A very important festival celebrating the life, times and example of the late Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere is taking place this week at the University of Dar es Salaam. The University itself is one of the many great achievements of Nyerere and had a well deserved reputation for being a centre of radical production of [...]

Yet another African country has been in the news for the wrong reasons to the delight of many Afro pessimists. The creeping coup in Africa’s largest island country, Madagascar, finally became a comical fait accompli with the ‘resignation’ of the President and the assumption of power by a self-created transitional government of the former DJ [...]

Some time ago I was a keynote speaker at an international conference jointly hosted by two leading policy think tanks on the African continent: ECA and CODESRIA. The former was set up by the UN for Africa while the latter was set up by Africans for Africans. The ECA remains a global institution focused on [...]

The focus of many International Women’s Day activities this year was on ending violence against women. For many years activists, both feminists and non-feminists, have been campaigning against gender based violence (GBV) drawing upon several international instruments, conventions and statutes that prohibit violence against women. All African states sign up to these instruments and our [...]

The United Nations Millennium Campaign is launching a report this week on maternal mortality to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8 and we are also joining with various national partners, UN agencies and governments in various countries across Africa in a month long series of activities to draw attention to the alarming number [...]