China frames the Africa Solar Belt as a clean-energy access story. Yet the materials it lists – streetlights, kits, one power station – sit against a shortfall of more than 600 million people.
Section
Economics
Cheap and Clean: Can Low-Cost Renewables Make African Factories Competitive
Chinese-built solar and hydro promise the low tariffs manufacturers need, but cheap clean power only sharpens competitiveness when the rest of the industrial base is ready.
Selling Sunlight Downhill: Ethiopia and Djibouti Wire a Regional Power Trade
A second 230-kV line will lift Djibouti’s import capacity from Ethiopia toward 220 MW – turning surplus hydropower into an export and a neighbour’s reliable supply.
East Africa’s Dams: Chinese Hydropower Tests the Industrial Promise
China-built dams now anchor East Africa’s grids, yet cheap megawatts alone have not delivered the factories and jobs the projects were sold to underwrite.
Floating the Shortfall: Bui Adds Solar to Steady a River-Bound Grid
Bui’s hydropower output swings with the Black Volta. Ghana’s answer is to float solar on the same reservoir – turning one dam into a planning platform.
SADC transport and ICT integration — regional economic opportunity and what comes next
The Southern African Development Community has never lacked ambition on paper. Protocols on trade, transport and communications have existed for decades, and intra-regional trade figures have moved only slowly against them. The persistent explanation is not the...
Liberalised skies and AI infrastructure: regional economic opportunity and what comes next
A regional bloc that has spent three decades trying to make its internal borders less expensive to cross gathered again this week in Bulawayo to say, in effect, that the job is not finished. The contradiction sitting under the polite language of Tuesday's...
Nine Percent of GDP Cannot Be Treated as Disposable
Migrants are framed as a cost, but their output is a material share of South Africa’s GDP. Why to model a 5%, 10% and 20% migrant-economy contraction now.
Surcharge Squeeze: How Transnet’s R52 Container Levy Raises the Cost of Trade
Transnet’s R52 per-container surcharge from May 2026 recovers rising diesel costs and could triple. What the floating fee means for SA exporters and importers.