Africa Center Commentary & Analysis

A Discussion with the Angola Open Policy Initiative

The Southern African nation of Angola has made commendable economic progress since emerging from a twenty-seven-year long civil war in 2002. Rich in natural resources, it has become Africa’s second largest oil producer and has enjoyed a decade of strong GDP growth while gaining in global importance—in 2009, the United States identified Angola as one […]

US help against Boko Haram: “Everything we can do” is not very much

By Bronwyn Bruton

Amid surging public outrage in Nigeria and abroad over Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 223 schoolgirls, President Barack Obama has promised that the United States will do “everything it can” to rescue them. His promise follows a pledge by Secretary of State John Kerry to do “everything possible” to help the Nigerian government defeat Boko Haram, […]

Muddying the African Waters: Assessing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s Visit to Africa

By Bronwyn Bruton

Secretary of State John Kerry ended an impromptu six-day tour of Africa yesterday, May 5. The trip was undertaken with little fanfare—the State Department announced the visit just a few days before his departure—and the Secretary’s activities received little attention from the press. (None of the five major American television networks even opted to send […]

Nigerian Government Must Earn the Trust of Local Communities to Find Missing Girls

By Bronwyn Bruton

On April 14, the Nigerian terror group known as Boko Haram (which translates loosely into the phrase, “Western education is sinful”) broke into a secular, all girls’ secondary school in the small northern Nigerian town of Chibok. Dressed in Nigerian military uniforms, the militants tricked some 270 students into clambering into the backs of trucks, […]

I am Rwandan

The international community spent last week reflecting on its failure to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, thrusting Rwanda back into the spotlight at a time when praise for the country’s remarkable economic progress is increasingly tempered by concerns over less progress in the political space. To discuss the country’s achievements and the controversy that […]

Discussion with African Development Bank Presidential Candidate Birama B. Sidibé

American and European businesses are looking for avenues of investment in Africa, but are often stymied by the complexity and diversity of the continent’s national markets. As investor interest in the continent peeks, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has taken the lead in facilitating new investments on the continent. The Bank’s 2015 election of a […]

Angola’s Emerging Capital Markets

The economy of Angola is on the verge of a major transition: financial market regulations have been established, secondary debt markets are opening up, and a new stock exchange will be coming on line in 2016. This was part of the optimistic assessment presented by Vice Governor of National Bank of Angola Ricardo Viegas D’Abreu and […]

Twenty Years Later: Has Anything Changed since the Rwandan Genocide?

Despite the “never again” rhetoric that followed the 1994 Rwandan genocide, terrible violence in some African states—such as the Central African Republic, Somalia, and South Sudan—persists, and the international response to these crises has generally been slow and inadequate. The twentieth anniversary of the genocide is cause for reflection, and the Africa Center hosted an […]