The Rift Valley Institute is one of twelve non-profit organisations to be awarded an Open Society Foundation New Executive Fund grant in 2017. The grant, which is intended to assist newly appointed leaders to implement their vision for…
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The Rift Valley Institute, together with the South Sudan Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports, and UNESCO, with funding from Norway, are pleased to announce the first ‘Tarikh Tana (Our History)’ Radio Show, which will air on Wednesday 1 November…
We Kissed the Ground is the dramatic first-hand account of a young man’s attempt to migrate to Europe from Somaliland and the hardships of the journey through Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya, a journey attempted by many young Somalis and commonly…
In May and June, the Rift Valley Institute will hold the 2018 annual field courses in Sagana, Kenya. Now in their fifteenth year, each course examines a different sub-region within eastern and central Africa: Sudan and South Sudan, the Great…
Recent Publications

SHECONF 2026: International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
July 9, 2026
Event report On 26 March 2026, researchers, practitioners and academics gathered in Addis Ababa for SHECONF 2026, an International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in Ethiopia, the first of its kind convened by the Ethiopian Women Researchers Network (EWNET).

State Capture in Africa: How elite networks undermine democracy, development and security
June 24, 2026
Key points State capture has been increasingly recognized as a major governance challenge due to the way it helps to drive many of the most pressing problems facing contemporary states, including democratic erosion, corruption, economic exclusion, insecurity and declining trust

The New Geopolitics of Eastern Africa
June 17, 2026
On 20 May, the British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA), Chatham House, and the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) convened a group of experts to discuss the ‘The New Geopolitics of Eastern Africa’. The closed-door roundtable considered the ongoing transformation of