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rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Rachel Strohm
@rachelstrohm.bsky.social
1.9K followers 67 following 440 posts
📍 London / Chicago / Nairobi
🌐 http://rachelstrohm.com
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rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Thoughtful reflections from Rose Mutiso about natural resource management in Africa: policy autonomy is more important than any single policy outcome rosemutiso.substack.com/p/when-the-s...
You know the drill: foreign powers swoop in, dig up our minerals, cart them off, process them into higher-value goods, pocket the profits, and leave us with holes in the ground and dreams deferred. The criticism is familiar—whether we’re talking about cobalt in the DRC, bauxite in Guinea, or green hydrogen in Namibia. The subtext? If only we processed our resources locally and captured more of the value chain, we’d be rich, industrialized, and free from neocolonial chains. But here’s a curveball: Australia does the same thing. Despite producing almost half of the world's lithium supply, Australia mostly ships unprocessed lithium ore to China. China, in turn, does the refining and battery manufacturing, raking in the value-added margins. Sounds familiar? And yet no one accuses Australia of being "exploited." Why? Because they made a strategic choice. They are not being locked out of value chains by force or dysfunction—they’re sitting out by design. Processing is dirty, expensive, and technologically intensive. Meanwhile, Australia makes serious bank selling the dirt: lithium exports grew from $1.3 billion AUD in 2020-21 to over $18 billion AUD in 2022–23. A big difference between Australia and African countries here is one of agency and choice. Where Australia exercises strategic restraint, Africa operates under structural constraint.
May 27, 2025 at 6:32 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇰🇪 This looks like a really insightful piece about the legal and political complexities of urban water provision in Nairobi. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
State and non-state water service providers in Nairobi strive to produce legitimate claims to water. This article examines the state's attempt to regulate water provision in Kibera, a slum of Nairobi, Kenya, where the state-owned water service provider has installed a water system, the so-called ‘chambers’, to combat the unauthorized diversion of water from the grid and extend the reach of their services. While the chamber system has failed the intended regulation of water provision in Kibera, it plays a central role in structuring the water provision system in the settlement. The article shows that the interactions the chambers facilitate between state and non-state service providers produce a localized legality which draws on the language of the state and the appearance of the rule of law. At the same time, this localized legality is operationalized by illegal activities and the direct transgression of statutory law. Therefore, the legitimacy and legality of service providers is co-produced by state and non-state actors and between the ideal of law and practical norms constituting a ‘practical water law’.
April 24, 2025 at 9:00 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🌍 Very interesting post from @kopalo.bsky.social about the weakness of the African Union and what might be done to revive it, plus a useful graphic on the "spaghetti bowl" of partly overlapping regional cooperation forums www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-proble...
A graphic showing a dozen different regional cooperation fora across Africa's 54 states
April 24, 2025 at 8:47 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇦🇪🇸🇦 What's driving the increasing role of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the Horn of Africa? democracyinafrica.org/middle-easte...
My recent study with political scientist Abigail Kabandula shows that the UAE and Saudi Arabia gradually increased their presence in Sudan after the 2011 Arab uprisings. The fall of some regimes, including Egypt, made the two Gulf monarchies fear that instability could entangle them. Our analysis identifies two main reasons for the two countries’ influence in Sudan: changes to the regional power structure the strategic importance of the Horn of Africa. The US pivot to Asia – shifting resources from the Middle East to the Pacific – and the Arab Spring protests increased uncertainty among Gulf states. This led to a realignment of regional power dynamics and the formation of rival blocs. As a result, the UAE and Saudi Arabia sought closer ties with African countries. In Sudan, the relationship has developed through both military and political engagement.
April 24, 2025 at 8:31 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇰🇪 Insightful analysis about the unusual role of Raila Odinga in Kenyan politics - "de facto in government, yet de jure the opposition leader." www.theafricareport.com/380082/ruto-...
“This handshake feels like déjà vu — because it is,” Kenyan political analyst Rose Mumanya tells The Africa Report. She argues that Raila’s playbook for navigating Kenya’s political terrain has remained consistent over the years, with the veteran opposition leader continuing to leverage his political capital, street influence and capacity to mobilise unrest as tools to negotiate access to power. “It’s a cycle: lose the election, shake hands, secure influence, and start planning for the next round,” Mumanya says. Analysts observe that Raila’s pact with Ruto is notably more substantial, with clearly defined political power-sharing elements, including nominations of cabinet members and direct participation in policy formulation. This handshake provides Raila with official, institutionalised influence within Ruto’s administration — far surpassing his earlier arrangement with Uhuru.
April 22, 2025 at 11:49 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇸🇸 Insightful piece on South Sudan's return to conflict in late 2024 africanarguments.org/2025/03/what...
The proximate cause of the conflict that is occurring in the three states in 2024–25 is checkpoints. This war for checkpoints is rooted in the political economy of South Sudan. In a country without productive forms of industry, economic power depends on two things: (1) controlling the country’s extractive industries, including the gold mines of Eastern Equatoria and Western Bahr el Ghazal, and (2) controlling networks of circulation, such that armed actors can extract taxes and levies from flows of people and things. Checkpoints, along with taxation at national borders, are primary sites for this mode of predation. Both humanitarians and Western diplomats have frequently asked for the removal of the checkpoints which pockmark the country, and that provide a source of income to otherwise unpaid soldiers. You should be careful what you wish for. In 2024, Kiir’s regime decided to remove the checkpoints. Its rhetoric was that they would remove ‘illegal’ opposition-held checkpoints, but in truth this was only as a means of cutting off opposition revenue-streams, and replacing their roadblocks with its own, just as it did in in Maiwut county after Ochan Puot’s defection in 2019. Kiir’s regime, along with the opposition, depends on illicit forms of resource extraction and taxation for its survival; it’s a feature, not a bug, of the current political-economic system in South Sudan.
April 17, 2025 at 8:38 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🌍 African countries are making substantial progress towards women's parliamentary representation, but substantial variation remains, from 64% of MPs in Rwanda to just 4% of MPs in Nigeria www.jeuneafrique.com/1668916/poli...
A graph showing that African women's parliamentary representation has increased from 9.8% in 1995 to 27% in 2025
April 15, 2025 at 8:42 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Really striking finding from @cgdev.org: in the UK, foreign aid spending is evaluated at 10x the rate of other gov't spending www.cgdev.org/blog/uk-aid-...
Graph showing 13 evaluations per billion £ spent for aid, vs. 1.2 evaluations per billion for the reste of the government
April 15, 2025 at 8:34 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🌍 Not kidding when I say @rhaplord.bsky.social has pretty much singlehandedly rewritten my understanding of precolonial African history www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/internal-d...
In my previous essays on African explorers of the Old World and their associated diasporas, I outlined how the international activities of pre-colonial African travelers were often facilitated by the expansion of African states’ diplomatic and commercial interests. This was especially true for the envoys and scholars who traveled from; ancient and medieval Nubia; Aksum and Ethiopia; the empires of West Africa; and the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo, whose diasporas could be found anywhere between western Europe and China. Similarly, the merchant-sailors and princes of the Swahili cities and the Mutapa kingdom who traveled across the Indian Ocean world often acted as political and commercial agents of their countries.
March 17, 2025 at 1:59 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Yaw Boadu's hierarchy of debt for developing countries yawboadu.substack.com/p/book-revie...
Pyramid which reads, from bottom to top: profits from state owned enterprises, raising taxes, domestic borrowing, foreign aid & bilateral loans, multilateral banks, international borrowing, commodity-backed loans, IMF bailout
March 17, 2025 at 1:56 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Insightful as always from @kopalo.bsky.social: "What explains the ambition gap among African elites?" www.africanistperspective.com/p/what-expla...
A lot follows from this predicament. Intra-elite lack of trust inhibits coordination at scale, and means that elites rarely make long-term deals founded on “open access” public policy. It’s also not a surprise that the region doesn’t have many giant private corporations (which are excellent mechanisms for coordinating elite accumulation). Instead, intra-elite deals typically involve spot payments or conditional access to patronage resources via direct appointments within closed ethnic/regional groups (see works on prebendalism). Even then perfidy reigns, with coalitions rising and falling on rather flimsy grounds. Importantly, the reliance on personalist dealmaking obviates the need for pro-growth rule of law (or even rule by law). The logic here is straightforward. Deals founded on policy require law-imposed predictability. Deals founded on precarious/condutional prebends require weak rule of law to facilitate maximum discretion in the management of personalist networks. Under these circumstances, only direct appointments to specific posts emerge as credible forms of power sharing in the public sector. This explains the Continent’s many examples of bizarre appointments of aging unqualified old people to public office whereby competent younger proxies would’ve been appropriate. The same is true in the private sector where dealmaking tends to limited to domains where extra-legal contract enforcement is feasible. The net result has been a discernible Continental pattern of erratic wealth accumulation and destruction due to elite political instability.
March 6, 2025 at 2:36 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇸🇴 This is an insightful interview on contemporary Somali politics alexthurston.substack.com/p/seven-ques...
AG: Supporters of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud often praise his administration's focus on addressing Somalia’s security challenges, particularly the stalled fight against Al-Shabaab. His "total war" strategy, initiated in 2022, has involved significant military offensives alongside grassroots mobilization of local militias (Ma’awisley) and cooperation with international partners like the U.S. and Turkey. Proponents credit him for strengthening diplomatic ties, including Somalia's potential inclusion in regional blocs like the East African Community (EAC) and reinvigorating Somalia’s economy through initiatives such as debt relief discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Critics argue that Mohamud’s administration has fallen short on delivering tangible outcomes, particularly in consolidating federalism, reversal of territorial gains made in the stalled anti al-Shabab military operations and building trust among Somalia’s regional states. They accuse him of prioritizing power centralization in Mogadishu at the expense of federal member states. Furthermore, the ongoing clan-based favoritism in appointments and resource allocation remains a contentious issue. Critics also highlight his limited success in addressing Somalia’s humanitarian crises and the slow pace of security sector reform. The ongoing clan-based political tensions and disputes over federalism have fueled opposition. Detractors also highlight corruption allegations within his administration and claim his focus on centralization has overshadowed security efforts to address Somalia’s dire humanitarian crisis, including famine and displacement. Moreover, critics accuse Mohamud of favoring certain clans, deepening political divides.
March 5, 2025 at 10:53 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🏗️ Interesting segmentation of firms in African cities: magicians, workhorses, and powerbrokers. www.african-cities.org/magicians-po...
> Magicians Manufacturing and tradeable services firms – including IT and tourism – are key to structural transformation. They are export-oriented firms that drive investment and growth, but also rely on the state for policies that help them prosper and grow to face world competition. We call this set of firms “magicians” because they are competing in the global market and export within those constraints. > Workhorses Along with magicians, we also tend to see “workhorses”. These are informal enterprises, both in services and manufacturing, that operate mostly for the domestic market. Street vendors are a classic example of workhorses in African cities. They are not very productive enterprises, but they are important because they also face and create competition in the domestic market. > Powerbrokers The final group key to understanding the political economy drivers of structural transformation are “powerbrokers”. Powerbrokers are enterprises – such as utility companies, telecommunications providers and real estate firms – which also produce for the domestic market but tend to have a large share of the market. As they do not face the same competitive pressures as workhorses or magicians, they hold a lot of power.
March 5, 2025 at 10:47 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
The Rift Valley Institute annual courses on the Great Lakes, Horn of Africa, and Sahel are now accepting applications! Highly recommended for anyone hoping to build or deepen expertise in the region. riftvalley.net/courses/grea...
February 19, 2025 at 8:25 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Very timely research from Siri Gloppen & Lise Rakner on the courts as venues of resistance to autocratic rule in Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Since the 1990s, African incumbents have engaged in forms of rule-bending that weaken democratic institutions. The democratic backsliding witnessed weaponises law through processes of autocratic lawfare. However, civil society and the opposition may challenge the incumbent’s attempts at autocratisation through the use of law and, in so doing, resist processes of democratic backsliding. We refer to processes where civil society actors and opposition politicians seek to defend pluralism through legal mobilisation as democratic lawfare. We explore the responses to autocratic lawfare by pro-democracy actors in five African common law countries: Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Our analysis shows that across the common law system countries, court decisions have secured space for political debate and protest, particularly in relation to elections. In the countries with the strongest pluralist traditions (Kenya, Malawi and Zambia), court actions have often succeeded in preventing incumbents from tilting the electoral playing field and reigning in parliament. Even in the most autocratic settings, as the cases of Uganda and Zimbabwe, courts have provided some protection to opposition candidates. To understand resistance to autocratisation, it is necessary to analyse the opportunities inherent in the institutional context and the resources – organisational, strategic and normative – that different actors bring to these contests.
February 17, 2025 at 10:52 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇬🇦 Useful update on the state of post-coup politics in Gabon 👇 theconversation.com/gabon-post-c...
Nguema’s transitional government has already started reforms to improve the management of public finances. All received funds are centralised into the treasury’s account. A regulatory framework for the management of state-owned enterprises has been set up. And public investment processes will be better managed. But these reforms will take time. Nguema has assured foreign investors of political stability. He has assured both France and the United States that Gabon is an ally of the west. He has promised to lower Gabon’s debt burden to 49% of GDP by 2025. There is no doubt that whatever Nguema does over the next two years, it could not be worse than what the Bongos did for 56 years.
May 31, 2024 at 8:36 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Wow www.pogo.org/investigatio...
Last summer, a little-known U.S. government agency was considering a deal that sources say would have directed more than $100 million in U.S. funding to build and run a toll road and bridge in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. The project would help link valuable cobalt mines in the Congo to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. An analyst from the agency, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), raised concerns that the project risked displacing nearly 10,000 people in Congolese villages and possibly more. To move forward would violate an agency policy “categorically” prohibiting it from funding projects displacing 5,000 or more people. After the analyst refused to sign off on the project, the agency fired him in August 2023, two sources told POGO. This firing is one of several recent alleged or confirmed instances of reprisal at the agency.
May 24, 2024 at 10:08 AM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
There's still a long way to go to end corporal punishment of children in schools across Africa, according to Semafor Africa (www.semafor.com/newsletter/0...). Grateful for the work that orgs like Raising Voices are doing on this in Uganda (raisingvoices.org)
A graph showing rates of secondary school children saying they'd experienced violence from a teacher in the last year. It's highest at 43% for Uganda, 35% for Uganda, and 25% for Malawi, and lowest at 4% for Lesotho and Zimbabwe
May 15, 2024 at 1:58 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇰🇪 An important call for structural change in the way that Kenya is responding to the climate crisis, dedicated to the memory of the Mothers of Victims & Survivors Network members who died in Mathare last month mwamko.org/the-climate-...
Like many others, Mama Victor and Jacinta lived through all forms of normalised abnormalities, from the extra-judicial execution of their sons, to surviving in dingy dwellings next to open sewers, to having to pay to access basic necessities like toilets or bathrooms. Can you imagine the irony of poverty stricken people dying from the very thing they fight tooth and nail to get a drop of – water! But this is not just water, it is an ongoing state of intense floods that have left us devastated and mourning. Mathare Slum in Nairobi is indeed a good example of the structural violence of capitalism and the inequality it perpetuates. Over the decades, many of our relatives in the village have been forced to pack up and move to urban slums like Mathare so as to sell their labour in the busy city and secure their survival. They can no longer depend on rain fed agriculture to survive in the village as was the norm hitherto because of increasingly unreliable weather patterns.
May 14, 2024 at 5:46 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
The Rift Valley Institute's courses are open again for 2024! I did the Great Lakes course some years ago, and it was incredibly insightful. Learn more and register: riftvalley.net/courses/grea...
A map of East and Central Africa showing the countries covered by the Rift Valley Institute's 2024 Field Courses, including the Horn of Africa, the Sudans, and the Great Lakes
May 7, 2024 at 8:31 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇧🇮 Bujumbura is really struggling with a lack of water, as people wait for up to 8 hours to access public taps www.iwacu-burundi.org/penurie-deau...
A long queue of people waiting to fill yellow jerrycans with water
April 30, 2024 at 1:46 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
🇨🇩 I had no idea that colonial-era land theft and forced labour in the DRC led to the creation of the company that would eventually become Unilever africanarguments.org/2024/04/colo...
Following the brutal reign of King Leopold II in what was then considered his private property, the Congo became a Belgian colony in 1908. Three years later, the colonial authorities granted British industrialist Lord Leverhulme a license to create large scale oil palm plantations on over 750,000 hectares. In addition to the theft of land from indigenous communities, historical records show that in the following decades, forced labor was used on a massive scale, enforced by the Belgian colonial army on behalf of Leverhulme. With the goal of establishing a monopoly, local communities were prevented from cultivating and trading oil palm despite the fact that they had produced it long before Belgian colonisation. These plantations fuelled the rise of the Lever Brothers and laid the foundation of what is today one of the world’s largest multinational corporations – Unilever.
April 25, 2024 at 5:30 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
☀️ Climate change is leading to the age of the camel across East Africa www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...
The global camel population has doubled over the last 20 years, something the U.N. agency for agriculture and investment attributes partly to the animal’s suitability amid climate change. In times of hardship, camels produce more milk than cows. Many cite an adage: The cow is the first animal to die in a drought; the camel is the last. “If there was no climate change, we would not even bother to buy these camels,” said Jonathan Lati Lelelit, the governor of Samburu, a county about 240 miles north of Nairobi. “We have so many other things to do with the little money we have. But we have no option.”
April 25, 2024 at 5:18 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
In the DRC, Goma's population has grown by almost 50% over the last two years as people have fled M23 - and this is only a fraction of the total displacement 👇 africanarguments.org/2024/04/crow...
The number of people displaced by the M23 war is around 1.7 million, though the conflict is just one of many in the country, which is still impacted by the legacy of colonial rule, foreign meddling after independence, and the ongoing exploitation of its resources. The M23 says it won’t seize Goma – which is the provincial capital of the war-torn North Kivu province – but its fighters are within touching distance and have choked the city by cutting off most of its access roads. Anne-Sylvie Linder, who works for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Goma, told The New Humanitarian that prices have doubled or tripled for basic goods like maize, charcoal, and beans because of the blockade.
April 24, 2024 at 2:15 PM
rachelstrohm.bsky.social
Don't miss CODESRIA's summer school in African Studies and area studies in Africa! Held in Dakar from 26-30 Aug 2024. Apply here by 31 May: codesria.org/6th-codesria...
A poster for the summer school, with the theme "making knowledge policy-relevant: the SSH's role in global sustainable development"
April 24, 2024 at 2:11 PM