The “soft landing” that so many, both in Burkina Faso and abroad, had worked so hard to achieve is not to be.
At the 2014 Atlantic Dialogues in Marrakesh, Morocco, Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham spoke on the "Stopping Organized Crime at Sea" panel.
Even as, coming out of the annual NATO summit in Wales, the United States and its allies are promising to ratchet up their response to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, another militant group, Boko Haram, is rapidly gaining ground in Africa, achieving many of the same operational and strategic successes that have made ISIS such a force to be reckoned with, including significant dominion over territory and populations.
Ahmed Abdi Godane, leader of al-Shabaab, the Somali terrorist group and al-Qaeda affiliate, may have been killed in a US airstrike on Monday. The Pentagon said on Tuesday that the military was gunning for Godane in the strike and that it was confident it hit the target, though there is no confirmation Godane is dead.
Atlantic Council Executive Committee Member Ana Palacio writes for Project Syndicate on why despite this summer's Ebola threat, there are still many reasons to be optimistic about emerging opportunities in Africa:
Africa's demographic trends have been gaining attention for years, and our last maps for this week show why. Africa today has just over 1 billion people, but by the end of this century it is projected to hold more than 4 billion. Nigeria is a major part of the story; already Africa's most populous country with approximately 178 million people, its population is projected to grow to more than 900 million by 2100. Or in other words, in 2100 almost every fourth African will be a Nigerian.
