Dans l’exercice de leurs activités commerciales quotidiennes, les femmes vendeuses de la ville de Bukavu sont régulièrement exposées à des situations d’insécurité. Elles se plaignent souvent de cela ainsi que des conséquences engendrées sur leurs activités quotidiennes. Selon ces femmes, les auteurs de cette insécurité sont notamment des…

Roadblocks—infamous for the informal fees travellers must pay—are often thought to be found exclusively in rural areas. Yet, as Evariste Mahamba shows in this blog, the harbor of Goma also has a history of roadblocks. Having become hotspots of extortion, pressure mounted from citizen movements to dismantle the roadblocks. Recently, the new…

Western donors are struggling to maintain leverage on the increasingly authoritarian regimes in the Great Lakes region, whose desire to remain in power through formal, legal and informal means block efforts at governance reforms. While economic forecasts for most of the region are stable—due to rising commodity prices and the slowing down of…

In the coming months, the Usalama Project will publish a series of blogs on urban insecurity as experienced by different professional groups and layers of the population, such as female vendors and traders, money-changers and motor-taxi drivers. It will also look at different causes of and responses to insecurity, such as vigilante groups. The…

A form of insecurity that first manifested in rural areas in North Kivu, since 2015, kidnappings for ransom have also become commonplace in the city of Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Here, it is children who are often the victims. In this blog, Passy Mubalama zooms in on the experiences of parents whose children have been…

In June and July, the Rift Valley Institute will hold the 2019 annual field courses in Ethiopia. Now in their sisteenth year, each course examines a different sub-region within eastern and central Africa: Sudan and South Sudan, the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa. They offer a dawn-to-dusk programme of lectures, seminars, panel discussions…

The Rift Valley Institute is pleased to announce the seventh Juba Lecture Series under the theme of ‘Everyday Economies: Historical Perspectives and Present-day Realities in South Sudan’. The lectures will take place from 3:00pm – 5:30pm on 19 and 20 November 2018, in partnership with the Institute for Justice and Peace Studies (IJPS)…

Since early 2018, Ethiopia’s political context has been in flux, including a deep popular challenge to democratic centralism, and the prevailing political order. In this context, reforms which strengthen constitutionalism and the rule of law in the country are increasingly urgent.

The Institute recently wrapped up its fifteenth year of annual field courses, which were held this year in May and June in Kenya. The one-week intensive courses covered an array of historical and contemporary issues in the Horn of Africa, Sudan and South Sudan, and the Great Lakes regions. They were attended by 83 participants and taught by 32…

Over the last hundred years, the most powerful authorities—along with formal government—amongst the western Nuer communities have been individuals known as prophets. In Nuer society, men, and sometimes women, become prophets when divine beings choose to speak through them, bringing them renown and significant temporal power. One of the most…