consumers. Distributed energy systems allow distinct locales to pool and share their energy, so that system disruptions have more limited impacts. Energy generated from the wind and sun are not subject to political capture or fossil fuel price volatility, the only means of truly securing energy security and economic sovereignty.

The current frameworks and institutions for global decarbonisation were built for a different era. Net-zero plans and mitigation targets obscure the way in which energy systems have transformed, expanding opportunities and enabling emissions reductions through systems optimisation.

Rather than insisting on net zero plans and mitigation commitments, we need:

• rigorous technical analyses to identify least-cost pathways to decarbonised, optimised energy systems, considering how integration across sectors and regions unlocks efficiencies and reduces cost

• coordination among diverse actors to support technological diffusion across interconnected systems

• risk-sharing mechanisms to manage the financing risks that deter private capital at the early stages of transition.

The world is also failing Africa in particular. Africa holds 60% of the world’s best solar resources.

Some 600 million people on the continent still lack access to electricity. Modern infrastructure, properly planned and coordinated, represents an extraordinary development opportunity; energy system investments will power industrial growth, digital connectivity, health and education.

Yet Africa receives just 2% of global clean energy investment, a tiny fraction of the financing needed to build clean energy and mobility systems at scale.

This mismatch reflects the profound bias of the international financial system.

A broken international financial system

The cost of borrowing determines whether an energy system is financeable, and especially whether it is more competitive than fossil-based energy. In Africa’s power sector, the average cost of borrowing to build clean energy infrastructure is 15%-18% on average, compared to 2%-5% in Europe and the United States. At these high costs of capital, clean energy infrastructure is simply not financeable.

Those borrowing costs do not reflect genuine investment risk. They reflect a compounding set of structural constraints and misperceived risks.

GDP per capita is de facto the most decisive determinant of a country’s creditworthiness. A low-income country has virtually no path to investment-grade status regardless of its growth trajectory, governance quality, or returns on public investment.

As of late 2025, only three of 34 rated African countries held investment-grade status. Not a single low-income country held that status.

The IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework compounds the damage. Based on their institutional methodologies, the IMF and World Bank discourage the long-term public borrowing that African governments need to invest in infrastructure, human capital and climate resilience.

Recent European Central Bank research shows how these failures add up. Climate disasters directly raise sovereign borrowing costs. The ECB analysis shows that the effect is largest and most persistent in developing countries.

A major storm can push bond yields up by more than 140 basis points in an emerging economy, versus roughly 66 in a typical advanced economy. This means the cost of borrowing rises sharply at precisely the moment a country most needs resources to recover and rebuild. Financial breathing room shrinks precisely when climate impacts demand the greatest response.

The ECB analysis further shows that countries with slow energy transitions face a growing transition risk premium. The slower one transitions, the more costly it is to borrow. But the trickle of financing for clean energy in Africa is itself the result of high borrowing costs. So African countries are penalised for facing high borrowing costs for not having adequate public resources to build resilience to the climate impacts they did not cause.

Diagnose and target risk

The structural determinants of this problem are well understood. African governments must be able to access affordable, long-term capital to build clean energy and mobility systems, to invest in resilient cities, agriculture and coastlines, and to develop the institutions, health systems and education on which everything else depends.

That requires credit rating methodologies that stop treating poverty as a self-fulfilling proxy for default risk. And a debt sustainability framework that stops discouraging the public investment African economies need to grow. African countries that can make these critical investments at scale will grow far faster than the world’s wealthy economies. The international financial architecture must reflect that – urgently, before adaptation becomes an increasingly inadequate response to risks we had every opportunity to contain.

– Climate finance has failed Africa twice over – how to fix it
– https://theconversation.com/climate-finance-has-failed-africa-twice-over-how-to-fix-it-278117

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Abdoulaye Ndiaye, ensiengnant-chercheur, New York University

Senegal is facing a serious debt crisis. The IMF estimated the country’s debt at 132% of GDP at the end of 2024. Debt servicing costs are projected at 5.5 trillion CFA francs (about $9.1 billion) this year, eating up a growing share of tax revenue.

A restructuring of the debt seems necessary but Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko has ruled out this option. Instead, government has announced the shutdown of 19 agencies to save an estimated 55 billion CFA francs (about US$97.95 million) over three years.

A recent report examines the main implications of two options: trying to repay the debt at all cost or defaulting. In an interview with The Conversation Africa, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, one of the authors of the report, breaks down what each path could mean for the country.

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How did Senegal’s debt crisis come about?

In September 2024, the new government announced that it found irregularities in debt reports. In response, the IMF froze its US$1.8 billion credit facility for Senegal in October 2024.

A few months later, in February 2025, Senegal’s Court of Auditors, the country’s supreme auditor of public finances, found that the deficit had been underestimated by 5.6% of GDP per year between 2019 and 2023. As a result, the debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 74% to 100%. Between March 2025 and October 2025, despite several visits to the country, the IMF program remained on hold.

The government later published a revised 2025 budget and medium-term outlook. It then estimated the debt at 120% of GDP. A month later, an IMF visit was extended by two weeks. Tension between the IMF and the Senegalese government became public. As a direct consequence, government bonds collapsed. Under pressure, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko pledged to do everything in his power to avoid default.

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Read more: PIB du Sénégal : comment le nouveau calcul redessine les marges de manœuvre de l’État

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What does Senegal’s current strategy rely on?

Repaying at all costs means making two assumptions. The first is achieving massive budget consolidation in record time. In simple terms, it’s like running a marathon at sprint speed. Going from a primary deficit of roughly 14% of GDP in 2024 to a 2% surplus is something few countries have achieved. This usually requires a big natural resource windfall, as was the case in Antigua and Barbuda.

The second gamble is hoping key players, including the IMF, will agree that Senegal’s debt is sustainable and keep lending during this hard times.

To cover its current deficit and repay its debts due between 2026 and 2028, the government needs to raise 15 trillion CFA francs (US$25 billion).

If not the IMF, who could lend to Senegal and at what cost?

The IMF is the most suitable institution to support countries in crisis. Its programs are designed for these situations. They unlock other low-cost loans and offer zero-interest lending to low-income countries. Our analysis suggests that’s unlikely.

Under its own rules, the IMF can only approve a programme if its debt analysis shows the debt is sustainable.

If the IMF cannot lend, others might step in. For example, Egypt and Kenya] got loans in 2024 from emerging lenders like the United Arab Emirates despite doubts about their solvency. But this support comes at a price. The riskier the loan, the tougher the conditions, including painful privatisations.

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Read more: Crise de la dette: les quatre leviers qui peuvent aider le Sénégal à éviter la restructuration

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Does Senegal have other options?

A third option would be to rely on regional financial markets. In 2025, regional banks lent to Senegal over 4 trillion CFA francs (US$6.7 billion) . They could continue to do so, but probably not as much. If they do, they would squeeze lending to the private sector and, above all, could expose the banking sector to increasing risk.

This strategy of paying back the debt at all cost might work. But it’s a big gamble. It carries two serious risks – either the fiscal adjustment fails, or no lender steps forward.

How can Senegal negotiate with creditors without hurting future investments?

Another path is negotiating with creditors under the G20’s Common Framework. This process was devised to reduce debt owed by developing countries to bilateral creditors. This option is not easy either. That said, Ghana and Ethiopia moved faster than Zambia in negotiating with creditors?.

The international community should treat Senegal as a test of possible cooperation. China and France together hold about 70% of Senegal’s bilateral debt. They should clearly show their support by committing to fixing the debt as quickly as possible.

Dealing with private creditors adds another layer of complexity. Their primary goal is to minimise losses which tends to make negotiation’s lengthy and adversarial. If the restructuring involves reducing or rescheduling payments, the country’s bond would usually be rated as “in default” by credit agencies, taking a temporary hit to its financial reputation. Default is not the end of the road. Countries can regain access to financial markets after a default. The key is making the debt cut deep enough to restore sustainability.

International institutions should step in with new loans. This would help Senegal keep investing despite its limited access to international markets. Finally, to minimise economic costs, debts denominated in CFA francs should be excluded from the restructuring scope to avoid destabilising the regional monetary zone.

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Read more: Comment le Sénégal peut financer son économie sans s’endetter davantage

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What is the best path forward?

In any case, the lessons of this crisis must go beyond Senegal. Debt transparency and banking oversight across the region need to be strengthened. As European countries did during the Greek crisis in 2010, the West African Economic and Monetary Union will have to reform and build additional safety nets.

Experience shows that delaying a default is costly. It is better to negotiate early to reduce the impact on exports and growth. Both options – repaying and restructuring – are challenging, and can cause serious damage to the economy. Our analysis shows that without access to large amounts of cheap money, trying to repay would be more dangerous and more costly than restructuring.

Restructuring carries short-term costs mostly during the negotiation period of two to three years. A failed repayment would bring much deeper and more lasting damage to economic stability. That outcome should be avoided.

This article was commissioned in French and later translated.

– Senegal’s crisis: why debt restructuring may be the least bad option
– https://theconversation.com/senegals-crisis-why-debt-restructuring-may-be-the-least-bad-option-276663

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Miki Flockemann, Extraordinary Professor of literature, University of the Western Cape

South African-born literary scholar Dennis Walder recently published an evocative life story called Amid the Alien Corn: A Son’s Memoir. In it, he tracks how, even as a child, he became aware that his mother Ruth was withholding something of herself, and her past, from him. This disquiet comes to a head after her death.

The book paints a rich and entertaining description of Walder’s childhood and young adulthood. He grew up near Cape Town in the 1940s and 1950s with his Namibian-born, German-speaking mother and estranged Swiss-born father. But, as you read, this shifts to a single-minded quest to get to the bottom of the contradictory accounts Ruth has given of her past.

After completing a degree at the University of Cape Town in the early 1960s, Walder decided to leave apartheid South Africa, vowing never to return. In 1981, he was nevertheless drawn back to interview renowned playwright Athol Fugard for a book, and to take stock of what was happening in the country.

In fact, Amid the Alien Corn is patterned by departures and returns between South Africa, the UK, Namibia and Germany. It offers fascinating glimpses into the social and political landscapes Walder moved between. In South Africa, there were interactions with members of the almost forgotten African Resistance Movement. There are also vividly described encounters with cultural figures, among them Gibson Kente and Nadine Gordimer.

But it’s his mother that’s at the heart of much of this beautifully written book. As a scholar of South African literature, I was impressed by the complexity it achieves. The reader is drawn into Walder’s search for the truth about Ruth’s life, but he also warns us:

Nostalgia poisons your ability to understand your place in your own narrative, therefore in history too, while drawing you in.

This idea, that emotion-laden memories might hide the truth about one’s life story and its place in history, is what I consider one of the most rewarding aspects of the memoir.

Beyond a memoir

The book’s prologue begins with Walder’s journey to Cape Town in 1992 when he was 50, to bury Ruth. He moves between his own coming-of-age experiences and his attempts to uncover information about Ruth and her parents, who moved to Namibia in the early 1900s from Germany. In the process, Walder makes us aware of how personal histories are connected with wider events.

The cover is dominated by a striking black and white photo of Ruth, who appears to exude self-sufficiency, even determination. She has an enigmatic not-quite smile and holds the viewer’s gaze. This easy first impression is soon unsettled by references to her fragility, her often contradictory accounts of past events. Her “tight smile” indicates a determination to keep words unspoken.

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Read more: Darker Shade of Pale: why I wrote a book about my grandfather and how it changed my view of him

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As Walder later reminds us, the French philosopher and scholar Roland Barthes describes family photographs as offering only “fugitive knowledge”. Our interpretations of what we see depicted are unreliable.

At the same time, the title (from English poet John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale), invokes the biblical Ruth, a figure of exile, loss, displacement and unbelonging.

This sense of unbelonging is shared by an intellectually precocious and sensitive young Walder. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin while growing up in apartheid South Africa and its oppressive race laws.

Family secrets

Walder’s quest to know more about Ruth’s past leads him and his wife Mary MacLeod to the archives and to genealogy researchers who trace family origins in Windhoek, Cape Town, Bad Liebenstein and Berlin.

Without compromising, he grapples with the possibility that his search might uncover his family’s complicity with colonial history.

His task is made all the more difficult by Ruth’s evasiveness. She recalls the family history selectively. She falsely claims her father Albert Liebenstein was an only child, as was she. Like the Stolperstein monuments (literally stones that you stumble across) in German cities to commemorate the places where holocaust victims and survivors last lived, Walder’s pursuit leads to unexpected discoveries and living relatives he hadn’t been aware of.

He notes his unease at the growing sense that Ruth’s memories, as told to him or imagined, are becoming his own, uninvited. Taking on Ruth’s memories is a way of mourning a mother he felt he did not really know or understand.

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Read more: Learning from the story of pioneering South African writer Sindiwe Magona

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Ruth’s presence after death lingers in places like the grand Villa Lanwers in Windhoek, owned by her father when he was a successful tradesman. Now listed as a heritage house, it becomes a site of memory he feels it is “a duty not to forget” on her behalf.

His grandmother Margarethe’s grave in Windhoek becomes the site of another burial. The couple place a headstone there in memory of Ruth and her mother and father.

Yet there are also bitter realities here, given that the mass graves of the indigenous Herero and Nama inhabitants executed by German colonisers during the century’s first genocide were not dignified with burial rites.

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Read more: 5 great reads by South African writers from 30 years of real-life stories

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It would be a spoiler to tell what Walder discovers. But the reason Ruth kept her secret remains unclear by the end. One could speculate that it was to protect her family, or herself, or that she simply tried to erase a personal history that felt too difficult – or even too shameful – to live with.

Whatever the “truth” of her silence may be, the son’s memoir is, if not a record, a memorial to Ruth’s life. But the book’s dedication, “For the Forgotten”, takes in a much wider sweep of humanity, across time and place. It prompts readers to reflect on similar silences within their own and other families.

– Memory is not to be trusted: a South African memoir traces the search for a family secret
– https://theconversation.com/memory-is-not-to-be-trusted-a-south-african-memoir-traces-the-search-for-a-family-secret-276198

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Suleman Lazarus, Visiting Fellow, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science

For a young man growing up in Ghana or Nigeria, few dreams burn brighter than becoming a professional footballer. Icons like Michael Essien (Ghana), Jay-Jay Okocha (Nigeria) and Nwankwo Kanu (Nigeria) didn’t just win trophies. They escaped poverty, provided for their families, and earned the respect of entire communities.

Football, in much of west Africa, isn’t just a sport. It is a promise.

This promise has led to an elaborate trafficking scheme that claims many young, African victims every year. Victims are lured with promises of football trials, academy placements or opportunities in Europe, only to end up in exploitative conditions in Nigeria. They may be confined, stripped of their documents, and forced to solicit money from relatives, while their devices are used in further fraud schemes run by traffickers.

I am a criminologist who has also researched the socio-cultural dynamics of online offending and victimisation for over a decade. In a recently published paper I examined how deceptive football recruitment can be a form of trafficking.

The paper focused on the case of 76 young Ghanaian footballers who were trafficked to Nigeria for fake trials in 2025 (before being rescued). I examined how digital tools, legal loopholes and emotional appeals were used to entrap the victims.

I concluded that this case was unlikely to be exceptional but part of a wider, emerging form of exploitation in which traffickers weaponise young people’s sporting ambitions through digital deception. That conclusion draws not from this case alone, but from a wider body of research showing how football ambitions can be channelled through exploitative recruitment networks, deceptive intermediaries, and precarious migration pathways.

The key argument is that football migration, cyber-enabled fraud, and human trafficking cannot be treated as separate domains of research. Treating them in isolation has harmful consequences, because this fragmentation creates the very blind spots traffickers exploit. I suggest that prevention requires coordinated regulation, athlete protection, digital monitoring, and stronger oversight from sport and regional bodies.

I also challenge the policy framework that treats sport aspiration and cybercrime in west Africa as separate domains.

Hijacked dreams

The 76 young Ghanaian men were trafficked to Nigeria under the guise of football trials and academy placements.

Recruiters used Facebook posts, WhatsApp messages and targeted digital ads to present themselves as legitimate scouts, complete with the language, branding and rituals of real sports agencies.

When the victims arrived, the reality was very different. Their phones and identity documents were confiscated. They were confined to overcrowded compounds and cut off from the outside world. They were then coerced into contacting their own relatives and fabricating stories about training fees and travel costs to extract money from families back home. Their phones – and the trust embedded in their contact lists – were turned into instruments of fraud.

Some were pressured to recruit their peers, turning the scheme into something resembling a coercive multi-level marketing operation. Eventually, authorities intervened and the victims were rescued.

But the damage – financial, psychological and social – had already been done.

Why football makes such effective bait

To understand why this works, you have to understand what football means in this context. For young men with limited access to education or formal employment, football represents a socially sanctioned path out of precarity. Families invest emotionally and financially in these dreams. To be offered a trial with a club in another country is not just an opportunity. It is a validation of everything a family has hoped for.

Traffickers understand this intimately. They don’t need to drag victims across borders by force. They simply need to make an offer that feels too real, and too meaningful, to question. The coercion comes later, once victims are far from home, stripped of documents and dependent on their captors.

This is a shift from more familiar trafficking patterns. Unlike the well-documented trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation, this case involved young men trafficked between two African countries for what researchers call “forced criminality” – being made to commit fraud against their own communities.

Blind spot in policy and research

Sport-enabled trafficking barely registers in anti-trafficking policy or academic research. Most frameworks still focus on sexual exploitation, domestic servitude and irregular migration to Europe.

Intra-African trafficking, particularly through digital deception and aspirational manipulation, remains largely invisible.

There is also a structural problem. In both Ghana and Nigeria, cybercrime enforcement and anti-trafficking responses operate in separate silos. But this case shows how those two worlds overlap: digital recruitment, physical confinement and coerced online fraud are all part of the same operation.

Treating them as distinct policy problems means traffickers can exploit the gaps between them.

Research shows that some Nigerian cybercriminals move to Ghana to expand and protect their operations. The free-movement protocols of the Economic Community of West African States, designed to promote regional integration, also play an inadvertent role. With minimal border checks between Ghana and Nigeria, traffickers can move victims across borders with ease and near impunity.

What needs to change

Policymakers have been cautious about linking football to trafficking, partly because football is widely seen as a source of hope, prestige and opportunity in many communities. But that reluctance is itself a vulnerability.

Several things need to happen.

Firstly, Ghana and Nigeria must improve cross-border intelligence sharing and coordinate enforcement, specifically around sports-linked fraud.

Secondly, awareness campaigns need to reach not just young men, but their families – the people who unwittingly provide the emotional and financial fuel that traffickers exploit.

Thirdly, digital platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, which serve as the primary recruitment channels, must take more responsibility for flagging fraudulent sports content.

Fourth, broader institutional reforms are also necessary. Ecowas, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) and national sports ministries must strengthen agent licensing, regulate intermediaries more rigorously, and embed athlete-protection measures into football governance.

The 76 Ghanaians trafficked to Nigeria are not an anomaly. They are a warning. Where football dreams are powerful, they will be exploited, unless the systems around sport, migration and digital life are brought into alignment.

Football has lifted many young men out of poverty across west Africa. That possibility is worth protecting. But protecting it means being honest about how the dream itself can be turned against the dreamers.

– Human traffickers are using football dreams to lure young Ghanaian men to Nigeria – how to stop it?
– https://theconversation.com/human-traffickers-are-using-football-dreams-to-lure-young-ghanaian-men-to-nigeria-how-to-stop-it-277536

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Christian Moretti, Senior Researcher, Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

The cost of electric vehicles (EVs) has long looked like a barrier to adoption in Africa. Most researchers didn’t expect battery power to become affordable enough to replace petrol or diesel on the continent before 2040.

But falling battery costs, surging global EV production and abundant solar resources are changing that view.

Our new research shows that EVs, particularly when paired with off-grid solar charging, may be cheaper than petrol- or diesel-powered cars in many African countries in the not-so-distant future. However, several factors are still limiting up-take. We argue that financing is a big one.

We are researchers working on energy policy, life-cycle assessment and low-carbon technologies at ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI. With African university partners, we’ve spent the past two years examining whether African countries can proceed directly to electric mobility, bypassing older technology. This study came out of the need for context-specific evidence to assess whether EVs can play a meaningful role in the region’s transport future. This could improve local air quality and also transform the emissions trajectory of one of the world’s fastest-growing transport sectors.

The main challenge is not whether electric mobility makes sense technically for the African context – it does – but rather, how to make financing work at scale.

High interest rates, risk premiums and limited access to long-term credit still make electric vehicles unaffordable for most Africans. But in lower-risk countries such as Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa, the financing conditions today are already close to making costs the same for electric and fossil fuel cars.

Our research shows that if an EV is purchased with cash upfront, excluding taxes, in certain scenarios it would be cost-competitive already today.

There is a need for focused research into scalable financing solutions to unlock accelerated growth of EVs in Africa. We outline four potentially relevant points for researchers, African policymakers and international finance institutions.

Financial de-risking alongside indirect public subsidies

Africa’s EV market is growing fast, reaching US$17.4 billion in 2025 and expected to hit US$28 billion by 2030, despite currently being less than 1% of the total on-road vehicle fleet.

Our research looks at the total cost of ownership competitiveness of EVs across 52 African countries in six passenger vehicle segments: small and medium two-wheelers; small, medium, and large four-wheelers; and a minibus segment. We also looked at three timeframes: 2025, 2030 and 2040.

We found that, for more than half the countries examined, financing costs would need to fall by 7-15 percentage points for EVs to reach cost parity with conventional vehicles by 2030. That drop can reduce lifetime financing expenses by thousands of dollars, often enough to shift a vehicle from being unaffordable to firmly within reach.

Technology risk is no longer the problem: EVs are now commercially mature and widely used around the world and increasingly in Africa.

Country-specific risk is more the problem. It reflects several perceived or actual investment risks such as macroeconomic or institutional instability, currency volatility, or unfamiliarity with EV business models among lenders, which results in elevated purchase prices.

Indirect subsidies such as tax or import duty exemptions for EVs are helpful and popular in many African countries.

But to accelerate and sustain EV adoption, countries may also need tools that transfer financial risk from private lenders to public actors. This could lower the overall price of the vehicle.

Among these tools could be credit guarantees, concessional loans and blended finance structures. In practice, this means governments or other public financial institutions would absorb part of the risk associated with EV loans. This would make lenders feel more comfortable to finance EVs. By absorbing some risk, these instruments could lower interest rates to levels that make EVs more affordable – speeding up adoption and shortening the window where public subsidies are needed.

EVs as financial assets

EVs are well suited to de-risking. Cars and charging systems are standardised assets with predictable cash flows. Loans can be bundled and securitised, meaning individual vehicle loans are pooled together and converted into tradable financial products. A similar thing happens with mortgages, but not with most infrastructure projects. In this sense, EV financing could be simpler and more scalable than traditional development finance.

Packaging thousands of small EV loans into investable products could attract pension funds, insurers and impact investors – capital pools far larger than traditional development aid.

Multilateral development banks play a critical role here, not as primary lenders but as market makers. By helping structure financial products, setting standards and offering partial guarantees, they can crowd in private capital at scale.

Public financing to reinforce private sector momentum

Private companies are already proving that electric mobility can work in lower-risk African markets.

In Kenya and Rwanda, firms offering battery-swapping, leasing and pay-as-you-go models for electric two- and three-wheelers are expanding rapidly. These business models reduce up-front costs for consumers and generate operating data that builds confidence among investors.

The opportunity now is to secure public funding to build on these early successes. Private firms can bundle vehicle loans and charging assets into regional portfolios, spreading risk across countries and customer segments. Once these portfolios are established, public actors, like development banks or climate funds, could scale them, particularly in higher-risk markets. They could help to, for example, build pan-African EV financing platforms that channel capital smartly across high and low risk environments.

EV policies and country-specific financing conditions

Financial de-risking efforts for EVs in Africa must be developed along with broader EV policy. Clear, predictable national policy frameworks can reduce investment uncertainty and directly lower financing costs.

Kenya’s National Electric Mobility Policy is a leading example. In addition to offering incentives to increase EV adoption, the policy strengthens regulatory frameworks and supports expansion of charging infrastructure. It encourages local EV manufacturing and assembly too, potentially helping to create opportunities for green economic growth.

This does not mean every country needs aggressive EV mandates tomorrow. Within the continent, there are strong cross-country differences in both financing needs and policy environments for e-mobility. Some countries may require more public intervention than others.

Effective policy measures may include:

• temporary import duty exemptions

• targeted purchase incentives for lower-income buyers

• fuel tax reforms

• clear strategies for phasing out high-polluting used vehicles.

Policies should be time-bound and regularly reviewed, avoiding long-term fiscal burdens as EV prices fall naturally.

Targeting incentives towards smaller, mass-market vehicles can also improve equity. This would ensure that public support benefits first-time buyers rather than wealthier households.

The evidence is clear, Africa does not need a technological breakthrough to electrify passenger transport. What it needs is cheaper capital and supportive policy environments for accelerated EV adoption.

– Electric vehicles could soon be cheaper than petrol cars in Africa – if financing barriers fall
– https://theconversation.com/electric-vehicles-could-soon-be-cheaper-than-petrol-cars-in-africa-if-financing-barriers-fall-275732

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Fanny Georges, enseignant-chercheur, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3

His name is Khabane Lame, but he is known worldwide as Khaby Lame. Born in Dakar, Senegal, he is the most followed content creator on TikTok.

He became famous for video clips in which he reacts to absurd “life hack” videos with a blank, slightly annoyed face, showing the hack wasn’t needed.

At the time of writing he has over 160 million followers: a world record achieved without uttering a single word. In January he sold his brand rights for nearly US$1 billion.

But there’s another dimension to his story that the western media rarely mention: Khaby Lame is a practising Muslim and a hafiz, a Muslim devotee who has memorised the entire Quran. This after being sent to a Quranic school near Dakar at the age of 14.

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Read more: Nigerian TikTok star Charity Ekezie uses hilarious skits to dispel ignorance about Africa

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The tension between the sacred body of the hafiz and the commercialisation of the influencer’s digital life makes his journey a rich case study.

For me, as a researcher of digital identity, his online career also raises questions about turning personal data into digital assets.

From the suburbs of Turin to the top of the global stage

Khaby Lame’s story reads like a modern-day myth. Not because it’s hard to believe, but because it mirrors the core narratives of digital modernity. It starts with hardship, goes through a period of creative isolation and ends with global recognition.

This is what the French thinker Roland Barthes called “mythical speech”, a story that seems natural and simple, but is actually shaped by deeper forces and structures.

In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Khaby Lame lost his job as a factory worker. He was stuck at home and locked down in social housing in the suburbs of Turin, Italy, where his parents had moved when he was a baby.

Out of this hardship he made a simple decision: he started filming short videos. Just 17 months later, he reached more than 100 million followers on TikTok. He was the first content creator based in Europe to reach that milestone.

His story reflects the promise often promoted by TikTok that the platform can lift anyone up. All you need, it suggests, is a mobile phone, and talent will quickly be rewarded with global fame.

This should be celebrated. But the myth of instant success also needs a closer look. Behind every viral rise lie smart decisions, hard work, and the powerful, and often unpredictable, role of the platfom’s algorithm.

Comic tradition

What sets Khaby Lame apart from almost all the creators before him is the semiotic system (of signs and symbols) he invented – or rather reactivated. He brought back an old comic tradition.

Many compare him to British comedy actor Charlie Chaplin. Others see echoes of US comedian Buster Keaton. Both were masters of Hollywood’s silent slapstick comedy.

Khaby Lame revives the codes of 1930s Hollywood silent comedy cinema: mime, meaningful glances, no dialogue, and burlesque sketches (short theatrical scenes) that convey messages. But the Chaplin connection ends there, as the two men inhabit their bodies in radically different ways.

Chaplin’s films carry emotional weight, driven by social and political themes. His character, the tramp, is a poor wanderer pushing back against an unfair industrial world.

Khaby Lame’s style is closer to Keaton’s. He says nothing. He simply shows how unnecessary and complicated these internet quick fixes are. His absolute impassivity in the face of the absurd is what Keaton perfected with his famous “great stone face”.

But while the comic structure is similar, their relationship to their bodies is not. Throughout his life, Keaton remained completely indifferent to religion or metaphysics in any form. Khaby Lame is the opposite. He is a hafiz. The separation of his digital identity from his physical person is notable.

Wordless humour allowed him to build a global audience because there are no language barriers, just as silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin became global icons a century ago.

TikTok’s algorithm favours content that anyone can understand instantly. Chaplin needed a movie theatre, Khaby Lame needs only a phone and an algorithm. The mechanics are similar. The way it spreads has completely changed.

Digital identity

In January 2026, Khaby Lame’s carefully crafted expressive persona took on a new status. It became a financial asset. He sold his company, Step Distinctive Limited, for US$975 million to Rich Sparkle, a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong. The agreement includes the transfer of rights to use his image, voice and behavioural models to create an artificial intelligence-powered digital twin.

This digital twin will produce multilingual content, including material for advertising and promotions. Companies will be able to run commercials in several countries without Khaby being physically present. According to Rich Sparkle, this could help generate over US$4 billion in annual sales, especially through livestream e-commerce (a format already dominant in Asia), broadcast simultaneously around the world.

This transaction marks a turning point. Digital identity no longer merely represents a person. It becomes an asset that can be separated from the individual who created it. Now, a creator is no longer a brand ambassador, but a brand in its own right. In theory, Khaby Lame’s digital being is now legally separate from Khaby Lame himself.

The digital twin is, in this sense, the Buster Keaton body that digital platform capitalism has always dreamed of – impassive, reproducible, available across all time zones.

Signature gesture

Khaby Lame’s signature gesture is to place both palms open and turned upward. This seems simple and easy to understand, a light and humorous sign of of disbelief. But the gesture carries deeper meanings.

In Islamic tradition, as in many African cultures, this same gesture is linked to dua, the act of raising one’s hand in supplication to God. What millions of viewers read as a comic signature is also a spiritual practice.

Yet Khaby Lame’s digital double is not simply an image. It can act in his name. It can speak with his voice. It can repeat his familiar gestures. This is no longer simple representation. It is a form of transferring his way of expressing himself onto a digital system.

The same open hands, the same expressive gaze, the same voice that once recited the suras of the Quran in a school in Dakar are now the attributes of a commercial transaction valued at nearly a billion dollars.

There is an ethical question in handing over his active identity to financial markets.

An ethical question

For many young Africans, especially in Senegal, Khaby Lame embodies the possibility that digital spaces are territories where Africans can succeed, where the hierarchies inherited from colonial history can, at least symbolically, be overturned.

But the deal raises a difficult question: what does it mean to sell your digital self in a world where Black and African bodies have been used and profited from for centuries without consent and fair compensation?

Is this a win or a new form of exploitation? Can the financial benefits balance the transfer of his identity?

More African creators are building global audiences every year. That means these questions will become harder to ignore. Who owns a creator’s digital twin once it’s sold? Who set the rules for its use?

Khaby Lame is not just a social media success story. He is a revelation of the future and, perhaps unwittingly, a pioneer.

– Khaby Lame is the world’s most followed TikToker: the story of a Senegalese-born star who sold his identity
– https://theconversation.com/khaby-lame-is-the-worlds-most-followed-tiktoker-the-story-of-a-senegalese-born-star-who-sold-his-identity-276910

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Suleman Lazarus, Visiting Fellow, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science

When former US secretary of state Colin Powell took to a London stage alongside Nigerian artist Olu Maintain in 2008 and danced to a song called Yahoozee, he almost certainly didn’t know that the track is widely understood in Nigeria as a celebration of internet fraud.

The moment became a striking illustration of something my research keeps returning to: how music can carry the moral codes of cybercrime far beyond their origins, laundering them in rhythm, recognition and prestige.

Over the last ten years I’ve studied cybercriminal pathways, romance fraud, victimisation of senior citizens, business email compromise, and the cultural politics of cybercrime.

My latest collaborative study examines 40 Afrobeats songs released between 2023 and 2025, looking for themes.

Afrobeats is the broad label often used for contemporary Nigerian and west African popular music that has come to dominate global streaming culture in the 2010s and 2020s. Driven by artists such as Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, Tems and Asake, it has grown from a regional sound into a global cultural force, filling arenas, winning major awards and shaping youth culture far beyond Africa.

Yet some of what travels with Afrobeats is more ambivalent. In the Nigerian context, the cybercrime most often referenced in music is linked to Yahoo Boys, a popular term for online fraudsters involved in scams such as romance fraud and advance fee fraud. In some lyrics, these figures are framed not simply as offenders but as resourceful hustlers or icons of success.

The songs in our study all contain explicit references to online fraud. All were performed by male artists. And all were globally available on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. What we found goes well beyond glorification. Afrobeats, we argue, is functioning as a moral text – one that actively rationalises, spiritualises and normalises cybercrime for millions of listeners worldwide.

In other words, some of this music is doing more than making crime sound cool. It is helping listeners make sense of online fraud as acceptable, even justified. It wraps criminal behaviour in the language of hustle, survival and divine favour, making it feel not just normal, but earned. And because Afrobeats is now heard everywhere, these ideas are travelling with it.

More than just ‘hustle culture’

It is tempting to dismiss fraud themed lyrics as bravado. They can seem like a form of performative edginess, not unlike gangsta rap. Gangsta rap is a branch of hip hop in which hustling, toughness and street survival became both narrative material and cultural style.

But that reading misses the depth of what’s happening. Our analysis shows that these songs use subtle rhetorical moves to present fraud as something other than wrongdoing.

One of the most pervasive techniques is what researchers call euphemistic labelling. Fraud is rarely called fraud in Afrobeats songs. It becomes “hustle”, “grind” or “blessing”. Lyrics frame scamming as honest work blessed by God, stripping away its moral weight. In one track, the phrase “work and pray for the payday” wraps a reference to cybercrime in the language of religious devotion and diligence.

Victims fare even worse. In these songs, they are rarely granted humanity. They become “maga” or “mgbada”, terms linked to the Igbo word for antelope, casting the fraudster as hunter and the victim as prey. In this language, victims are no longer people to be harmed, but targets to be chased: “clients”, “profiles”, even “cash cows”. We argue that this dehumanisation is not incidental. It makes exploitation feel rational, even honourable.

God, juju, and the spiritual economy of fraud

Perhaps the most striking finding in our research is the pervasiveness of what we call cyber-spiritualism. Across multiple tracks, success in online fraud is framed not as a product of skill or cunning but as a matter of divine favour and ritual protection.

This aligns with a broader phenomenon scholars have documented in Nigeria known as “Yahoo Plus” or cyber spiritualism, a variant of internet fraud in which digital scamming is combined with spiritual practices such as juju rituals, charms and incantations. The idea is that metaphysical forces can be mobilised to manipulate victims, attract luck and protect perpetrators.

What is striking is how openly some of these beliefs appear in music. One track includes lyrics invoking Aje – a Yoruba deity associated with wealth – while another frames a ritual object (“soap”) as essential spiritual insurance for a fraudster. Another song merges Islamic thanksgiving phrases with references to successful scam transactions, as if divine gratitude and financial crime can occupy the same moral space. Fraud, in this framing, is not a choice. It is destiny.

Why this matters beyond Nigeria

The genre now circulates across continents, through algorithms and playlists, reaching audiences who may know little about Nigeria’s specific struggles. These include a high unemployment rate, elite corruption, and the longer afterlives of British colonial rule. In some of these lyrical worlds, fraud is not framed simply as greed but as a way of taking back from a global order understood to have first taken from them. Similar justifications also appeared in interviews with active scammers in Ghana.

The fraud narratives in these songs emerge from real and painful structural conditions: blocked opportunities, absent institutions, the pressure on young men to provide for their families. Understanding those conditions is essential. But as these lyrics travel globally, they become detached from their context. For diasporic or international listeners, “maga don pay”, meaning “the senseless animal has paid”, stops being a commentary on poverty and starts sounding like a lifestyle aesthetic, a marker of ingenuity, cosmopolitan hustle and transgressive cool.

Our research also reveals a telling career dynamic. Emerging artists lean heavily on fraud references to establish credibility and street authenticity. More established artists tend to drop them as their careers develop. Fraud talk, in other words, is a currency for those still trying to break through. This makes it all the more concentrated among the youngest, most influential voices in the genre.

What should be done?

I want to be clear: this research is not a moral panic about Afrobeats. The genre is not responsible for cybercrime, and reducing it to a crime soundtrack would be both inaccurate and deeply unfair to its richness and complexity.

But music is never politically or morally neutral. When lyrics consistently dehumanise fraud victims, frame exploitation as a divine blessing and circulate these ideas to hundreds of millions of people, the cultural consequences are real. My previous study on scammers and their allies reports on that.

Streaming platforms must take seriously their role in amplifying these narratives. Policymakers, educators and the music industry itself need to understand the moral ecosystems in which cybercrime thrives.

– Afrobeats celebrates cybercrime and it’s becoming a global problem
– https://theconversation.com/afrobeats-celebrates-cybercrime-and-its-becoming-a-global-problem-277543

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Nadia Zahoor, Associate Professor, Queen Mary University of London

The informal economy is the basis of everyday economic life across sub-Saharan Africa. In Ghana, as in many low- and middle-income contexts, a lot of retail trade, food distribution, artisanal production and service provision happens outside formal regulatory frameworks.

Women occupy a prominent position in this world. They trade in open-air markets, process and sell foodstuffs, produce garments, provide hairdressing services and manage micro-enterprises that sustain households and anchor local economies.

Many do this work because they haven’t been able to get an education, a formal job or formal finance.

The informal economy is easier to enter – but also less secure. Enterprises tend to work without firm tenure, enforceable contractual protections or social insurance mechanisms. Income streams are volatile, exposure to risk is routine and it’s difficult to expand the business.

Despite these challenges, women’s informal enterprises play an important developmental role. They generate income where few alternatives exist, finance children’s education and contribute to local supply chains.

Public debates often portray them as vulnerable victims of poverty or as heroic symbols of resilience.

Both pictures oversimplify a far more complex reality.

We are researchers specialising in gendered entrepreneurship and informal economies. We conducted a study to explore how women in Ghana with low or no formal education sustain businesses where they are at a disadvantage, and how they deal with being portrayed as “weaker vessels”.

The research sheds light on what entrepreneurship looks like when resources are scarce, institutions are fragile and gender norms remain powerful. Our findings show resilience, as well as the hidden costs of survival in an economy where formal support systems are largely absent.

Our findings suggest that by supporting women in Ghana’s informal economy, policymakers can strengthen local markets, reduce economic precarity and enhance inclusive economic growth. Informal enterprises are deeply embedded in broader supply chains and community networks. Recognising and supporting them can increase productivity, stabilise livelihoods and create spillover benefits for the wider economy.

Life on the ground

We interviewed 21 women in southern Ghana and observed market spaces. The women were invited to share stories of actions they believed had enabled their businesses to survive despite limited resources.

These conversations highlighted the advantages associated with formal education, like access to networks, skilled labour and government programmes.

We also learned how informal women entrepreneurs kept ventures going without that kind of support. The findings pointed to informal-formal collaboration as an important, if often overlooked, linkage.

Participants described an environment marked by pervasive uncertainty:

• threats of eviction

• fluctuating input costs such as wholesale food prices, transport overheads and cooking fuel

• ad hoc levies imposed by local market associations, informal gatekeepers and neighbourhood officials

• harassment by municipal authorities.

This instability shaped how they operated.

As one trader explained:

Today you are selling peacefully. Tomorrow they can tell you to move.

The women also said they couldn’t get conventional bank finance because they didn’t have collateral, formal documentation or credit histories. Instead, they relied on rotating savings and credit associations (locally known as susu), kin-based financial support and reinvestment of modest profits.

The bank will ask for papers I don’t have. So we depend on our susu (rotating savings system).

Risk diversification was a key survival strategy. Some managed multiple activities. For example, they combined food vending with petty trading or seasonal commodity sales.

If one business is slow, the other one helps.

Equally critical were dense social networks. Fellow traders provided short-term loans, shared information about changes in prices and regulations, and offered psychosocial support.

Informal subcontracting relationships with formal enterprises sometimes provided extra income streams. This showed that informal entrepreneurship is embedded within broader economic circuits.

Participants also had to deal with people’s ideas about women as inherently fragile or dependent. Yet women’s survival depends on physical endurance, negotiation skills and financial acumen. One market trader put it this way:

If you are weak in this market, you cannot survive.

Rather than openly rejecting what people expected of women, some used those ideas to their advantage. They framed entrepreneurial activity as caregiving. This made income-generating work look more socially and morally acceptable.

I tell them I am doing this for my family. Then people accept it.

The women also spoke of the physical and psychological strains they worked under. They managed multiple income streams, absorbed market shocks and fulfilled unpaid care responsibilities.

Implications

Several recommendations emerge from our study.

First, informal women entrepreneurs should be formally recognised and supported. Simplified registration processes and flexible regulatory frameworks can help reduce barriers to formalisation. They can also give access to legal protection, institutional support and market opportunities.

With legitimised informal businesses, women would be able to operate more securely and plan for sustainable growth.

Second, access to context-sensitive finance is essential. This could include microfinance schemes, low-barrier credit products and support for community-based savings mechanisms.

Third, targeted capacity-building and social support programmes would help. This could include:

• literacy and context-sensitive training in business management, financial literacy and digital skills

• social protection measures like affordable childcare and healthcare access

• time-saving interventions such as improved water and energy infrastructure.

Finally, links between informal and formal sectors need to be strengthened. Policies that encourage collaboration through subcontracting, supply chains or networking platforms can improve income stability, access to resources, and long-term business sustainability.

These measures can create an enabling environment where women’s informal enterprises don’t just survive, they thrive, and contribute to economic development.

– How do women entrepreneurs survive in Ghana’s informal economy? We went to a local market to ask them
– https://theconversation.com/how-do-women-entrepreneurs-survive-in-ghanas-informal-economy-we-went-to-a-local-market-to-ask-them-277634