The African Red Sea Region does not produce enough food to feed its own population. Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland (Somalia) are each reliant on imports to make up for domestic production shortfalls. This presents unresolved challenges to…
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.
SEARCH
PUBLICATION TYPE
LANGUAGE
REGION
COUNTRY
- By Mustafe M. Abdi
- Download
This blog is the third in a series published by the Rift Valley Institute to help understand the causes of the drought-related crisis in the Somali regions of the Horn of Africa. It is a product of the UK government’s XCEPT…
- By Ahmed M. Musa
- Download
This blog is the first in a series published by the Rift Valley Institute to help understand the causes of the drought-related crisis in the Somali regions of the Horn of Africa. It is a product of the UK government’s…
By Liz Mahiri Key points Panelists Professor Michele Grossman (Victoria University, Melbourne) Rashid Abdi (International Crisis Group) Lul Issack (UMMA Community Based Organisation) Mohamed Shale Billow (Life and Peace Institute) Moderator: Abdullahi Boru (Amnesty International) Introduction The emergence…
Recent Publications
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
Commodification and Conflict in the Horn of Africa Borderlands
April 1, 2026
This report synthesizes findings from the Rift Valley Institute’s X-Border Local Research Network (2019–2025). In the surveyed studies, 25 leading local and international area specialists conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork across borderlands in South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Somali