.png)
Learning Africa
Curious and expansive Learning Africa is a podcast for anyone who wants to understand the continent beyond the headlines. Each episode explores the stories, people, and forces shaping Africa today, from political upheaval and economic transformation to culture, history, and the ideas driving the next generation. Hosted by Amadou Dieng, it's a space to ask honest questions, sit with complexity, and come away knowing Africa a little better than before.
Episodes
16 episodes
CAF Said Nothing, And FIFA's $20B World Cup Plan Died Anyway
When FIFA asked its 211 members to approve a $20 billion plan to sell a stake in the World Cup, UEFA voted 55-0 to boycott. CONCACAF revolted. Asia's confederation joined them. A senior FIFA adviser resigned in protest. CAF, the confederation r...
.png)
M-PESA: The App That Became a Country's - Kenya- Bank
Before 2007, sending money across Kenya meant a bus ride and a stranger you had to trust. Then a loan-repayment pilot got hijacked by its own users, and became M-Pesa, the mobile money system that now moves more value in a year than Kenya's ent...
Cabo Verde: The Country the World Fell in Love With
Cape Verde just won the internet's heart at the World Cup, a nation of 530,000 that took defending champions Argentina to extra time. But the real story is what's underneath: a culture built on leaving, an economy that turned emigration i...
MADIBA: The man behind the icon, on Mandela Day
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a cell barely eight feet long. He refused an early release that would have required him to say something he didn't mean. He walked out of prison in 1990 and immediately set about building a country for the...
African Players in European Jerseys: a World Cup Tale
European football runs on African talent, but African clubs receive just 1.1% of global transfer income despite developing much of it. This episode traces the colonial pipeline that built modern recruiting, how FIFA's eligibility rules we...
What Did UN Say About Slavery?!?
On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. 123 countries said yes. The United States, Israel, and Argentina said no. 52 others — including the entire...
Ethiopia's Civil War and the Nobel Prize Winner Who Started a War
In 2019, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stood in Oslo and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He'd ended a twenty-year war with Eritrea, freed thousands of political prisoners, and made his country believe things could be different. Fourteen m...
Juneteenth: The News That Arrived Late
African Americans and Africans share the most important origin story in the modern world. They also have a relationship that is complicated, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, and almost never spoken about honestly.This Juneteenth, Learning...
South Africa: Xenophobia and Anti-migration Crisis
When xenophobic violence escalated across South Africa this May, African governments did something that should not have been necessary: they sent planes. Ghana chartered a flight. Mozambique deployed buses. Nigeria negotiated waivers so i...
Can Africa Win the World Cup?
Cameroon 1990. Senegal 2002. Ghana 2010. Morocco 2022. Four times Africa was close enough to believe. Four times it wasn't enough. Now ten teams head to North America. This is the story of what has held African football back — and what it would...
The Recolonization of Africa, and the role of Africans?
In 1884, fourteen European powers met in Berlin and divided Africa among themselves. Not a single African voice was in the room. Today, China controls the mines, Russia is selling security to coup leaders, Turkey is taking over French military ...
Happy Africa Day!!!
Sixty years ago, the world said Africa wasn't ready to govern itself. Africans decided not to wait for permission. In this Africa Day special, we mark what has actually been built since: the years of life gained, the democracies defended, the t...
So Macron Is a Pan-Africanist Now!?!
At a summit in Nairobi last week, Emmanuel Macron called himself a Pan-Africanist. The outrage was immediate — and fair. But the more interesting question is the one underneath it: what is Pan-Africanism actually, what does it demand, and how m...
Can an African Man Lead the UN?
Africa has not held the UN Secretary-General position in twenty years. Macky Sall wants to change that. But his path to the world's top diplomatic job runs through a fractured African Union that never officially backed him, a home country that ...
Is Democracy Failing Africa, Or Is Africa Failing Democracy?
What do you do when the government you elected stops being worth defending? That's the question millions of people across West Africa have been living with for the past five years, and in country after country, their answer has been to le...