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, 8 one of the larger investment deals in sub-Saharan Africa to date. Njoroge said that he had ‘to go out on the road and sell that dream to investors worldwide’. It took him two years. 9 During the process, he lost six staff members in a terrorist attack on the DusitD2 complex in Nairobi. 10 More bad news hit the company in 2020. Its farmers’ payments platform in Nigeria, Agrikore, suffered internal fraud
4 Locating the EU’s strategic behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa: an emerging strategic culture? Richard G. Whitman and Toni Haastrup There is now a need for a new phase in the Africa-EU relationship, a new strategic partnership and a Joint Africa–EU Strategy as a political vision and roadmap for the future cooperation between the two continents in existing and new areas and arenas. (Council of the European Union, 2007) Conflict is often linked to state fragility. Countries like Somalia are caught in a vicious cycle of weak governance and recurring conflict. We
This chapter looks at three aspects of sub-Saharan Africa's emerging digital life: how online content emerged, its producers and business models and the increasing controls placed on it; who uses this content and how it fits into their everyday lives; and the ways in which languages and literacy limit the use of online content. Dawn comes up on Africa's digital life Before the arrival of the international cables in 2009 and 2010, using the internet was tough, ‘like sucking the whole of global knowledge
3 French officials and the insecurities of change in sub-Saharan Africa: Dakar, 19 August 1960 revisited Alexander Keese* The history of European decolonisation on the African continent is full of intriguing events, many of which are not easily explicable. Particularly in cases in which opinion -makers in a former metropole attempt to sell the process as a ‘successful decolonisation’, such as is notably the case for the French decolonisation process (Chafer 2001: 178), these attempts tend to provoke opposition. In negative interpretations, decisions taken by
Before internet use could reach more sub-Saharan Africans, three factors had to align: lower mobile internet prices and faster speeds; cheaper mobile phones with better functionality; and attractive and widespread content apps on these improved phones to breed internet use. The opening section of this chapter looks at how this process looked from two very different perspectives: the one of a mobile phone fanboy who became an influencer; the other of an African mobile executive who grappled with some of the first mobile internet roll-outs. From
Security Council in early 2018 has unlocked £50 million for a UK network upgrade of personnel and infrastructure in Africa. There has increasingly been recognition of UK decline in Sub-Saharan Africa as other nations have upgraded and invested more deeply in their Africa networks. In January 2018, Martin Kettle in the Guardian observed that: In some respects Britain is not a global leader but a global laggard. Macron has only been president of France for eight months, but he has made six visits to Africa in that time. By contrast no British
Africa 2.0: Inside a continent’s communications revolution provides an important history of how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans and the impact they have had on their lives. The book deals with the political challenges of liberalisation and privatisation that needed to be in place to get these technologies built. It analyses how the mobile phone fundamentally changed communications in sub-Saharan Africa and the ways Africans have made these technologies part of their lives. It examines critically the technologies’ impact on development practices and the key role development actors played in accelerating things like regulatory reform, fibre roll-out and mobile money. The book considers how corruption in the industry is a prism through which patronage relationships in government can be understood. The arrival of a start-up ecosystem has the potential to break these relationships and offer a new wave of investment opportunities. The author seeks to go beyond the hype to make a provisional assessment of the kinds of changes that have happened over three decades. It examines how and why these technologies became transformative and seem to have opened out a very different future for sub-Saharan Africa.
This book deals with the planning culture and architectural endeavours that shaped the model space of French colonial Dakar, a prominent city in West Africa. With a focus on the period from the establishment of the city in the mid-nineteenth century until the interwar years, our involvement with the design of Dakar as a regional capital reveals a multiplicity of 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' dynamics. These include a variety of urban politics, policies, practices and agencies, and complex negotiations at both the physical and conceptual levels. The study of the extra-European planning history of Europe has been a burgeoning field in scholarly literature, especially in the last few decades. There is a clear tendency within this literature, however, to focus on the more privileged colonies in the contemporary colonial order of preference, such as British India and the French colonies in North Africa. Colonial urban space in sub-Saharan Africa has accordingly been addressed less. With a rich variety of historical material and visual evidence, the book incorporates both primary and secondary sources, collected from multilateral channels in Europe and Senegal. It includes an analysis of a variety of planning and architectural models, both metropolitan and indigenous. Of interest to scholars in history, geography, architecture, urban planning, African studies and Global South studies – this book is also one of the pioneers in attesting to the connection between the French colonial doctrines of assimilation and association and French colonial planning and architectural policies in sub-Saharan Africa.
The overthrow and exile of Napoleon in 1815 is a familiar episode in modern history, but it is not well known that just a few months later, British colonisers toppled and banished the last king in Ceylon. This book explores confrontations and accommodations between European colonisers and indigenous monarchs. It discusses the displacement of a few among the three dozen 'potentates' by British and French authorities from 1815 until the 1950s. The complicated relationship between the crown of a colonising country and colonial monarchies has often lain in the background of historical research, but relatively seldom appeared in the forefront except in the case of the Indian princely states. The book further examines particular cases of the deposition and exile of rulers: King Sri Vikrama Rajasinha in Ceylon in 1815, Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar in 1897, and Emperors Ham Nghi, Thanh Thai and Duy Tan in Vietnam during 1885-1916. It also provides more composite accounts of Asia and Africa: the British ouster of Indian princes, the last Burmese king and a sultan in Malaya, and then British and French removal of a host of 'chieftains' in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, the book looks at the French colonial removal of rulers in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia - and the restoration of a Moroccan sultan on the eve of decolonisation. By the end of the colonial period, in many countries around the globe, monarchism - kingship, had lost its old potency, though it has not disappeared.
Bandwidth is the petrol of the digital economy, and before the international cables were built it was supplied largely through satellite services: quality was often poor and the costs were high. Sub-Saharan Africa had ‘the lowest capacity in the world for international Internet bandwidth’. 1 Without effective internet, there were few incentives to develop local African content. This chapter looks at how sub-Saharan Africa got connected to the internet, the birth of independent African ISPs and