Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Seth Asare Okyere, Visiting lecturer, University of Pittsburg and Adjunct Associate Professor, Osaka University, University of Pittsburgh

Africa’s urban future will be shaped not only by large cities and capitals but also by its many small and medium-sized towns.

Large capital cities are no longer the hotspots of rapid urban growth. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat), small and medium-sized towns are growing faster than large cities. These smaller towns often start as rural settlements.

Despite their rapid growth, many small towns lack infrastructure and planning capacity, leaving them vulnerable to environmental risks.

Ghana offers a telling example. While the spotlight is often on the rapid growth of the two major cities, Accra or Kumasi, dozens of smaller towns across the country are booming. At the same time, they are struggling with environmental problems such as decline in green spaces, flooding and pollution, usually associated with much larger cities.

Our research examined this issue, arguing that overlooking small towns has put them on an unsustainable path. In Ghana, small towns often “rest in the shadows” of bigger cities when it comes to resource distribution and development priorities. They receive less funding, fewer services, and scant regulatory oversight compared to major urban centres.

We conducted research in Somanya, Ghana. It lies in the eastern region, about 70km from Accra, the national capital. Our aim was to establish whether emerging sites of urbanisation like Somanya were developing in ways that made them sustainable, or replicating environmental problems seen in large cities.

To identify the drivers of environmental risks in the town, we used geographic information data and interviewed residents, institutional representatives and local assembly members.

We found that the urban growth of Somanya was linked with a decline in vegetation cover and loss of biodiversity. The main factors at play were: pollution from mining, political neglect, and lack of infrastructure facilities and services.

We concluded that current realities pointed towards unsustainable futures where environmental problems will become pronounced and the impacts on everyday life will be destructive. Based on our findings we recommend that Ghana’s national urban sustainable development policies and international development programmes must not fixate solely on big cities. Small towns require attention and investment commensurate with their growth.

Environmental risks in a rapidly growing small town

Somanya’s population grew from 88,000 people in 2010 to over 122,000 by 2021. The proportion of the municipality’s population living in urban areas jumped from 31% to 47% in that period.

Local leaders and officials we interviewed painted a worrying picture of a town rapidly growing without proactive environmental planning, grappling with multiple hazards at once.

Declining ecological resources: Rapid expansion has led to the loss of green spaces and forests around Somanya. Hillsides that used to be covered with vegetation have been cleared for large mango plantations or speculative estate development. This situation has made the area more prone to erosion and flash floods. One community elder observed:

The trees on the hills are almost all gone now. Without those natural buffers, flooding has become more frequent and severe, threatening homes built in low-lying areas.

Pollution and toxicity from industry: Somanya’s growth has attracted extractive industries, notably stone quarries and small-scale mining. These bring jobs, but also environmental hazards. Residents described clouds of dust hanging over communities near a quarry. There are also reports of chemical runoff polluting local streams and soil. Heavy dust and particulate pollution have become part of daily life, and people worry about the health effects. One resident said:

The dusty conditions are not only an infrastructure problem, but also an environmental risk for us, especially if you have underlying health conditions.

Strained and inadequate infrastructure: Basic environmental infrastructure in Somanya has not kept pace with its growth. The town’s drains and gutters are few and often clogged, so even moderate rainstorms result in street flooding. Proper sewage and waste treatment facilities are non-existent. Piles of uncollected refuse are commonly seen, sometimes burnt in the open, posing health risks. One community leader remarked that:

It is only when there’s a major flood or disaster outbreak that they pay us attention.

These infrastructure deficits mean that as the town grows, so do the environmental health risks – from water-borne diseases to flooding and pollution.

Governance lapses and political indifference: Underlying many of these problems is a sense of neglect and weak institutional capacity. Local authorities in Somanya operate with limited funding and fragmented responsibilities, and higher-level support from the central government is minimal. As an Assembly member put it:

We live in a constant state of perpetual waiting for the crumbs after big cities have taken their lion’s share of available funding. If you are not connected to the ruling party, it’s hard to get the support you need.

All these factors put small towns on a path to unsustainable futures.

Steering towards sustainable urban futures

Our research highlights the need to adopt a cross-sector, integrated approach to environmental planning at the local level. In practice, that means urban planners, environmental agencies, and community leaders all working together on development plans. For example, in Koa Hill settlement, Solomon Islands, a community-led development team with support from local groups and university experts led to the successful pilot of nature-inspired disaster risk reduction programmes.

Therefore, communities should be involved in co-designing solutions, from problem identification to experimenting strategies and evaluating outcomes. After all, residents know the local risks and resources best.

– Small towns are growing fast across Ghana – but environmental planning isn’t keeping up
– https://theconversation.com/small-towns-are-growing-fast-across-ghana-but-environmental-planning-isnt-keeping-up-257766

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Douglas Lucas Kivoi, Principal Policy Analyst, Governance Department, The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)

The recent killing in Kenya of a young man in police detention highlights a string of systemic failures to hold the country’s security officers accountable for their actions. Despite public outrage and protests, Kenyan police officers continue to use inhumane, brutal and sometimes fatal methods with little consequence. Douglas Lucas Kivoi, who has studied policing and police reform in Kenya, unpacks the situation.

Why is the Kenyan police service given to brutality?

First, Kenya’s police institution was established as a colonial instrument of oppression. Police reforms since independence in 1963 have had little impact in changing this. Instead, successive governments have used the police to suppress dissent. This has cemented a culture of violence and police impunity. This was seen during former president Daniel arap Moi’s repressive regime, the post-2007 election violence and recent crackdowns on public protests protected under the constitution.

The reaction to mass mobilisation in June 2024 was violent. This was because the state sees public demonstrations as a threat to its authority.

Second, police brutality thrives in environments where wrongdoing goes unpunished. Kenya’s police force lacks good internal control mechanisms. A culture of silence and solidarity – the “blue code” – deters whistleblowing. Advancements and rewards are sometimes determined by political allegiances rather than professionalism.

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Read more: Kenyan police use excessive force because they’re serving political elites, not the public – policy analyst

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Third, many police officers work in toxic conditions marked by poor pay, limited resources and long shifts. These contribute to feelings of frustration and aggression. The situation is worsened by institutionalised corruption where police officers extort money from citizens and demand bribes. This has contributed to diminished ethical standards.

What’s in place to punish police excesses?

Kenya has several formal avenues for holding police accountable. But all are deeply flawed.

Independent Policing Oversight Authority: This was established in 2011 in light of the post-election violence of 2007-08. Its job was to independently investigate police misconduct. However, underfunding and understaffing has led to delayed investigations.

There has also been a lack of cooperation from the police. They often fail to provide evidence or deliberately provide misleading information to impede investigations.

The authority also has limited enforcement power. It has recommended thousands of prosecutions of rogue officers. However, it has seen low conviction rates given the slow processes at the judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Internal Affairs Unit: This is a critical oversight body. It’s mandated to provide accountability and professional discipline within the police service. It’s tasked with investigating public complaints and complaints from within the police service against police officers.

The unit can recommend to the National Police Service Commission disciplinary action – such as prosecution or dismissal – against officers it finds guilty. It also monitors police officers to ensure that ethical conduct and professional standards are maintained.

However, the unit faces perceptions of a lack of independence and as an internal cover-up tool. In many instances, cases of police misconduct are simply punished by a transfer to another station.

Judiciary and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions: Cases take years to move through the judicial system. Convictions are rare. The public prosecutions office has faced accusations of bias, which it exhibits through its reluctance to prosecute high-profile police killings.

The time it takes to conclude police misconduct cases allows impunity to thrive. Deliberately poor investigations carried out by the police (who are also suspects) have led to collapsed cases.

National Police Service Commission: This was established by the 2010 Kenyan constitution. The commission recruits and appoints police officers (except the inspector-general of police, who is appointed by the president with parliamentary approval). It also promotes, transfers and disciplines police officers.

However, the commission has faced claims of being unduly influenced by the inspector-general’s office in recruitment and promotions. This undermines its independence.

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Read more: How Nairobi police failures let people get away with murder

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Civil society and the media: Organisations like Amnesty International Kenya and the Kenya Human Rights Commission document police abuses. But their reports rarely, if ever, lead to any real action being taken. The media’s attention and reporting of cases may exert temporary pressure but this doesn’t seem to have any long-term impact.

Why haven’t these mechanisms worked?

Firstly, there’s an institutional resistance to reform. Powerful factions in the police and government benefit from the current system. Whenever there is an attempt at enforcing accountability, these senior officials take advantage of bureaucratic delays, and harass investigators and whistleblowers.

In extreme cases, they enforce the disappearance of witnesses.

Secondly, a lack of political will creates a favourable environment to circumvent constitutional frameworks. This ultimately weakens any chances of accountability. At best, police in Kenya are used to defend political interests and suppress dissent.

This emboldens powerful political players who want the police to be controllable. This dissuades them from instituting actual reforms and establishing a humane policing service.

What will change things?

Until those in leadership positions genuinely prioritise independent institutions and justice over transient political gains, significant police reform is unlikely to be realised.

Elements of such reform would include steps to:

Strengthen police oversight and guarantee independence

The Independent Policing Oversight Authority Act needs to be amended to enhance autonomy. The current system is easy for the president to manipulate because he gets to appoint the authority’s commissioners.

There’s also a need to provide the authority with equipment. This includes ballistics analysis, digital forensics and crime scene reconstruction capabilities to combat police cover-ups.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions must also be required to respond to the authority’s recommendations within 30 days. Currently, cases can take years to complete. There have been instances when rogue police have used this window to eliminate witnesses or tamper with evidence.

Overhaul police training and culture

There must be a move away from paramilitary-style drills and procedures in training. Instead, officers need to practise de-escalation, communication and problem-solving tactics with the public. What exists within Kenya now is a paramilitary service not a police service.

Additionally, the police service commission needs to reward professionalism and not cronyism.

Judicial and prosecutorial reforms

Ending police impunity in Kenya requires a multi-pronged approach. This involves judicial independence, vigorous prosecution, meaningful oversight, legislative changes and public engagement.

But this requires meaningful political will.

Political accountability

Continued police impunity has eroded public confidence in Kenya’s policing and justice systems. The policing oversight authority needs sufficient funding – free of political interference – to investigate and prosecute police misconduct. Senior officers should be held accountable for not disciplining rogue officers under their charge. The presidency and interior ministry must have a zero-tolerance policy toward police brutality.

If Kenya doesn’t grapple with police impunity, then the anniversary of the June 2024 protests will be just another date in history when the state brutally attacked, maimed and killed its own citizenry. And still managed to silence them.

– Kenya’s brutal police have been exposed again – why the system fails people
– https://theconversation.com/kenyas-brutal-police-have-been-exposed-again-why-the-system-fails-people-258843

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Elena Moore, Professor of Sociology, University of Cape Town

In South Africa, most long-term care for older people happens at home through the efforts of family members, largely female kin, not through government services.

With South Africa’s population growing older, combined with reduced funding for community care, higher levels of disability in old age, and widespread poverty and unemployment, family care has become more important than ever and more challenging. But government and policy makers don’t know how it happens, and we can’t just assume it happens.

The Family Caregiving Programme is the first major programme dedicated to understanding family care of older persons in southern Africa. As part of the research team for this programme we are looking at how family care works and how it can be better supported. The five-year programme aims to improve our understanding of how family care is experienced in South Africa, Malawi, Namibia and Botswana.

For the latest research report, we worked with 103 caregivers and 96 older persons in 100 family units across seven locations in three South African provinces: the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal. We worked in two rural areas, one peri-urban area and four urban areas including two townships.

Three quarters of the sample of older persons required constant care or supervision.

We found that all the care needs were being met – but at a significant cost for caregivers, older persons and society.

Care needs go beyond physiological and cognitive issues and are shaped by the physical and social environment. The environment can make care more challenging and create more dependency. Lack of access to water, sanitation and electricity adds to care work.

For care needs to be met, older persons need supported caregivers, access to care services and basic services.

The gaps

South Africa’s long term care policy encourages “ageing in place”, meaning older people should live in their homes, supported by community-based services. But the reality is that support is limited.

Of the 5.5 million older people in South Africa, around 4 million receive the Older Person’s Grant, and at least 1.5 million need help with daily activities. Very few receive home-based care or subsidised meals. Even fewer receive assistive devices and materials such as wheelchairs or incontinence products.

It’s a common assumption that if an older person lives with family, they’re being cared for. But this isn’t always true. Sometimes the available family member isn’t able – physically, emotionally, or financially – to provide proper care. Mental health support is also largely missing. Many older people experience loneliness and depression, but help is hard to find. In our study, one in five older persons experienced feelings of loneliness, anxiety and despair.

Many older people don’t have running water, proper toilets, wheelchairs, or incontinence products. If basic services are missing, the older person needs more help. Older black people in rural areas and in under-resourced townships are most affected.

Older people also need help accessing healthcare. High levels of diabetes, hypertension and arthritis in many cases lead to disability in later life. But getting help to access care isn’t always available.

Mary Mwebu (we have used pseudonyms), who lives in the rural Eastern Cape and has TB of the spine and mobility challenges, has no running water in her home. She also has no accessible and affordable transport, so she hasn’t been to the clinic in 10 years and struggles to manage her pain.

Care needs of older persons include basic provision of food. Our findings show that older persons and their households spend way below what is needed for a healthy diet.

The older person’s grant, at R2,315 (US$130) a month in 2025 and similar to the cost of incontinence products for the month, is often the main income in the household and is used to cover the costs for everyone, especially in a context where 64% of people living with an older person are unemployed.

Food is the biggest cost, often up to two thirds of income. It is the first thing to cut when there’s not enough money.

Money is particularly tight in black low-income households. In many cases expenditure exceeds income, and older people are left vulnerable. If any unexpected costs like medical needs or hygiene products arise, the older person will often have to sacrifice food.

Others will obtain loans and so many fall into debt. Borrowing from loan sharks is a way to buy food but high interest rates put people in a worse position the following month.

Limiting spending, eating less, and limited help from family members are the only other ways to meet their needs.

Why care is depleting

The average older person household has five people in it. Large households have many care needs, not just elder care. We found that women – especially daughters and female relatives – are the main caregivers.

But the findings show that due to HIV/Aids and migration, older people can’t always rely on their children. In such instances care is also provided by nieces, neighbours, and adult granddaughters.

Looking after an older person often requires caregivers to relocate. Our findings showed that one in five caregivers had to move, often with young children or leaving spouses behind.

Sometimes older persons need to move to get care. This happened in one in 10 older persons in our sample. Many are reluctant to move from their homes and the process can take years.

The findings show that family caregiving is not an endless supply of “free” labour. It is physically, emotionally and financially costly, especially for black low-income women.

Some answers

The report proposes three key recommendations.

Firstly, family caregivers and careworkers should be adequately compensated for their work.

Secondly, we call for expanding home-based care services to ease the load and give caregivers breaks and mental health support.

And thirdly, care-related items, such as wheelchairs, incontinence products and healthy food, should be made more easily available.

Supporting family caregivers means supporting the wellbeing of millions of older South Africans. It’s time the country took elder and family care seriously and backed it with real investment and action.

– Older South Africans need better support and basic services – and so do their caregivers
– https://theconversation.com/older-south-africans-need-better-support-and-basic-services-and-so-do-their-caregivers-258409

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Hedley Twidle, Associate Professor and head of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town

Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. The Interpreters is a new book that collects the work of 37 authors, all of it writing (plus some drawing) concerned with actual people, places and events.

The anthology is the product of many years of reading and discussion between my co-editor Sean Christie (an experienced journalist and nonfiction author) and me (a writer and professor who teaches literature, including creative nonfiction).

The book is a work of homage to the many strains of ambitious and artful writing that shelter within the unhelpful term “nonfiction”. These include: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony.

To give an idea of the range, energy and risk of the pieces collected in the anthology, here I discuss five of them.

1. Fighting Shadows by Lidudumalingani

We debated for a long time which piece to start the anthology with, and ultimately went for this one, which begins:

One afternoon my father and the other boys from the Zikhovane village decided to walk across a vast landscape, two valleys and a river, to a village called Qombolo to disrupt a wedding.

It’s a quietly compelling opening. First of all, there is intrigue: why the disruption? It could also easily be the first sentence of a novel (maybe even one by famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe). And so we begin with a reminder of how storytelling is such a deep, ancient and fundamental part of societies – an impulse that long predates writing and moves across and beyond the fiction/nonfiction divide. (Lidudumalingani won the 2016 Caine Prize for a short story, so he works across both.)

Fighting Shadows is about the tradition of stick fighting, and how it’s transported from rural areas to urban ones. But it’s also about so much more, about “the dance between then and now”, as the writer puts it later on. The prose is so deft and graceful, as if the author is trying to match the “dance” of expert stick fighters with his own verbal arts. For me it’s a story that could only have emerged from this part of the world: it has a distinct voice, precision and poetry to it.

2. The End of a Conversation by Julie Nxadi

This is the shortest piece in the anthology, but for me one of the most affecting. It traces how a young girl comes to realise that the (white) family she is being brought up with are not really her family. She is the daughter of the housekeeper, the domestic worker:

I was not ‘the kids’. I was not their kin.

It’s probably best described as autofiction, a kind of writing that lies somewhere in the borderlands between autobiography and fiction. Nxadi has spoken of how she decided to write in a way that contained her own life story – the “heartbreak” of that moment – but was also able to carry and represent the experience of others who had gone through something similar.

The piece is also a product of the #FeesMustFall student protests (2015 onwards), when many young South Africans felt able to share unresolved, awkward or shameful stories for the first time.

The End of a Conversation is such a deft, wise and subtle handling of a difficult subject, with no easy targets or easy resolutions. Somehow the writer has found just the right distance – emotionally and aesthetically – from this moment of childhood realisation.

3. South African Pastoral by William Dicey

I co-own a pear farm with my brother. I attend to finances and labour relations, he oversees the growing of the fruit.

This essay by William Dicey thinks hard, very hard, about what it means to manage a fruit farm in the Boland (an agricultural region still shaped by South Africa’s divided past). It is one of the most frank and unflinching accounts of land and labour I’ve ever come across. The writer makes the point that he could easily have stayed in the city, lived in “liberal” circles and not thought about these issues much.

But becoming a farmer confronts him with all kinds of difficult questions (How much should he intervene in the lives of his employees? In family and financial planning, in matters of alcohol abuse?) as he is drawn into an awkward but meaningful intimacy with others on the farm.

The US essayist Philip Lopate suggests that scepticism is often the tool for moving towards truth in personal nonfiction writing:

So often the “plot” of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defences toward deeper levels of honesty.

This is very much what happens in South African Pastoral, and why it is such a mesmerising piece (even while written in such a plain and restrained style).

4. Hard Rock by Mogorosi Motshumi

My co-editor said from the start we should include graphic nonfiction (drawn stories and comics) and I’m so grateful he did. Mogorosi Motshumi’s warm, zany but also harrowing account is about coming of age under apartheid and then the heady days of the 1990s transition.

In his early career, Motshumi was widely known for his comic strips and political cartooning, but this graphic autobiography is far more ambitious. The style of drawing changes and evolves as the protagonist gets older; also, there is something intriguing about seeing weighty subjects like detention, disability, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS stigma approached through the eyes of a wry cartoonist with a keen sense of the absurd.

Hard Rock is a prologue to the graphic nonfiction memoir that he has been working on for many years, the 360 Degrees Trilogy. The first two instalments have appeared – The Initiation (2016) and Jozi Jungle (2022) – and I would urge anyone to seek them out. Mogorosi’s work is a major achievement in South African autobiography and life writing (or life “drawing”).

5. The Interpreters by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele

This co-authored piece is what gave the anthology its name. The Interpreters is a reflection on being a language interpreter during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (1996-1998) into gross human rights violations during white minority rule.

A series of individuals recall the challenges of that process. Sitting in glass booths in the middle of proceedings, they had to move across South Africa’s many official languages in real time, translating the words of victims, perpetrators, grieving families, lawyers and commissioners.

The chapter is also a reminder of how our English-language anthology faces the challenge of doing justice to a multilingual, multivocal society where all kinds of cultural translations happen all the time.

The piece is a blend of many people’s voices, testimonies and reminiscences. As such, it also seemed to symbolise the larger project of The Interpreters: trying to record, render and honour the many voices that make up our complex social world.

– 5 great reads by South African writers from 30 years of real-life stories
– https://theconversation.com/5-great-reads-by-south-african-writers-from-30-years-of-real-life-stories-258340

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ibrahim Z. Bahreldin, Associate Professor of Urban & Environmental Design, University of Khartoum

What makes a public space truly public?

In Khartoum, before the current conflict engulfed Sudan, the answer was not always a park, a plaza or a promenade.

The city’s streets, tea stalls (sitat al-shai), protest sites and even burial spaces served as dynamic arenas of everyday life, political expression and informal resilience.

In a recently published article, I studied 64 public spaces across pre-war Greater Khartoum, revealing a landscape far richer – and more contested – than standard urban classifications suggest. Specifically, I uncovered four classifications: formal, informal, privately owned and hybrid spaces – each alive with negotiation and everyday use.

While some spaces were planned by colonial engineers or municipal authorities, many were carved out by communities: claimed, adapted and reimagined through use.

My research offers valuable insights into the design and planning of Africa’s cities. As they grow and face mounting political and environmental pressures, it’s time to rethink how public spaces are defined and designed – not through imported models, but by listening to the ways people already make cities public.

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Read more: Sudan needs to accept its cultural diversity: urban planning can help rebuild the country and prevent future conflict

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Across the African continent, cities are growing fast – but not always fairly. Urban expansion often privileges gated developments, mega-projects and high-security zones while neglecting the everyday spaces where most people live, work and gather.

In Sudan, these dynamics have been further complicated by conflict, displacement and economic instability. The ongoing war has disrupted not only governance, but also the spatial fabric of urban life.

My paper aims to invite those involved in planning policies and post-conflict reconstruction to move beyond formal, western-centric models that often overlook how publicness actually unfolds in African cities: through informality, negotiation and social improvisation.

Khartoum’s public spaces, as documented in my study, serve as diagnostic tools for understanding how cities survive crises, express identity and contest inequality.

In the wake of war and displacement, these spaces will play a role in shaping how Sudan rebuilds not just infrastructure, but social cohesion.

Pre-war Khartoum

Khartoum’s public spaces cannot be understood through conventional categories – like formal squares and urban parks – alone. These formal squares represent only one layer of a much more plural and negotiated urban reality.

Drawing on fieldwork and the documentation of 64 public spaces across Greater Khartoum, I identify four overlapping types that reflect how space is produced, accessed and contested.

1. Formal public spaces: These include planned parks, ceremonial squares, civic plazas and administrative open spaces, often relics of colonial or postcolonial urban planning. They are defined by order, visibility and regulation. Mīdān Abbas, originally an active civic space in the centre of Khartoum, repeatedly reclaimed by informal traders and protesters, is one example, illustrating how even the most formal spaces can become contested. It was notably active during Sudan’s April 1985 uprising, serving as part of a wider network of civic spaces used for political mobilisation. Informal traders consistently transformed it into a bustling marketplace, embedding everyday commerce and social exchange into the formal urban fabric.

2. Informal and insurgent spaces: These emerge beyond or against official planning logics – riverbanks used for gatherings, neglected lots transformed into social nodes or bridges appropriated by traders. They include spiritual sites like Sufi tombs, and protest spaces such as the sit-in zone outside the city’s army headquarters. These spaces reveal the city’s capacity for bottom-up urbanism and collective adaptation.

3. Privately owned civic spaces: Shopping malls, privately managed parks and cultural cafés fall into this category. While they appear public, they are often classed, surveilled (monitored through cameras or security presence) or exclusionary. The rise of these spaces coincides with the decline of state-managed urban infrastructure, reflecting the turn in Sudanese urban governance.

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Read more: Sudan: the symbolic significance of the space protesters made their own

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4. Public “private” spaces: These spaces blur lines between ownership and use. They include mosque courtyards, school grounds, building frontages or underutilised university lawns that serve as informal gathering points. Access here is governed less by law and more by social codes, trust or class.

Together, these typologies highlight that “publicness” in Khartoum is relational. It depends not only on who planned a space, but who uses it, how and under what conditions.

Planning in African cities must therefore move beyond fixed zoning maps to embrace the layered, fluid and lived nature of urban space.

Rebuilding, rethinking, resisting

Post-conflict reconstruction in Sudan – and elsewhere in Africa – must resist the allure of “blank slate” master plans. Those involve rebuilding cities from scratch with sweeping, top-down designs that ignore existing social and spatial dynamics.

Imported models, often guided by bureaucratic thinking or commercial incentives, risk erasing the very spaces where public life already thrives, albeit informally or invisibly.

Rather than imposing formality, planners should recognise and strengthen the informal and hybrid systems that sustain civic life, especially in times of instability.

Urban theorists working in and on the global south, such as AbdouMaliq Simone and the late Vanessa Watson, have long argued for planning frameworks that centre on everyday practices, adaptive use and spatial justice.

Khartoum offers a compelling case.

From the sit-ins of 2019 to tea stalls run by displaced women, public spaces in Sudan are not inert backdrops. They are active platforms of everyday life, resistance, care and community-making.

Reconstruction must begin by asking: what spaces mattered to people before the war? Which ones fostered inclusion, dignity and visibility? Only then can new urban futures emerge, ones that are rooted in the practices of those who have always made the city public, even when the state did not.

What makes spaces truly public?

The public realm in Sudan has always been shaped through negotiation, sometimes with the state, often despite it.

Rebuilding after war is not only about reconstructing buildings but also about reimagining the terms of belonging.

This requires a shift from viewing public space as a fixed asset to understanding it as a dynamic process. Who gets to gather, to speak, to rest, to protest – these are the true measures of publicness.

Understanding Khartoum’s pre-war public spaces isn’t a nostalgic exercise. It’s a necessary step towards building more inclusive, resilient and locally grounded cities in the wake of crisis.

– Khartoum before the war: the public spaces that held the city together
– https://theconversation.com/khartoum-before-the-war-the-public-spaces-that-held-the-city-together-258632

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Simon Gikandi, Professor of English and Chair of the English Department, Princeton University

The passing of celebrated Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on 28 May 2025 marks the end of a remarkable period in African literary history – the fabulous decades in the second half of the 20th century when African writers came to command the world stage.

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Read more: Five things you should know about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of Africa’s greatest writers of all time

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This was the time of what I call the African literary revolution. As a scholar of African literature and the author of many books and papers on Ngũgĩ, I have raised several questions about this period. Why and how did this revolution happen? What motivated this turn to the imagination as a tool of decolonisation? And what was Ngũgĩ’s role in this drama?

To answer these questions one must think of Ngũgĩ inside and outside a generational cultural project.

The African literary revolution

Accounting for this project is not difficult. One can say for certain that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the African continent entered the last phase of decolonisation, writers and intellectuals became important actors in the fight for independence. They did so by quietly entering and occupying the spaces and knowledge systems that had until then been the preserve of colonial agents.

They used the work of the imagination to challenge colonial systems of thought and imagine decolonial alternatives. And what made this a period like no other in African literary history was a powerful sense of newness and the possibilities of a world yet to come. As the Nigerian writer and critic Chinua Achebe once put it:

There was something in the air.

Literature was asked to herald the possibilities and perils of freedom and Ngũgĩ was to play a major role in chaperoning the language of African being and becoming.

In the memoirs he wrote about his education, he would often return to his mental imprisonment in English literature and the mythology of Englishness.

Hidden in these narratives of colonial miseducation, however, was the discovery of the gift of African fiction brought by precursors. Nigeria’s Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi and South Africa’s Peter Abrahams gave Ngũgĩ a model of how English could be used against Englishness.

Coming after these writers provided him with an alternative to the “Great Tradition” of English letters.

Reimagining Africa

As a student at Alliance High School in Kenya and later at Makerere University College in Uganda, Ngũgĩ positioned himself as part of a literary vanguard that was reimagining Africa.

His first major fiction was published in Penpoint, a pioneering journal of literature edited by students at the Makerere English department. He was a delegate to the 1962 Conference of African Writers held at the university, sharing the podium with writers who were to define the African culture of letters for several decades. He was one of the few writers at this historic conference without a major publication, but his presence seemed to signal the promise of the future.

Something else made this period distinctive: this was a time when African intellectuals, writers and politicians shared a common belief in the redemptive work of art and literature. At Makerere, Ngũgĩ had been preceded by Julius Nyerere, a translator of Shakespeare in Swahili who was to become president of Tanzania. At the same college, Apollo Milton Obote, future president of Uganda, had appeared in a 1948 production of Julius Caesar, the first performance of Shakespeare at the university.

And the contributors represented in Origin East Africa, an anthology of creative writing at Makerere, provide the most vivid example of the role writing and a literary education could come to play in the making of the postcolonial public sphere. Ngũgĩ had four stories published in the anthology, coming just after a short story by Ben Mkapa, future president of Tanzania.

Ngũgĩ belonged to a generation that saw literature as a forum for critique, of questioning dominant ideas and beliefs. In this context, creative writing was asked to perform at least four tasks:

• to reimagine an African past whose resources might be rehearsed for the future

• to rehearse the drama of decolonisation

• to account for postcolonial failure

• to produce fictions that might help readers rethink a global African identity.

Ngũgĩ’s novels rose to fulfil these tasks with conviction and courage. The River Between and Weep Not, Child dealt with the wounds of history. A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood were positioned in a zone where the figure of the new nation was caught between its aspirations and desires and the possibility of failure and betrayal. Wizard of the Crow was simultaneously an allegory of postcolonial failure and the possibility of its transcendence.

And then came banishment and exile.

The late career

Although he barely acknowledged it in his writings or in public, Ngũgĩ’s late career was defined by the realities of exile and an awareness of his own displacement from his primary audience and the Gĩkũyũ language that had energised his poetics.

He was celebrated and honoured in powerful American universities and institutions including the Library of Congress. He was recognised in the global African world and cited by the few African leaders like Ghana’s John Dramani Mahama who understood the need for a forceful response to racial ideologies.

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Read more: Drama that shaped Ngũgĩ’s writing and activism comes home to Kenya

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But he was a persona non grata in the one place – Kenya – where recognition mattered most to him.

In the end, there was a certain kind of belatedness in Ngũgĩ’s later fictions. The subject of these works and their points of reference were distinctly Gĩkũyũ, Kenyan, African, pan-African, and global. Nonetheless, these gestures of being African were enacted far away from the homelands in which Ngũgĩ’s writing and thinking was both intelligible and functional.

Imagining and writing about Africa away from Africa was a promise and debt. It was an obligation to a place but also a measure of one’s distance from it.

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Read more: 3 things Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o taught me: language matters, stories are universal, Africa can thrive

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I reflected on this problem as I reviewed Ngũgĩ’s 2006 novel set in an imaginary autocratic country, Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), in its original Gĩkũyũ edition and later in its translation.

I was reading the same book, but it was pointing in two different directions – towards home and away from it.

In our many encounters, Ngũgĩ made fun of the fact that I seemed to have adopted alienation as the essential condition for thinking and writing. What he sought to do until the last minute of his life was carry within himself and his fictions that place that used to be home, its politics and poetics.

– Ngũgi wa Thiong’o and the African literary revolution
– https://theconversation.com/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-african-literary-revolution-258428

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Marlese von Broembsen, Associate Professor (in Labour Law and Development), University of the Western Cape

A new report from the International Labour Organisation outlines a set of propositions on how countries should go about formalising the informal economy. The report provides the basis for negotiations on the subject at the International Labour Conference in Geneva in June 2025.

Formalising the informal economy is a burning issue, particularly for countries in Africa. In some, such as Nigeria and Ghana, more than 80% of the workforce is informal.

According to the ILO report, the informal economy is a “structural barrier” to social justice and decent work. This is so because informal enterprises do not pay tax, therefore governments do not have the public revenue to meet their sustainable development goals.

Based on my research and policy work on the informal economy I believe that the ILO’s analysis, and its proposed solutions, are flawed. In my view, they follow a long tradition of misplaced thinking about the formalisation of informal work.

The ILO has the view that all “independent workers” should be “brought under” laws that regulate enterprises. And it assumes that providing “independent workers” with access to finance, business and skills training, and access to markets (“business development services”), will lead to more “productive” enterprises that create jobs.

I don’t agree.

Business development services have been tried in many countries since the 1990s – without success.

Clearly, informal enterprises that earn above the tax threshold must be “brought under” enterprise laws and must comply with labour laws if they employ others. But what about own-account workers, such as street vendors and waste pickers, who earn way below the tax threshold?

Labour law only covers employees, but I argue that it should be reformed to include own-account workers. That’s because given structural unemployment, artificial intelligence and a shift from firms investing in production to investing in financial products, industrial reform and business development services are not going to create sufficient jobs.

The flaws

The ILO report argues that the reasons “independent workers” don’t formalise are that: they lack the capital to be productive; it’s too costly to comply with legislation; and they don’t want to pay tax because they don’t trust state institutions.

This logic suggests that states should: support enterprises to become more productive and profitable; reduce the cost of compliance; make institutions trustworthy; and reform industrial policy to improve productivity and create jobs. This is exactly what the report recommends.

But these approaches haven’t worked. If decent work is the aim, most people in the informal sector should fall under labour law, rather than enterprise law.

Old wine in new wineskins

Policy approaches to the informal sector have changed over the decades. For example, in the late 1980s simplifying regulations and creating property rights was seen as the answer for informal micro-enterprises to formalise.

This was first popularised by Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto’s 1989 book The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. He argued that Peruvians operated informally because complying with the regulations was too time-consuming and expensive. His insights were incorporated into the World Bank’s “good governance” development agenda.

Similarly, access to credit and markets, business and skills training – known as “business development services” – was the key strategy in the 1990s, when I first worked in this sector. When the first democratically elected government in South Africa published its small business strategy in 1996, this reflected “best practice” at the time.

South Africa’s policy visualised the formalisation process as a ladder: with the right support, micro-businesses would climb the “entrepreneurial ladder” to become “globally competitive businesses” and create jobs. Government’s role was to simplify regulations and provide funds to service providers.

Back in 2010, I critiqued this approach, in part because there was no evidence that livelihood activities (such as street vending) will grow into job-creating businesses simply by providing the inputs, correcting market failures and simplifying business regulations.

Since then, informality has increased everywhere, as evidenced in the ILO’s report. Kate Philip, the programme lead on the Presidential Employment Stimulus in the Office of the South African Presidency, argues that this approach places the responsibility on the most economically marginalised citizens to “self-employ themselves out of poverty”.

One size does not fit all

The ILO report lumps together employers – people whose businesses are informal and employ others – together with own-account workers into one category: “independent workers”.

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Read more: Informal workers in Ghana’s chop bars get no benefit from foreign aid: donors are getting it wrong

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ILO data show that own-account workers make up 47% of informal workers, and fewer than 3% are employers. In Africa, the percentage of own-account workers is even higher. In sub-Saharan Africa, street vendors comprise 43% of informal employment.

The goal is “bringing them under regulation, with both the advantages and obligations it entails” to realise decent work and to grow the tax base. It assumes that own-account workers are not regulated and are not contributing to the fiscus.

Both these assumptions are false. Public space, where many work, falls under nuisance, health and vagrancy regulations. And vendors pay “taxes” to local authorities to trade.

The report recognises that own-account workers suffer violence and harassment in their workplace. Violence, arrests and confiscation of goods – by municipal officials and the police – is ubiquitous. Workers are powerless to engage individually with the state. To realise decent work, they need to do that collectively.

Where labour law fits in

Labour law recognises that workers and employers’ interests are not aligned. It provides a collective bargaining framework for workers to negotiate as a group.

Although labour law only covers employees, I have argued that it can be reformed to include own-account workers. Street vendors and other own-account workers are here to stay. Reforming labour laws to realise their right to collective bargaining – to co-determine their working conditions – should be a critical part of formalisation.

– Waste pickers and vendors should be treated as workers, not small businesses – labour lawyer
– https://theconversation.com/waste-pickers-and-vendors-should-be-treated-as-workers-not-small-businesses-labour-lawyer-258635

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kate Gannon, Assistant Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science

Women in Africa are often framed as especially vulnerable to climate change. Our earlier research suggested that women entrepreneurs often face a “triple differential vulnerability” to climate risk compared to men.

What we mean is that there are three possible reasons for their additional vulnerability. First, their livelihoods are often in climate sensitive sectors. Second, they face additional barriers to accessing resources for adaptation in the business environment – such as finance, new adaptation technologies and markets for climate smart goods and services. Last, they also hold primary responsibility for managing climate risk at the household level.

However, our new research also suggests a parallel, more overlooked reality. Women entrepreneurs may also be leading the way in action on climate resilience in Africa.

Through the Women Entrepreneurs in Climate Change Adaptation (WECCA) project we are researching this role of women as strategic actors in inclusive adaptation action.

Women’s entrepreneurship is key to development outcomes in Africa. This is because their businesses make wide ranging contributions to economic activity. They are active in critical agriculture and food processing value chains, which boosts export earnings. And through cooperatives, and savings groups, at the local level, women create access points to finance and markets for others in underserved regions. Studies also suggest women are more likely to use their profits to address the most critical household needs.

Small businesses form the backbone of most African economies. They generate most employment opportunities and provide essential goods and services.

Yet, these businesses are on the frontline of climate impacts. Floods, droughts, and concurrent disruption to power, water and transport networks threaten supply chains, disrupt markets, interrupt livelihood activities and damage business assets.

Businesses must adapt to survive. But how they adapt can make the difference between building long-term resilience and deepening vulnerability.

Results from our study of small businesses in climate vulnerable regions of Kenya and Senegal suggest that businesses with women leaders take a more sustainable approach to adaptation than those with only male leaders. This safeguards long-term business resilience. Our results also found adaptation assistance has a stronger impact on helping women-led small businesses adjust to climate change, compared to those led only by men.

These results suggest that supporting adaptation for women entrepreneurs isn’t just about fairness. It’s also a smart strategy for scaling up climate resilient economies. Building an inclusive business environment for adaptation may deliver bigger returns on investments for governments and donors.

Women entrepreneurs as strategic actors

Our study analysed survey data of small businesses in semi-arid regions of Senegal and Kenya. The aim was to consider how having female owners and managers shaped a business’s adaptation to extreme events.

Our dataset covered the Senegalese regions of Louga, Saint Louis and Kaolack. In Kenya, it covered the county of Laikipia. The regions experience extreme drought and flooding that is expected to increase in the coming decades. Entrepreneurship in these regions is particularly concentrated in agricultural sectors. These are highly exposed to the impacts of these extremes.

We investigated how a business having female leaders impacted the number of sustainable and unsustainable adaptation strategies that they adopted.

Following earlier literature, we classified adaptation strategies as:

• “sustainable” when they maintain business operations at existing levels

• “unsustainable” if they help businesses “cope” in the short term but result in a temporary (or sometimes permanent) reduction in business activity. This could reduce the resources that they have to cope with future climate impacts.

We found that businesses which include women within their management and ownership teams adopted fewer unsustainable adaptation measures than those led solely by men. Unsustainable adaptation actions are typically reactive coping strategies that can help businesses address immediate needs to minimise the negative impacts of climate shocks in the short term. These might include selling off business assets or cutting staff.

But these actions often come at a cost. They reduce business activity, undermine future growth, and may limit a business’s ability to recover from subsequent climate impacts.

In contrast, we found that businesses with female leaders were more likely to adopt sustainable adaptation measures that protected the long-term health of the business. These included:

• diversifying income sources

• switching to different crops

• taking out loans or insurance.

Such strategies can help to reduce vulnerability to future climate shocks, and support income stability and recovery during periods of climate stress.

These findings are striking given the additional barriers that women face when trying to adapt.

It is well documented, for example, that women entrepreneurs in Africa face deeper constraints than men in accessing adaptation resources. This includes finance, training and technologies.

Similarly, gendered expectations around domestic responsibilities can limit women’s time and mobility, restricting their ability to attend training sessions or participate in external markets.

Social norms may also limit their decision-making power within households or businesses. This can make it harder to act independently on adaptation investments.

Given these constraints, the use of more sustainable adaptation strategies by women-led businesses deserves careful interpretation. Many of the sustainable measures we analysed – such as switching crops or diversifying income streams – can require less upfront capital than the unsustainable ones. Actions like selling assets or scaling back staff, meanwhile, are only possible if the business owns significant physical or financial resources to begin with.

The lower use of unsustainable strategies by women-led businesses may therefore reflect more limited coping capacity: they may simply have fewer assets to draw on when a shock hits.

Yet this makes the findings even more important. Sustainable strategies can still be highly effective. Our research suggests that women business leaders are often finding ways to adapt that are both practical and forward-looking, even when working with limited capital. In this sense, women entrepreneurs are not just more vulnerable – they are also strategic actors driving adaptation innovation, often with fewer resources.

What’s needed

These findings highlight not only the constraints women entrepreneurs continue to face, but also their untapped potential in adaptation.

What’s more, our study suggests that this potential can be especially powerful when the right support is in place. We found that when adaptation assistance (whether financial or technical) is made available, women-led businesses didn’t just catch up with their male-led counterparts. They often outperformed them.

This points to a highly strategic opportunity: that investing in adaptation for women entrepreneurs could deliver outsized benefits for climate resilience. For their businesses as well as the communities and economies they support.

This finding points to the need for governments to develop a business-enabling environment for adaptation that targets women entrepreneurs. This means designing policies, programmes, and support that address persistent gaps in access to tailored finance, technologies, and adaptation goods and services.

Better data is also needed. Our study used the best available data. But it was based on a relatively small sample from specific regions in Kenya and Senegal and should not be overgeneralised.

To test the strength of our findings, there is an urgent need for additional high-quality, gender-disaggregated datasets on business level adaptation behaviour.

The World Bank Enterprise Surveys could play a vital role, as one of the most extensive sources of data on small and medium-sized enterprises globally.

– African women entrepreneurs are a smart bet for climate change investment: research shows why
– https://theconversation.com/african-women-entrepreneurs-are-a-smart-bet-for-climate-change-investment-research-shows-why-252821

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Misheck Mutize, Post Doctoral Researcher, Graduate School of Business (GSB), University of Cape Town

The governments of Ghana and Zambia recently took a decision that could have serious consequences for other African countries. The decision relates to arrangements on how the two countries will repay the debt they owe to Africa Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

They have both taken decisions to relegate Afreximbank to a commercial lender from a preferred creditor. This means that the terms on which Afreximbank has lent money to these two countries will change. And it will lose certain protections. For example preferred creditors are repaid first, before any other lenders.

This protects preferred creditors’ balance sheets and enables them to continue lending during crisis periods when others cannot. In contrast, commercial banks get paid later or might not get paid at all. This higher risk factor means that they charge higher rates.

Based on decades of researching Africa’s capital markets and the institutions that govern them it’s my view that the long-term consequences of this precedent are detrimental. If other African borrowers follow suit, treating loans from African multilateral development banks as ordinary commercial debt during restructuring, it will erode the viability of these institutions. Investors who fund Afreximbank through bonds and capital markets may reassess its risk profile, pushing up its cost of funding and making future lending less affordable.

The ultimate losers will be African countries themselves, especially those with limited access to international capital. Afreximbank, along with other African financial institutions, is a lifeline for trade finance, infrastructure development, and crisis response. Undermining its legal protections weakens the continent’s capacity for self-reliant development.

Afreximbank was created under the auspices of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in 1993. It was set up with a public interest mandate to develop African trade and promote integration. Its legal status and structural features place it closer to international multilateral development banks than to private creditors, justifying its treatment as a preferred creditor.

The decision by Accra and Lusaka signals lack of confidence in African financial institutions. It suggests that they do not trust them to the same extent as global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These are treated as preferred creditors, on the assumption that they will lend to countries in crisis or distress when commercial lenders retreat.

The actions of Ghana and Zambia set a dangerous precedent by sidelining African financial institutions in favour of external creditors. That risks weakening Africa’s financial institutions and undermining the very concept of African solutions to African problems. Investors will become more sceptical and pessimistic, demanding more interest.

The continent needs to develop an ability to independently design, finance and implement its economic development policies without support from external financial institutions. Afreximbank helps to achieve this through financing African-designed infrastructure and counter-cyclical lending.

Ghana and Zambia still have an opportunity to correct course. In my view they should do so for the sake of the bank, its member states and the future of African economic sovereignty.

The background

Ghana and Zambia have both defaulted on their external bonds in the last four years. Zambia in October 2020 and Ghana in December 2022. This forced them to negotiate new sustainable terms with creditors.

During their respective debt negotiations, both countries have announced that they would include African multilateral development banks such as Afreximbank and the Trade and Development Bank in the debt restructuring.

This followed private and bilateral creditors contesting unequal distribution of restructuring burdens, where they face losses while some multilateral institutions are shielded. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are preferred creditors, do not fund infrastructure, they only offer balance of payments support.

The decision by Ghana and Zambia to relegate Afreximbank was made during an ongoing comprehensive debt restructuring. Ghana and Zambia have been negotiating with creditors for over a year in an attempt to resolve their sovereign debt crises.

The two countries were complying with International Monetary Fund supported restructuring terms. Bilateral creditors were also demanding fair burden sharing with African multilateral banks.

Afreximbank: not just another lender

Ghana and Zambia don’t have a legal leg to stand on.

Afreximbank’s preferred creditor status is not an informal privilege but derives from Article VX(1) of its founding agreement. The agreement has been signed and ratified by member states into national laws, including Ghana and Zambia.

This status is further reinforced by the bank’s diplomatic immunities and privileges and its ability to operate across African jurisdictions under protected legal frameworks. The role of Afreximbank, therefore, goes beyond that of a traditional commercial bank.

Preferred creditor status protects development finance institutions in a number of ways. The biggest protection is that lenders are prioritised for repayment. This protects their balance sheets, enabling them to continue lending when others cannot.

A preferred creditor status is accorded for a reason. It is to ensure that development finance institutions can lend in times of distress with confidence, on the guarantee that they will be repaid ahead of other creditors. Country actions that violate this principle disrupt the implicit covenant that enables counter-cyclical financing. This is breaking the financial lifeline that countries might need when nobody else is willing to help them. This is precisely the kind of support that Ghana and Zambia relied on during their respective debt crises in December 2022 and October 2020, respectively.

A bank that has consistently stepped up

It is worth recalling that during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021) and again when global markets closed access to Eurobond issuances for African countries, investors didn’t want to lend African countries for fear of defaulting. Afreximbank was one of the few institutions that continued to lend to African sovereigns. This included US$750 million to Ghana and US$45 million to Zambia.

When Ghana, Zambia and other commodity export-dependent countries faced acute foreign currency shortages and tightening global liquidity caused by the 2015/16 commodity crisis of low prices, Afreximbank did not hesitate to deploy resources.

Zambia has also benefited significantly from Afreximbank’s trade and development finance in energy, agriculture and healthcare. These are areas that many commercial banks view as too risky or low-margin.

For Zambia and Ghana to classify Afreximbank in the same category as hedge funds, bondholders or purely commercial lenders, is ahistorical and unwarranted.

Restructuring loans from Afreximbank risks inadvertently raising the cost of capital for African countries. If Afreximbank can no longer be shielded under preferred creditor status norms, it may be forced to adopt more conservative lending practices, charge higher risk premiums or retreat from high-risk markets altogether.

The knock-on effect is reduced access to affordable, timely financing for countries that need it most.

Afreximbank has rejected the idea that its loans ought to be restructured.

Ghana and Zambia should correct course

Ghana and Zambia still have an opportunity to correct course. They can reaffirm Afreximbank’s preferred creditor status, exclude it from restructuring tables meant for commercial creditors, and honour their legal commitments.

In doing so, they would not only preserve their reputations as reliable debtors but also strengthen the broader fabric of African financial solidarity.

African countries must be cognisant that no one else will build their institutions for them. If they do not defend and respect them, they cannot expect the rest of the world to do so. The credibility, sustainability and legitimacy of Africa’s financial independence depends, in large part, on how they treat the institutions they have built.

The decision to treat Afreximbank and the Trade and Development Bank like commercial lenders is short-sighted and self-defeating. It must be reversed.

– Ghana and Zambia have snubbed Africa’s leading development bank: why they should change course
– https://theconversation.com/ghana-and-zambia-have-snubbed-africas-leading-development-bank-why-they-should-change-course-258467

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Adrienne Lees, Researcher, Institute of Development Studies

Uganda is one of the countries most exposed to recent cuts in international aid, particularly with the dissolution of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In 2023, about 5% of gross national income – a measure of a country’s total income, including income from foreign sources – was received in aid.

The cuts have given new impetus to the drive to increase taxes raised from domestic businesses.

Less than half (45%) of the Ugandan budget is financed through domestic revenue. The remainder is funded largely through debt and budget support (grants) from bilateral and multilateral donors. Corporate income tax makes up around 8% of total domestic revenue. Firms also collect employee income tax (pay-as-you-earn), value added tax, excise duties and fuel duties.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute a small share of overall corporate income tax collection. But they make up over 90% of the private sector. The economy is heavily reliant on these firms for employment and growth.

These businesses struggle to navigate an increasingly complex tax system.

The complexity of Uganda’s tax system makes for a time-consuming tax filing process, compounded by low taxpayer knowledge and high levels of distrust in the Uganda Revenue Authority. The time, money and effort incurred by taxpayers to meet their tax obligations adds to their total tax burden.

These compliance costs also have real economic consequences. Firms might miss out on tax benefits or artificially constrain business growth to avoid greater reporting requirements. Since smaller firms are more constrained in their ability to document revenues, accurately calculate tax liabilities and file returns, they might even pay more tax than necessary.

At the margin, compliance costs affect the economic choices people make: the fear of high compliance costs might induce a potential entrepreneur to take a salaried job instead of starting a new business.

Relieving this burden could unlock greater productivity and growth, and encourage innovation and investment.

For my PhD in economics I collaborated with the Uganda Revenue Authority to generate detailed measures of tax compliance costs, using data from a survey of nearly 2,000 taxpaying SMEs. My research finds that the burden of compliance is significant, even for firms with very little tax revenue to contribute.

Solutions should focus on making compliance easier and ensuring that tax thresholds are set appropriately to exclude unproductive small firms.

The burden

The median firm faces total annual compliance costs of about US$800, equivalent to just under 2% of turnover. These costs are also highly regressive: smaller firms face costs exceeding 20% of turnover, versus less than 1% for the largest firms.

A more troubling result is that many firms, and particularly smaller ones, spend more on completing their tax returns than they pay in actual income tax.

Much of this burden stems from labour time. Employees and firm owners dedicate over 30 hours a month on compliance-related activities, primarily compiling tax documentation and preparing returns. For firm owners personally involved in tax compliance, this responsibility consumes around 20% of their working hours, on average.

Somewhat surprisingly, the amount of time spent on tax compliance does not increase significantly with firm size.

To compensate for limited tax knowledge, many firms use the services of a tax agent. These include external accountants, consultants, or other tax specialists who assist with tax compliance. My research finds that the use of agents is common across all taxpayer categories and is primarily driven by a desire to ensure proper compliance, rather than to minimise tax liabilities.

Although these agents do not necessarily reduce compliance costs, since firms spend an average of US$54 per month on agents’ fees, related research shows that they have a broadly positive impact on the quality of tax returns submitted.

What can be done

The Ugandan parliament recently voted on the 2025 tax amendment bills, with measures aiming to bolster revenue collection and simplify compliance. For instance, policymakers propose to use the national identity document as a taxpayer identification number, rather than requiring separate tax registration.

But policymakers should consider bolder actions.

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Read more: Uganda’s tax system isn’t bringing in enough revenue, but is targeting small business the answer?

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Firstly, the administrative thresholds for corporate income tax and presumptive tax (a simplified tax on business income for the smallest firms) have not been adjusted for over a decade. In a high inflation environment, this means that the tax system is capturing many firms with very little profit, and no tax to pay. Yet, these firms still bear compliance costs, and the revenue service incurs administrative costs registering and monitoring unproductive taxpayers.

Roughly 30% to 35% of firms filing returns each year file a nil return, meaning that they report zero on all significant fields of the tax return. Even these firms report compliance costs of, on average, around US$500 per year.

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Read more: Uganda study shows text messages can boost tax compliance: here’s what worked

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Rather than chasing the “little guy”, bigger revenue gains are likely to come from focusing on the largest businesses. For instance, research shows that tax incentives and exemptions cost Uganda over US$40 million in lost revenue per year.

Secondly, the Ugandan corporate income tax return is particularly long, complex, and more suited to the business structure of very large firms, rather than the SMEs making up most of the Ugandan economy. In addition to changing the thresholds, simplifying the return would be beneficial.

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Read more: Wealthy Africans often don’t pay tax: the answer lies in smarter collection – expert

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Filing processes could also be eased through automated pre-filling, for instance by using information from a firm’s monthly VAT returns to pre-populate parts of the corporate income tax return. The rollout of the Uganda Revenue Authority’s electronic invoicing system for VAT is a promising step in this direction, although it has been met with resistance by taxpayers.

– Uganda’s tax system is a drain on small businesses: how to set them free
– https://theconversation.com/ugandas-tax-system-is-a-drain-on-small-businesses-how-to-set-them-free-258120