Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Amina Ebrahim, Research Fellow at at UNU-WIDER, United Nations University

Bilateral aid to Africa fell by nearly a quarter in 2025, the largest annual decline in the history of official development assistance. Meanwhile, sovereign debt interest payments now consume on average 27% of government revenues across the continent, up from 19% in 2019.

The pressure to fund development from within has never been greater. But meeting it requires African governments to understand their own economies with precision: which tax policies work, which incentives serve their purpose, how fiscal decisions distribute their consequences.

Administrative tax data, the anonymised filings, returns and transaction records generated through the tax system that African revenue authorities already hold, is one of the most powerful tools for answering those questions. South Africa, Uganda and Zambia have built the means to use it, and what they are finding is shaping how they govern.

Each has established a secure research data lab where researchers work with anonymised tax records under strict confidentiality protocols. All three were developed with support from the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). It provides technical expertise and facilitates knowledge-sharing across countries, while ensuring that the data, the research agenda and the findings are retained by the institutions that use them.

We have been part of that support, from the establishment of the labs and making raw administrative data research-ready, to facilitating partnerships and ensuring findings reach the people placed to act on them.

What these data labs are producing is evidence that has fed into solutions including tax policy reform, budget decisions, labour market programmes and social protection. It can deepen how governments understand the economies they are responsible for, and the people within them.

From research findings to decision

In South Africa, the National Treasury Secure Data Facility, the cornerstone of the Southern Africa Towards Inclusive Economic Development programme, has been doing this work for over a decade. The cumulative impact reflects that longevity. The data has repeatedly illuminated how the economy works, often differently from how policy expected.

Findings have shaped a number of decisions. For example:

• Research revealed that the corporate tax system was quietly favouring debt over equity financing. This was nudging firms to borrow more than they otherwise would, making companies and the economy more fragile in downturns. This informed corporate tax restructuring in Budget 2020.

• Analysis of the Employment Tax Incentive, a wage subsidy for young workers in a country where nearly 60% cannot find work, revealed a more complicated picture of impact than its designers had anticipated. This informed a decision to expand the subsidy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Research which describes how much economic activity increases when the government raises spending or cuts taxes emphasised the importance of growth-oriented investments such as infrastructure, education, or public health.

• Analysis of behavioural patterns at tax thresholds provided evidence for designing fairer policies that reduce avoidance and broaden the tax base.

Similarly, in Kampala, Uganda’s commercial capital, adjustments were made to policies based on the use of the data.

• Research conducted through the Uganda Revenue Authority’s secure data lab found that fewer than 15% of firms were paying both national corporate income tax and the local trade licence fee. The gap had existed for years. It had simply never been quantifiable before.

• Separate research revealed that corporate tax incentives were costing approximately US$42 million in forgone revenue. More than half of the benefiting firms likely remained profitable at the full statutory rate of 30%. An incentive regime designed to attract investment was, in measurable terms, more generous than the investment required.

For policymakers, findings like these do not simply describe a problem. They reframe it. The questions have shifted from how to collect more revenue to where the system is working against itself, and what can be changed.

Some examples from Zambia:

• Tax gap research estimated the country’s compliance gap at between 47% and 56%. This helped quantify, for the first time, where revenue was being lost and how audit resources could be better targeted. The findings fed directly into the 2026 budget. The government’s audit strategy was reshaped. And the findings informed the deliberations of the Tax Policy Review Committee.

• Separately, research on VAT administration uncovered a structural inefficiency: large firms generating simultaneous liabilities and credits on the same accounts, a circular flow consuming administrative effort without producing revenue. This was invisible without transaction-level data. When it was identified, the problem was corrected.

From a number to a life

Statistics, even compelling ones, exist in abstraction. What brings them to reality is the chain of consequences, from research finding, to decision, to the life that decision shapes.

Zambia’s domestic revenue contribution to the national budget is rising from 55.7% in 2020 to a planned 73.1% in 2026. This reflects fiscal decisions made with increasing precision and confidence, in a country that now has the tools to interrogate its own tax system rather than rely on external assessments of it.

That stronger revenue base has also made possible a free education initiative that has brought approximately 2.3 million children who were previously out of school back into classrooms. A research lab did not put those children there. Evidence-informed fiscal policy did.

South Africa’s record adds another dimension. Microsimulation modelling showed that the Social Relief of Distress grant was significantly reducing poverty just when a decision about its future needed to be made. The evidence changed what that decision could credibly be. The distinction matters, because it clarifies what these labs are actually for: not the production of research, but the conditions that allow governments to govern better.

The case in practice

Africa’s financing challenge will not be resolved from outside. The most durable path runs through domestic revenue systems that are efficient, fair, and sharpened by what the evidence shows. That requires a particular kind of analytical honesty: the willingness to examine fiscal systems rigorously and act on what the data reveals.

Development economics has long argued that evidence-based policymaking produces better outcomes. South Africa, Uganda and Zambia are making that argument in practice. They are doing this through what they have built, what they have found, and what they have chosen to do because of it.

At a moment when external financing is contracting and debt service is rising, the quality of fiscal decisions is not an academic question. It is the difference between governments that can see their own economies clearly enough to act, and governments that cannot.

The data is already there. The model has been proven. What remains is the will to use it.

– Tax data can be mined to shape better policies. South Africa, Uganda and Zambia show how
– https://theconversation.com/tax-data-can-be-mined-to-shape-better-policies-south-africa-uganda-and-zambia-show-how-281555

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Umutcan Yüksel, Analyst /Researcher, European University Institute

For over a decade, the European Union (EU) has relied on external partnerships to increase the return of migrants who don’t have the right to stay in Europe. It has used a growing web of funding instruments, projects and bilateral arrangements to get countries in Africa and the Middle East to cooperate in its bid to send migrants back to their home countries.

Its policies have included incentives such as the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, the Facility for Refugees in Türkiye and the Neighbourhood Development and International Cooperation Instrument.

Billions of euros have been channelled into migration-related projects.

Incentives have been accompanied by coercion. The EU wields the revised Visa Code (Article 25a) as a lever, allowing the European Commission to impose visa restrictions on countries that don’t cooperate.

Alongside this financial and diplomatic leverage, the EU has invested heavily in enforcement infrastructure to increase returns. This includes border equipment, biometric databases, detention capacity and operational support through Frontex, the European border and coast guard agency.

The approach has been dubbed the EU’s externalisation strategy. It assumes that financial incentives can buy cooperation and that enforcement infrastructure can convert political agreements into actual returns.

In Africa, the EU has used funding primarily as a containment tool, while in the Middle East it has been a way to share the burden of the Syrian crisis. Neither model has produced the desired cooperation.

We are policy leader fellows at the European University Institute’s Florence School of Transnational Governance. Building on previous research on EU return and readmission governance, our latest policy brief examines whether the EU’s policies have led to sustained cooperation on returns from Africa and the Middle East. We drew on Eurostat returns data, EU spending records and the European Migration Network.

The short answer: it hasn’t. Return rates remain below 10% across most of Africa. In the Middle East, only a small number of states cooperate meaningfully. Our research confirms that return rates follow regional structural dynamics more than they respond to readmission agreements or funding levels.

We found that financial leverage and enforcement infrastructure have contributed to a more transactional and short-term approach. Cooperation is often negotiated case by case and dependent on short-term political bargaining.

Based on the evidence from our research, we argue that more funding on returns and readmissions will have limited effect on actual returns to countries of origin. We conclude with three recommendations for better aligning the EU’s return objectives with its financial and diplomatic investments.

First, measure the quality of returns rather than the volume alone, including the sustainability and safety of reintegration. Second, prioritise targeted migration diplomacy over broad financial packages, keeping migrant rights central to EU partnerships. And third, expand investment in legal labour migration pathways, currently under 10% of total EU migration spending.

Impact

The return rate of African migrants is, on aggregate, 9.9%. This figure masks dramatic sub-regional variation. North Africa’s 11.2% return rate is partly driven by cooperation with Morocco and Tunisia. In contrast, return rates are lower in west Africa (7.5%) and east Africa (7.9%), regions that generate many irregular arrivals to Europe and receive substantial EU migration funding.

In the Middle East, the region’s overall return rate is 16.8%. There is strong cooperation with Jordan (57.0%) and Iraq (35.4%). Yemen remains at 2.1%, underlining that high funding and political will cannot substitute for basic conditions of safety and state functionality in countries of origin.

Voluntary return programmes, often supported with reintegration funding, are widely promoted as a more humane alternative to forced deportations. Yet the boundary between the two is often blurred: migrants may opt for “voluntary” return after receiving a return order, facing detention, or losing access to legal stay. Assisted return is rarely a pre-planned choice for migrants – it is mostly a last resort.

The answers

We make three recommendations. First, measure the quality of returns, including the sustainability and safety of reintegration. Understanding returnees’ experiences can help ensure that return policies do not lead to renewed displacement or onward migration.

To support this, reintegration programmes should adopt standardised indicators covering areas such as housing, income, access to healthcare, education, legal status, and overall well-being. Outcomes should be monitored over the longer term, and onward migration or re-displacement tracked as indicators of policy failure.

Second, prioritise targeted migration diplomacy over broad financial packages. Sustained engagement with specific partners can produce more lasting outcomes than broad financial packages. At the same time, migrant rights and international protection standards must be upheld.

Third, expand investment in legal labour migration pathways, like schemes that match training in countries of origin with labour shortages in the EU.

The EU should increase dedicated funding, streamline recognitions and visa processes and provide incentives for stronger private sector engagement.

Qualified migrants could then work legally and support economic development in both origin and destination countries.

Migration cooperation is ultimately political. Enforcement tools are not effective if there is no political cooperation.

– Europe is spending billions on deporting migrants. Why the strategy isn’t working
– https://theconversation.com/europe-is-spending-billions-on-deporting-migrants-why-the-strategy-isnt-working-282741

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By David Baidoo-Anu, Assistant Professor, Frazer Faculty of Education, Ontario Tech University

The West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) is a high-stakes test. For decades, it has served as the gateway to post-secondary education across five countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia and The Gambia. But is it fair?

David Baidoo-Anu and Monsurat Raji say their research shows that cultural bias in exam questions can put students at a disadvantage. This happens through language, contexts and examples. It raises questions about what counts as “ability” in standardised testing.

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Why do students in the five countries write the same exam?

The exam is administered by the West African Examinations Council. This was established in 1952 during the colonial era to oversee standardised examinations across British West Africa.

The original aim was to coordinate administration across the region. Universities and employers would be able to interpret and compare qualifications consistently. For their part, students could follow opportunities across borders.

Although the examination system has changed over time, it still has a regional structure. It remains deeply tied to university admissions, employment screening and cross-border recognition of qualifications.

Why is this a problem?

The problem is not simply that students across five countries write a similar exam. The deeper concern is that some questions are not culturally responsive. That is, they do not always reflect students’ language backgrounds, cultural references or everyday experiences. Students are not all familiar with particular examples.

Exam questions use language, names, places, stories, images, objects and examples to help students understand what is being asked. These are important features of a quality and equitable assessment. When those features are unfamiliar to a student, a question may become harder to understand. It’s not that students lack ability, but the context of the question does not reflect their experiences.

Our research argues that assessment systems must pay closer attention to this. The language, examples, images and scenarios used in exam questions should be meaningful, fair and responsive to learners’ realities.

Guided by a framework for test design that takes cultural experience into account, we analysed available mathematics, English language and science exam questions from 2019 to 2021 in Ghana and Nigeria. We looked at how the language, contexts, names, images, examples and representations used in test items reflected learners’ societies and cultures. The analysis included characters, places, situations, events and stories used in questions.

What are the differences that matter?

Students don’t interpret questions in a vacuum. They make sense of assessment tasks through their own lived experiences, languages, cultural knowledge and ways of knowing.

Our analysis of the exam questions revealed several concerns. Some questions assumed familiarity with cultural references, examples and experiences that may not be shared by all across the region. One major finding was that many exam contexts and character names reflected mostly western experiences and identities, rather than African ones. Some English language questions, for example, used unfamiliar western names, settings and literary contexts.

The study also found that some mathematics and science questions relied heavily on complex technical language. There was not enough visual support. This could be a problem for students who may understand the content, but struggle with interpreting the language used.

In several instances, the questions referenced objects, situations, or experiences that may not have been familiar or culturally relevant to African learners, potentially affecting their interpretation and responses.

Another key finding was that images, diagrams and abstract representations were sometimes used without adequate explanations. In some cases, there were no visuals that could have improved students’ understanding of questions. In other cases diagrams lacked sufficient contextual explanation.

Why is the exam so important?

Exam results determine access to universities, scholarships, jobs and future social mobility.

In Ghana, for example, students who don’t get the required grades can’t go on to postsecondary education. Some spend years rewriting the exam. Institutions like the Ghana Immigration Service, Ghana Police Service and Ghana Armed Forces require job applicants to pass core subjects such as English and mathematics. The exam is not only a school-leaving certificate, it is also a gateway to formal employment and national service careers.

Reports from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics indicate that the performance of candidates in the exam is generally poor. In 2020 only 36.4% of North-East candidates passed. In 2019, only 47.4% of North-West candidates passed.

The high-stakes nature of examinations has consequences for teaching and learning too. Teachers feel pressured to teach primarily for exam performance rather than for deep understanding or meaningful learning.

Examinations that aren’t socioculturally responsive can make existing inequalities even more pronounced.

What solution do you propose?

We don’t argue that west Africa should abandon regional exams or standardised assessments altogether. Rather, we argue that assessment systems should become more responsive to the students’ societies and cultures. They need to be more equitable.

Equitable examination isn’t simply about giving every student exactly the same examination. It should give all students fair opportunities to understand what’s expected of them and to demonstrate what they know.

We propose that examination developers pay greater attention to students’ languages, lived experiences, cultural contexts and ways of making meaning.

Practically, this means:

• using clearer and more accessible language in questions

• including visuals and representations

• using culturally relevant and locally meaningful examples

• reviewing examination items for cultural bias

• involving educators, students, linguists and local communities from different regions in the design and review of assessment items.

This approach does not weaken standards. Rather, it strengthens the validity and fairness of assessment. It would measure students’ actual knowledge and abilities rather than their familiarity with dominant cultural norms or linguistic conventions.

We also propose that examination bodies involve communities throughout the process of developing tests.

How does your solution address differences between countries in the region?

This approach keeps the regional examination system but is more sensitive to national and local realities. The participating countries share some educational histories, but they differ in language use, cultural practices, school resources, rural and urban experiences, and everyday examples familiar to students.

A socioculturally responsive approach would require examination bodies to review whether the language, images, examples and scenarios used in questions are meaningful across these different contexts.

– Cultural bias in west Africa’s school-leaver exam questions puts many students at a disadvantage
– https://theconversation.com/cultural-bias-in-west-africas-school-leaver-exam-questions-puts-many-students-at-a-disadvantage-283154

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Annika Surmeier, Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, University of Cape Town

Globally, about one in five people in jobs live in poverty. A key reason lies in how global supply chains are organised. From agriculture to tourism, many jobs are embedded in systems that keep wages low, even as they generate value for international markets.

This has brought renewed urgency to the living wage debate. In 2024, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) formally endorsed general principles for defining and calculating living wages across different national contexts, including guidance on wage-setting and implementation. Living wages are pay for work that is high enough for the worker and their family to sustain a decent life.

We are researchers working on living wages, labour conditions and sustainable livelihoods, including those in global value chains in Africa. We argue that the growing recognition of living wages shifts the question from whether workers should earn enough to live on to how to make it happen.

But turning this idea into reality is far from straightforward. Our recent article, based on evidence from Africa, shows that some well-intentioned efforts to raise wages can backfire, while alternative approaches tailored to the local context are beginning to show more promise.

Our research is focused on socially innovative organisations in Africa. It shows that change is possible. But only if the focus shifts beyond compliance in the form of tick-box approaches and policing, and instead fosters collaboration between buyers, suppliers, workers and other actors across the value chain. This also requires moves away from constant cost-cutting through low wages and precarious work and towards supply chains that support sustainable livelihoods.

Why workers in global supply chains earn so little

Our research has analysed living wages, labour conditions and social innovation across supply chains in sectors including agriculture and tourism. It showed that global supply chains often place suppliers and workers under intense pressure to reduce costs. This is because today’s global economy is organised through complex supply chains that stretch across countries. Products like fruit, coffee or clothing are often produced in lower-income countries and sold in wealthier markets.

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Read more: Ghana’s cocoa farmers are trapped by the chocolate industry

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These systems create efficiencies and economic opportunities. But they also concentrate power in the hands of large multinational buyers, such as supermarkets or global brands. These companies typically control pricing, standards and purchasing conditions.

As a result, lead companies capture most of the value, while suppliers – and especially workers – receive a much smaller share. In some industries, producers capture only a fraction of the final retail price. To remain competitive, suppliers are under constant pressure to reduce costs.

In this environment, wages are often treated as a flexible expense. This can lead to a “race to the bottom”, where countries and companies compete by keeping labour costs low.

When good intentions go wrong

Our research shows that over the past two decades, many governments and companies along supply chains have tried to improve working conditions through standards and certification schemes. These include specific requirements related to labour conditions, health and safety, and sometimes living wages. But such compliance-based approaches can fail to deliver better outcomes – and can even make matters worse.

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Read more: Technology and supermarket chains can help strengthen southern Africa’s food systems

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South Africa’s fruit export industry offers a telling example. Supermarkets in Great Britain and Europe impose strict quality and labour standards on fruit producers. At the same time, they push for low prices and high volumes. To be able to meet these standards, farmers face higher costs, but without higher payments from buyers. Many respond by cutting labour costs: replacing permanent workers with seasonal ones, increasing workloads, or reducing benefits. As a result, standards that were designed to improve labour conditions end up contributing to more precarious work.

What works better: collaboration, not just compliance

If standards-driven approaches are not enough, what does work?

We analysed examples in depth through case studies. The cases presented here focus on inclusive tourism in South Africa, speciality coffee in Uganda, and chilli farming in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. We found that these more collaborative and locally grounded approaches can make a difference to workers’ livelihoods.

Our first example is Nando’s PERi Farms initiative. The restaurant group works with smallholder chilli farmers in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, providing technical support, access to inputs and guaranteed purchase agreements. This has helped farmers increase their incomes and invest in education and housing.

Mountain Harvest, a social enterprise in Uganda, focuses on coffee. The organisation works directly with farmers and pays higher prices for coffee beans to improve farmers’ lives. The company also supports farmers’ income diversification through crops like macadamia and avocado. An in-depth understanding of the local coffee farming context has allowed Mountain Harvest to improve conditions specifically for women employed seasonally as coffee bean sorters, a group who are often overlooked in supply chains.

In South Africa’s tourism sector, the NGO Fair Trade in Tourism has developed a certification standard that goes beyond compliance. It combines living wage requirements with mentoring, peer learning and support to strengthen businesses. We found that participating businesses reported better working conditions, higher staff retention and improved service quality.

Why these approaches succeed

All three examples share key features. First, they recognise that wages cannot be increased in isolation. Higher wages require changes in how value is distributed along the supply chain – including fairer prices paid to suppliers.

Second, they rely on long-term relationships rather than short-term transactions. Stable partnerships give suppliers the confidence to invest in their workforce.

Third, they involve collaboration across businesses, non-profit organisations and local actors. This grounds interventions in local realities.

Finally, they treat workers not just as a cost, but as humans who make important contributions to the quality and sustainability of the business.

What needs to change

Achieving living wages will require more than standards or regulations.

Companies need to rethink their sourcing practices, including how they set prices and manage supplier relationships. Governments and international companies must ensure that labour standards are supported not just by enforcement and fair trade conditions but through collaboration. And consumers, too, play a role in supporting businesses that prioritise fair wages.

– Global supply chains keep workers poor: three case studies show how the cycle can be broken
– https://theconversation.com/global-supply-chains-keep-workers-poor-three-case-studies-show-how-the-cycle-can-be-broken-283806

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Mandla J. Radebe, Professor, University of Johannesburg

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of everyday newsroom work across Africa. It has entered quietly through routine tasks such as transcription, headline writing, translation and content preparation.

In southern Africa, where AI adoption is steadily growing, its application in journalism is raising critical questions from policymakers and governments. While technology offers gains in speed and efficiency, its use remains contested due to ethical concerns and fears about job losses.

As communication and media scholars researching data and digital communication, in our study we examined its influence on production processes, ethical guardrails and job security. Interviews with senior editors revealed that, while AI improves efficiency and, in some cases, quality, it still requires human expertise and editorial judgement.

Senior editors described efficiency: faster turnaround, transcription, summarisation, headline generation and story drafting. Large volumes of information can be processed within tight newsroom deadlines. Most editors do not see AI as an immediate threat to jobs. Ethical concerns remain, prompting some newsrooms to adopt internal guidelines.

AI is already helping journalists sharpen headlines, summarise reports, generate illustrations, transcribe interviews and clean up copy under pressure. In some Zimbabwean newsrooms, AI-powered presenters are already reading weather bulletins and assist with news delivery.

Yet caution prevails. Editors are experimenting with AI because newsroom pressures demand efficiency, but they remain determined not to surrender editorial judgement to machines.

This caution reflects broader structural pressures. Print circulation has declined, advertising revenue remains fragile and newsroom staffing has shrunk. In South Africa, newspaper circulation declined by 17.3% in 2024, with several major titles reducing operations or shifting to digital-first models. Journalists are expected to produce more content, across multiple platforms, at greater speed.

AI, however, introduces its own risks, including factual inaccuracies, hidden bias embedded in training data and weak contextual understanding. For example, AI systems may reproduce racial, gender, political, or cultural biases while struggling to interpret satire, local idioms and politically nuanced African contexts. As a result, editors emphasise that AI must remain under firm human control.

AI is doing the routine work first

The first newsroom functions being reshaped by AI are repetitive tasks. Editors described using AI for headline optimisation, summarising, transcription and minor editing. These are labour-intensive processes but do not determine editorial direction.

In Zimbabwe, experimentation is more advanced in selected organisations. AI avatars, AI-powered digital news presenters capable of delivering human-like news bulletins through synthetic voices, facial expressions and automated script reading, are presenting weather updates and selected content.

South African newsrooms remain more restrained. AI is mainly used in editing, reporting and headline optimisation. Full article generation remains limited because editors insist on rigorous human verification.

For now, AI functions as an assistant rather than a substitute.

Why editors remain reluctant to trust it

The central issue is credibility. Generative AI produces fluent language, but fluency does not guarantee accuracy. It predicts plausible content rather than verifying truth. So it can generate convincing but incorrect information. One example is in the saga involving the development of the South African AI strategy by government. It was found to contain several fictitious academic references likely generated by AI hallucinations.

Editors in both countries highlighted this risk. Zimbabwean editors noted that AI often draws from online sources without distinguishing between verified reporting and misinformation. South African editors raised concerns about plagiarism, weak attribution and unverifiable sourcing.

This creates a paradox: AI speeds up writing but also creates more work, as journalists must verify machine-generated content before publication.

The African challenge is bigger than accuracy

Accuracy is only part of the problem. Many AI systems struggle with African linguistic and cultural contexts. Editors reported issues with pronunciation of indigenous names and poor handling of local nuance.

Most AI systems are developed in the global north and trained on western datasets, leaving African languages underrepresented. This calls for greater investment in African-centred AI research, local language datasets, and inclusive digital innovation policies.

African newsrooms are adopting tools that do not fully recognise their communication environments. Editors argued that locally grounded AI systems will be necessary to reflect African realities and avoid deepening technological dependence.

Will AI reduce journalism jobs?

While fears about job losses are widespread, editors offered a more measured view. Most do not expect journalists to disappear but anticipate pressure on technical roles such as sub-editing and layout.

Some acknowledged that media owners may eventually use AI to justify leaner staffing. But high costs remain a barrier. In Zimbabwe, in particular, expensive subscriptions and infrastructure challenges limit adoption.

In South Africa, editors similarly noted that current adoption levels are too limited to drive major labour restructuring. For now, AI is reshaping workflows rather than eliminating jobs. For example, one editor noted that AI tools have improved audience analytics and helped identify stories most likely to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. It also freed financial resources that can be redirected towards hiring freelance journalists.

Policy is falling behind technology

A key concern is that newsroom governance is not keeping pace with technological change. Zimbabwe’s Zimpapers group has introduced internal AI policies addressing disclosure, verification and training. Many South African newsrooms have yet to formalise such frameworks. The inputs from editors suggest that while existing press codes and ethical frameworks provide a basis for addressing AI-related challenges, they still need to be adapted to respond to the new ethical, operational and transparency risks posed by AI.

This gap matters because journalism depends on public trust. Readers need transparency when AI is used, and journalists require clear guidelines on accountability.

Without safeguards, efficiency gains risk undermining credibility.

Journalism remains a human responsibility

The central lesson is not that AI should be resisted, nor that journalism faces immediate automation. Rather, journalism remains fundamentally human because public trust depends on judgement, responsibility and context.

Machines can generate text and process information quickly, but they cannot fully grasp political sensitivity, moral consequence or historical meaning.

For this reason, editors in both countries maintain a clear position that AI may assist the newsroom, but journalism must remain under human editorial control.

– AI and journalism in southern Africa: editors are using it but balanced with human expertise and editorial judgement
– https://theconversation.com/ai-and-journalism-in-southern-africa-editors-are-using-it-but-balanced-with-human-expertise-and-editorial-judgement-282644

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ursula Hoadley, Professor, University of Cape Town

South Africa’s schooling system presents a striking paradox. Fewer than one in five grade 4 learners can read for meaning, yet more than 60% of young people (aged 15 to 24) eventually complete grade 12. Matric (school leaving exam) pass rates have been rising steadily and reached record highs in recent years, especially in poorer schools.

How do so many learners make it through the system when their early learning paths suggest they should not?

This question motivated recent work by our research project, the Mixed Methods Investigation of Learner Assessment Progress and Support, located at Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Fifty teachers in eight high schools were interviewed about how learners move through the schooling system. We also drew on existing quantitative databases, official reports and policy documents.

Rather than offering a single explanation, the research identifies a set of interlocking policies and practices that enable learners to reach grade 12 even when mastery of grade-level content is limited.

The system operates with two competing pressures:

• keeping learners in school and moving through the grades

• upholding the quality of learning.

This tension places teachers under immense strain, especially without adequate remediation opportunities for learners with large learning gaps.

A hybrid system of promotion and progression

When large numbers of learners fall behind, education systems typically choose between two strategies: grade retention, where learners repeat until they meet minimum requirements; or social promotion, where they advance regardless of performance. Grade retention is used in many low- and middle-income countries, like Brazil. Social promotion is used across a range of contexts, from Denmark to Ghana. South Africa uses both.

Official policy limits learners to repeating only once per school phase (foundation, intermediate, senior). After that, they must progress to the next grade even if they haven’t met the requirements for promotion. This “years-in-phase” rule was introduced partly to reduce over-age learners in the system and control the cost of repetition, where repeaters consume around 8% of the national education budget. Only 30% to 40% of learners reach matric without repeating.

The result is a hybrid system that retains some learners to repeat the grade while allowing others to progress to the next grade despite not having met the promotion requirements.

In practice, many learners enter high school without the curriculum knowledge they should have.

One of the striking findings of the study is how poorly progression status is understood at the school level. Many teachers are unaware of how many progressed learners are in their classes, or even how to identify them. This information exists in learner records, but is rarely used to plan teaching or provide additional support.

Teachers in our study reported significant academic gaps, especially in grades 8 and 9. Learners may struggle to read, write or perform basic calculations, yet are expected to engage with increasingly demanding content. Without dedicated support structures, teachers are left to “turn stones into bread”, as one teacher put it.

School-based assessment makes passing possible

Promotion decisions depend heavily on school-based assessments – projects, tests, assignments, orals and practical tasks set and marked by teachers.

Over time, the weighting of these assessments relative to examinations has increased, especially during and after the COVID-19 period. Our research shows they are often leniently marked and rarely failed. Learners are frequently given multiple opportunities to complete tasks, with help from teachers or parents. As one grade 8 mathematics teacher explained:

We mark and return the work to them so that they can fix what they have done. The mandate is that no child should fail an assignment. They can fail a test but not an assignment. If they fail you have to give it back to them so that they redo.

As a result, school-based assessment marks often compensate for weak examination performance. Administrative data confirm widespread “bunching” of learner marks just above pass cut-offs, particularly at the end of the school year. One teacher explained:

We get told, ‘you have too many failures’, ‘go back to rectify’. So those close to 30%, they get pushed up.

Predictable exams and teaching to the test

Examination formats have become more predictable. Past papers are recycled. Teachers in the study described coaching learners to recognise recurring question types, memorise essays and rehearse model answers.

That might help learners move through the grades, but it can discourage deeper conceptual understanding and potentially limit learners’ ability to transfer knowledge to unfamiliar contexts.

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Read more: What’s stopping kids from learning useful skills? Short answer: exams

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Bureaucratic and political pressure to pass

Matric results are publicly reported and used to evaluate schools and provincial education systems, which intensifies the focus on pass rates. Retaining learners, by contrast, involves onerous administrative procedures and increases financial pressure on the system. Progression, therefore, becomes not only a decision about learning, but an organisational and political one.

Teachers in the study felt that their professional judgment was overridden in the process. The ethical dilemma of passing students, knowing they are not academically prepared for the next grade and are unlikely to receive additional support there, is deeply felt.

Intensive support arrives late, and unevenly

In addressing academic backlogs, the system concentrates its resources at the very end of schooling. Grade 12 learners benefit from extra classes, revision camps, NGO programmes and targeted district interventions. These “just-in-time” strategies are designed to push learners over the matric finish line.

Grades 8 and 9 often receive less experienced teachers and minimal additional support. The study found that in some schools, student teachers are assigned to lower secondary grades while senior teachers focus on matric classes.

By matric, the cohort is smaller and more resilient

Many learners drop out or repeat before reaching grade 12; currently just over 60% of youth will obtain a matric. Those who remain tend to be more academically able and more resilient. And motivation increases as matric approaches.

However, schools also engage in gatekeeping, recent research shows, discouraging weaker learners from proceeding to grade 12 if they are seen as a risk to overall pass rates. The eventual matric cohort is therefore winnowed and intensively supported.

Progression without remediation comes at a cost

Taken together, these dynamics explain how learner flows to grade 12 are sustained despite poor early learning outcomes.

The hybrid model is not inherently flawed, but is poorly understood and insufficiently supported. We argue that progression must be accompanied by realistic, well-resourced strategies to address learning gaps early, especially in lower secondary grades.

The challenge is to ensure that reaching the end of school represents meaningful learning, not just survival through the system.

– Getting through school in South Africa: how learners make it to the end after a poor start
– https://theconversation.com/getting-through-school-in-south-africa-how-learners-make-it-to-the-end-after-a-poor-start-282533

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Paul Bowen, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Construction Economics and Management, University of Cape Town

The first shipment of Lenacapavir, a long-acting injectable that prevents HIV with two shots a year, arrived in South Africa from the United States in early April 2026. Clinical trials showed close to 100% efficacy. The rollout, expected to begin in June 2026, prioritises adolescent girls and young women, pregnant and breastfeeding women, transgender people, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and people who inject drugs.

These are the right populations to start with. But one group repeatedly slips through the cracks: adult, employed men in mobile, male-dominated industries, who move between work sites and home, between long-term partners and casual or paid encounters. In epidemiology, they are a “bridging population”: people whose sexual networks connect higher-prevalence groups to lower-prevalence groups.

In 2017, UNAIDS named the problem in its Blind Spot report, showing that men across sub-Saharan Africa are less likely than women to test for HIV, less likely to be on treatment, and more likely to die of Aids-related illness. A 2022 meta-analysis of 168 studies confirmed that across sub-Saharan Africa, men remain missing along the HIV care continuum, and South Africa, with the world’s largest HIV burden, is a particular concern. South African men are less likely than women to know their HIV status, link to treatment less often, and are 27% more likely to die from HIV.

For decades, South Africa’s HIV campaigns have focused on awareness. That work has largely succeeded: in our work on HIV-related risk behaviour and condom use among male construction workers, spanning 2008 to date, nearly all participants understood how HIV is transmitted and what condoms do. The problem is that this knowledge does not translate into consistent behaviour. We are researchers working in the field of HIV/Aids in the South African construction industry since 2008, with a particular focus on the psycho-social aspects of the disease. We focus primarily on site-based construction workers.

Like the military, mining and trucking industries, construction work is highly mobile and male-dominated. Workers move between sites, spend long periods away from long-term partners, and live in worker hostels where shebeens and sex work flourish. These conditions are linked to multiple and overlapping partnerships, long identified as a key driver of transmission.

In our 2023 study, we showed how condom use varies by partner type: participants were far more likely to use condoms with sex workers and casual partners than with long-term partners. A follow-up study of participants reporting concurrent relationships confirmed that what predicted consistent use was not awareness, but how much men felt they could insist on and use a condom, and how much at risk they felt.

Attitudes to condoms matter

In our most recent study of male construction workers who self-reported that they were clients of sex workers, the same pattern held: how much men felt they could insist on and use a condom (perceived control), and their attitudes towards condoms, mattered far more than awareness. Men in this group were also relatively more likely to use condoms with sex workers, and less so with long-term partners. It looks like sensible risk management, and at the individual level it is. But HIV prevalence among female sex workers in South Africa is around 62%.

It only takes one unprotected encounter to acquire the virus, and once a man does acquire it, his steady partner becomes his highest-probability transmission target: not because she is high risk in the abstract, but because the sex is unprotected.

The evidence on this is consistent.

A KwaZulu-Natal study found HIV prevalence of 21% among rural partners of migrant men and 26% among the men themselves, with modelling suggesting that migration accounts for a tenfold increase in HIV among migrants’ female partners. Similarly, female partners of migrant miners in the southern African region have been found to be 8% more likely to be HIV positive than partners of non-migrants, and miners themselves are 15% more likely to be HIV positive.

Because condoms are associated with risky sex, introducing one into a marriage may import a meaning of infidelity. Research with married couples in rural South Africa has documented the pattern directly. Married women who suggested condom use described being beaten after raising it. Others said persistence risked the husband seeking sex outside the marriage. The rational choice for a woman in a long-term relationship who suspects her husband is at risk is often to say nothing, even when saying nothing may be the choice that infects her.

Age-disparate relationships

Relationships where young women have partners five or more years older have become more common over the past two decades. A report by the Human Sciences Research Council shows such partnerships among adolescents rose from around 39% in 2005 to nearly 48% in 2017.

A recent national study found that young women in relationships with men who were five or more years older faced higher rates of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, intimate partner violence and pregnancy than peers not in such partnerships. The age gap and financial dependence which often accompanies such partnerships leave little room to negotiate condom use. As one participant put it: “When he says no condom, I can’t say no to him.”

Why this matters for the Lenacapavir rollout

Who is reached matters as much as how many. Clinics, schools and maternal health programmes do not easily accommodate men who spend up to ten hours a day on site, change sites every few months, and distrust formal health settings.

The priority groups for the Lenacapavir rollout are the right ones. These are the populations at highest risk of acquiring HIV.

But the rollout still has a gap. Protecting people who are likely to acquire HIV is one half of prevention; reaching the people who transmit it is the other. A 36 year old woman in a rural area, who is not pregnant, not breast feeding and not a sex worker, is not a priority, but she is at risk every time her migrant husband comes home. The husband himself, older, employed, heterosexual, and likely having casual or paid sexual encounters during his time away, fits no category the rollout names, even though he is the one who acquires and transmits HIV.

Estimates indicate that sex between clients of female sex workers and their long-term partners accounted for 42% of new infections in South Africa between 2010 and 2019. Female sex workers are in the priority list, their clients are not. A strategy that does not address who transmits HIV will always have a gap.

Two practical shifts would help.

First, prevention services, PrEP, post-exposure prophylaxis, testing and, where appropriate, Lenacapavir, must reach men where they already are: construction sites, transport hubs, taxi ranks, and mining hostels. The Test@Work model, piloted in the UK and adaptable in South Africa, shows opt-in workplace testing in general health checks achieves high uptake among men who rarely visit clinics.

Second, men who are clients of sex workers, and older men in age-disparate relationships with young women, should be named explicitly in the national prevention framework. They are a bridging population into otherwise low risk groups, including adolescent and young women.

Kamal Yakubu is a co-author on this article.

– HIV in South Africa: why rolling out a groundbreaking new shot will miss a critical group of men
– https://theconversation.com/hiv-in-south-africa-why-rolling-out-a-groundbreaking-new-shot-will-miss-a-critical-group-of-men-282618

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Valentin Buffa, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Palaeontology, University of Zurich

The origin of turtles has always been a bit of a puzzle for scientists who study the evolution of animals. To this day, where they fit in the tree of life remains a highly debated topic.

The evolutionary relationships of most vertebrate groups are well understood. Thanks to genetic and morphological (anatomical, body shape) data, even animals with highly specialised skeletons can be clearly placed on the animal family tree. Examples include whales or birds.

Turtles, however, have long remained an exception. Genetic studies identify them as relatives of the so-called archosaurs. This is a group that includes modern birds and crocodiles as well as extinct reptiles like dinosaurs and pterosaurs. But the fossil record seemed to tell a different story. Living turtles and their fossil relatives were so specialised that they offered few clues that would link even the oldest turtle fossils to other reptile groups. Or so scientists thought.

Our international team of palaeontologists has now provided a comprehensive reassessment of the turtle’s place in the animal world. Our analysis sheds new light on the relationships among primitive turtles. It confirms that Eunotosaurus africanus, a fossil from South Africa and Malawi, which was presumed to be a “proto-turtle”, is not a direct ancestor of modern turtles. Instead, this animal is very distantly related to modern reptiles, finding its deep root among much older reptilian ancestors that have no modern representatives.

Based on anatomy, the phylogenetic analysis also provides the first robust support from fossil studies for the close relationship between turtles and the archosaur (bird-crocodilian) lineage.

For more than 20 years, genetic data and anatomical data reached different conclusions about the relationships of turtles. Now they agree.

Comparing reptile anatomy

Fifteen researchers from South Africa, the US, UK, France and Germany participated in the study. Their combined expertise included:

• computed tomography (CT) technology (advanced x-rays)

• reptilian anatomy and phylogenetics

• Permo-Triassic stratigraphy (the study of rock layers where fossils are found).

The combination was critical to obtain these groundbreaking results. Collection staff from the Evolutionary Studies Institute, Iziko South African Museum, National Museum, Albany Museum and Council for Geoscience in South Africa were also instrumental in enabling access to the specimens.

The team painstakingly compiled anatomical comparisons across more than 200 fossil reptile species. We hoped to find previously overlooked similarities between early shelled turtles, their shell-less predecessors, and other early reptiles. Comparisons of the bones that frame the brain cavity were particularly important. These couldn’t previously be seen by scientists, but with powerful CT scanning methods their anatomy was laid bare.

Particularly surprising was what we learned about Eunotosaurus africanus, a 30cm-long burrowing reptile that lived in southern Africa some 260 million years ago. Previous studies considered it as the oldest known member of the turtle family, or a “proto-turtle”. Its broadened trunk and wide ribs looked something like a turtle shell. We studied almost all of the material of Eunotosaurus available in South African collections to address this idea once again.

Our working group at the Evolutionary Studies Institute studies some of the oldest rock layers from the Karoo Basin of South Africa, where Eunotosaurus is found. If Eunotosaurus was indeed a “proto-turtle”, we’d expect to find the forerunners of living lizards, crocodiles or birds (that is, reptiles) in these same layers. Paradoxically, we’ve found no other close relatives of modern reptiles at all. This made us suspect that even if turtles are ancient relatives of living birds and crocodilians, perhaps Eunotosaurus was no “proto-turtle” at all.

One breakthrough was reconstructing the bones of the braincase (housing the brain and ear) from high-resolution x-ray images of fossil and living reptiles. By peering inside the skull of Eunotosaurus, and comparing its bones with those of undisputed fossil turtles, we could see previously out-of-reach aspects of their anatomy for the first time.

These x-ray scans revealed the very primitive anatomy of Eunotosaurus. For example, it has bones in the back of the skull that were lost in turtles and all living reptiles. Features like a slender ear bone (the stapes) and the hooked fifth toe that are present in many living reptiles and other fossil turtles were completely lacking in Eunotosaurus. In contrast, the braincase of unambiguous fossil turtles, such as Proganochelys quenstedti, shared a suite of characteristics that are found in the ancestors of crocodilians and birds, but absent in Eunotosaurus.

These lines of evidence provides firm anatomical support that turtles are the closest living relatives of archosaurs. When Eunotosaurus was considered a “proto-turtle”, many of these features were considered to have evolved independently in the turtle lineage. Now, we show that turtles share these features with their archosaur relatives because they inherited them from a common ancestor.

These new results now place the origin of turtles where it fits better with both fossil and genetic data. When geneticists study living turtles, they compare their DNA to modern birds, crocodiles and lizards to infer evolutionary relationships. Our fossil findings now align with what those genetic comparisons have been suggesting all along: turtles branched off from the same ancestor that gave rise to crocodiles and birds.

Instead of being a living group of relics with ancestors present in the Middle Permian, turtles, like other modern reptiles, diversified and evolved their shell in the Triassic Period, approximately 20 million years after Eunotosaurus was already extinct.

With turtles now firmly placed among their closest living relatives, palaeontologists will need to reassess other long-standing questions about reptile evolution. Advanced imaging techniques like computed tomography should now be applied to other enigmatic fossil groups, potentially clarifying their evolutionary relationships.

Our work highlights the fact that overlooked early reptile fossils, particularly those found in the South African fossil record, may hold the key to understanding reptile relationships.

– Turtles finally have a place in the tree of life: X-ray study of South African fossils was a decider
– https://theconversation.com/turtles-finally-have-a-place-in-the-tree-of-life-x-ray-study-of-south-african-fossils-was-a-decider-282871

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rod Crompton, Visiting Adjunct Professor, African Energy Leadership Centre, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand

The supply of crude oil to the world had been reduced by about 7.5% to 10.1% by March 2026 in what the World Bank described as the largest oil market disruption in history. The fall was a result of the attacks on Iran by Israel and the US and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

No country was spared the impact. For some the economic fallout has been dramatic. In the case of South Africa, which imports all its oil and 81% of its petrol, diesel and paraffin consumption, the effects have so far been felt mainly in the price. This has caused the government to subsidise petrol and diesel.

In this article we explore the problems with official data, the mismanagement of strategic stock and the possibility of developing domestic oil and gas supplies.

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Read more: Iran war is exposing South Africa’s dependency on diesel: what went wrong

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Both of us have been closely involved in the energy sector for some decades. Rod Crompton teaches and researches the topic. Prior to that he was responsible for fuel price regulation and strategic stocks at the Department of Minerals and Energy before serving 11 years on the board of the National Energy Regulator of South Africa. Bruce Young spent 30 years at the petrochemical giant Sasol before joining academia.

Our analysis of the current situation is that South Africans should be concerned about the fact that the quality of fuel data is very poor and the country only has a rough idea of where it stands in relation to fuel stocks. Based on our reading of the situation it appears that the government doesn’t have much idea of how much trouble it’s in.

As a small player in a large global market, not really knowing how much fuel your country needs is a problem. And not having adequate strategic stocks leaves the country vulnerable to global shortages caused by the Iran war.

The gaps

There are huge challenges in the data about fuel stocks and needs. For example, the Fuels Industry Association of South Africa 2024 annual report data shows that net imports of petrol, diesel and kerosene were 81% of consumption, based on data claiming that diesel imports were 118% of consumption. According to this data set, LPG imports were a staggering 1,685% of consumption. These are obviously highly improbable numbers. The fuels industry data is based on official sources (South African Revenue Service and Department of Mineral Resources and Energy).

In addition, National Treasury is concerned about the discrepancies between actual and reported imports. It is also concerned about illegal “spiking” of diesel with paraffin, which carries a lower tax rate, with cases reaching 68%.

According to the South African Revenue Service, organised criminal networks smuggle and illegally adulterate fuel and many of the fuel-storage and distribution depots are involved in the adulteration of all fuel products. Fuel adulteration costs the fiscus approximately R3.6 billion (US$220.5 million) per year, according to the International Trade Administration Commission.

There are also concerns around stocks of crude oil.

Many countries hold strategic stocks of crude oil for events like the Iran war. The International Energy Agency mandates its member countries to hold 90 days of oil imports. South African policy requires “at least three months total consumption”, taking into account the production of synthetic fuels from coal by Sasol.

South Africa’s strategic crude oil storage capacity is substantial and could meet 88 days of consumption. But tank capacity is not the same as stock.

Strategic stock is kept secret. The country’s Strategic Fuel Fund accounts to Parliament through the portfolio committee on mineral and petroleum resources. Although the quantity of stocks was not disclosed, in its March 2025 report the committee raised concern about “insufficient” strategic fuel reserves.

It seems that South Africa currently holds only about 7.7 million to 8 million barrels. In May 2025 the international news agency Reuters reported that South Africa had strategic crude stocks of about 7.7 million barrels. Local reports have referred to approximately 8 million barrels.

The 8 million barrels would last only about 13 days against total liquid-fuels demand of about 600,000 barrels a day, or about 18 days if output from Sasol’s coal-based output of 150,000 barrels a day was taken into account. Sasol’s coal-to-liquids plants were built in the 1970s and 1980s by the apartheid regime in the face of anti-apartheid oil sanctions. Sasol was gradually privatised from 1979 with substantial state guarantees.

Beyond what’s actually being held in stock there’s an additional problem. Storage is concentrated on the west coast at Saldanha Bay and there’s no readily available means of transporting crude oil across the country to the oil refinery in Sasolburg, which is 1,400km away.

South Africa’s other weak spot when it comes to fuel is a lack of inland storage capacity for refined products. The country imports most of its refined products. Storage capacity is concentrated at the country’s major ports, far away from its industrial heartland.

The need for more strategically placed storage capacity was identified in the Moerane Investigation Panel into Fuel Supply Shortages more than 20 years ago. The panel was established in response to the 2005 fuel supply crisis. The panel recommended that South Africa review its strategic stock policy and strengthen refined product stockholding requirements.

It also noted that the country lacked strategic refined fuel inventories despite increasing dependence on imported petroleum products.

But these recommendations were never acted on.

What role, if any, can the private sector play?

There is provision in the fuel price regulations for oil companies to hold stocks. Producers and importers are paid through the pricing regulations to hold 25 days’ stock and wholesalers 14 days’ stock. But we don’t know if they actually do so as the commercial imperative is to hold as little as possible and the government seems to lack the capacity to police this.

Nor is private-sector storage a substitute. Oil companies and large fuel users do have tanks at refineries, import terminals, depots, airports, mines, farms, factories and logistics sites. But this is mostly operational storage. It is product-specific, commercially committed and designed to keep fuel moving through the supply chain. It is not designed to provide long-duration national cover.

Governance of strategic stocks

The governance of strategic stocks is a sore point.

South Africa has already experienced a major governance failure involving its strategic crude oil reserves. In 2015/16 the state-owned Strategic Fuel Fund sold about 10 million barrels of strategic crude oil to commodity traders including Vitol, Taleveras and Venus Rays. The Western Cape High Court later set the transaction aside, finding that it had been conducted unlawfully and without proper approval or oversight.

Critics argued that the transaction effectively depleted South Africa’s emergency reserves through a secretive and poorly governed process that primarily benefited oil traders and intermediaries.

The episode exposed serious weaknesses in the governance of South Africa’s strategic fuel stocks. These concerns have never fully disappeared. Parliamentary oversight processes in 2025 continued to raise concerns about reserve adequacy, underutilisation of storage infrastructure, fragmented governance arrangements, and unresolved oversight and accountability issues.

Funding strategic stocks involves difficult trade-offs. Given South Africa’s constrained fiscal position, it is not obvious that the state can simply fund a R78 billion (USS$4.7 billion) to R79 billion stock-rebuilding programme from the fiscus. But a purely private solution is also unrealistic. Private firms do not generally have spare strategic-scale storage and will not voluntarily hold large volumes of idle stock.

The likely solution is a hybrid model: better data, a credible state reserve, mandatory and incentivised industry stockholding and policing thereof, levy-funded procurement over time, clear emergency-access rules, transparent reporting and independent oversight.

New finds

The oil crisis makes exploration for oil and gas in the offshore Orange Basin more attractive for the country. The basin lies off South Africa’s west coast. Geologically, it extends into Namibian waters, where oil companies have recently made massive oil and gas finds. There are high hopes in the oil industry that oil will also be found in South African waters.

But it won’t be quick; it will take about 10 years, if successful. There is regulatory uncertainty, ultra-deepwater technical challenges, no existing oil infrastructure, and other countries which oil companies find more attractive.

Despite these difficulties, South Africa will need petrol and diesel for a long time to come. Those concerned about the security of supply of oil and gas should be giving serious thought to removing the obstacles to oil and gas exploration that are holding South Africa back. Namibia has shown that it can be done.

– South Africa’s fuel supply and the Iran war: data black holes and low strategic stock put the country at risk
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-fuel-supply-and-the-iran-war-data-black-holes-and-low-strategic-stock-put-the-country-at-risk-283913

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Nicole Goldin, Head of Equitable Development, United Nations University

A recent development in the credit rating space could signal important progress in one of the more intractable challenges in global development finance. The challenge is how countries can manage periods of acute debt stress without being pushed prematurely towards default.

The current system can discourage countries facing acute financial stress from seeking temporary liquidity relief, because doing so may trigger market reactions that worsen borrowing conditions. Delays in seeking support can, in turn, deepen financial instability.

But Fitch Ratings, one of the world’s three major credit rating agencies, has revised its sovereign rating criteria. This is the analytical framework for assessing country creditworthiness.

At first glance, the change concerns a narrow technical issue: when countries can temporarily pause bond repayments without being treated as being in “default”.

But the implications may be more significant. This is particularly true for emerging markets and developing economies that are highly exposed to external shocks, constrained fiscal space and heavy debt burdens.

At the heart of the revision is a longstanding problem in sovereign debt markets: the tendency of ratings frameworks to treat temporary payment difficulties as signs of deeper inability to repay debt over time.

In practice, this has often discouraged countries from seeking timely relief during periods of external disruption. This has been true even when the underlying problem is short-term financing pressure rather than an inability to repay debt over time.

That disincentive became particularly visible during the pandemic. Although the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative offered temporary liquidity relief to eligible countries, few sought comparable treatment from private creditors. One reason was concern that doing so could have a number of negative consequences. These included:

• triggering sovereign downgrades, which can signal increased financial risk to investors

• increasing borrowing costs

• being excluded from some international lending and investment markets.

These fears overrode the intentions of the measures: to provide short-term breathing space.

Fitch’s revision signals a cautious shift in that logic. The agency now clarifies the circumstances under which bounded, rules-based payment deferrals may not be treated as defaults. The change reflects growing recognition that temporary liquidity relief, when tightly structured and transparently governed, need not automatically constitute a negative credit event.

What is changing remains modest. It nevertheless suggests that sovereign debt markets are beginning to develop ways to distinguish temporary financial stress from deeper solvency problems. This will allow countries to manage shocks before they escalate into full debt restructuring episodes.

This matters because disorderly defaults and prolonged restructurings can impose major economic and social costs. In turn these can hinder investment and halt development and growth, especially in emerging and developing economies.

Structured flexibility is key to temporary relief

Fitch’s revision was prompted in part by proposals advanced by the London Coalition. This is an informal group of private creditors and official actors convened by the UK government in 2025. It has advocated for broader adoption of debt pause clauses. The idea is to provide temporary relief during clearly defined external shocks such as climate disasters.

Crucially, the proposed architecture is heavily constrained. Creditor safeguards are embedded throughout the design.

The message from Fitch’s revision is therefore not that flexibility itself is a problem. But that unstructured flexibility is. The analytical barrier has been uncertainty, opaque triggers and broad borrower discretion.

Grenada’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the dilemma these mechanisms seek to address. In 2020, Grenada requested an eight-month suspension on payments due under a restructured sovereign bond from private creditors, despite the bond already containing a hurricane-linked debt pause clause. Because the clause was tied to a narrowly defined natural disaster trigger, it could not be activated for a pandemic shock.

The request was ultimately unsuccessful.

The episode showed that contractual mechanisms are often too narrow to address the range of shocks countries face. Climate events, commodity price volatility, pandemics and global financial tightening can all generate acute liquidity stress without necessarily implying insolvency.

Yet sovereign debt frameworks have not allowed countries to absorb shocks like these without setting off a default or restructuring.

Signalling a new direction

That challenge is becoming increasingly urgent, as more countries face the prospect of debt restructuring. This is a process governments go through to renegotiate debt repayments with creditors when debt repayments become unsustainable.

The International Monetary Fund’s recent stocktake of private sector sovereign debt restructuring noted that the number of restructurings since 2020 has been relatively limited. But, it noted, they were often more economically damaging and prolonged than in earlier debt cycles.

This is where Fitch’s revision may prove significant. It suggests that financial tools designed to help countries manage short-term crises may be able to operate within existing market rules, rather than automatically being treated as as signs of default or financial collapse.

This has broader relevance in the context of the UN Financing for Development agenda, including the Seville Commitment, agreed in July 2025. This calls for earlier, more orderly responses to sovereign financial stress. Such approaches depend on mechanisms that allow countries facing exogenous shocks to:

• pause payments temporarily

• stabilise their finances

• recover without automatically facing sharp increases in borrowing costs or loss of market access.

Fitch’s revision does not go as far as broader market reform ambitions reflected in the Seville Agenda. But it does signal that tightly governed, rules-based payment suspensions need not be automatically treated as credit negative.

Importantly, this shift is procedural rather than ideological. It does not rewrite the basic rules of sovereign debt markets. Instead, it clarifies the conditions under which temporary payment suspensions can be used without automatically being treated as signs of default.

That gives investors, governments, and credit rating agencies greater clarity about how such mechanisms operate and how they should be assessed.

Distinguishing stress from insolvency

The revision itself remains narrow. The proposed clauses are voluntary, largely untested at scale and do not address situations of fundamentally unsustainable debt. Nor does the change produce immediate rating adjustments.

Reform in sovereign debt governance rarely arrives through sweeping overhaul. More often, it proceeds through cautious accommodation: incremental changes that gradually become embedded within market practice. Fitch’s revision may prove to be one small but revealing step in that direction.

This is an edited version of the post first published by UNU-CPR, Fitch’s Recent Revision Signals a Notable Shift in Sovereign Debt Governance.

– Rating agency Fitch changes its criteria on pausing debt repayments: why it matters
– https://theconversation.com/rating-agency-fitch-changes-its-criteria-on-pausing-debt-repayments-why-it-matters-283098