Mcebisi Jonas, a former deputy finance minister, said the country must diversify its commercial ties and protect itself from the fallout of a global transition away from multilateralism.
Drop Site Daily: November 19, 2025
Mcebisi Jonas said that South Africa should shift away from its current focus on investment treaties towards free trade.
The company uses machine learning to provide micro-financing and mobile phone credit to people who often don't have traditional bank accounts.
Productivity growth in Angola, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia has slowed over the last decade, S&P noted.
A new report titled “Data Crunch: How the AI Boom Threatens to Entrench Fossil Fuels and Compromise Climate Goals” from the Center for Biological Diversity warns the booming artificial intelligence industry’s high resource consumption threatens the world’s climate goals, despite rosy prognoses of AI’s projected benefits. Co-author Jean Su says that the increasing use of AI for military applications offsets any positives it offers for climate change mitigation. “What we need to do is empower communities and countries, especially in the Global South, to ask what is the public benefit that they are supposed to get from AI, and weigh it very carefully against the severe cost to their climate, to their electricity prices and to their water.”
Sudanese climate diplomacy researcher Lina Yassin is supporting the Least Developed Countries Group at the U.N. climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The group is composed of 44 countries, including Sudan, whose cumulative emissions amount to less than 1% of total global emissions. “They are the countries that have the least amount of resources to respond to the climate crisis,” explains Yassin. Yassin also discusses the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, where the estimated death toll is now at 150,000. “This is a proxy war funded by foreign nationals who have vested interests in Sudan’s resources. … The UAE has been using the RSF militia to illegally smuggle gold out to finance the war and finance their own gold reserves. The UAE is also really interested in Sudan’s agricultural lands.”