Africa

ColdHubs, an innovative Nigerian agricultural enterprise that uses solar-powered refrigerated storage units to keep food from spoiling, is slowly but surely expanding to nearby West African countries. But it faces big challenges to scale up and finance its operations, company founder and CEO Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu told a Harvard Kennedy School audience celebrating the 2022 Roy Award winner.

Climate change, especially the variability of rainfall patterns, poses a threat to maize production in Ghana. Some farmers harvest rainwater and store it for maize production to cope with unpredicted rainfall patterns. However, there are only a few studies on the adoption of rainwater harvesting for maize production. This study analyses the factors that influence farmers' decision to harvest rainwater for maize production in Ghana. 

The Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs announced today that ColdHubs Limited is the winner of the 2022 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership. The company—born out of a partnership between the Smallholders Foundation, the Institute for Air Handling and Refrigeration (ILK Dresden), and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)—uses solar-powered walk-in cold rooms to reduce post-harvest losses for smallholder farmers across rural Nigeria.

When the U.S. military trains other states’ forces, it tries to impart liberal norms such as respect for human rights. But when liberal norms clash, these soldiers prioritize loyalty to their unit, the military, and shared goals.

When winning rebels face intense security threats during civil wars, rebel field commanders are more likely to remain obedient during war-to-peace transitions because they have less incentive to challenge newly installed rulers and less capacity to mobilize supporters outside the postwar military hierarchy.

Modern states recurrently buttress their militaries with legionnaires—soldiers who are neither citizens nor subjects of the governments for which they fight. Legionnaire recruitment is a function of political constraints on a government's ability to enlist citizens and its perceptions of external territorial threats.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important cooperative framework that increasingly affects the global economy, trade, and emission patterns. However, most existing studies pay insufficient attention to consumption-based emissions, embodied emissions, and non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs). This study constructs a GHG emissions database to study the trends and variations in production-based, consumption-based, and embodied emissions associated with BRI countries

This paper responds to a topic from the Army War College’s Key Strategic Issues List, 2018-2020: Evaluate the ramifications of China’s and/or Russia’s interests in Africa for U.S. land forces and suggest options, both to compete and to cooperate, to further U.S. interests.

While U.S. land forces may benefit from competition or cooperation with Chinese elements in Africa, I judge that they possess limited agency to compete or cooperate in the context of these definitions. Therefore, I will take a whole-of-government approach to furthering U.S. interests in Africa vis-à-vis China.