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The Water Sector Nexus Trap
How old are you? If you are reading this, you might fall within what I call the nexus era, a period in which integration became the standard answer to almost every development-related problem. In this blog, I focus on integration interventions in the water sector. While integration remains a worthwhile aim, this piece asks why successive integration agendas have done so little to change the incentives that determine inter- and intra-sector cooperation.
Dr. Victor osei kwadwo
Oct 126 min read
Medical Drones, Fragile Health Systems, and the Politics of Priority in Africa
Medical drone programmes are in fashion in Africa. In November 2025 the U.S. State Department pledged up to US$150 million to expand Zipline's drone network across five African countries. The pledge covers the expansion but does not cover operating costs, which the receiving governments have agreed to cover as the systems scale. What is imminent is that over the next few years, the use of medical drones in Africa will be scaled. This piece asks what governments will be paying
Dr. Edwin Ambani Ameso
Sep 286 min read
"The Policy Coherence Trap": South Africa's Next Industrial Policy Challenge
Industrial policy is back across Africa, and South Africa has one of Africa's most sophisticated industrial policy architectures, yet industrial transformation remains elusive. The usual explanation, poor coordination between departments, stops too early. The deeper problem is a policy coherence trap. Governments align their strategies and institutions and count that as progress, while the productive system stays fragmented. Universities, financiers, training institutions and
Prof Elvis Avenyo and Dr. Gideon Ndubuisi
Sep 286 min read
Aid is collapsing. Africa’s development banks must make the same money work twice as hard
In the face of falling aid, development banks need to use all the financial instruments available to them to make their capital go further. Africa's development banks can no longer count on donors or treasuries. The way through is not more money, but better use of the money already in hand. By bundling loans that have proven themselves, selling them to investors, and lending the proceeds again into the early-stage projects nobody else will finance, a development bank can fund
Prof. Prince Sarpong
Sep 85 min read
Leapfrogging Care? What Medical Drones Are Doing to Public Health Governance in Africa
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
Dr. Edwin Ambani Ameso
Jul 26 min read
Sachet Water Costs Ghanaians 60 to 100 times What Piped Water Costs
Sachet drinking water is comparatively one of the most expensive source of drinking water in Ghana. Households pay 60 to 100 times the residential piped tariff (Ghana Water Limited) for it. That makes up approximately GHS 6.45 billion a year larger than the operational cost of running piped services to same households. Add an estimated 84,000 tonnes of sachet plastic and the costs gets worse if we factor in environmental and public health cost. A 500ml of drinking water bough
Dr. Victor osei kwadwo
Jun 153 min read
AI Governance in Higher Education: Your University’s AI Policy Is Punishing the Wrong People
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
Dr. Victor osei kwadwo
Mar 57 min read
The Democratic Illusion: Why AI Governance Lacks a Public Mandate
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.
Prof. Prince Sarpong
Feb 199 min read
"A Room in the City, a House in the Village": The Double Life of Migrants and Urban Housing
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.
Dr. Victor osei kwadwo
Jan 215 min read
Who Opens the Door? Rethinking Youth Employment in Africa.
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
Dr. Obaa Akua Konadu
Jan 136 min read
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