ADF

Security at Sea Must Consider an Array of Issues, From the Environment to Economics ADF STAFF There was a time when a country’s maritime strategy consisted of its navy or coast guard protecting its waters, defending citizens from enemies and pirates, and going after people fishing illegally. That’s a shallow view of maritime security in the 21st century. Groups such as the United Nations and the African Union say that a modern-day maritime strategy must protect assets, ensure sustainable economic growth, guard the environment, manage energy use, and build the ability to work with neighboring countries and regions. Africa’s nations…

Half a century after the historic trial at which Nelson Mandela escaped the gallows, one of his fellow former prisoners walked the Cannes red carpet on the French Riviera for the premiere of a documentary about those with him in the dock. Andrew Mlangeni is one of the last surviving defendants of the 1963-1964 Rivonia trial of Mandela and nine others who faced the death sentence on charges of plotting guerrilla warfare and acts of sabotage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. “I knew that one day I would come out of prison,” said the 92-year-old, who spent 27 years behind…

President Danny Faure of the Seychelles spoke for island nations around the world by calling for action to clean up the ocean. He spoke at the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Quebec, Canada, and displayed photographs of plastic waste piling up on the nation’s beaches.  “Islands can no longer afford to see ourselves as dots lost in a sea of blue,” Faure said in June 2018. “We are sentinels, the guardians of two-thirds of our blue planet’s surface. We must act accordingly.”  To make his point, Faure showed photos of Aldabra, a coral atoll and UNESCO World Heritage Site…

ADF STAFF Google plans to open its first artificial intelligence (AI) center on the African continent. The center, which was slated to open in 2018 in Accra, Ghana, will bring together top machine learning researchers and engineers and address challenges in health care, agriculture and education, Google said in a blog. Moustapha Cisse, a staff research scientist from Senegal, will lead the center. “AI has great potential to positively impact the world, and more so if the world is well-represented in the development of new AI technologies,” wrote Cisse and Google AI senior fellow Jeff Dean in a blog post…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Tunisia’s tourism industry, hard hit by terror attacks in 2015, is rebounding, with revenues up nearly a third in the beginning of 2018, the sector’s minister said. “There is a significant improvement,” Tourism Minister Selma Elloumi Rekik told AFP, as visitor numbers surpassed the first five months of 2014, largely due to rising Russian and Chinese arrivals. The 2015 attacks devastated Tunisia’s tourism industry. An attack at the National Bardo museum in Tunis and another targeting a beach resort in Sousse together killed 59 foreign tourists and a Tunisian guard. Visitor arrivals surpassed 2.3 million through May 20,…

DEFENCEWEB As part of a push to support counterinsurgency and peacekeeping efforts, the United States donated equipment and vehicles to the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF). The equipment donated on June 7, 2018, included 30 Mercedes-Benz trucks, six boom lifts, a rough terrain container handler, three Oshkosh armored trucks, a bulldozer, 10 generators and spares.  The equipment was donated at a ceremony attended by U.S. Ambassador to Uganda Deborah Malac and received by Ugandan Chief of Defence Forces Gen. David Muhoozi at the Uganda Rapid Deployment Capability Centre in Jinja district. The center is a unit of the East African…

DEFENCEWEB Six Southern African Development Community (SADC) states agreed to strengthen cooperation to battle the scourge of poaching, particularly that of rhinos and elephants. The countries — Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe — met in Mpumalanga, South Africa, for the fourth multilateral meeting of defense and security chiefs on anti-poaching. During the meeting, Gen. Solly Shoke, chief of the South Africa National Defence Force (SANDF), said they were “close-knit member states” and must collectively deal with poaching to find a common long-term solution. After years of increases, South Africa saw a slight decline in the number of…

REUTERS Landlocked Ethiopia, which lost its access to the Red Sea nearly three decades ago, plans to build a Navy as part of military reforms.  The country disbanded its Navy in 1991 after its then-province Eritrea seceded in the wake of a three-decade war for independence. Ethiopia maintains a maritime institute that trains seafarers.  “Following the efforts made to build capacity of our national defense, we built one of the strongest ground and air forces in Africa,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said during a meeting with senior military officials. “We should build our naval force capacity in the future.” …

WORLD BANK  Photos by VINCENT TREMEAU/WORLD BANK Ousmane Diallo is a 35-year-old university graduate with a degree in sociology. He owns 8 hectares of farmland in Mandiana, one of the most remote places in Guinea, about 730 kilometers east of the capital, Conakry. Mining companies operate in the area, where artisanal mining provides an income to more than 80 percent of the local population. Unlike his peers in the mining sector, Diallo decided to invest in agriculture when he could not find a job, because he “understood the agricultural potential of the region.” When he started farming in 2014, he…

THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION As a young boy chasing chickens on his parents’ farm in northern Uganda, Louis Lakor dreamed of becoming a teacher. But when he finally set foot in a local primary school at age 7, it was as an armed killer. Abducted in a night raid, Lakor was forced to become a child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group, which terrorized northern Uganda for nearly two decades before being driven out of the country by a military offensive in 2005. Clutching a gun handed to him by his kidnappers, Lakor was ordered to “shoot everything…