Dereje Feyissa and Fana Gebresenbet, with Abreham Abebe This report offers a case study of the contestation for ownership and control of key urban resources in Hosanna, located in the Hadiya zone of the newly formed Central Ethiopia Regional…
RVI publishes books, research reports, research papers, briefings and meeting reports in a range of formats. Publications cover policy, research, arts, culture and local knowledge in the countries of eastern and central Africa. Research publications—books, reports and papers—are peer-reviewed. Some RVI publications are also available in French and/or Arabic.
The RVI is a signatory of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001); all publications are free for download in PDF format under Creative Commons licences. The views expressed in books and reports published by the RVI are those of the authors, not the Institute.
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Recent Publications

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

Making Sense of Borderlands
March 27, 2025
This think piece is an extract of a longer paper taking stock of the roughly 40 X-Border studies carried out between 2019 and 2025 under the auspices of the Rift Valley Institute’s XCEPT programme. If we are to fully grasp