If the US wants to create jobs and promote consumption of America-made products by Americans as Trump claimed during his electoral campaign, it will be hard for him to achieve such goals. The US economy is strongly tied to other economies around the world. With Trump’s rhetoric about protectionism and nationalism in an increasingly globalised world, it would be interesting to see how the US charts alone its trade and economic future.

The debate about Africa’s middle class has largely ignored earlier analyses on African elites.

Like many young people across Africa, Ugandan youth face the challenge of acquiring appropriate skills and deploying them in achieving their dreams. An essay competition at Kampala International University gave students the opportunity to reflect on this issue and to explore solutions to youth unemployment.

Djibouti is poised to transform itself if it takes advantage of this current moment of infrastructure and investment boom.

Entrepreneurship is more than just an economic term — it is a way of thinking. Creating jobs, empowering people and giving individuals access to better lives is certainly a development goal which all countries aspire to. But while South Africa has embraced the rhetoric, it has yet to create the economic ecosystem necessary for entrepreneurship to thrive.

In Zambia, as with elsewhere in Africa, Canada’s mining industry, foreign policy and neoliberalism overlap tightly. It is a subject Canadians ought to pay attention to if they want their country to be a force for good in the world.

The G20’s Compact with Africa is meant to force open African doors to European and generally western investments. African governments have been told in no uncertain terms that for them to receive foreign direct investments, they must improve conditions for such investments. Using its financial muscle the west (through Berlin) is waging war against Africa.

No new plantation has succeeded since independence, either state-owned or private. But it has not stopped Frelimo leaders since Samora Machel from dreaming of giant mechanised farms funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from abroad.

The rules, institutions and operations of global markets, unchanged since the end of formal colonialism, are among the greatest obstacles to the development of African countries.

Inga 3 could generate modest revenues under highly favorable conditions in the best and good-case scenarios. However, under the worst, worse, and most realistic median-case scenarios, Inga 3 would not even cover the  DRC government’s debt payments for the project, let alone constitute a windfall that could fund development priorities.

With its Compact with Africa the German G20 presidency is actively promoting private loans and investment as solutions to infrastructure deficiencies on the African continent. The Compact aims at using public resources in order to improve the investment climate and mobilize private capital to finance investment critical to achieving sustainable development.

On Monday-Tuesday next week, Berlin will host the G20 finance ministers’ negotiations with African elites led by a South African, Malusi Gigaba. Is this the next neo-colonial defeat for the continent, harking back to another process 132 years ago?

As business continues to grow in influence globally, sometimes enjoying asymmetrical power relations with developing states, a new report notes serious concerns over private sector practices that are leading to increased human rights abuses and attacks on fundamental freedoms.

The vision for an African-led clean energy revolution is in danger of being thrown off course because of attempts by the European Commission (EC) and France to hijack the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative.

Last week's World Economic Forum (WEF)-Africa conference in Durban hosted some of the world’s most controversial politicians: not just Jacob Zuma and his finance minister Malusi Gigaba plus regional dictators Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni, King Mswati and Edgar Lungu, but also the most powerful man in Europe, the notoriously-corrupt neoliberal German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.

The Compact does not have the right balance between public and private financing but is heavily prone towards the private side. A fair Compact should include a strong rules-based binding framework that much more clearly points to the important roles that the state has to play in ensuring sustainable investments, human rights and environmental protection as well as attracting investors (especially domestic) through infrastructure aimed at meeting the needs of the citizenry.

At a time US and South African presidents Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma personify controversies over crony capitalism, corruption, populist rhetoric and self-serving economic strategies, will big business calm down the politicians – or just egg them on?

The so-called middle class appears to be a “muddling class”. Rigorously explored differentiation remains largely absent – not to mention any substantial class analysis. Fortunately, though, the debate has created sufficient awareness among scholars to explore the fact and fiction of the assumed transformative power of a middle class.

A major claim of the purveyors of the ‘Africa rising’ narrative is the expansion of the African middle classes. Africanist scholarship has built upon this narrative, placing heavy emphasis upon such key issues as definition, consumption and the fragility of the ‘new’ middle classes across the continent. This book, the latest such offering amidst a burgeoning literature, confirms this trend, and is set to become a standard work of reference.

Africa is a vast continent with diversity of cultures. Rather than see this as an impediment to development, the continent should take advantage of this rich cultural diversity in its quest for economic development and should change the attitudes of its people towards work, interpersonal trust, time, youth and women.