Africa Is Buying a Record Number of Chinese Solar Panels
August 22nd, 2025
Via Wired, a look at how Africa’s energy-starved countries on the continent have reluctantly turned to coal and gas for decades. Cheap Chinese solar panels are now finally changing the calculus. From Algeria on the Mediterranean coast to landlocked Zambia in the south, countries across Africa have been importing significantly more solar panels from China this year than […]
Read more »The Global Copper Race Heats Up: India Moves into Zambia’s Mining Sector
April 5th, 2025
Via MetalMiner, a report on India’s growing interest in African copper: Much like neighboring China has been doing for decades, India is now making inroads into the African continent to mine copper reserves, among other mineral assets. It is a move that is sure to shake up the already-competitive international copper market, where multiple nations continue […]
Read more »The Railway That China Hopes Will Take On The US In Africa
March 22nd, 2025
Courtesy of The Financial Times, an article on the railway that China hopes will take on the US in Africa: Mukololo Chanda still recalls the glory days of Africa’s “freedom railway”. Almost four decades ago, fresh from high school in Zambia, she began working as a switchboard operator on the railway built by Mao Zedong’s […]
Read more »China, America, and the Great Railway Race in Africa
March 7th, 2025
Via The Diplomat, a look at how China and the United States are engaged in a battle for access, resources, and influence along railways in Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, and the DRC, echoing trends from the colonial era. The Mukuba Express had been motionless for eight hours, stopped in a small village about 50 miles west […]
Read more »Trump Aid Freeze Risks $1 Billion African Minerals Project
February 18th, 2025
Via Bloomberg, an article on how an expansion of the US’s biggest strategic critical-minerals project in Africa is at risk: A billion-dollar expansion of the biggest US strategic critical-minerals project in Africa faces delays because of the Trump administration’s sweeping foreign-aid freeze, providing a potential opening for rivals like China. The Lobito corridor railway project […]
Read more »PGI’s Lobito Corridor Rail Network to Unlock African Copper Belt
January 17th, 2025
Via Fast Markets, an article on how Africa’s first transcontinental rail network, known as the Lobito Corridor, which aims to eventually connect almost the entire regional copper-cobalt belt with additional links across sub-Saharan Africa, is on track to break ground early in 2026: The project will link Angola and Zambia by rail for the first […]
Read more »Focusing primarily on The New Seven Sisters - the largely state owned petroleum companies from the emerging world that have become key players in the oil & gas industry as identified by Carola Hoyos, Chief Energy Correspondent for The Financial Times - but spanning other nascent opportunities around the globe that may hold potential in the years ahead, Wildcats & Black Sheep is a place for the adventurous to contemplate & evaluate the emerging markets of tomorrow.