In 2013, journalist Joe Studwell published the book How Asia works, an explanation of how Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – and, in part, China – had become rich countries. Studwell's book became canonical reading for understanding the “Asian recipe.” An avid reader of the book was Bill Gates, who met with Studwell and asked him what he thought about Africa's development. Studwell told him he knew nothing about that continent. Shortly thereafter, the governments of Ethiopia and Rwanda invited him to meet and ask him questions about how to apply the Asian recipe to their countries. Studwell would end up dedicating the following years of his career to researching Africa's development. A few months ago, he published How Africa works, in which he asks whether African economies can become prosperous countries like Japan or Korea. Studwell’s “Asian recipe” consists of three steps, which were repeated in all developed East Asian economies. First, land reform: land does not belong to landlords or the state, but is redistributed at the family level. Curiously, this policy was implemented in East Asia by anti-communist – but pragmatic – governments with the support of the United States. Second, promotion of manufacturing: the state supports new industries, but on the condition that they are successful in exporting abroad. This is how multinationals like Hyundai, Samsung, or TSMC were born. Finally, in the Asian model, the state has strong control over the financial system, imposing capital controls, and directing investment towards the small-scale agriculture and manufacturing sector. All these steps were taken by strong governments with leadership that had economic development as a strategic objective.In How Africa works, Studwell explains that the main obstacle Africa has had for development has not been political, but demographic. Africa has only now reached the population density that Asia had in the fifties. A low population density generates few markets and demand, expensive labor, and little return on investment in infrastructure. Africa, moreover, suffered a colonial model with little investment and especially extractive. When African countries gained independence, they had almost no experience in politics at a national level.However, Africa, since then, has improved and has several success stories, which in part have applied steps from the Asian recipe. Botswana and Mauritius are the most pioneering examples. The most recent are Ethiopia – its leader, Meles Zenawi, was a scholar of the Asian model – and Rwanda – where the case of Singapore is the example to follow –. All these cases have been successful, in large part, thanks to the fact that their governments opted for “pro-development coalitions” where various ethnic groups agreed to prioritize the economy. Studwell views Africa's future optimistically in general: the agriculture sector is the main driver of growth and successful industrial initiatives are beginning to emerge, largely thanks to the private sector. The author believes that Africa will cease to be the "failed continent" to resemble Asia more, where political decisions will create both success and failure stories.

Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, has been repeating the same idea for years at economic forums where he is invited: the continent will continue to be dependent as long as it limits itself to exporting raw materials without processing them. That's why he launched a refinery in his country, Nigeria, a project that aims to transform a large part of the African energy market. The total cost approached 20 billion dollars, paid mainly by his company, and it has been operational since January 2024.Few debates spark as much tension in Africa as the price of gasoline. With states that often offer few public services and very limited social protection systems, fuel subsidies have become one of the few visible forms of state support. When the price of gasoline rises, the cost of transport, food, and daily life immediately increases. This is why many governments maintain costly subsidies even if they end up unbalancing public finances. As in so many places, subsidies are the most elegant way to avoid confronting a difficult structural problem to solve. Nigeria, one of the continent's major oil producers, has gone decades without sufficient capacity to refine its own crude. The lack of functional infrastructure forced the import of fuel at high prices while the state assumed part of the cost to prevent social unrest. The business primarily benefited gasoline importers, many of them linked to the country's elites. A cement giant

Dangote is part of these elites. He made his fortune in the cement market in the early 2000s, partly thanks to a protected market and his good relations with the government. He then diversified his income by investing in the food sector, and in recent years has focused on energy and fertilizers. In May 2024, the president of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, announced the withdrawal of gasoline subsidies and the devaluation of the Nigerian currency. The prices of energy and food soared, and the poorest Nigerians are still recovering from the blow; the new infrastructure has allowed the country to start consuming gasoline refined locally. While in other African countries prices are soaring and there is a gasoline shortage due to the conflict in the Middle East, in Nigeria –for now– there are no supply problems. Dangote has already announced his next goal: that his refinery double its capacity and be the largest in the world. With its industrial activity, it aims to replace imports that have turned Africa into a territory that lives consuming what is manufactured abroad. Facing him will be the local elites who live off distributing these imports. “I never imagined that the oil mafia is worse than the drug mafia”, he said on one occasion, given the difficulties he had encountered in starting up his refinery. For his critics, Dangote represents the risk that a single private fortune accumulates excessive power over strategic sectors. For his followers, it is the opportunity to launch projects that states have neglected for decades. For the moment, the war in Iran has generated more markets for him in Europe, where airlines buy fuel from him, and it is opening more doors for him across the continent: Kenya and Tanzania; in East Africa they are already fighting to be the country where Dangote builds the next refinery. 

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Mali's Minister of Defense, General Sadio Camara, died this Saturday in an explosive attack during the large-scale offensive launched by Al-Qaeda and northern secessionist groups against civilian and military targets. In the attack, three relatives of the leader who were at his home in the town of Kati, located about 15 kilometers north of the capital, Bamako, also died.

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Her hair really catches the eye. She herself admits that she feels observed wherever she goes and that she is tired of being stopped in the street to be asked if they can touch her hair or if they simply touch it without her permission. Isabel Balde, 32, has beautiful afro hair. The kind that's a huge ball of curls. "People are not aware that touching someone's hair is invading personal space," she says, as her hairdresser styles it and she looks proudly in the mirror. It wasn't always like this. She used to hate her hair.

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"We were taken to an open field [...]. The first man raped me twice; the second, once, and the third, four more times. The fourth also raped me once". "All the way, the militiamen asked the women to follow them and insisted when we refused. It happened everywhere. In the woods: two militiamen there, three more after a while. They were everywhere. Everything happened in broad daylight".Testimonies as chilling as these are common in the Darfur region, in Sudan, where in a couple of weeks it will be three years since the country has been immersed in a devastating civil war.

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2026 has begun with news that will surely be among the most important of the year when December arrives. Aware that our attention spans are short, world leaders are fighting to capture headlines that are becoming increasingly fleeting. The big winner in this game is the President of the United States, Donald Trump. The EU, Canada, and the United Kingdom, faced with the collapse of the order in which they had operated for decades, They react by announcing trade agreements with IndiaMercosur and China.

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The Catalan and Spanish tourists who had been trapped in Ethiopia by the Fano militia uprising in the Amhara region were successfully evacuated. This was confirmed to ARA by the tourists' families. A military helicopter picked them up and took them to the city of Bahir Dar, from where they were then flown to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The group has already booked return tickets to Catalonia. "We don't yet have the flight details, but they will most likely arrive in Spain via a European layover on Monday morning," said Jonás Baños, director of the Kananga travel agency.

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"My sister, Núria, is stuck on the road between the cities of Gondar and Bahar Dar," explains Neus from Barcelona. Núria left for Ethiopia on a trip organized by the Barcelona-based agency Kananga at the end of July, but she has been stuck for six days. in the Amhara region (in the northwest of the country) due to the armed uprising of the Fano militia, which in just a few days has seized control of the entire region by force and rebelled against the army. "I've been communicating with my mother by text message for six days now, and they need food and medicine," Núria's daughter, Mar, also explained by phone.

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It was September 30th, and in Burkina Faso, rumors of another coup—the second in just eight months—were circulating, and the country was glued to their television screens. There was no signal. Gunfire and explosions could be heard near the Ouaga 2000 neighborhood, where the presidential palace, the homes of wealthy families, and the embassies are located. The capital, Ouagadougou, awoke in uncertainty and confusion. The rumors were confirmed: a new military uprising had just taken place.

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"Ibrahim Traoré is not a new Sankara, but he is a Sankaraist," says a teacher from a school in Bobo-Dioulasso. Following his assassination in 1987, the Burkinabe revolutionary leader, Thomas SankaraThe man who changed his country's colonial name—Alt-Volta to Burkina Faso, "the homeland of upright men"—has left behind a very strong current of anti-colonial thought. This thought defends, above all, the dignity of the African people and "cooperation with all the peoples of the world," in opposition to the "image of the beggar" that the West had imposed through development aid.

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"Out with the white woman, out with the white woman!" is the first thing I hear upon arriving at Tiéfo Amoro Square in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, the epicenter of anti-French protests and demonstrations in support of the military junta that has ruled the country since the coup d'état of September 30, 2022. "IB! IB! IB! IB!" Ibrahim Traoré, the world's youngest president, has promised to restore peace to Burkina Faso, a West African country, by July 2024. An ambitious promise for a country that already has more than two million internally displaced people and 11,312 deaths since 2016, according to the organization Conglicte. in the hands of terrorist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State that operate mainly in the northern and eastern regions of the country.

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The coup in Niger, led by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, head of the presidential guard of the ousted president, Mohamed BazoumThis has worried French President Emmanuel Macron, who convened an emergency Security Council meeting on a Saturday at 3:00 p.m. An unusual time, were it not for the fact that France needs uranium from Niger to operate the nuclear power plants that supply electricity to the entire country. "We will not tolerate any attack against France and its interests in Niger," Macron declared from the Élysée Palace. France is the leading nuclear energy power in Europe and the second largest in the world, after the United States. In fact, more than half of its production—64.67% of its total electricity—comes from nuclear power, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

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"We are facing a new cold war in the Sahel, which has become Europe's new geopolitical laboratory," says Beatriz Mesa, researcher and professor at Gaston Berger University. The coup in Niger has shifted the pieces of the game in the international and geopolitical sphere. Two blogs have spoken out and taken a position.

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Niger expects a military response from Nigeria, Benin, Ivory Coast and Senegal after the Nigerien military junta ignored the ECOWAS ultimatum (Economic Community of West African States) to "restore constitutional order" and release President Mohamed Bazoum. The deadline was 11 p.m. last Sunday, and this group of governments had warned that they would take military action to restore order in the Sahel country.

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“From now on, the Sahel’s resources should benefit Sahelians and partners who understand the paradigm shift in today’s diplomacy,” says Azise Sodore, head of the geography department at Joseph Ki-Zerbo University in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The Sahel is the semi-desert belt between the Sahara Desert to the north and the Sudanese region to the south, stretching 5,000 kilometers between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. “The Sahel’s natural resources have made it the target of geopolitical and geostrategic plans,” Sodore says, noting the greed of those who want to exploit them.

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A group of soldiers organized under the name of the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Homeland (CNSP) announced on Niger's state television on the night of July 26-27 that they had overthrown President Mohamed Bazoum after holding him captive throughout Wednesday in the presidential palace in the capital, Niame. The UN has suspended its humanitarian aid program in the country, which benefited 4.3 million people.

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There's a deep memory that has taken root in the mind of director and playwright Manel Dueso (Sabadell, 1953). In the 1980s, he met Samba, a young Gambian man who worked felling trees in Sant Hilari Sacalm. One day, a tree fell on him, leaving him a quadriplegic. Dueso met him in the hospital, as Samba shared a room with the director's brother, who had a similar diagnosis. "Samba was very cheerful. I looked after him. We dressed everyone up in ties, we squirted the nurses with syringes. Even in the most brutal places, funny things can happen," Dueso recalls. This is the spirit that permeates his latest show, Jambo BwanaStarring Montse Germán, Antonia Jaume, Àurea Márquez, and Usu Tambadou, this performance can be seen in the Sala Pequeña of the National Theatre of Catalonia from December 17 to January 11.

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The Guinean engineer Amílcar Cabral, one of Africa's most important anti-colonial leaders, confessed in his biography that as a child his mind was so steeped in colonialism that he felt Portuguese. Within a few years, he became one of the continent's most renowned revolutionaries: he led the independence movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde against Portugal, and was assassinated a year before the definitive recognition of independence in 1974. His writings and speeches have become legendary. One of them stated that to convince peasants to join the guerrillas, people didn't need to hear grand theories, but rather the promise of a better life.

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"The Sudanese city of Al Fashir, the scene of catastrophic levels of human suffering, has descended into an even darker hell." This was the stark assessment of Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, during Thursday evening's session of the UN Security Council. The UN's executive body debated and condemned the atrocities and the "crimes" committed by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries during the capture of this city Just days ago, this included the killing of nearly 500 civilians at the Saudi Maternity Hospital. This capture and the massive violent repression that followed have forced more than 15,000 people to flee the city in two days and head towards Tawila, in western Sudan, where they are currently in makeshift camps.

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On September 26, we saw its distinctive green marble again following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the UN General Assembly. Where was Netanyahu speaking from? Like any other building, the General Assembly is located somewhere specific, obviously. The complex is located on the seafront, in Turtle Bay, Manhattan, and occupies some seven hectares, including the Secretariat building (the famous 39-story tower we've seen in a thousand images), the General Assembly building, the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, and the conference building. Despite being physically within the United States, these seven hectares are not subject to US jurisdiction: they have extraterritorial legal status. The UN's own statute applies there, and the diplomats working there enjoy immunity. Then there are the headquarters in Geneva, Vienna, and Nairobi, as well as the various agencies (for example, UNESCO in Paris). In any case, it's clear that the most symbolic body of the UN is the General Assembly. It is located in the same city that gave birth to one of its worst critics: US President Donald Trump.

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