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71. How USAID's exit could reshape northern Kenya's conservancies

Author:
Caleb Braham, Ceciliah Njagi, Emma Bostrup, Eric Kioko, and Jane Mutune
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
USAID’s withdrawal is reshaping green transition initiatives across Africa. In northern Kenya, the Northern Rangelands Trust was hit immediately – highlighting dynamics likely to emerge wherever donor‑dependent environmental institutions operate. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) is a nonprofit umbrella organisation supporting 47 community conservancies in northern and coastal Kenya, as well as parts of Uganda. Since its founding in 2004, the organisation has operated under the motto ‘Transforming lives, conserving nature.’ Today, it employs more than 1,300 people and claims to benefit over 700,000 individuals. Over the past decade USAID has been one of the NRT’s key donors. Internal financial summaries indicate cooperative agreements totalling approximately USD 34 million, of which around USD 13 million had been disbursed prior to the 2025 suspension. The funding freeze occurs at a time when the NRT is already under intense scrutiny. The organisation has faced repeated allegations of human rights abuses and violations of community land rights linked to its conservation and security activities. These controversies reflect broader tensions surrounding international conservation and development partnerships in northern Kenya, where land disputes have generated legal challenges and local opposition. In 2025, the Environment and Land Court of Kenya ruled that the NRT’s establishment of the Biliqo Bulesa and Cherab conservancies violated community land rights, highlighting the legal and procedural risks associated with such interventions. Despite these criticisms, the NRT leadership and its remaining donors continue to support the conservancy model as an appropriate mechanism for conservation and local development. As noted by a senior NRT officer: ‘You won’t get 100 percent of people supporting the conservancy model. Ten to fifteen percent may oppose it due to different interests, and competitors focus on that ten percent.’ This underscores the diversity of community interests and the contested character of conservancy governance. The NRT and its member conservancies oversee more than 10% of Kenya’s land area and perform functions typically associated with the state, including education and security provision. The withdrawal of USAID funding may therefore trigger substantial programmatic cuts and operational downsizing, with immediate repercussions for local communities and rangeland governance, especially in newer conservancies that lack financial self-sufficiency and are not integrated into carbon credit projects.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Environment, Natural Resources, USAID, Development Policy, and Global Economy
Political Geography:
Kenya and Africa

72. Green investments and local tensions in northern Kenya's drylands

Author:
Caleb Braham, Ceciliah Njagi, Emma Bostrup, Eric Kioko, and Jane Mutune
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
Large green investments in northern Kenya are reshaping how local communities use and manage their land. This is creating new legal and political tensions that risk undermining the country’s green transition. Northern Kenya plays a central role in the country’s green transition. Its drylands and rangelands have attracted large-scale investments in renewable energy, conservation and climate finance, including carbon credit projects. This is positioning the region as a strategic site for national and international green development. However, the rapid expansion of green projects in this historically marginalised region has generated significant legal and social concerns. Communities are increasingly challenging land acquisitions, with several disputes ending up in court. There are also reports that community land rights have been overlooked, opportunities for meaningful participation limited, and project benefits unevenly distributed. These conflicts are not simply symptoms of failed project implementation but reflect unresolved tensions over land governance, authority and participation that are now becoming embedded in Kenya’s green transition. They are rooted in a history of colonial land alienation, structural inequalities and centralised governance models that have long characterised the relationship between Nairobi and northern Kenya. Left unresolved, these issues have perpetuated a more concentrated authority over land and investment decisions in practice than Kenya’s 2010 constitutional reforms suggest. As green investments accelerate, these historical patterns resurface, making projects more politically sensitive and legally vulnerable. Projects that rely on perfunctory or non-transparent community involvement are more likely to encounter court action, stalled implementation and collective resistance. This, in turn, creates regulatory and political uncertainty that can undermine their long‑term stability. While this tension reflects broader global challenges of inclusive green development, it is amplified in northern Kenya by the sheer scale of land investments, the contested legal status of community land, uneven implementation of the Community Land Act and the longstanding political and economic marginalisation of pastoral regions by central state institutions. The region’s development trajectory points towards either an exclusionary green transition or one grounded in meaningful community involvement and partnership; the outcome will depend on how state institutions, donors and private investors choose to structure and govern green investments in response to the issues raised.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Environment, Natural Resources, Investment, Development Policy, and Global Economy
Political Geography:
Kenya and Africa

73. Community finance and agroecology build climate resilience in East and Central Africa

Author:
Esbern Friis-Hanse, Kristine Kaaber Pors, and Donald Kasongi
Publication Date:
05-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
Climate change has become a defining feature of rural life across Africa. Rural households face increasingly erratic rainfall, shifting seasons, prolonged droughts and destructive floods. These are no longer exceptional shocks but recurring stresses that undermine food security, livelihoods and social Agriculture remains central to African economies, employing more than half of the labour force in sub-Saharan Africa and absorbing most new entrants in contexts marked by a large youth population. Yet agriculture is also highly climate-exposed. Smallholder farmers depend on rainfall, soil fertility and seasonal predictability, conditions that climate change is steadily eroding. Public responses have often been insufficient. Agricultural extension systems have weakened in many countries, and climate finance rarely reaches smallholders effectively. Support frequently comes in the form of standardised input packages or short-term projects that fail to address structural vulnerability. In some cases, such interventions increase risk, for example when farmers take loans for inputs poorly suited to local ecological conditions. Against this backdrop, community-based institutions offer an alternative pathway. This brief draws on a multi-country learning process examining how Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) contribute to resilience-building among smallholder households in Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. It argues that VSLAs should be seen not merely as informal financial tools but as resilience-building institutions with broader policy implications.
Topic:
Agriculture, Climate Change, Rural, Resilience, and Agroecology
Political Geography:
Africa

74. Rethinking Europe's approach to a defiant Sahel

Author:
Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, Eva Stambøl, and Almamy Sylla
Publication Date:
02-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
For Europe, disengaging from the Sahel means ceding influence in a region where geopolitical competition is intensifying and where European security is increasingly interconnected with local conflicts and threats. Continued cooperation enables Europe to support stability, protect its interests and those of Sahelian countries, and maintain credible global partnerships. But as observed by a Malian economist, ‘Western policies no longer have credibility in Africa.’ (Interview, Bamako, March 2023). Across Africa, anti-colonial and neo‑pan-African discourses have gained strength since the early 2020s, influencing domestic politics and shaping alliance shifts. Their core aims are renewed sovereignty and a more equal global order, less dominated by Eurocentrism and Western hegemony. These ideas inform political ideology not only in countries such as Senegal, Benin, the Central African Republic and Chad, but have also become central to the military regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger following the coups of 2020–2023. Yet European policy debates often reductively view these ideological movements as effects of Russian propaganda or Chinese strategic expansion.1 For example, in January 2024 EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described the Sahel’s distancing from France and ECOWAS as occurring ‘at the same time that we see the Russian influence increase’, framing these changes as driven by Russia’s expanding military and political presence.2 Such interpretations deny African agency and reproduce the paternalistic, Eurocentric assumptions that anticolonial actors explicitly contest. They also ignore that contemporary anticolonialism and Pan-Africanism are not new phenomena but draw on longstanding histories of political resistance rooted in the struggles for decolonisation. These misreadings risk skewing European policy responses to regional security and development at a moment when the Sahel’s geopolitical alignments are undergoing fundamental change.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Post Colonialism, Geopolitics, and Anti-Colonialism
Political Geography:
Africa, Europe, Mali, and Sahel

75. Russia targeting African migrants in digital recruitment campaigns

Author:
Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde and Karen Philippa Larsen
Publication Date:
01-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
As the war in Ukraine approaches its fourth year, Russia faces a rising demand for labour across the army, defence industry and civilian sectors. Heavy battlefield losses make the recruitment of Russian nationals difficult, and the military’s continuous need for drones requires a large workforce for production. To fill these gaps, Russia is increasingly looking beyond its borders. Prominent cases of people from North Korea and China serving as frontline soldiers have drawn international attention. Since 2024, media reports have also indicated that Russian actors are luring migrants to the frontline with misleading promises of civilian work and citizenship through simplified procedures in exchange for military service.1 Recruitment is also increasingly targeting young African women—particularly Nigerian students to work in drone factories supporting Russia’s military war machine.2
Topic:
Labor Issues, Recruitment, Migrants, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, and Ukraine

76. Escalating Threats: Africa in the Global Terrorism Index 2026

Author:
FARAS
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Future for Advanced Research and Studies (FARAS)
Abstract:
The Institute for Economics and Peace has released the thirteenth edition of the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) for 2026 — the annual report widely regarded as the most comprehensive reference for monitoring and analyzing global terrorism patterns. The Index draws on Dragonfly’s Terrorism Tracker database, which meticulously documents terrorist incidents across approximately 163 countries, offering a detailed picture of the scale and trajectory of the phenomenon worldwide. A defining feature of this edition is its focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, where Sahel countries topped the list of nations most affected by terrorism during 2025. Against that backdrop, the report examines the scale of attacks and casualties while analyzing the most active organizations and the political and social conditions that have fueled the escalation of armed violence across the continent.
Topic:
Security, Terrorism, Violence, and Transnational Threats
Political Geography:
Africa and Sahel

77. Arena of Rivals: China, Taiwan, and the Contest for Africa

Author:
FARAS
Publication Date:
05-2026
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Future for Advanced Research and Studies (FARAS)
Abstract:
The China-Taiwan file has undergone a notable transformation at the African level. Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te concluded his visit to Eswatini on May 5, 2026 — a trip that had originally been scheduled for April 22 to 26 before being postponed, after Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar revoked overflight permits for the Taiwanese presidential aircraft. Beijing, meanwhile, received the President of Mozambique from April 18 to 22, who met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the latter’s invitation, as well as Namibia’s Minister of International Relations and Trade from April 11 to 18.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Geopolitics, and Trade
Political Geography:
Africa, China, Taiwan, Asia, and Eswatini

78. From Reform to Credibility: Rethinking How Policy Shapes Investment in Africa

Author:
Chukwuka Onyekwena and Adedeji Adeniran
Publication Date:
05-2026
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA)
Abstract:
This paper examines how policy reforms influence investment, emphasising the role of policy credibility. Using panel data for African economies, the results confirm that improvements in the policy environment are associated with higher investment. However, these effects are gradual and shaped by persistence in investment behaviour, reflecting the forward-looking nature of capital decisions. The key finding is that the effectiveness of reforms depends on their credibility. Sustained reforms over time generate stronger investment responses, while those subject to reversal or volatility have weaker effects. Policy stability does not independently drive investment; rather, it shapes how reforms are interpreted by investors. These findings suggest that attracting investment requires more than implementing reforms. It requires sustaining them in a consistent and predictable manner. Policy credibility, therefore, emerges as a critical determinant of investment outcomes
Topic:
Reform, Economy, Investment, and Credibility
Political Geography:
Africa

79. Emerging Challenges and Opportu-Nities in Humanitarian Assistance in Mozambique: A Case Study from Cabo Delgados

Author:
Fátima Chimarizeni Papelo
Publication Date:
09-2025
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brazilian Journal of African Studies
Institution:
Brazilian Journal of African Studies
Abstract:
This paper aims to analyze the emerging challenges and opportuni-ties derived from the humanitarian assistance actions applied in Cabo Del-gado in the context of violent extremism that has been ravaging the province since 2017. This topic is relevant because the traditional concept of huma-nitarian assistance presupposes support for victims of a disaster caused by nature or man-made, and the province of Cabo Delgado presents a growing demand for humanitarian assistance due to the ongoing prolonged violent conflict. In Cabo Delgado, there are victims of a violent, unconventional, low-intensity conflict. More than 1 million people are in need of humanita-rian assistance, of which more than 50% are women and children (OCHA 2021). Along with terrorism, climate disasters, such as Cyclone Keneth in 2019, and the COVID-19 Pandemic, which began affecting Mozambique in 2020, are exacerbating the state of vulnerability of humanitarian victims. Combined, these events force non-state humanitarian actors to operate in an environment characterized by uncertainty, insecurity, and unpredictability. Nevertheless, these humanitarian actors may operate beyond what is defined by traditional humanitarian principles, which concern saving lives and allevia-ting the suffering of humanitarian victims, including developmental actions that may result in the reduction of state power in the humanitarian space and that lead to the implementation of political action by external forces. If prolonged, this scenario may accentuate the weakening of state power. Given this context, one wonders what challenges and opportunities are derived from the humanitarian support process in Cabo Delgado. This paper seeks to reflect on the emerging challenges and oppor-tunities arising from the humanitarian assistance process in Cabo Delgado. Specifically, it sought to a) define what humanitarian assistance is; b) analyze the emerging challenges for humanitarian actors in Cabo Delgado; and c) analyze the emerging opportunities for humanitarian actors within the pro-cess of humanitarian assistance in the region. We started from the hypothesis that the problem of the humanitarian assistance process in the context of violent extremism creates emerging challenges and opportunities for non--state humanitarian actors that are linked to human security, management, and coordination of humanitarian actions.
Topic:
Security, Violent Extremism, Armed Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance
Political Geography:
Africa, Mozambique, and Cabo Delgados

80. Situation Analysis of the Chissano Government: Domestic Transitions and Economic Pragmatism in Mozam-Bique (1986–2004)

Author:
Ercilio Neves Brandao Langa
Publication Date:
09-2025
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brazilian Journal of African Studies
Institution:
Brazilian Journal of African Studies
Abstract:
This article analyzes the political situation of Mozambique during Chissano’s Government between 1986 and 2005, as well as the internal and external factors that contributed to the fulfillment or unfulfillment of the government’s objectives. Political, economic, and historical events are observed in order to evaluate the Chissano Government. Situation analysis is a plural methodology that allows interpreting events, facts, and causes, as well as describing the behavior of the actors involved, the correlations of force, and the internal and external interests that influence the course of politics. Another aspect that justifies using this tool is the historical time involved – 18 years between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century – characterized by transformations, transitions, and dis-tinct domestic, regional, and international political-economic changes. The situation analysis proved to be an effective tool to reach a broader and deeper perspective of the Chissano Government and the national and international context in which it developed. This methodology requires historical knowle-dge of the object of study, its context and political dynamics, the organization of local society, its behavior patterns and social values, as well as its politi-cal groups, their objectives, and interests. The text constitutes a subjective perspective, a point of view on the “Chissano era”, a political, economic, and social period in the history of Mozambique. It is an ex-post-facto analysis, as it is written decades after the events have occurred, and although it limits its scope to a short period of time, it nonetheless covers long and complex socio-economic transformations. Despite systemic changes in Mozambican society, the structure of the country’s politics has remained almost the same, led by the party-state.
Topic:
History, Economy, Domestic Politics, and Pragmatism
Political Geography:
Africa and Mozambique