Mobility is a precondition for economic growth: mobility for access to jobs, education, health, and other services. Mobility of goods is also critical to supply world markets in our globalized…

Marc Juhel |

Countries coming out of crises undergo rapid structural changes, including migration and big economic shifts. This can complicate the measurement of their progress, sometimes in unexpected ways,…

Mark R. Thomas, Kristen Himelein |

Conflict Diamonds A National Geographic Special on conflict diamonds. I am a mining specialist, not a conflict specialist. But on my recent trip to Sierra Leone, I was struck by the ever-present…

Christopher Sheldon |

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), including mobile phones, are increasingly seen as critical tools to improve public health and health outcomes in Africa. Several experiments,…

Samia Melhem |

With oil in Niger and Uganda, natural gas in Mozambique and Tanzania, iron ore in Guinea and Sierra Leone―African countries are increasingly finding rich new deposits of oil, gas, or minerals and…

Makhtar Diop |

This summer, I made a project visit to a government clinic in northern Sierra Leone.  It is a clinic pretty much in name only, being constructed as 1-bedroom living quarters for a teacher and…

Margaux Hall |

Rusumo Falls Hydroelectric Power Project: Bringing More Electricity to Africa's Great Lakes Region In May this year, I joined World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and U.N. Secretary…

Makhtar Diop |

If you saw how poor I was before, you would see that things are getting better.   When I hear stories like that of Jean Bosco Hakizimana, a Burundian farmer whose life was transformed by a cow, I…

Joachim von Amsberg |

Under current trajectories, the world is headed toward a world that will be 4 degrees warmer by the end of this century. Despite the mounting concern around this scenario, many countries…

Uwe Deichmann |

A major factor holding back African development is the time it takes to transport goods within the continent. Though road conditions are poor in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, research has shown that…

Gael Raballand, Julia Oliver |