A few weeks ago I had to travel to Switzerland. As I was preparing for the trip, I wondered whether I needed my passport or if my Spanish ID would suffice. Switzerland doesn’t belong to the European Union but I wasn’t sure about this type of administrative arrangement between it and the EU member countries. […]
Sub-Saharan Africa: A Road Map to Opportunity
This week I’m writing from Nairobi. It’s been a bit less than a year since I left, and I needed to get my “shot of Africa.” I arrived early on Sunday morning, and I could soon hear familiar song from a nearby church. Singing and dancing is an important part of African cultures (note the […]
A Young Population, a Youthful Mentality
“Africa is young, Europe is old“. That was one of the first conclusions I reached after a few weeks in Lagos. I wasn’t thinking just in terms of the age of the population, more in terms of the spirit and outlook I saw there. Africans are bursting with youth and energy which is why I […]
A new era of indigenous entrepreneurship
I came across a short article by Ronald Coase (1991 Nobel laureate in economics) published at the Harvard Business Review a few months before he died, aged 103, in 2013. The article is a delicious call for economists to re-engage with the (real life) economy. I want to focus on just one sentence in the […]
Increasing urbanization and smart cities
Urbanization is on the up. The prospect is that by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities – for Africa, the prediction is 50 percent. The challenge is for cities to offer improved living conditions to their citizens. To this end, the concept of “smart cities” is being developed. In essence, […]
