2025 Year in Review
The 2025 Year in Review provides an overview of the Rift Valley Institute’s work over the past year across eastern and central Africa. The report highlights RVI’s research and publication outputs, education and training activities, and public forums and convenings, alongside regional trends shaping the Institute’s work. It includes summaries of programme activity in Ethiopia, […]
Beyond Research: Who funds knowledge
Episode 5 – Beyond Research: Who Funds Knowledge | Rift Valley Radio Who decides what counts as research, and whose voices shape the global knowledge agenda? In the fifth episode of the Beyond Series, we turn to the politics of knowledge production, funding, and power in global research systems. Hosted by Jason Mosley, the episode […]
Beyond Labour: Gendered work, survival and shifting economies
Episode 4 – Beyond Series | Rift Valley Radio How do women navigate work, trade, and survival in conflict-affected borderlands? In the fourth episode of the Beyond Series, we turn to women’s labour and cross-border trade as a lens for understanding resilience, gender roles and shifting economies in the Horn of Africa’s borderlands. Featuring research […]
Thinking about Borderlands: Observations and implications from XCEPT programme research
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 effective policy and programming choices in these contexts? Such are the questions that have informed […]
Digital Governance and Security in the Horn of Africa
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 the perspective of states affected by institutional weakness and/or security threats, digital financial technologies represent […]
Legally Informal: Women, conflict and cross-border trade in the Mandera tri-border area
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 zone in which policy contradictions form an integral part of the regulatory environment. With this […]
Making Sense of Borderlands
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 conflict dynamics and related phenomena in borderland areas—whether that be in Africa or elsewhere—we must […]
RESTRUCTURING THE MARGINS: EMERGING POLITICAL ORDERS IN KENYA’S BORDERLANDS
During the past decade, northern Kenya’s peripheral border counties have become key to the central state’s political and economic agenda. This synthesis report therefore uses the concept of ‘restructuring the margins’ to unpack the findings of two case study reports exploring how political decentralization, coupled with cross-border, national level and county-level dynamics, impact borderland trade […]
Who Controls the Borderlands? Rents, debts and the role of political and commercial elites on the Kenya-Ethiopia and Sudan-South Sudan borders
Format: Hybrid EventDate: Tuesday, 18 February 2025Time: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PMVenue: BIEA Seminar Room, Laikipia Road, Kileleshwa, Nairobi and Online Borderland revenues, routes and controls are at the heart of state projects on the margins in Kenya and South Sudan. New XCEPT research examines the evolution of border controls and revenue generation projects on two crucial borders in the region. These […]
INFORMAL TRADE, GENDER AND CONFLICT DYNAMICS ON THE NEW KENYA-ETHIOPIA TRADE CORRIDOR
This report examines the effects of infrastructure development and shifting political conditions on trade and conflict at the Kenya–Ethiopia border, including on gender dynamics. In doing so, it focuses on how small-town cross-border traders in the town of Moyale, which straddles both countries, are navigating the area’s shifting economic and political landscape. This report is […]