Taghreed el-Sanhouri’s documentary Our Beloved Sudan (2011) portrays Sudan from independence in 1956 to partition in 2011. Expanding on some of the themes of Taghreed's earlier All About Darfur (2005) the new film includes interviews with prominent northern and…
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The recent RVI Usalama Project report on the origins and activities of the M23 rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), From CNDP to M23: The Evolution of an Armed Movement in Eastern Congo, was featured…
The new hostilities between Sudan and South Sudan have generated renewed interest in two RVI publications: Douglas Johnson's When Boundaries Become Borders and Eddie Thomas' The Kafia Kingi Enclave. The books offer the most detailed available account of border…
The Sudan Volunteer Programme (SVP) is a London-based charity that has been sending volunteers to teach English in Sudanese universities for the past 15 years, SVP has a number of placements open, due to start in August 2012. Volunteers…
Abaarso Tech is a newly-established secondary school in Somaliland. The school provides international-level education for outstanding students. Rift Valley Fellow Ahmed Esa, one of the school's prime movers, seeks to recruit a number of teachers to join its staff….
The Rift Valley Institute is among the 50 leading think tanks in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the annual Global Go-to Think Tanks Report issued by the University of Pensylvania’s Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program. The research team identified approximately 6,603…
On 6 December 2012, the RVI's Nairobi Forum hosted a seminar on ‘Rethinking state-building in Somalia: Negotiated statehood and hybrid governance’. The first discussion was led by Dr Marleen Renders, author of Consider Somaliland: State-Building with Traditional Leaders and…
Dr Virginia Luling, who died in January, was an independent researcher on Somalia who worked for more than 20 years with Survival International. She conducted her first field research in Afgooye, a village 30 km from Mogadishu, in the…
On 21 June 2013, the Nairobi Forum and the Kwani Trust hosted Nadifa Mohamed, the Somali-British author, in conversation with Ellah Allfrey, Deputy Editor of Granta, which listed Nadifa among the best young British novelists. Born in Hargeisa and raised in South London,…
Ethnic violence in South Sudan's rural communities is addressed in a report from the Juba-based Sudd Institute. In 'Mapping the Sources of Conflict and Insecurity in South Sudan: Living in Fear under a Newly-Won Freedom', RVI co-founder Jok Madut…
Recent Publications

Thinking about Borderlands: Observations and implications from XCEPT programme research
March 31, 2025
Do the ways in which policymakers and national governments view borderlands reflect how the communities living there experience them? Building on this, can a better understanding of the characteristics of borderlands help in promoting development, improving governance and making more

Digital Governance and Security in the Horn of Africa
March 28, 2025
While digital finance—including mobile money—has developed unevenly across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, such technologies are nevertheless transforming everyday economic activities. In some cases, borderlands and cross-border financial flows are central to these digital developments and are driving further innovation. From

Legally Informal: Women, conflict and cross-border trade in the Mandera tri-border area
March 28, 2025
In the Mandera triangle—a pastoralist region encompassing the point at which the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia meet—the reality of local and cross-border trade often diverges widely from official state policies of control. This disjunction has created a grey