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by K. Riva Levinson
October 22, 2020
After nearly six months, West Africa was cautiously re-opening its airports for international arrivals and so I could navigate my return.
by K. Riva Levinson
September 08, 2020
This is a story about impunity; what happens when state actors believe they are exempt from punishment because those who can speak truth to power, don’t.
by K. Riva Levinson
August 28, 2020
Liberians have seen it all during the past two decades: dictators and warlords, civil war and regional conflict, 250,000 dead, more than a million refugees, a generation of children left uneducated and an economy shattered. Then came stabilization brought about by regional and international peacekeepers, followed by the election of the first woman to lead an African nation, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and 15 years of peace and economic growth. (Full disclosure: I worked as a political consultant to Sirleaf when she was first a candidate and then for the government of Liberia from 2005 to 2017.)
by K. Riva Levinson
August 12, 2020
Can the American-led Black Lives Matter movement trigger an African awakening?
This is a question that Moky Mokura, the Executive Director of #AfricaNoFilter, posed on CNN in early June after the death of George Floyd sparked protests against racial injustice across the United States.
by K. Riva Levinson
July 20, 2020
Something curious happened last week. Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s teams both made plays for Africa, a foreign policy area often relegated to a footnote, especially during an election year. The motivations vary, but the upshot could be auspicious for U.S.-Africa policy.
by K. Riva Levinson
June 10, 2020
The year 2020 will be forever marked by the coronavirus, with more than 100,000 lives lost, tens of millions out of work, and the country adjusting to a new normal. But for me, it will also be remembered as a time when young Americans decided not to take their democracy for granted and when their voices were heard around the world.
These young Americans join an activist generation abroad — particularly in Africa — that has been drawn to the streets in America’s image, because democracy — with all its imperfections — remains our greatest export to the world.
by Tom Sheehy
May 18, 2020
In a White House ceremony twenty years ago this week, former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the African Growth and Opportunity Act. While AGOA hasn’t met all of its lofty goals, this trade legislation has helped lift many Africans out of poverty. Today, with the global economy bordering on coronavirus-sparked turmoil and African economies bracing for great damage, it’s worth considering AGOA’s past and future, and celebrating the bipartisan collaboration that made this landmark initiative possible.
by K. Riva Levinson
May 20, 2020
Here’s some good news. African nations, who have benefited from America’s years of largesse in global public health are doing an impressive job of managing the coronavirus pandemic, using a disease response infrastructure enabled by U.S. foreign assistance and a play book that America taught. They are also proving to be determined and innovative.
But the fight has just begun, and the United States needs to double-down on helping some of the world’s poorest, because it is what we do – and have always done – as Americans. Moreover, it is in our own self-interest.
by K. Riva Levinson
May 01, 2020
It is a tale that spans continents, with heroes, heroines and a moral about our shared humanity. This is the story of Remdesivir, the anti-viral drug showing promise in the fight against COVID-19 — offering up the first glimmer of scientific hope against a global pandemic that has claimed more than 60,000 American lives and 200,000 globally. In 2009, researchers at Gilead Sciences of Foster City, Calif., developed the antiviral compound Remdesivir as a possible treatment for Hepatitis C. Unfortunately, it was not effective, and remained in closed research until 2014, when the deadly Ebola virus emerged in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
by K. Riva Levinson
April 15, 2020
Last week, African leaders rallied to the defense of the World Health Organization’s Director General, former Health Minister of Ethiopia Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, after U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Tedros for his China-centric approach to the global coronavirus pandemic COVID-19. "The WHO really blew it," President Trump said, adding that he was considering withdrawing funding to the UN agency. In a show of solidarity, Africa and Africans, stood with Tedros.
by K. Riva Levinson
March 29, 2020
Only three people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the West African nation of Liberia. But even so, the country has sealed its borders, shut its airspace, and declared a state of emergency, closing schools, banning social and religious gatherings, and shuttering all but essential businesses. Watching from the United States with our stay-at-home-order, one might wonder why such a drastic measure with so few cases for a post-conflict economy still reeling from the twin shocks of the West Africa Ebola outbreak and the collapse of commodity prices four years ago? Consider this single contrast of capacity.
by K. Riva Levinson
March 08, 2020
If you trust the polls, a clear majority of Americans do not support the current U.S. president, and for registered Democrats, it is with a raging fury. So as soon as Biden proved his viability in South Carolina, the electorate was drawn to him. It’s elementary human nature — when fear and hope fuse to propel behavior. I saw this phenomenon play out in West Africa in August of 2014, at the height of the deadly Ebola virus outbreak, after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) predicted a trajectory between 550,000 to 1.4 million cases by early the following year. And then — within just months — Liberia, the country hardest hit, was able to break the chain-of-transmission.
by K. Riva Levinson
February 11, 2020
Just when you think that Washington D.C. is wholly broken, that bipartisanship is dead-on-arrival, and good policy comes secondary to politics, something surprises you. So it did for me last week as I watched the bipartisan, bicameral Congressional push-back in reaction to press reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was weighing proposals for a major reduction — or even a complete pullout — of U.S. forces from Africa. The articles asserted that intelligence assets and U.S. defense attachés could also be pulled, leaving America with a weakened ability to stop terrorist threats.
by K. Riva Levinson
January 21, 2020
Just when you think that Washington D.C. is wholly broken, that bipartisanship is dead-on-arrival, and good policy comes secondary to politics, something surprises you. So it did for me last week as I watched the bipartisan, bicameral Congressional push-back in reaction to press reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was weighing proposals for a major reduction — or even a complete pullout — of U.S. forces from Africa. The articles asserted that intelligence assets and U.S. defense attachés could also be pulled, leaving America with a weakened ability to stop terrorist threats.
by K. Riva Levinson
December 31, 2019
2019 was notable year for Africa — politically, economically, culturally, and for the coming of age of its technological revolution. Some of the year’s advancements were cyclical, but others were historic, unprecedented, and could propel a continent of largely young people forward in a region on track to overtake central and south Asia as the most populous in the coming decades. Meeting the needs of Africa’s youthful population will be one of the defining global challenges of our time.
Here are my top three change-making events for Africa’s notable year:
by K. Riva Levinson
November 05, 2019
When Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation and his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea, I knew the celebrations would be short-lived.
The Nobel Committee said in its citation: “He spent his first 100 days as Prime Minister lifting the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, discontinuing media censorship, legalizing outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders who were suspected of corruption, and significantly increasing the influence of women in Ethiopian political and community life.”
by K. Riva Levinson
October 10, 2019
When National Security Advisor John Bolton unveiled the Trump administration’s Africa policy nearly a year ago in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, he invoked dark and foreboding language reminiscent of the Cold War: “The predatory practices pursued by China and Russia stunt economic growth in Africa; threaten the financial independence of African nations; inhibit opportunities for U.S. investment; interfere with U.S. military operations and pose a significant threat to U.S. national security interests.”
by K. Riva Levinson
August 21, 2019
Last week marked an extraordinary advancement in our global health security as clinical drug trials treating Ebola, one of the most deadly known pathogens to mankind, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), saw a 90 percent survival rate in patients where past outbreaks claimed up to 90 percent of their victims. While an experimental vaccine was in use to protect people from catching Ebola, this is the first effective treatment for those infected with the hemorrhagic fever. Never before has a drug been developed and administered during an ongoing epidemic, jumping what can be a decade-long queue through regulatory agencies for neglected diseases, which some call the pharmaceutical valley of death.
by K. Riva Levinson
July 30, 2019
I was traveling from Washington, D.C. to Monrovia, Liberia, on 14 July when Donald Trump, in a series of Sunday morning tweets, told four progressive Congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from, setting off a political firestorm with accusations of racism and xenophobia against the U.S. president. Though he didn’t name them, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley(D-Mass.), critics of his immigration polices, were clearly the targets. Only Omar was not born in the U.S. She emigrated from Somalia.
by K. Riva Levinson
July 01, 2019
When I entered the Joaquim Chissano International Conference center in Maputo, Mozambique, on 19 June for the opening of the Corporate Council on Africa’s (CCA) summit and the roll-out of the Trump administration’s Prosper Africa strategy, my first reaction was, “what were the organizers thinking?!” Who inaugurates a U.S. policy to counter our global competitors, most notably China, in a conference center built by the Chinese, with a grant of 50 percent of the construction cost, attached to a colossus of a hotel, the Hong Kong-managed AFECC Gloria, flanked by lions sitting on pedestals, in capital city where the skyline is dominated by the Maputo–Catembe Bridge, the largest suspension bridge on the continent with 85 percent of the $725 million cost financed by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC)?
by K. Riva Levinson
June 08, 2019
At the close of the fourth episode of the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, the highest ranked TV show ever scored by IMDb, we learn that Lyudmilla, the pregnant wife of the heroic firefighter Vasily Ignatenko, survives an otherwise fatal dose of radiation because her unborn fetus absorbed the radioactivity. This did happen. Lyudmilla is alive today and living in Kiev. This reminded me of a story I heard from a doctor who battled the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Ebola is one of the most lethal-known pathogens; the 2014 outbreak left more than 11,000 persons dead, 28,000 infected, and a generation of orphans behind.
by K. Riva Levinson
May 28, 2019
When Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton unveiled the long-awaited Africa Strategy of the Trump Administration on 13 December, 2018 to an over-capacity crowd at the Heritage Foundation, the reception — including mine — was pretty grim. On 18 June, in Maputo Mozambique, the content of Prosper Africa will be disclosed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on the margins of the annual summit of the U.S. Corporate Council on Africa (CCA).
by K. Riva Levinson
April 23, 2019
Last week, Ivanka Trump, the first daughter of the United States and adviser to the president made a four-day trip to Africa, first landing in the East African nation of Ethiopia, then flying 2,942 miles west to Côte d'Ivoire.
While some wrote off the trip as self-promotion, just “Ivanka, Ivanka-ing,” and others called it “Hypocrisy without Borders,” Ms. Trump deserves credit for focusing the U.S. government on support for women empowerment around the world, and particularly in Africa.
by K. Riva Levinson
April 08, 2019
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets this past weekend in Sudan in the biggest-yet series of rallies since December 2018 to demand the resignation of President Omar al-Bashir. What’s happening in Sudan is part of the rise of the activist generation, a phenomenon that BBC’s Africa Editor Fergal Keane suggests is the most important thing to happen to Africa politics in the last two decades. These protests are not single events, they endure. CSIS’s Judd Devermont in analyzing the data said, “the game has changed.”And he is right.
by K. Riva Levinson
March 22, 2019
Power from the Margins: Opening up African political systems to women, youth and other disrupters
by K. Riva Levinson
March 12, 2019
Like all elections in this impoverished but oil-rich nation, the competition was intense. It was violent and deadly. And while no one expected a flawless process, and there were warnings of sanctions from the U.S. and UK to those who interfered in the polls, it was hoped that gradual improvement could be scored from the 2015 contest which saw an historic transition of power from an incumbent government to the opposition party.
by K. Riva Levinson
January 14, 2019
Last week, while cable news was calculating the hours and minutes of the U.S. government shutdown, some unexpected headlines from Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) managed to creep into the international news roundup. At first blush it appeared most welcome and historic news to distract from the blame game of U.S. governing failure. But like all things Congo, it’s complicated.
by K. Riva Levinson
December 18, 2018
The Trump Administration’s New Africa Strategy, unveiled by U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton at the Heritage Foundation last week, was in the works for one year and was a closely guarded secret. Congressional staff invited to the roll-out only received the White House fact sheet upon arrival at Heritage, and while the policy was “an intensive interagency process,” few outside of the National Security Council knew in advance how things would roll on 13 December.
by K. Riva Levinson
December 11, 2018
The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), once the conversation of academics and elites in New York and Geneva, have seeped into everyday vernacular, particularly so amongst Millennials. This generation considers social impact as important as return-on-investment, and their numbers flooded the festival at FNB. But within African nations, meeting the SDGs is more than a question of civic action, it is an urgent race against time.
by K. Riva Levinson
November 06, 2018
As demographics shift and Americans awaken to the fact that elections do matter, what is the line between vote protection and voter discrimination? Like everything in this age of hyper-partisan politics, it depends upon your party.
And no surprise, South African-born comedian Trevor Noah is at it againdefaulting to African stereotypes when talking about Kemp’s control over the Georgia voter roll: “That is some Africa-level shit right there.” But maybe Noah is on to something.
by K. Riva Levinson
November 06, 2018
No matter the outcome of Today’s mid-term elections – be it a blue wave, red wave or divided government, a repudiation of Donald Trump, or a reluctant embrace – the elections will make history. Not for the results, but because of the historic number of women running for state offices and very likely for the rise in participation of voters under 30.
by K. Riva Levinson
October 25, 2018
by K. Riva Levinson
October 08, 2018
No, I would not have gone with a pith helmet for safari gear in Kenya. It was an unfortunate wardrobe choice for Melania Trump on the third stop of a four-country African tour which included Ghana, Malawi and Egypt, her first solo trip as first lady, and her first time traveling to sub-Saharan Africa.
by K. Riva Levinson
September 15, 2018
Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, the only black African to hold the post and the first elected from within the ranks of the organization, was laid to rest on Thursday in his native Ghana at a State Funeral usually reserved for the passing of presidents. Annan was 80 years old.
by K. Riva Levinson
August 07, 2018
Following the July 30 presidential election in Zimbabwe, where for the first time in three decades 94-year-old Robert Mugabe was not on the ballot, a violent crack-down on opposition supporters and a full-blown crisis is now unfolding. Instead of constraining itself to diplo-speak, the U.S. government, as part of a coalition of Zimbabwe’s international stakeholders, needs to show leadership.
by K. Riva Levinson
July 06, 2018
“The U.S. needs to step up its game in Africa,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who was in Ghana to close out the four-country mission of the President’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa (PAC-DBIA), originally established by President Obama in 2014. The fact that the Trump administration chose to embrace PAC-DBIA, when so few Obama initiatives are still standing, should be noteworthy for those wondering where Trump’s Africa policy is headed.
by K. Riva Levinson
June 11, 2018
When the deadly Ebola virus outbreak was at its peak in West Africa, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) responded to anxieties of a U.S. contagion by establishing an enhanced Ebola screening tracking program at five airports, allowing borders to stay open and enabling the movement of people and supplies. But this Ebola sequel, fortunately, does not have the predictable no-Washington-political-compromise ending.
SHEROES Talk
May 18, 2018
K. Riva Levinson's talk at the International SHEROES Forum, Accra, Ghana.
by K. Riva Levinson
May 15, 2018
On Mother’s Day, "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah opined that President Donald Trump reminded him of an African dictator during an interview with CNN's Brian Stelter on the Sunday talk show, “Reliable Sources.” Soon after, social media was flooded with cartoons of the U.S. president in full military regalia, with African soldiers marching in-step. It was not Noah’s first time using this reference to describe Trump.
by K. Riva Levinson
April 17, 2018
Orlando Stadium overflowed in Johannesburg's Soweto township on Saturday, April 14, during the state funeral for anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of the late Nelson Mandela. Mourners from across the country and the continent, along with dignitaries from around the world, gathered to pay tribute to the “Mother of the Nation.”
by K. Riva Levinson
March 22, 2018
On Monday, Feb. 12, 2018, President Donald Trump unveiled the second budget proposal of his presidency, which included the creation of a new Development Finance Institution (DFI) charged with leveraging private sector investment to advance U.S. foreign policy interests. It would seek the merger of USAID’s Development Credit Authority with the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a 47-year old self-sustaining U.S. agency established to help American businesses invest in emerging markets.
by K. Riva Levinson
February 27, 2018
NBA Africa, led by Managing Director Amadou Gallo Fall and the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, have helped to transform the NBA’s footprint in Africa. In doing so, they have become part of the front-line of private sector institutions which celebrate a continent unhampered by inaccurate clichés, and defined by its potential, its people, and its diversity.
by K. Riva Levinson
January 21, 2018
After Liberia’s very divisive political campaign season, where social media often trafficked in anger and hurtful political attacks, I anticipated the same to be reflected at the U.S. president.
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