As part of its transnational security series, the Munich Security Council organised a roundtable debate on the eve of the ECOWAS summit on 28 June in Abuja. The event brought together high-level government representatives, security experts and business leaders from across the region. Participants discussed new ways to co-operate and counter illicit flows and other transnational crimes. Read on

The Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research has launched an initiative to support entrepreneurs and start-up companies active in the fields of mobile health, pharmacometrics, innovative financing or digital humanities (knowledge transfer) in sub-Saharan Africa. More particularly, the Swiss Africa Business Innovation Initiative (SABII) aims to boost the entrepreneurial know-how and exposure of sub-Saharan graduate students. Read on

According to 2018 data from 30 member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), official development assistance (ODA) has fallen by 2.7% since 2017. However, ODA remains a crucial pillar of development finance, particularly in the Sahel and West Africa. In 2017, the 17 Sahel and West African countries received a total of USD 13.9 billion in ODA, representing 9.5% of all ODA given. Read on

This op-ed, published on the IPI Global Observatory, by Jorge Moreira da Silva, OECD director of the Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD) and Eric Rosand, director of the Prevention Project and Brookings non-resident senior fellow, calls upon governments and development partners to develop a new approach to development that prioritizes prevention. A stronger focus on prevention will require “a much more coherent effort among political, security, development, humanitarian and peace actors—recognizing that the challenges in fragile contexts are too big and too complex for one set of actors to tackle alone,” explain the authors. Read on