Global issues to watch include Crises converging everywhere and all at once Future on the ballot in 2024 Fixing a broken finance system and recognizing shifts in power Safeguarding rights and equity Future-proofing the United Nations Global impact of Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts Election overload Geopolitical regulatory competition Rising hate Terrorism: acute local and regional threats More disruptive environmental activism Global economic resilience challenged Energy transition: the resource nationalism challenge The confluence of disruptive global trends merges in Africa. With an intractable debt crisis, the drying up of capital flows, growing impacts of climate change, and major drought, conflict and political instability are now endemic across a large swathe of Africa — from the Sahel, including Mali, and Niger to Southern Sudan, Sudan and Ethiopia. By 2050, a quarter of the world’s population will be African, with a projected one billion in their prime working-age years of 25-59, a “doubling of its share of world population workforce from 12% to 23%,” according to the chief of the UN’s population estimates. Absent more economic growth and greater job opportunities, the risk of Africa’s demographic bounty becoming a liability for the region as well as the world will continue to grow. Africa saw spectacular economic growth between the mid-1990s and mid-2010, when per capita growth was 40%. Even before the pandemic, however, many developing countries, not just African ones, experienced slowing growth. Debt ballooned with the pandemic’s increased health costs, becoming now a major impediment to Africa’s growth. According to the World Bank, 21 African states are facing debt distress or the risk of it. The continent’s public debt has tripled since 2010 to $645 billion, with annual servicing of the debt amounting to about 25% of Africa’s GDP. A precondition for Africa achieving a new development trajectory has pointed to the need for OECD nations to qualitatively ramp up G-20 efforts in the Common Framework — working with China — to relieve debt stress. But the recent breakdown in a debt agreement for Zambia augurs badly for any quick relief. China, along with other official creditors, forced the copper-rich African nation to suspend a deal of almost $4bn in dollar bonds that had received the IMF’s approval. As the world economy becomes increasingly fragmented, protectionist, and region-centric, Africa’s development will become more challenging,