This year's Annual Spring Festival Gala on China's national broadcaster, CCTV, included a 13-minute long skit featuring a Chinese actress in full blackface and a cheerful monkey played by an unidentified African actor. It relied on all the stereotypes about Africa that the Chinese media claim to be debunking in their public diplomacy activities in the continent. As Dani Madrid-Morales writes, it suggests that China needs to have a conversation about racial insensitivity.

Over the past few years Rwanda has rolled out a massive on-grid rural electrification programme. Jorg Peters takes a close look at the impact this has had, including the fact that people’s lives have been made easier on a number of fronts. But given the low levels of demand, he argues that it would make more sense to find cheaper ways of delivering energy to people in remote areas.

There are many reasons why South Africa's children are battling to read. Among them are the low quality of teacher training, too few school libraries and the absence of a reading culture among adults.  John Aitchison explains why these issues shouldn't be ignored: they're contributing to poor cognitive development and threatening the country's future development.