Heads of State and Governments of the member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) will be meeting this week in Gaborone, Botswana to further discuss the region’s industrial and infrastructure development.
Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states have been called to produce strategic plans to transition their electricity supply industries towards cost-reflective tariffs by 2019. This was concluded at the 34th meeting of SADC Energy Ministers Conference, recently held in Johannesburg.
African elephants face an escalating poaching crisis due to an explosion in demand for ivory, mostly in China. Over 100 000 elephants were killed illegally between 2010 and 2012.
Patents and restrictions on intellectual property have become more problematic for developing nations in the last decade. At the centre of the storm is the development and influx of inexpensive generic medicines that developing countries need to treat HIV, TB and other communicable diseases.
The rise of so-called ‘emerging economies’ – such as Brazil, India and China – has been marked by their growing contribution to developmental issues, regionally and globally. This provision of assistance to the developing world by the developing world is known as South-South Cooperation (SSC).
While the BRICS’ initial focus when it was established in 2009 was on improving global economic governance in response to the 2008 financial crisis, over the last seven years BRICS co-operation and dialogue has moved into politico-security areas.
International trade has changed dramatically since the 1980s. Due to enormous reductions in transportation and communications costs, as well as the worldwide liberalisation of trade in goods and – to a lesser extent – services, production processes have been fragmented while value chains have gone global. Some observers now speak of global production networks.
In June 2015, the Department of Mineral Resources gazetted regulations related to hydraulic fracturing or fracking in South Africa offering a framework for the exploitation and exploration of shale gas. It could easily lead one to think that another step has been taken in the direction of the highly controversial question of industrial fracking in the Karoo basin.
During state visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia in later 2013, President Xi Jinping outlined China’s vision of a ‘One Belt One Road’ – running overland from China to Eastern Europe – and a complementary Maritime Silk Road that stretches from Southeast China across the Indian Ocean to Dar es Salaam and onward around the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean.
Despite the operationalisation of the African Standby Force (ASF) within the AU security system, rapid reaction remains a challenging task, as the crisis in Mali has demonstrated.
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