Six countries vote. A record El Niño reaches the harvest. A wall of sovereign debt comes due. The political risk of 2027 sits in the South. The capital that prices it sits in the North.
Fifty numbered calls for 2027. Each carries a date, a probability, and the evidence that would prove it wrong. Published in advance so that it can be graded in arrears.
A record El Niño peaked in late 2026. Its heat reaches the atmosphere three to five months later, which puts it in the 2027 harvest, and then in the till.
A minister quotes the growth rate. A household experiences the wage. The distance between those two numbers is where the politics of 2027 will be decided.
The trade deficit is not an accident of pricing. It is the arithmetic consequence of exporting the raw material and importing the finished product made from it.
The largest single bet on African import substitution ever placed. Whether it worked is the most consequential question in the continent’s industrial policy.
Enrolment rises and learning does not. Doctors are trained and leave. Human capacity is counted as spending when it is the only asset that compounds.
Migration is an economic verdict delivered with the feet. The remittance that follows is the same verdict, paid monthly, by the people who left.
16 January. The largest economy in Africa opens the global election year, and the naira will move before the result is certified.
A French presidential election in April sets the terms for a monetary zone of fourteen countries that will not be voting in it.
10 August. A general election scheduled against a debt service calendar that does not pause for campaigns.
What the Global South must refinance in 2027, in which months and to whom. An election year is an expensive year to go to market.
Comparable risk, comparable tenor, several times the coupon. The asymmetry is not explained by fundamentals, and that is precisely the point.
Where the IMF is active in 2027, what the letters of intent require, and what the World Bank is doing while aid budgets contract.
The African Union has no money. SADC has no enforcement. ECOWAS has lost three members. The year will test all three at once.
Russia and Ukraine may reach a settlement in 2027. The borrowing the war generated will outlive the ceasefire by a generation.
Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, Panama. Four stretches of water that set the landed price of almost everything an importing economy consumes.
Three states left the bloc. The uranium, the gold and the migration routes did not. What replaces the architecture that departed with them.
China, Russia, India and the Gulf are competing for the same governments. What each one offers, and what each one expects in return.
The August to October Oceanic Niño Index came in at +2.46°C, the highest reading on record for that window. The atmosphere has not yet collected.
NOAA publishes two measures of the same Pacific. Which one a government cites determines which emergency it can declare, and therefore which money it can release.
East Africa floods, southern Africa does not rain, and the price arrives a season later in countries that grew none of it.
An economy that buys most of its food abroad holds no domestic buffer against a global harvest shock. 2027 tests that arrangement directly.
Seychelles, the Maldives and Mauritius run different politics and carry the same exposure: tourism, offshore finance, and debt denominated somewhere else.
Thirty-year loans are being written against coastal property that may be uninsurable well within the term. This is a banking regulation problem before it is an environmental one.
Named, dated, and with the trigger that would do it. The list we expect to be judged on twelve months from now.
The cover question, answered by name. The closing essay of the annual outlook, with no hedging and nowhere to hide.
Six countries vote. A record El Niño reaches the harvest. A wall of sovereign debt comes due. Twenty-six analyses on what 2027 will cost, who will carry it, and what we are willing to be wrong about.
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