Nanjira

8 Overrated Business Trends in Africa (That Aren’t What They Seem) These are the businesses that attract attention, Instagram posts, or even investor money, but rarely deliver long-term value.

"Africa doesn’t lack opportunities, but it does lack patience for fundamentals. The problem with these overrated businesses isn’t that they’re useless; it’s that they’ve been sold as shortcuts to wealth" weetracker.com/2025/08/18/o... ht @nanjira.bsky.social

Death by a thousand roundtables Most policy work is pointless. It doesn’t need to be.

"Policy isn’t a more secure or better compensated branch of academia. Stacking up publication credits doesn’t come with any rewards" www.chalmermagne.com/p/death-by-a... ht @nanjira.bsky.social

“No Future”: A Lexicon - Public Books If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now?

“If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now?”

www.publicbooks.org/no-future-a-...

A worrying signal for the future of #Ai in #humanitarian aid in this article by GiveDirectly. | Paula Gil Baizan A worrying signal for the future of #Ai in #humanitarian aid in this article by GiveDirectly. Targeting and selection are the holy grail of humanitarian innovation - get it wrong and your whole progr...

Instead of asking: “How can AI make selection faster?”
We should ask: “How can AI help us find those we’d otherwise miss?” www.linkedin.com/posts/paulag...

Africa’s youth potential: A policy mirage A guest post by Nanjira Sambuli

I am so, so tired, of the term 'potential'.
It has been used endlessly to speak about Africa, her youth demographic and to animate poor policy postures.
So, when a chance presented itself to pen a (yet another) polemic, I did.

developmentekko.substack.com/p/africas-yo...

We're getting used to cyber attacks that cause massive service outages, assuming every unknown number is a scam, not being able to tell what's real from a deep fake. We're walking through a digital junkyard in which nothing really does what it's meant to do, but sure, AI can make Jesus ride a prawn

"Refrains like youth being leaders of tomorrow never specify when tomorrow is. In the eyes of many of the continent’s young and not-so-young, tomorrow never comes, not in time at least"

Africa’s youth potential: A policy mirage A guest post by Nanjira Sambuli

The last two decades of Africa potential discourse have already taught us that entrepreneurship cannot per se overcome poor public policy. It is especially fallacious to expect young people to magically leapfrog these entrenched complexities developmentekko.substack.com/p/africas-yo...

#InnovationAmnesia depends on cultural patterns that appear to be increasingly widespread: the valorization of technological innovation and the sensation of limited political space for reforming social arrangements.” /2

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

💡 “…a theory of amnesia in the face of innovation:
when apparent technological innovations occasion the disregard of preexisting cultural, legal, and infrastructural norms.” /1

As aid ends, empire endures Western donors are cutting budgets, but the aid model they built—rooted in control, dependency, and depoliticization—still shapes Africa’s development.

Aid is more than a line item in a budget—it is a system of power.” /3 💯

africasacountry.com/2025/04/as-a...

It’s a moment that demands a deeper reckoning with how aid and development have functioned as tools of control—how they hollowed out the African state and replaced political struggle with donor-led projects. /2

“…calls for sovereignty cannot be separated from the history of aid and the role of NGOs on the continent. This is not just a moment of budget cuts. /1

Reclaiming pan-Africanism from elite capture. That’s the struggle! ✊🏾

Pan Africanism under elite capture Recent celebrity investments in the continent raises the question: Who is it really for?

In this distinctively diasporic African imagination, African nations become idyllic homelands, fertile lands of possibility, sanctuaries from the racial injustices of the West, and places where lost ancestral connections can be miraculously restored.” /3 🎯

africasacountry.com/2025/05/pan-...

Beyond the material consequences, these celebrities also aid African governments to craft a progressive, aspirational image that conceals deep-seated class inequalities and the dire material conditions of ordinary Africans. /2

“‘#Wakandification’: the process through which Africa *as a product* is reimagined to serve the interests of representation, nation, and capital[…]
/1

Davos founder accused of manipulating World Economic Forum research Klaus Schwab denies whistleblower claims and says he is the victim of ‘character assassination’

Policy extraversion always amounts to playing a rigged game.

Davos founder accused of manipulating World Economic Forum research. on.ft.com/3GAaWlM

How Vietnam earned its world-renowned anticolonial standing | Aeon Essays Vietnam’s potent and storied anticolonialism is founded upon a unique sense of national shame

It turns out that political thinkers from outside the West can challenge and enhance our Western conventional wisdom about political life, partly because there is at least one big difference between Western and non-Western political theory: the experience of European colonialism.”/4 👏🏾

With this broader understanding of where we can find political theory, we are now seeing scholarly work emerge about the political thought of people previously excluded from the field. /3

But over the latest generation, many have accepted that political theory also happens in speeches, letters, newspapers, pamphlets, wherever humans express themselves to make sense of what is happening in their world so that they can respond to it. /2

“Until the past two decades or so, political theorists assumed that political theory happens in only treatises: written books with systematic, logical arguments. /1

Tech giveth, tech taketh away The rise and fall of online writing livelihoods in Nairobi

The ways that AI disrupts livelihoods in Africa are bound to be different than the West developmentekko.substack.com/p/tech-givet... ht @nanjira.bsky.social

The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter Morozov describes a newly emerged Silicon Valley class of “oligarch-intellectuals,” billionaire tech elites who combine vast wealth, ideological ambition, and the philosophical pretense to reshape pub...

www.theideasletter.org/essay/silico...

Their arsenal combines 3 implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s convo unfolds) /2

“Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms—who present the greater danger./1

The Deep Roots of Oligarchy Private contracting is in the DNA of the modern state.

“The failure to recognize that the United States was born out of rebellion against oligarchy, not just monarchy, has long helped preserve oligarchic influence in the country.”

foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/25/d...

“Hopelessness Makes Possible a New Hope” Though it’s more than a hundred miles from the coast, during the early evening of October 29, 2012, my apartment in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had the salty ...

« …the market-obsessed language of commercial solutions is almost comically inadequate to the enormity of the challenge. Neoliberalism has no regenerative power in it: it can’t cure itself, much less the world. »
😮‍💨

www.publicbooks.org/hopelessness...

Nature Needs Its Own ID | by Midori Paxton - Project Syndicate Midori Paxton shows how digital tools can drive a data-driven approach to protecting our planet’s environmental health.

Digital 'nature' IDs. Quantifying natural ecosystems...
Rather bleak to quantify the qualitative. But such is the age we are living in. 😮‍💨

www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/t...