Afrique

Standfirst para:

Egypt’s manufacturing sector faces a dual challenge of weak job creation and persistent informality. Drawing on survey evidence on business behaviour and labour market dynamics, this column explains why job creation is limited and informal work remains such an integral part of how firms organise production. The generation of more formal jobs requires a comprehensive policy approach, one that goes beyond enforcement of labour regulations to reshape the economic environment in which firms and workers make decisions.

In a nutshell

Informality in the labour market reflects incentives on both sides: firms benefit from lower costs and flexibility, while workers may prefer higher take-home pay or they may perceive limited benefits from formal employment.

Policies to create formal jobs that are focused solely on enforcement may backfire by raising hiring costs; effective reform requires reducing the cost of formality -including through simpler tax procedures and more proportionate labour costs - while increasing its benefits.

Addressing informality requires targeting informal employment within formal firms, aligning labour market and industrial policies, and adapting social protection and contribution systems to non-standard work arrangements.

Standfirst para:

Egypt’s manufacturing sector faces a dual challenge of weak job creation and persistent informality. Drawing on survey evidence on business behaviour and labour market dynamics, this column explains why job creation is limited and informal work remains such an integral part of how firms organise production. The generation of more formal jobs requires a comprehensive policy approach, one that goes beyond enforcement of labour regulations to reshape the economic environment in which firms and workers make decisions.

In a nutshell

Informality in the labour market reflects incentives on both sides: firms benefit from lower costs and flexibility, while workers may prefer higher take-home pay or they may perceive limited benefits from formal employment.

Policies to create formal jobs that are focused solely on enforcement may backfire by raising hiring costs; effective reform requires reducing the cost of formality -including through simpler tax procedures and more proportionate labour costs - while increasing its benefits.

Addressing informality requires targeting informal employment within formal firms, aligning labour market and industrial policies, and adapting social protection and contribution systems to non-standard work arrangements.

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La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

La route des Balkans reste toujours l'une des principales voies d'accès l'Union européenne, pour les exilés du Proche et du Moyen Orient, d'Afrique ou d'Asie. Alors que les frontières Schengen se ferment, Frontex se déploie dans les Balkans, qui sont toujours un « sas d'accès » à la « forteresse Europe ». Notre fil d'infos en continu.

- Le fil de l'Info / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Albanie, Kosovo, Bulgarie, Questions européennes, Populations, minorités et migrations, Migrants Balkans, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Turquie, Grèce, Moldavie, Macédoine du Nord, Monténégro, Slovénie, Roumanie, Serbie, Gratuit, Grèce immigration

By Mohamed Omar
MOGADISHU, Somalia , May 12 2026 (IPS)

When war erupted in the Middle East in late February, the most visible consequences were playing out in the Persian Gulf, with smoke rising from Dubai’s Jebel Ali port and shipping traffic across one of the world’s most critical maritime routes grinding to a near halt.

What was harder to see was a mother in Somalia, traveling 200 kilometers with a child too sick to sit upright, arriving at a stabilization center that was running low on the one product that could save her child’s life.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints, has sent shockwaves through global supply chains that reach far beyond the Gulf. Before the war began, roughly 3,000 vessels transited the strait each month.

In March, that number fell to just 154. The UN has warned that the resulting disruption is triggering a widening humanitarian and economic shock far beyond the Middle East, with rising oil prices and reduced maritime traffic driving up transport and food costs across import-dependent economies. We are certainly feeling that shock in Somalia.

Dr. Mohamed Omar is head of Health and Nutrition at Action Against Hunger in Somalia.

Somalia was already contending with acute malnutrition, with an estimated 1.84 million children under five expected to be impacted this year, up from 1.7 million last year. Of those cases, over 480,000 involve severe acute malnutrition, the form that requires immediate inpatient medical treatment.

These children are treated with two products: Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) and therapeutic milk, specifically the formulas F-75 and F-100, which are produced exclusively by Nutriset in France. Before the Strait of Hormuz closure, those products arrived in Mogadishu in 30 to 35 days via the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden.

Ships now divert around the entire African continent, extending delivery times to 55 to 65 days. That is nearly double the original transit time, and it comes with far less certainty about when shipments will actually arrive.

The cost increases compound the delay. A carton of therapeutic milk that cost $139 in 2024 rose to $186 in 2025 after USAID funding cuts, and has since climbed to $200 in 2026 following the Strait of Hormuz closure, a 44 percent increase in two years.

Fuel costs inside Somalia have surged by 150 percent, raising both the price of food for households and the cost of transporting supplies from Mogadishu to remote program sites like Hudur in the Bakool region. They represent the difference between whether a child receives treatment and whether a facility can afford to stay open.

Action Against Hunger, which operates 10 of the 52 remaining stabilization centers in the country, currently has only 69 cartons of therapeutic milk on hand. That figure covers roughly two weeks to one month of supply under current demand, and demand is rising sharply. Admissions at our facilities increased 35 percent between the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. At the same time, the number of stabilization centers across Somalia has already fallen from 71 to 52, after USAID’s termination order prompted facility closures earlier this year.

In areas such as Wajid, Somalia, Action Against Hunger replaced diesel-powered engines with solar-powered systems to supply water, reducing costs and providing a sustainable, long-term solution. Credit: Action Against Hunger

The funding gap to sustain nutrition interventions through 2026 stands at $2.9 million. That figure covers product procurement and in-country transportation costs. To put that in context: treating a child for severe acute malnutrition costs between $140 and $213. Preventing it costs $35. The math on early intervention is not complicated.

The Council on Foreign Relations has documented how shipping containers at Dubai’s International Humanitarian City now carry a $3,000 emergency surcharge, while the World Food Program has warned that supply chain pressures are driving up the costs of life-saving operations globally. These are systemic failures that compound each other.

There is a specific and urgent timeline here. UNICEF’s in-country stock of therapeutic milk is projected to run out by August 2026. Because of the extended shipping times caused by the Africa diversion route, funding must be committed by May or June for the product to arrive before that deadline.

Iran has agreed, in principle, to facilitate humanitarian aid shipments through the strait, and diplomatic efforts to reopen the waterway to commercial traffic are ongoing. But the ceasefire remains fragile, and even a partial reopening offers no guarantee that the specialized supply chains supporting therapeutic nutrition programs will recover in time.

The supply chain disruptions caused by the Iran war are a new layer on top of pre-existing funding deficits and a withdrawal of US foreign aid that was already forcing closures and rationing across the country.

The children arriving at stabilization centers and outpatient nutrition sites in Somalia did not cause any of these disruptions. They are the downstream consequence of a global logistics network absorbing simultaneous shocks it was never designed to handle. A $2.9 million funding gap is solvable. The question is whether the international community will respond in time.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Escalatory attacks on multilateral rules and institutions in this era of raw power politics have plunged international politics into uncharted territory. Traditional alliances have been fractured and new partnerships between unlikely bedfellows are emerging. No longer in transition, the post-World War II world order is in rupture. This paper examines international cooperation under these conditions and argues that a new ‘flexi-lateralism’ is taking shape as a pragmatic response to changing times. We define the new flexi-lateralism as international cooperation expressed through adaptable modular tools and selective coalitions, anchored in UN norms, that proceeds even when universal commitments are openly contested and attacked. Our paper considers a set of initiatives launched around the Financing for Development (FfD) conference in Sevilla (July 2025) on the issue of debt servicing. We illustrate how cooperation often depends on selective participation, informal venues and issue-specific coalitions, rather than comprehensive universal bargains. The paper uses ‘flexi-lateralism’ as a term for these flexible multilateral forms that sit between classic UN-style universality and narrow great-power deals. We conclude that international cooperation in this era is neither automatically collapsing nor simply fragmenting. It is adapting and reconfigured through overlapping clubs and coalitions with uneven implications for the Global South and the North.

Escalatory attacks on multilateral rules and institutions in this era of raw power politics have plunged international politics into uncharted territory. Traditional alliances have been fractured and new partnerships between unlikely bedfellows are emerging. No longer in transition, the post-World War II world order is in rupture. This paper examines international cooperation under these conditions and argues that a new ‘flexi-lateralism’ is taking shape as a pragmatic response to changing times. We define the new flexi-lateralism as international cooperation expressed through adaptable modular tools and selective coalitions, anchored in UN norms, that proceeds even when universal commitments are openly contested and attacked. Our paper considers a set of initiatives launched around the Financing for Development (FfD) conference in Sevilla (July 2025) on the issue of debt servicing. We illustrate how cooperation often depends on selective participation, informal venues and issue-specific coalitions, rather than comprehensive universal bargains. The paper uses ‘flexi-lateralism’ as a term for these flexible multilateral forms that sit between classic UN-style universality and narrow great-power deals. We conclude that international cooperation in this era is neither automatically collapsing nor simply fragmenting. It is adapting and reconfigured through overlapping clubs and coalitions with uneven implications for the Global South and the North.

The OECD conference “will focus on action, connecting geopolitical realities with development priorities and translating vision into practical strategic directions.” So how does the flexi-lateralism framework help? We argue that cooperation is reconfiguring into selective coalitions using discrete modular instruments, orchestrated through intermediaries, connected to universal norms but no longer dependent on universal participation. Whether this configuration can maintain legitimacy while delivering speed and adaptation is an open question. Delegates in Paris could look at the design principles we set out that distinguish workable flexi-lateral arrangements from fragmentation, namely, transparency, open accession pathways, and normative alignment with agreed development goals. These are the features that differentiate new forms of cooperation.

The OECD conference “will focus on action, connecting geopolitical realities with development priorities and translating vision into practical strategic directions.” So how does the flexi-lateralism framework help? We argue that cooperation is reconfiguring into selective coalitions using discrete modular instruments, orchestrated through intermediaries, connected to universal norms but no longer dependent on universal participation. Whether this configuration can maintain legitimacy while delivering speed and adaptation is an open question. Delegates in Paris could look at the design principles we set out that distinguish workable flexi-lateral arrangements from fragmentation, namely, transparency, open accession pathways, and normative alignment with agreed development goals. These are the features that differentiate new forms of cooperation.

The OECD conference “will focus on action, connecting geopolitical realities with development priorities and translating vision into practical strategic directions.” So how does the flexi-lateralism framework help? We argue that cooperation is reconfiguring into selective coalitions using discrete modular instruments, orchestrated through intermediaries, connected to universal norms but no longer dependent on universal participation. Whether this configuration can maintain legitimacy while delivering speed and adaptation is an open question. Delegates in Paris could look at the design principles we set out that distinguish workable flexi-lateral arrangements from fragmentation, namely, transparency, open accession pathways, and normative alignment with agreed development goals. These are the features that differentiate new forms of cooperation.

Looking back, the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and, in the early phase, the role played by Elon Musk in reshaping the U.S. foreign aid approach has, to a large extent, foreshadowed what the second Trump administration would become. This profile consists of: (i) crude transactionalism, (ii) a strong ideological foundation (with significant elements of authoritarian libertarianism), (iii) a high degree of chaos with decisions not necessarily based on strategic or even tactical considerations, and (iv) an obsession with disruption. The wide range of current initiatives, coalitions, commissions, and conferences that are discussing development cooperation, as well as efforts to reflect on narratives, international aid governance, and resource mobilisation, are thus operating in a highly hostile environment shaped by the U.S. administration assault on long standing policy norms. European leaders could speak out more clearly about what can be seen as an open challenge those norms. They could also advance a more proactive narrative and, importantly, refuse to de facto repurpose development institutions and decide not to follow the fundamental ODA reductions by the United States.

Looking back, the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and, in the early phase, the role played by Elon Musk in reshaping the U.S. foreign aid approach has, to a large extent, foreshadowed what the second Trump administration would become. This profile consists of: (i) crude transactionalism, (ii) a strong ideological foundation (with significant elements of authoritarian libertarianism), (iii) a high degree of chaos with decisions not necessarily based on strategic or even tactical considerations, and (iv) an obsession with disruption. The wide range of current initiatives, coalitions, commissions, and conferences that are discussing development cooperation, as well as efforts to reflect on narratives, international aid governance, and resource mobilisation, are thus operating in a highly hostile environment shaped by the U.S. administration assault on long standing policy norms. European leaders could speak out more clearly about what can be seen as an open challenge those norms. They could also advance a more proactive narrative and, importantly, refuse to de facto repurpose development institutions and decide not to follow the fundamental ODA reductions by the United States.

Looking back, the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and, in the early phase, the role played by Elon Musk in reshaping the U.S. foreign aid approach has, to a large extent, foreshadowed what the second Trump administration would become. This profile consists of: (i) crude transactionalism, (ii) a strong ideological foundation (with significant elements of authoritarian libertarianism), (iii) a high degree of chaos with decisions not necessarily based on strategic or even tactical considerations, and (iv) an obsession with disruption. The wide range of current initiatives, coalitions, commissions, and conferences that are discussing development cooperation, as well as efforts to reflect on narratives, international aid governance, and resource mobilisation, are thus operating in a highly hostile environment shaped by the U.S. administration assault on long standing policy norms. European leaders could speak out more clearly about what can be seen as an open challenge those norms. They could also advance a more proactive narrative and, importantly, refuse to de facto repurpose development institutions and decide not to follow the fundamental ODA reductions by the United States.