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Eight More Nations Pledge New Circular Economy Roadmaps in Africa
As part of this second phase of the National Roadmaps for the Circular Economy (NCER) program, Angola, Liberia, Madagascar, and Senegal will develop their own roadmaps by identifying priority sectors, aligning institutional efforts, and tailoring strategic guidelines to their local productive structures.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Smallholder-Supermarket Disconnect: Addressing the Missing Links that Separate East African Farmers from Formal Retail Markets
Smallholder farmers are the backbone of East African agriculture, accounting for approximately 75% of production in several countries. At the same time, formal food retail is expanding across the region. Yet as Daniel Njiwa at AGRA and Kris Ansin and Audrey Tsoi at TechnoServe explain, despite this alignment, the formal retail market remains inaccessible to many smallholder farmers, as a range of barriers prevent them from supplying these vendors. They share learnings from a pilot program that highlighted some of these constraints, and explore how supermarkets can work through aggregators that consolidate and coordinate supply from multiple farmers to source smallholder produce at scale.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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South Africa Court Ruling Blocks Shell Offshore Exploration, Raising New Questions for Energy Investment and Environmental Governance
The dispute illustrates a growing tension in African resource-producing economies: governments seeking new sources of domestic energy, investment and fiscal revenue must increasingly reconcile those objectives with environmental safeguards, community rights and legal requirements for public participation.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- blue economy, energy access, ESG, governance, mining, regulations
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Kenyan Teenagers Build $126 Exhaust Filter From Maize Cobs and Coconut Shells
Fredrick Njoroge Kariuki and Miron Onsarigo call their invention HewaSafi, Swahili for "clean air". It is designed to fit onto matatus, the privately owned minibuses that carry millions of passengers across Kenya's cities every day and are among the country's biggest sources of urban air pollution.
- Categories
- Energy, Transportation
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: The AI Sustainability Paradox
AI is being sold as a tool to solve sustainability’s hardest data problems, from Scope 3 emissions to climate-risk intelligence. But the infrastructure behind that intelligence — data centers, water use, energy demand, chips, grids, and community consent — is becoming its own sustainability test. Drawing on conversations at Trellis Impact 26, Ming Wong explores what AI’s physical footprint means for impact investors, corporate sustainability leaders, and the communities being asked to host the next generation of digital infrastructure.
- Categories
- Energy, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Global
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Making Waste Pay: The Keys to Sustaining Paying Customers in Solid Waste Management
Despite growing discourse around the revenue potential of waste to wealth — i.e., reimagining waste as a valuable resource — profitability in municipal solid waste management remains low in India and other low- and middle-income countries. As Vishwanath Varma, Archana Masih, Diksha Rana and Ashish Kapil at Waste Warriors Society argue, this challenge has led to a growing focus on collecting user fees from households — yet that goal is easier said than done. They share analysis based on Waste Warriors Society’s user fee records and customer surveys, which reveals key insights on how to retain paying customers in solid waste management and other user fee-based models of social entrepreneurship.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, WASH
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The Blind Spot in the EU’s New Deforestation Regulations: Laws and Satellites Don’t Save Forests — People Do
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents an ambitious legislative effort to protect our planet’s remaining forests. But Priscillia Moulin at MosaiX highlights a potential flaw in the regulations: To meet the EUDR's data requirements and prove that their supply chains are deforestation-free, major commodity buyers are turning to remote sensing and satellite AI — and if these technologies detect any tree-cover loss, the path of least resistance is often to permanently exclude that supplier. She argues that this creates the illusion of compliance while pushing vulnerable small farmers into the grey market, as satellite algorithms can identify changes in forest cover but cannot determine intent or causality, or assess other complex realities on the ground. She proposes three ways companies can comply with the EUDR without freezing smallholders out of the EU's premium, regulated markets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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Analysis: Green Crime Goes Global
Environmental crime has become so extensive that it is reshaping the global policy agenda, evolving from a niche concern to an urgent topic of international diplomacy.
- Categories
- Environment, Finance, Technology
- Region
- Global
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