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This piece draws on four years of comparative ethnographic research in Ghana and Malawi, between 2020 and 2024. I want to make three connected arguments for the people who shape African health governance: ministries, regulators, and the advisory bodies behind them. First, medical drones do not bypass infrastructure. They reassemble it. Second, Ghana and Malawi have taken divergent paths, and this divergence shows that "leapfrogging" is not a single pathway. It is a set of pol

We need to talk about the elephant in the lecture hall: universities are struggling to respond to AI, and many are getting it wrong. Walk into any faculty meeting these days and you will hear the same anxious refrains. “Students are using ChatGPT to write their essays!” “How do we detect AI-generated work?” “We need stricter policies!” It is 2026, and higher education is responding to transformative technology the same way it often has: with panic, prohibition, and a scramble

While narrow AI systems have long operated in specialised domains, the rise of Generative AI represents a structural shift. Arguably the most consequential cognitive infrastructures of our time, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-5 and Claude, were built, trained, and deployed without public consent or meaningful democratic oversight. This absence exposes a deeper paradox at the heart of modern governance.

The dual life of migrants creates challenges for urban housing governance. Many migrants limit investment in decent urban housing, opting to live in vulnerable or sub-standard structures. While the resulting housing outcome in the city may be seen as a failure of aspiration, it should rather be understood as a strategic sacrifice shaped by failures in urban housing governance.

Creating youth employment is not a single intervention, it is a coordinated system. Doors open not because one actor turns a key, but because all actors align and pull in the same direction

Too often, scholars from the Global South are questioned on their "research scope" when they study their own countries. Should this matter? My reflection draws on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Bent Flyvbjerg, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant to argue that proximity is not bias, but rather insight, and that personal connection can deepen the quality and relevance of academic research when approached with honesty and reflexivity.

It is obvious that local governments cannot do without central government transfer; however, coupling with internal competition can fix decentralization for Africa’s development. Our recent study in Benin shows that when one local government received funding, its neighbors, were inspired to invest more too. With fair funding and a touch of healthy competition, decentralization can move from promise to power, driving growth, reducing inequality, and facilitating development.

Decentralization improves governance and local participation in development, but it also fuels inefficiency when there is unguided creation of districts. Many decentralized districts in Africa are poor in revenue generation, dependent on central government transfers, and burdened by high administrative costs, leaving little for investment. Compounded by a lack of competition for innovation and leadership in some countries, decentralization risks becoming stagnant rather than

The impact of decentralization is not a yes-or-no question. It is about how reforms are designed and when they are rolled out. Decentralization does not benefit all communes equally, its success depends on the ability to raise more internally generated revenues........