It has gone mostly under the radar, but the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by African tech startups is on the rise, with the sector becoming bigger by the week and attracting more funding.

Traders in African markets have had a year to forget, and there are signs the rout’s not over yet. The continent’s stocks and bonds have performed worse than those of all other emerging-market regions in 2018, reversing their outperformance of last year.

Malawi is set to become the latest African country to legalize marijuana farming in a bid to boost its economy.

As 2018 comes to an end, extreme poverty is at the lowest level in recorded history but is expected to become increasingly concentrated in one region.

Five African crops have been selected to be harvested, studied and given to small farms across the state once the program is complete. Afterward, preliminary marketing will be conducted in the Washington, D.C., area, and consumers will be made familiar with these forgotten crops. 

Despite Africa’s impressive growth in past 25 years and its entry into the digital economy, the job market continues to be in a depressed state as youth unemployment continues to rise.

Digital transformation is the adoption of advanced technologies and the rise of innovations as companies and individuals reorganise to be mobile- and digital-first, multimodal, and intelligence-driven. It is a catalyst for engendering agility, and has become crucial for organisations to stay competitive, achieve successes, and even survive.

Towns and cities in the world's developing countries are growing on an unprecedented scale. Ten years ago, an estimated 40 percent of the developing world's population - or 2 billion people - lived in urban areas.

Hope for global conservation is what we wish to evoke in our readers with some of the more upbeat environmental stories from the past year that we have pieced together from around the world in this list. These include some of your favorite happy stories, from the expansion of protected areas for wildlife, cancelled reclamation projects that posed coastal ecosystem threats, to the impactful role of indigenous communities in conservation.

As it is practiced today, agriculture is one of the biggest environmental offenders – yet it is necessary for our survival. Agriculture contributes one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, uses 70% of freshwater resources, and harms wildlife through conversion and fragmentation of biodiversity-rich habitats, water diversions, pesticide poisoning and creation of oceanic dead zones.

The tail-end of 2018 was inundated with various news cycles, both domestic and international, which eventually over-shadowed a major policy pronouncement – The United States (US) Africa strategy.

China increased its corn production estimate for 2018-19 to 257.33 million tonnes based on the nation’s most recent agriculture census, Reuters reported on Jan. 11.

Trying to get to grips with what to expect from Africa’s economies in 2019 can be broken out into three categories of discussion: the good, the underwhelming and the disconcerting.

Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished Damian CarringtonEnvironment editor.

Look left, look right, look upwards before you go out in 2019 because the biggest threat could come from the skies. We’re not talking about bombers, nor meteorites from outer space, merely the destructive wrath of mother nature.

For many, Africa holds a special place in our hearts. It is the birthplace of our species; an epic landscape stuffed with biodiversity and humankind’s oldest traditional practices.

If 2018 was the year of the global heatwave, then 2019 looks set to bring even more extreme weather with early indications of an El Niño event in the next three months.

After rapid economic growth averaging 10% every year between 2004 and 2014, Ethiopia has emerged as an engine of development in Africa.
How investment in irrigation is paying off for Ethiopia's economy

Li Tie, a Chinese businessman who has been trading Chinese manufactured agricultural machinery in Africa for almost 20 years, always sees his Indian counterparts as strong competitors in local market.

A few months ago I wrote an essay for Business Day arguing that there should be more cross-border learning between the South African and Zimbabwean farming sectors in order to bring socioeconomic stability in the Southern Africa region.