Economic growth is expected to rebound in Sub-Saharan Africa, supported by increased private consumption and declining inflation in 2024. However, this positive outlook remains fragile due to uncertain global economic conditions, low fiscal buffers, growing debt service obligation, costly external borrowing, and escalating conflict and violence, which continue to weigh on economic activity in the region. Despite the projected boost in growth, the pace of economic expansion in the region remains slow and insufficient to significantly affect poverty reduction. Structural inequality is at the core of these challenges and tackling it can help to restore growth and accelerate poverty reduction. While domestic resource mobilization and support from the international community can help alleviate the region's funding squeeze, investing in human capital, and strengthening local capacity for service delivery can build people's capacity to seize market opportunities. Policies that boost market access by addressing institutional distortions and market imperfections are also critical for fostering inclusive growth.

Growth in sub-Saharan Africa has slightly recovered in 2019 (2.6 percent) from 2.5 percent in 2018. Economic recovery continues at a sluggish pace with growth in the region expected to pick up to 3 .1 percent in 2020 and 3 .2 percent in 2021. Accelerating poverty reduction in Africa requires action in four policy areas: fertility reduction, leveraging the food system on and off the farm, addressing risk and conflict, and providing more public financing to the poverty reduction agenda. Sustaining growth and eradicating poverty calls for policy solutions to empower African women in the following dimensions: building the right skills, relieving capital constraints, securing land rights, connecting women to labor, addressing social norms that limit women's economic opportunities, and boosting the capacity of the next generation.

Throughout time, African civilizations have manoeuvred and negotiated successfully to maintain their societies and ensure cultural continuity despite encountering expanding trade, foreign invasion, and imposition of colonial and neocolonial states. The Narrative of Africa Rising: Changing Perspectives evaluates the discourse on “Africa Rising” through representative case studies to create a complex and layered account of Africa’s struggles to rise above challenges and conflict in the twenty-first century. Using empirical data and field observations, editors Darlingtina K. Esiaka and Jamaine Abidogun measure Africa’s complex and uneven development over time to provide insight into how Africans across the continent utilize indigenous socio-political economic processes in the face of neocolonial “nation state” systems that routinely fail them. Africa’s twenty-first century rise is erratic as it struggles to undo the damage of colonialism and to fight neocolonial exploitation, but what stands the test of time are African civilizations’ sophisticated societal institutions that continue to vie for the wellbeing of their citizens.

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020 What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.

At long last, Sarah Britton, called the “queen bee of the health blogs” by Bon Appétit, reveals 100 gorgeous, all-new plant-based recipes in her debut cookbook, inspired by her wildly popular blog. Every month, half a million readers—vegetarians, vegans, paleo followers, and gluten-free gourmets alike—flock to Sarah’s adaptable and accessible recipes that make powerfully healthy ingredients simply irresistible. My New Roots is the ultimate guide to revitalizing one’s health and palate, one delicious recipe at a time: no fad diets or gimmicks here. Whether readers are newcomers to natural foods or are already devotees, they will discover how easy it is to eat healthfully and happily when whole foods and plants are at the center of every plate.