World
Imagine the Strategic Partnership between Asmara and Moscow
By Kestér Kenn Klomegâh
In this extremely poor Eritrea nation located in the Horn of Africa, with a population of 3.6 million, what factors could attract to strengthen cooperation in the spheres highlighted by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting with President of the State of Eritrea Isaias Afwerki at the Kremlin.
According to reports from the Kremlin on May 31, Putin referred to the fact that Eritrea has recently marked 30 years of independence. This was when the two countries established diplomatic relations too.
Russia is attracted due to its highly strategic location. Eritrea is bordered to the northeast and east by the Red Sea, Sudan to the west, Ethiopia to the south, and Djibouti to the southeast. The undemarcated border with Ethiopia is the primary external issue currently facing Eritrea. Geopolitical history informed us that Eritrea’s relations with Ethiopia turned from that of cautious mutual tolerance, following the 30-year war for Eritrean independence, to a deadly rivalry that led to the outbreak of hostilities from May 1998 to June 2000 that claimed approximately 70,000 lives from both sides.
Despite the differences between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Russia maintains good relations with the two. But the main significance, as stressed during the meeting, was trade and economic relations which deserve primary attention. There could only be a few, of course not a lot, of potential in many areas. From our studies, agriculture makes up 11 per cent of the wider economy’s value and is the main economic activity in Eritrea.
In 2013, the pickup in growth had been attributed to the commencement of full operations in the gold and silver Bisha mined by Canadian Nevsun Resources, the production of cement from the cement factory in Massawa and investment in Eritrea’s copper and zinc. Chinese are very active in the mining sector, and the Australians operate Colluli potash mining. In 2020, the IMF estimated Eritrea’s GDP at $2.1 billion.
With that economic background, however, Russia sees an opportunity to develop trade and economic ties between the two countries. “Of course, we must, first of all, pay attention to the development of trade and economic ties, here we have good prospects in many areas,” Putin said.
As expected, there was a display of passion for packing official documents. After a series of substantive consultations on partnership and intensive preparations between Asmara and Moscow, the delegation signed several intergovernmental agreements. “I am sure that our talks today will be successful and will benefit the development of relations between the Russian Federation and Eritrea,” Putin stressed.
The trade turnover between Russia and Eritrea in 2022 amounted to $13.5 mln, including $11.5 mln from wheat exports, according to materials for the talks between Putin and Isaias Afwerki in the Kremlin.
“The trade turnover between Russia and Eritrea in 2022 amounted to $13.521 mln (exports: $12.745 mln, including $11.5 mln – wheat (27,500 tons); imports: $776,000),” the statement said.
In 2021, the trade turnover between the two countries amounted to $9.314 mln. Exports of wheat amounted to $8.125 mln, oil products – $175,000, and sulfates – $888,000. At the same time, imports of ready-made clothes reached $126,000.
According to the statement, Eritrea is highly interested in strengthening ties with Ural Automobile Plant and Kamaz. In 2018, Kamaz delivered 56 cars and 5 buses valued at around $5 million to Eritrea.
“In my view, the global order, which is on the cusp of a radical transformation, requires an objective appraisal and mutual consultations on the timeless subject matter and phenomena of paramount importance and significance. The common assessment that we undertake will, in turn, revitalise the formulation of programmes and partnerships that we chart on,” Isaias Afwerki said during the meeting.
Isaias Afwerki believes that Russia was the primary competitor and rival of the policy of encirclement and containment by the forces of domination from the early 1990s, and its global impact in the past 30 years was considerable indeed. Russia did not undertake, at the outset, all the necessary preparations for effective resistance.
An integrated and comprehensive strategy of resistance was not accordingly set in motion. But with time, as the latent policy of containment against China becomes more transparent, international awareness of the free people has increased.
“It is imperative to expand and deepen this awareness, chart out a comprehensive strategy and concrete plans that encompass all fields, create dynamic mechanisms, marshal the necessary resources to ascertain the advent of and transit to a civilised international order of mutual respect, cooperation, complementarity and prosperity, where justice and the rule of law prevail. This is not an option but an obligation,” he explicitly pointed out to Putin.
It is important to remember that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Eritrea in January 2023. He said the agenda for Russia-Eritrea cooperation focuses on implementing potential joint projects, including the logistics hub in Asmara. At a meeting at that time, Afwerki and Lavrov also discussed the radical changes in the international situation and key directions for the development of Russian-Eritrean relations. Lavrov reported to Putin about the results of his African tour at a Security Council meeting.
Afwerki has been president since 1993, when Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia. He is the first and the only person to hold the post. Sergey Lavrov visited Eritrea in January as he toured Africa. The commercial activities revolve around this strategic location as a transit point, and the strategic location also makes the country prime for an increased military presence. This is the strategic importance for Russia.
Lavrov spoke extensively about economic cooperation. According to him, Russia’s truck maker KAMAZ was already working in Eritrea, supplying its products to that country, as was Gazprombank Global Resources, which was building cooperation in the banking sector. In the same year, 2018, concrete talks were held to build a logistics centre at the port of Eritrea, which makes the world’s class logistics and services hub for maritime transportation through the Suez Canal and is definitely set to promote bilateral trade.
Still that same year, Eritrea was interested in opening a Russian language department at one of the universities in the capital of the country, Asmara. Lavrov further indicated: “We agreed to take extra measures to promote promising projects in the sphere of mining and infrastructure development and to supply specialized transport and agricultural equipment to Eritrea.”
In April 2022, Eritrea’s top diplomat, Osman Saleh, made a quick reciprocal visit to Moscow to receive honour and congratulations for opposing the resolution in New York. That was in March 2022; Eritrea was one of the countries who voted against the resolution condemning Russia over the situation in Ukraine at the United Nations.
Eritrea is now a member of the African Union. The Eritrean government previously withdrew its representative to the African Union to protest the AU’s alleged lack of leadership in facilitating the implementation of a binding border decision demarcating the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Eritrea is also a member of the United Nations.
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
A $1 million funding package has been secured by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup, Echovane, to expand its market research platform.
The fresh capital would be used by the company to build AI agents that execute market research end-to-end, used by Fortune-500 firms, including P&G, Haleon, and Kantar.
Echovane will utilise the funds, co-led by Titan Capital and Neon Fund, to make complex market research a done-for-you AI-native service.
The platform is built on the premise that AI should take on the machinery of research while researchers retain control over the judgment. The result should be faster execution without sacrificing rigour, traceability or trust.
Echovane was founded by former Amazon, Stripe, Gojek and Razorpay product leaders and graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Smriti Gupta, Vipul Nair and Himadri Roy.
They initially set out to build an AI moderator for consumer interviews. But the deeper they went, the clearer it became that the interview was only a fraction of the problem. Research teams were still spending weeks recruiting participants, coordinating fieldwork, analysing evidence and turning it into something the business could act on.
So, the founders expanded Echovane into the execution layer for the entire research process.
“We thought better AI interviews would unlock faster research. But that was only one step in the research operations, for one methodology of research.
“In reality, research is more complex, and can vary from interviews to unobtrusive observations and longitudinal studies. It has multi-level complexity including finding niche participants, getting the research completed on time with them and maintaining quality checks,” the chief executive of Echovane, Smriti Gupta, stated.
“This funding allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multimodal capabilities, and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency,” the chief technical officer, Vipul Nair, noted.
Also commenting, the chief operating officer of Echovane, Himadri Roy, said, “Having done the research ourselves, we understand the operational pain researchers have to go through to conduct a good research that gives useful insights.”
“Echovane has made complex, multi-market studies feel simple. They find the right hard-to-reach participants, handle the nuances across markets and languages, and deliver actionable insights with remarkable speed and consistency,” the Consumer Science and Product Experience Lead for Haleon, Zee Alcasid, disclosed.
“Echovane turned a month of product research into two days. They reached exactly the right participants and let us test, learn and iterate continuously across multiple audiences, countries, product variants all within a single study that would be impossible to execute at speed and scale,” the chief product officer for Trustly, Adam D’arcy, stated.
A spokesperson for Titan Capital said, “We have backed Smriti, Vipul and Himadri because they have deeply understood why market research has stayed slow and expensive for decades.
“With Echovane, they are building an AI-native, end-to-end research platform focused on the quality of the final insight, encoding each client’s context into a system that gets sharper with every study.
“They are turning research from a recurring expense into compounding infrastructure — faster, cheaper and genuinely deeper. Their first-principles thinking and capital-efficient execution gave us confidence in Echovane’s long-term potential.”
By Kestér Kenn Klomegâh
Russia’s system of foreign students’ admission is currently experiencing a completely different shape, due to the rapidly shifting geopolitical reality. The emerging trends are closely connected with increasing the number of highly interested applicants rather than the quality of education. The geopolitical shift is pushing Russia to make education for young Africans an ultimate priority. The quota campaign has already begun as the figure compares favourably with previous benchmarks but, to some considerable extent, noticeable challenges are currently affecting enrollment from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Despite that, general interest in Russian education among foreign nationals is increasing; the quota campaign confirms this trend. Last year, for instance, there were about 144,000 registrations in Rossotrudnichestvo’s Education in Russian system. The number has exceeded 160,000 in 2026. What is important here is that Russia shows preparedness to get more students from developing countries, especially from Africa and uses it as a factor for influencing its foreign policy in the region.
Regarding educational initiatives, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with relevant agencies and organisations are active in Africa. Noticeably, Russia is developing and expanding the existing, successfully operating cooperation in the sphere of education. In fact, priority is given to projects in the field of education and training of professional personnel for African countries. Currently, over 37,000 students from Africa are studying at Russian universities. Reports say a gradual increase in the number of scholarships for African citizens and the expansion of the range of professional training programs will provide a strong incentive for further promoting education at Russian universities.
This will continue to actively strengthen inter-university ties with African partners, including through specialised umbrella organisations such as the Russian-African Network University, the Consortium of Technical Universities “Nadra Africa” based at the Empress Catherine II St. Petersburg Mining University, the Russian-African Network Transport University, and the Consortium of Russian Universities Working in West Africa based at the NGO “Centre for Public Diplomacy.”
Reports further indicated that the Rossotrudnichestvo representative offices—the Russian Science and Culture Centres—operating in eight African countries, as well as the Open Education Centres operating under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Education in 31 African countries, serve as a solid foundation for our humanitarian presence in Africa. They serve as conduits for the Russian language and culture on the continent. It is, however, hoped that their number would only increase in the subsequent years.
While addressing the staff and students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated Russia’s readiness to cooperate actively in the sustainable economic development and to strengthen efforts at training the needed specialists and professionals for Africa. After the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991, there were problems sustaining relations with Africa. Then, after more than a decade, Russia started to return to Africa. This process has been ongoing for the past 15 years, according to the top Russian diplomat.
According to Lavrov, these past few years have been characterised by frequent interactions between Russian and African Foreign Ministers, plethora of MoUs were signed that set out the broad parameters of cooperation. Russia’s Education Ministry and the Foreign Affairs Ministry have raised the quotas for many African countries, the highest given to Angola, Ethiopia, Namibia and Mozambique, and South Africa.
According to a report posted on the MFA website in August, for instance, some 1,120 Angolans have enrolled, on Russian scholarships or grants, at various institutes and universities throughout the Russian Federation. Figures for other African countries are available on the official information portal of the ministry.
Besides state-sponsored students, Russia’s Education Ministry has also launched a large-scale educational campaign targeting the recruitment of private foreign students into its educational institutions across the Russian Federation. The program is to be implemented until 2025, which has a website (studyinrussia) translated into different languages, seeks to boost the popularity and improve its image abroad.
Undoubtedly, Russia aims at strengthening the next generation of pro-Russian elites who will help promote its interests, including long-term ones in their home countries. With this in mind, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ultimately, hope to improve the efficiency of “soft power” in Africa, though not to the levels during the Soviet era.
Understandably, Russia is now targeting Africa’s fast-growing population as a huge potential market for knowledge transfer and export education. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a widely circulated Russian daily newspaper, reported that Russia has been focusing on the young population in developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, targeting the elite and middle class in these markets for the export of education, which has great potential.
The newspaper reported on the advantages of multiculturalism and cross-cultural interactive activities paving the way for integration in Russian society. As far back as 2023, Russia’s Federation Council and State Duma (upper and lower houses of parliament) passed a bill. That bill was finally signed into law, allowing foreign students the right to employment, a replica of the work and study model in Western and European countries.
Professor Viktor Sadovnichy, Rector of Moscow State University and Chairman of the Russian Rectors’ Association, an organisation that unites more than 700 heads of higher education institutions, argued that education and demography are interconnected; developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America have growing middle classes. “This favours the export of our education; it has great potential cooperating in the education sphere, it could serve as a huge market – training young professionals that are in demand on the labour market,” Sadovnichy said, addressing a plenary meeting of the Russian Rectors’ Association at Peter the Great St Petersburg State Polytechnic University.
Professor Natalia Vlasova, Deputy Rector at the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of the Ural State University of Economics in Yekaterinburg, explained that many African countries are developing rapidly, and the African elites and the growing middle-class have great potential for sponsoring their children’s education abroad. “In the times of the Soviet Union, African countries were strategic partners, and now we should reactivate these relations because in the near future they will have big economic and political power. This could, indeed, be a huge market and has the business potential,” she noted assertively.
An educational survey released in September 2024, divided into five major groups, said Russia has made significant efforts at improving teaching (the learning environment), research, citations (research influence), knowledge transfer, and international outlook (staff, students, research) in the educational field, according to the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.
By Kestér Kenn Klomegâh
One year after launching a continental initiative designed to make excellence in public governance the foundation of a new drive to transform Africa, LEAD, the Africa CEO Forum’s pan-African leadership programme, takes stock of its first cohort and announces the launch of its second class. Built around a community of senior public decision-makers committed to modernising the state and to the continent’s digital transformation, this new cohort gathers for three days, from 28 to 30 August 2026, on the campus of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) in Rabat, Morocco.
A second cohort that confirms the programme’s durability
For its second class, LEAD brings together 50 fellows, senior public decision-makers engaged in the design and implementation of the continent’s economic and social policies. Over three days, participants take part in collective and collaborative working sessions, peer exchanges and meetings with figures from the public, business and academic spheres, in order to compare their practices and build shared responses to the major challenges of governance.
Speakers include Mehdi Jomaa, former Head of Government of Tunisia, Donald Kaberuka, Managing Partner & Founder, SouthBridge Group, and former President of the African Development Bank, Serge Ekue, President of the West African Development Bank (BOAD), Sanjay Jain, co-creator of India Stack and Director of Digital Public Infrastructure, Gates Foundation, and Mauricio Cardenas, Professor of Professional Practice in Global Leadership, Columbia SIPA, and former Finance Minister of Colombia (2012-2018).
They share their reform experience, their public policy trade-offs and their view of continental priorities. Throughout the programme, the cohort benefits from the dedicated support of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Asafo & Co, BOAD, BCG and the African Development Bank, LEAD partners that have chosen to invest in the transformation of African public action.
LEAD, a pan-African community serving public action
Created by the AFRICA CEO FORUM, LEAD is a leadership programme whose ambition is to reposition Africa’s administrative elite as a driver of reform, of performance and of dialogue with all the continent’s stakeholders.
Designed for senior African public decision-makers, LEAD sets out to build a lasting community of public officials able to share their experience, compare their practices and build common solutions to the major economic, technological and institutional transformations under way in Africa. That community is structured around three pillars: modernizing the state, improving public services, and strengthening cooperation between governments, development institutions and private-sector players.
From fellows to alumni: a long-term initiative
Made up of 36 fellows drawn from a range of administrations and institutions and representing 24 countries across the continent, LEAD’s first cohort demonstrated the quality and the potential of this community from its very first year. In less than twelve months, six of its members have taken a significant step forward: two have been appointed ministers, two have moved into strategic positions at the highest level of the state and two have been promoted to chief executive roles. These moves, which account for 16.7% of the first class, show the role LEAD plays as an accelerator of impact within African administrations.
By bringing together a new cohort of fellows every year, each of them joining the LEAD alumni community, the initiative follows a long-term trajectory: in time, to unite several hundred African public decision-makers around a shared culture of transparency, performance and regional cooperation.
A first year devoted to public service and digital public infrastructure
Throughout the year, the fellows devoted their work to strengthening African public action, to make excellence in public governance a central lever of transformation. An awareness campaign, run as part of Africa Public Service Day, brought to light those who, within the continent’s administrations and institutions, are concretely transforming public policy and improving the services offered to citizens.
Members of the cohort also took part in a special round table held in Kigali during the ACF 2026, in order to carry their thinking to a wider community of public and private leaders. That forum reinforced LEAD’s role as a platform for dialogue between the administrative elite and the continent’s economic players. Digital public infrastructure (DPI) formed the main thread of this first year of work.
Discussions covered issues at the heart of the digital sovereignty of African states: digital identity, payments, secure data exchange, interoperability, governance and the protection of citizens. This work examined the conditions under which African states are developing, in some cases, and can develop, in others, shared, open infrastructure robust enough to improve the quality of public services while supporting local innovation and preserving the capacity of public authorities to set the rules of the game.
A white paper to move from consuming technology to creating value
This year of work concludes with the publication, in collaboration with BCG, LEAD’s Knowledge Partner, of a white paper on Africa’s place in the digital economy and in artificial intelligence. With the digital economy still accounting for around 5% of African GDP, against close to 15% worldwide, the paper calls on the continent to shift from a logic of technology consumption to one of value creation.
The white paper identifies three structuring priorities for African public actors:
- Building shared digital infrastructure that serves as the backbone of public services and private innovation.
- Pooling investment in order to reach critical mass and avoid the fragmentation of efforts across the continent.
- Favouring open and interoperable architectures, with trust and governance built in by design, so as to protect citizens while stimulating the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The white paper is available here to all public decision-makers, technical partners and institutions concerned.
“LEAD’s first cohort confirms a simple conviction: Africa already has the women and men capable of profoundly transforming public action. Our responsibility, either with our partners, is to give them, at pan-African level, a space in which to compare experience, build common solutions and bring forward a new generation of public policy. With this second cohort, we want to accelerate the move from ambition to execution, in particular on digital public infrastructure and artificial intelligence, two decisive issues for sovereignty, for the effectiveness of the state and for value creation across the continent,” says Amir Ben Yahmed, President of the Africa CEO Forum.
