Bachir Dkhil

The African currency rollercoaster ride: struggling against super-strong US dollar

As the global economy sinks into another period of crisis, African currencies are depreciating against the US dollar and rising import costs are adding to inflationary pressures. With around half of all international trade invoiced in dollars, a stronger greenback hurts consumers across the world — including in Africa — that use dollars to pay […]

Forex: falling euro drags CFA franc down, importing inflation and deepening debt

With the euro having recently declined to less than one US dollar, this development has a direct impact on the CFA franc, which has a fixed exchange rate parity value with the single European currency. The euro’s continued to slide toward the US dollar since 5 July has resulted in a 20-year low, according to […]

Torrential floods deepen food crisis in West, Central Africa amid climate emergency

An estimated 4 million people, many of them small subsistence farmers, in over a dozen countries in West and Central Africa that have seen their crops decimated by unusually heavy flooding. In northern Cameroon, for example, the latest floods have destroyed the harvest for this season, while nearly 1 million hectares of farmland across the […]