Africa Defense Forum - Africa Defense Forum

A Turkish company Albayrak Group has signed a 20-year agreement to manage the Mogadishu port with promises to modernize it and oversee its growth. Outsourcing port operations is one more sign of Somalia’s slow rehabilitation, a dramatic…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE International donors pledged $8 billion in development aid for projects across eight countries in the Horn of Africa, United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon announced at the start of a visit to the region in October 2014.…

DEFENCEWEB French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has announced his country’s intention to deploy more than 3,000 Soldiers to begin military operations under a broadened trans-Sahel counter-terrorism initiative set to operate from…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Ugandan security forces stopped a cell of Somalia’s al-Shabaab insurgents in the nation's capital that was planning an imminent attack. Police arrested people in September 2014 in raids two weeks after Ugandan…

DEFENCEWEB A reconnaissance light aircraft built by a South African company has made its maiden flight and has become the first military aircraft fully designed and built in Africa. A product of the Paramount Group, the Advanced…

The Nigerian Navy announced that crude oil theft fell 67 percent in 2014. Rear Adm. Charles Obiora-Medani, flag officer of Eastern Naval Command, said theft dropped from about 2.6 million barrels per month in January to about 800,000…

ECOWAS Defense chiefs from across the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have pledged greater cooperation to combat shared threats. The September 2014 meeting of the Committee of Chiefs of Defence Staff (CCDS) in…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE With camouflage uniforms, assault rifles, night vision goggles, thermal imaging devices and radios, wildlife rangers in Kenya’s Ol Jogi rhino sanctuary prepare for night patrol in the “war” against poaching. “It…

ADAM BEMMA/IPS Along the fertile banks of the White Nile, a war veteran’s co-op is planting for a food-secure future in South Sudan, a country potentially facing famine. Wilson Abisai Lodingareng, 65, is a farmer and founder of…

Story and photo by JOAN ERAKIT/IPS Dry, hot and often plagued with sandstorms, Niger has a population of more than 17.2 million. Insecurity, drought and cross-border crime contribute to this West African nation’s fragility, in which only…