The brainchild of South African cosmologist Neil Turok, one of Africa’s most decorated scientists, AIMS is a bold initiative that seeks to create a new scientific class in Africa. More than that, Turok hopes to advance science through the rest of the world by teasing from Africa’s intelligentsia an individual who can re-imagine how we see the world. Turok intends to create a mathematical community by establishing mathematical bootcamps. He plans to build 15, with versions already in Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.

Turok, 54, sees conditions in Africa today as comparative to those of eastern Europe 100 years ago: then, ambitious young Jews were suddenly granted access to education, and went on to make significant discoveries and advances in science. Now it is the turn of Africans. “Einstein came from a very disadvantaged community, which had been completely excluded from university until the second half of the 19th century,” he says in his office in Ontario, Canada, where he runs the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “But once they got into university, that first generation, you start having Jacobi, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli. This group completely revolutionised physics.”

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“There is no part of the world where corruption is absolutely eliminated. But [in other countries] that corruption has not been a way of life. When you are found, you are dealt with. And that’s what we need.”

Obasanjo was in the UK to promote investment in Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country and its second biggest economy, not to mention one of the world’s most promising emerging destinations for international investors. Its gross domestic product is forecast to grow at more than 7% this year, following a decade of rapid expansion.

Against the backdrop of moribund markets in rich countries and fears about the slowing of many emerging economies, Nigeria, like Africa’s other larger nations, is attracting global interest. The country’s urbanising, increasingly wealthy and consumptive middle class is portrayed as fertile ground for consumer goods companies, while its vast reserves of oil and gas have taken on a new strategic importance as the Arab spring creates political uncertainty in the Middle East.

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The companies responsible for the road have closed. Like so many Tunisian business concerns, they were reputedly run by the Trabelsis, a family whose star rose rapidly after the marriage of one of their members, Leila, to the former leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The popular uprisings in Tunisia last year that led to the departure of Ben Ali after a 24-year reign sparked similar revolts across North Africa and the Arab world. One year on from the Arab Spring, the unfinished road south of Gafsa is an apt symbol for the challenges facing the Tunisian and wider North African economy.

Tunisia’s new government, elected in October, is faced with untangling the former regime’s business interests. New strikes by emboldened workers and resurgence in protests last month are further undermining industrial output. Opposition leaders say the new government, led by moderately Islamist Ennahda party leader Rached Ghannouchi, is little different from the old regime: a fact they say was evidenced in the handling of the protests.

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Once the region’s most sophisticated economy, Côte d’Ivoire is now a case study for the economic impact of conflict and political paralysis. But even though its election descended into violence and the country teetered on the brink of another civil war, the much-delayed completion of the transition from post-war junta to democratic state has put Côte d’Ivoire back on the path to regaining some of its former glory.

A shaky cease-fire, signed in 2003 to hold the country together after an attempted coup, led to a government that controlled the south—under Laurent Gbagbo—and a north run by Forces Nouvelles rebels. During that limbo, investors talked about the country’s potential and the build up of money that was waiting to be released once the election finally passed. But it was delayed, then delayed again, until it seemed as though the delay would be interminable. While regional neighbors, such as Ghana, saw their economies boom and attract international investment, Côte d’Ivoire was in stasis.

In November 2010, there was one last twist. The incumbent old warhorse Gbagbo refused to yield, leading to a violent standoff. The victor, Alassane Ouattara, formed a government within the compound of the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, protected by a ring of UN peacekeepers while militias fought in the city around them.

Escalating international pressure and financial sanctions eventually led to the collapse of Gbagbo’s support. Ouattara, a former International Monetary Fund official, took over in April last year but not before the country had defaulted on its bonds by failing to make coupon payments to international creditors London Club, while its assets were frozen. His early achievements—in reassuring investors that the arrears would be repaid and getting backing for debt relief from France—were encouraging, and today in Abidjan there is a cautious optimism. The city is not visibly transformed from two years ago, but construction projects are restarting and traffic is building. Though the change has not been dramatic, the lifting of the deadlock means that companies can finally plan beyond the short term.

“There’s a sense that a lot of things are possible,” says the director of the private equity firm Emerging Capital Partners’ (ECP) Abidjan office, Brice Lodugnon. The security situation has improved and there’s some certainty over the direction of the government, which has pledged to increase spending on infrastructure and agriculture.

The good news is that at least around Abidjan, infrastructure and utilities still function. There are good companies in many sectors and a relatively strong system of governance. Key industries, including financial services, are competitive and the country is still the world’s largest exporter of cocoa. But while Côte d’Ivoire has some of the political risk of a post-conflict environment, it does not have an abundance of underpriced opportunities. That’s a problem for investors.

Even before the crisis, there were tentative expansions into previously politicized industries, including cement making and flour milling, with companies from North Africa, as well as the country’s large French and Lebanese expat communities, moving into manufacturing and processing. Agribusiness group Olam has pledged a further $200 million in investments, while ECP is expanding its portfolio in the power sector. Rather than looking for a new cohort of investors, Ouattara’s government might find more support from those existing players, now free to make long-term plans.

Many businesses were battered by the 2011 crisis but now stoically downplay the human cost of that period, talking instead of the relief at their newfound ability to plan beyond the short term. Still, the scars are there. At the height of the violence, pro-Gbagbo forces executed one of the country’s largest foreign investors—Yves Lambelin, the former president and patriarch of Sifca. That story gets told regularly.

International investors speak highly of Ouattara. One CEO of a multinational operating across the continent said that the president—while his ability to create a government is unproven—is one of the most accomplished leaders in economic planning in Africa.

Politics are bound to be difficult. An hour’s flight north of Abidjan is Ouattara’s hometown of Bouaké, until recently the headquarters of the Forces Nouvelles. There, the difference in development is marked. The roads are in worse condition and the security presence, in the form of UN peacekeepers from Pakistan, are far more visible. People living there refer to the country’s “reconstruction”.

Further up country the situation is worse, with an entire generation denied access to education after the southern government abandoned schools. An executive in a cotton company, with an extensive presence in the north, called the state of some areas “appalling”.

Making sure that the country’s redevelopment is even and that the government—headed by a northerner—does not re-open divisions that are still fresh, will be a massive task for the new president.

This article first appeared in the May edition of Forbes Africa

Guinean-American Eric Guichard grew up between West Africa and the USA. He worked in the international financial sector and then in the fund management industry. Now based in London, Guichard is working to position his latest venture— Homestrings— in the middle of remittance flows.

Global remittances reached record highs in 2012, totaling $351 billion. “Where it hit me was when I saw the actual global number in transfers and how disorganized that market is—no one is really looking at that mass as a potential source of patient capital,” Guichard says.

A George Washington University study showed that the majority of remitters wanted to use the money to invest at home. In fact, many already do through informal mechanisms – transferring the money to a relative, who then puts it into property or a small business.

Those informal structures work, but are inefficient and rely a great deal on trust. The remitter loses control over the money once it is out of his or her hands. There are a growing number of managed investment funds that target emerging and frontier markets, including in Africa, but few have subscription levels that are accessible to the average retail investor.

Defying the characterization of the members of the African diaspora as poor, the George Washington University report shows that many have above average incomes and significant annual investment portfolios, transferring tens of thousands of dollars each year. They are savvy and the majority use the internet not only for news about their home countries, but also to look for money-making opportunities.

“Being from Africa, and being one of those remitters, I knew that if there was a platform that gave me control and empowered me to choose where I wanted to put my money, I would potentially put all my discretionary capital in that platform,” Guichard says. “If I could choose to invest in this bridge, this healthcare clinic, invest in those sovereign bonds, partake in Actis’ real estate private equity funds at thresholds that are achievable by me, of course.”

Guichard built a platform to do just that. Homestrings is an online portal that connects the diaspora to opportunities back home.

Systems that collect and pool cash from individuals to pump into projects in the developing world already exist— Kiva, for example, has funded a large number of initiatives. However, it is still not permitted to gather cash for investment returns. Homestrings allows qualified investors to sign up and see investment opportunities— initially projects for co-investment and private equity funds listed on an online portal. There are currently 18 funds listed, targeting Africa, the Caribbean and India. The first “Diaspora bond”, a local currency instrument for international investors, was added this year, with Kenya the first to list.

The result is a traditional mutual fund structure meshed with crowd-funding platforms and online retail systems like Amazon. When social media features are added to it in the next few months, users will be able to review investment opportunities much like Amazon users can rate and discuss their purchases.

“Ultimately, the ideal would be that there are deals that are proposed by the investors, vetted by the members, then organized by Homestrings—a completely self-directed investment platform,” Guichard says.

“Our experience since the launch in August has been quite uniform. We’ve seen registration rates of about 50- 100 per month, and that’s with no social network push,” Guichard said. “That’s pretty remarkable for us, the level of interest is that high, and it’s primarily reflective of the three major diaspora groups—Kenyans, Ghanaians and Nigerians, working mainly in professional jobs as doctors, lawyers, financiers.” Those professionals—of which there are now around 500—have an average of $25,000 to invest per year, according to the company’s own surveys of them.

With the first diaspora bond now listed, and two more—Ghana and Ethiopia—in the pipeline, Guichard is excited about the prospect of financing much- needed infrastructure in Africa, and about offering individuals access to bonds that are normally the preserve of large institutions or local high net worth investors. For their part, governments in Africa have increasingly turned to local capital markets to raise finance for specific projects.

For an international buyer, the process would be long and arduous, requiring regulatory clearance in the destination country and a brokerage account.

“There exists no formal network where people can systematically do due diligence and then invest in their own country’s sovereign bonds targeted at specific projects without going through all kinds of bureaucratic difficulties,” Guichard says.

Homestrings has set up the requisite accounts in Kenya and interested parties just need to register on the platform.

Real estate will be the next step. Guichard hopes to connect developers and investors on Homestrings, systematizing what is already a major use of remittance money. Currently, the process of buying and building at home is long, costly and relies heavily on trust. By allowing professional developers to link up with diaspora capital, and then allowing the diaspora to buy units once they are built, Homestrings takes a great deal of risk out of the system.

“I think the basic proposition is an empowerment proposition,” Guichard says. “You can sit here and look at real estate in Notting Hill, plug in your laptop, use your wi-fi and choose what real estate company you want to select, and look at their catalogue of investments.”

At the heart of the prospect, Guichard claims, is a whole new way of profiling customers in the financial industry. “We started out with the fact that the way the current financial industry is organized, you are looking at individuals based on age, based on zip codes, based on professions, and based on levels of income, which we see as being a horizontal definition,” he says. “But if you were to look at people in terms of their affinity, in terms of their ethnic allegiances, in terms of their desire to stay connected to where they’re from, then you have a whole new definition of financial services.”

There is also, he says, the potential to change the way that development is financed—crowdsourcing, for profit, long-term capital to drive economic growth in Africa.

First published in Forbes Africa, March 2012

Speaking at his studio in North London, the architect says that the continent needs to define its own vision for urbanization and ensure that its architectural revolution reflects Africa’s cultural, geographical and climatic contexts. Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye traveled extensively in his youth, following his father’s diplomatic career through Africa and the Middle East. It was that exposure that was to later inform his work when, after studying fine art, he found architecture and became fascinated by the relationship between buildings and their environment.

“I realized that by having been brought up in very different contexts—cultural, religious and social contexts—I had somehow developed an appetite for learning more about how the built environment worked with that, and how it reflected that architecture in its human sense.”

Today, Adjaye is one of the world’s leading architects—in 2007 he received the Order of the British Empire for his services to architecture. His portfolio includes the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, which is scheduled for completion in 2015.

For a 2010 exhibition at the Design Museum in London, Adjaye traveled to cities across Africa, photographing the buildings which, although in varying states of development or decay, show startling commonality. Today Adjaye runs through his own potted history of African architecture: Colonial builders erased much of the pre-existing urban culture in Africa, replacing it with tropical versions of European architecture. Upon independence, new leaders embraced a vision of the future that was still largely European.

“I think the early leaders on the continent felt that modernity was the way to embrace or celebrate a sort of new world of empowerment for their nations. So you find a lot of modernist experiments, but modernist experiments that could not avoid the specificity of the geography and the climate. So you have what I call a kind of tropical modernism,” he says.

When the money and ambition began to wear thin, this modernism was replaced by economic pragmatism, driven by international donors who made their architectural choices based on their own financial imperative, and using their own approved contractors and designers.

“So you have very odd late ’70s early ’80s buildings that sort of appear, that have nothing to do with the context; they’re just blips,” Adjaye says.

With debt relief and the mineral- driven boom of the late 1990s, which gathered pace in the early years of the new century, African leaders began a new drive for modernity. With this financial independence and growing economic self-confidence has come a stronger sense of cultural identity across the continent, which is manifested in the creative arts.

“I think you see it in literature, fine arts, performing arts and architecture, they’re all in line. They all lead the image of what nations want to project of themselves.

“This image of most of the countries on the continent getting rid of their debt and suddenly discovering vast minerals and negotiating this, means that there is an opportunity to really explore the idea of modernity for these nations. And architecture comes to the forefront of that, because architecture is the image of the city and the future. Architecture is the image of the city as it sees itself. The story of the city is written in books, but it’s also written in buildings.”

The notion of buildings-as- ambassadors has gained currency in the past decade with the successful reinvention of the Emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the state of Qatar. “It totally worked,” Adjaye says. “It gave the Emirates a skyline. For my father’s generation, the Emirates was a horrible desert and a place you never went to.”

Where the Emirates initially failed, he says, was specifying what its own version of modernity was. It is a trap he is keen for Africa to avoid. Buildings need to exist in their context, rather than just mimic the current, internationally dictated interpretation of Western modernity.

“I think if there is much more criticality about the way in which buildings are built to their climate, you get a much more unique skyline,” he says. “That doesn’t require more money, it just requires more desire on the part of the patrons to insist on a response that makes things specific, rather than insisting on an approach which is just novel.”

Africa’s modernity, Adjaye says, should be dictated by the same geographic features that defined its early cultures. This means ignoring the artificially imposed national boundaries and shaping regional identities from the unifying climates and cultures across the continent, but also avoiding the “colonial trap” of what he calls “Disney-fication” of culture.

For inspiration, Adjaye looks to New York.

“I love the Rockefeller Center. It’s not a cheap building, but it’s an efficient building. It’s a building that strove to understand the time that it was in, which was the ’30s… It talked about density in the city, it talked about networks, it talked about interconnectivity. It talked about living in the heart of the city. It gave a model which was not iconic in terms of imagery but iconic in terms of place, and it’s still a fundamental part of New York.”

That specificity of place and time has created a building that is more than functional—an artifact that helps to define the city it is in.

“There’s something compelling about coming over that bridge from Brooklyn or Newark, New Jersey, and seeing that skyline. It’s like… it’s so powerful. It’s original. That’s the vision we need in Africa. What is the model of living in Africa that nowhere else in the world you can have? The person who cracks that, cracks the game. Not the person who imports the model that we’ve seen before.

“You’ve got to make a model that makes people say ‘I want to go to that city in Africa because it’s just so great. The life there is something I can’t have in London. It’s contemporary, I can have my life there, but it’s completely unique.’ That’s a hell of a thing.”

First published in Forbes Africa, March 2012

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In July 2012, Jeff Haskins, the tireless campaigner and advocate for global agricultural systems and sustainability, died of a heart attack in Nairobi at the age of 32. Without Jeff, this piece and many like it would never have been written. It would have been impossible for journalists like myself to understand and communicate the complex but incredibly important work being done in the field. His knowledge, combined with his enthusiasm, commitment and his patience in dealing with lay members of the media, made a massive contribution to the global debate and raised awareness of issues of international relevance. He was a rare talent, indispensable and irreplaceable. Rest in peace, Jeff.

With rainfall in the Sahel never abundant, in Turkana it has become even less common, and the traditional pastoralists of the Turkana and Pokot have increasingly been forced into conflict over the remaining grazing ground.

Lake Turkana has been shrinking in the drier climate, and its fishermen have, too, been forced to fight for diminishing resources. However, with some of its natural endowments melting away in the heat, the region’s wind-blasted shores could be set to become a major source of power to a country that suffers from perennial underinvestment in energy infrastructure, if a major wind farm project on the lakeside takes off.

Read more in the Wall Street Journal

Alongside his grander proclamations about the creation of some sort of ‘United States of Africa’, Gaddafi championed the creation of a single African currency, a cause that remains on the agenda of the African Union, albeit on a very long and presumably flexible timescale.

With regional integration having arrived on the title pages of development literature, closer cooperation on infrastructure, trade and customs has been on continental and regional agendas. Customs unions and eventually currency unions are seen as the endgames of these processes.

Read more in the Africa Report