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Academics from the diaspora of Cape Verde, which numbers an estimated 1.5 million people, compared to 587,925 inhabitants of this Atlantic archipelago, are complaining that their talents and expertise are being overlooked by local political and academic leaders.

Indeed, many claim they struggle to see their overseas qualifications recognised in Cape Verde, which they say would enable them to improve the country’s higher education and academic research.…

Higher education and research institutions in Burkina Faso are under threat from a jihadist insurgency, as the west African country’s military government struggles to secure the security initiative. Human Rights Watch says insurgents control 40% of the country’s territory and 1.4 million people have fled their homes out of an overall population of 22.1 million, recounting hundreds of deaths in the conflict – civilian, military and insurgents – although it has not released an overall figure, and nor has the UN.…

India’s Birla Cellulose, a world leader in producing viscose staple fibre, is targeting improvements in production sustainability. After achieving production of fibre comprising 20% textile waste and 80% wood pulp from certified sustainably grown and harvested forests, Birla Cellulose now plans to raise the proportion of waste in inputs to 30% textile waste, with the goal of producing 100,000 tonnes of this circular fibre across all categories in its products by 2024.…

Egypt was one of the fastest growing paint markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in 2021 and early 2022, but the depreciation of its currency on foreign exchange markets, surging inflation and an economic downturn over the past year is now depressing the sector.…

Should all anti-money laundering typologies be made public? AML experts argue it depends on the circumstances, but in general, as criminals are usually ahead of the curve, there is not always much that the bad guys can learn from typologies unless nitty gritty details are revealed.…

Despite high production costs and continued geopolitical instability, Italy’s domestic market for paints and coatings performed well in 2022 thanks to government tax credit schemes that boosted the building sector. Indeed, according to national paint trade and industry association Assovernici, Italy’s paints and coatings market posted overall satisfactory performance in 2022.…

The precious metals and stones sector is increasingly under the spotlight regarding ML and TF, particularly gold. Given the fungibility of precious metals, the complexity of their supply chains and the varying levels of oversight worldwide, they continue to be an attractive means to launder money – especially gold, which remains the precious metal of choice for launderers.…

AML is all about the deft use of IT and the marshalling of data culled from financial records, but comprehensive KYC and client monitoring, as well as proactive ML investigations following up a suspicion, are aided by effective online tools that can uncover essential information.…

South Asian clothing manufacturers are facing lean times, with international brands reducing or cancelling orders, but industry association leaders are looking towards a recovery by the end of this year. In major production hub Bangladesh, key purchasers from the USA and Europe have been cutting their order books as continuing high inflation depresses consumer demand and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sharpens nervousness among corporates and investors.…

Like many industries, the global textiles market is waking up to the potentially revolutionary applications of ‘generative’ AI tools able to create insight and hunt for information, such as ChatGPT. Its acronym stands for ‘generative pretrained transformer’ and is a natural language processing model that is free to use.…