Cultural barriers to partnership
The soft-side gaps that policy frameworks cannot fix alone: from expectations to decision cultures to language.
Drawing on more than two decades of reporting, most of it by bus and motorbike rather than by hired car, Ruud maps the landscape: why he calls the buying and selling of African stories a kind of colonialism, and names…
A proof-of-life video for the Chibok girls, handed to the one reporter still phoning their mothers two years after the news cycle moved on. Rwanda's logo on a Premier League shirt, and the outrage of people who had been…
A DRC bond issue four times oversubscribed, not because investors believed in the country but because the risk priced into it paid so well. A thousand people in the US and the UK who would buy a painting from Africa…
Data so expensive that people choose between connectivity and food. Newsrooms pressured not by censors with scissors, but by governments quietly pulling advertising. And a creator economy about to boom precisely because…
Which themes six leading Africa–Europe think tanks cover, and where the gaps for business are.
Five priority topics for 2026–2027: Global Gateway in practice, investment risk penalties, business flows between the continents, cultural barriers to partnership, and the limits of the shared-values narrative.