As the world marks the International Year of the Woman Farmer, it is worth asking how far our financing models actually go in recognising women’s labour, leadership, and power in Africa’s commodity value chains. Financing agriculture in developing economies is never just a technical exercise, it is a political one. My work with the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC) revealed

This blog post is part of a Women’s Month series marking the International Year of the Woman Farmer, drawing from interviews with Mary Portillo, Yuri Tabora and Araceli Peraza women working at the Capucas agricultural cooperative. Their narratives show that real transformation requires more than visibility; it depends on the institutional scaffolding that shapes who gets to lead, learn and

n early November, Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon raised their voices, reminding us that without forests there is no future: “sem floresta, não há futuro”. During the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 30), global leaders discussed how to protect tropical forests as a collective effort. However, it ended without a binding agreement to stop deforestation. Given that tropical forests

Domestic fires have heavily affected Bukavu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), causing deadly humanitarian crises with multiple effects. In 2024 alone, the DRC Humanitarian Observatory (DRC H-O) reported at least 59 cases of domestic fires leading to at least 21 deaths, 2706 houses, 5 schools and 4 churches were burnt, while at least 15,945 people were affected.

Humanitarianism has long been in crisis, but since early 2025, the sector has been experiencing an unprecedented organizational, institutional, normative, and political collapse. In this blog, Kristin Sandvik from the University of Oslo calls on scholars active in the broad, inter-, and multidisciplinary field of humanitarian studies to try to understand and analyze the impact of this collapse and address