On Policy Reluctance and Economic Peril

If Kenya is the world’s leading exporter of black tea, how come the 834,000 smallholder farmers growing tea across Kenya’s highland counties still cannot meet the country’s poverty threshold? This is the story of what happens to tea money after the digital scale beeps.

In wartime Sudan, civilians have built alternative financial networks to keep money circulating despite a broken banking system, enabling people to pay for food, healthcare and other necessities.

In recent years, Lagos weddings have become spectacles, in scope, in scale, in animation and in sheer grandeur. Despite Nigeria’s economic instability, the wedding industry, especially in the country’s economic hub, continues to flourish, revealing a complex ecosystem driven by social expectations, cultural pride and rising consumerism.

In The Gambia, migration and remittances have become society’s measure of success and failure. Through the lives of young people, we see the emotional and financial costs of staying behind, the expectations placed on those who leave, and what it means to return home after an unsuccessful attempt to migrate.

Our latest issue, Africa’s Hustle Republics, explores the social life of money across the African continent. Spanning weddings, agriculture, migration, finance and informal economies, this magazine examines the many ways Africans make, move, perform and imagine money; and what these worlds reveal about the continent today.