Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Algeria pushes for greater influence in the Sahel region, Zambia signs a $1.5 billion U.S. health deal, and Ghana applies to be a BRICS partner country.
The Malian military and its Russian allies retook Kidal last week after a tactical withdrawal by Tuareg separatists, who had captured the strategic city in April. According to some analysts, Algeria may have played a role in convincing the rebels to withdraw.
The developments come amid a resumption of bilateral ties with Algiers, which reopened its airspace to Bamako in July, ending a 15-month rift following a dispute over Algeria shooting down a Malian drone along their shared border.
Algeria, the second-strongest military power in Africa after Egypt, served for decades as a peace broker between Tuareg rebels and Mali’s government. In recent months, it has aggressively sought to reclaim this role—alongside its traditional status as a security mediator in the Sahel—amid escalating security threats across the region.
Although Algeria’s foreign policy maintains a strategy of noninterference in other states’ internal affairs, it has historically viewed the Sahel and West Africa as its backyard.
“They’ve always sort of looked at the Sahel as part of the general geopolitical area in which they exert their influence,” said Intissar Fakir, a senior fellow and the founding director of the North Africa and Sahel program at the Middle East Institute.
With Mali, Fakir added, “there’s a lot of shared interests in terms of the Tuareg issue, in terms of counterterrorism.” In particular, Algeria fears insurgency spilling over into its southern regions among its own Tuareg populations, according to some analysts.
But in recent years, as Algeria’s role in the Sahel has waned, it has become increasingly worried about foreign actors, including Russia and the United Arab Emirates, pushing for greater influence in the region. “Algeria began to find itself quite isolated in its own neighborhood,” Fakir said.
Algeria has long disapproved of Mali’s use of Russian mercenaries, despite Algiers’s good relations with Moscow. This prompted Mali in 2024 to terminate the Algiers Accord, a peace deal brokered in 2015 by Algeria between the Malian government and a Tuareg-led coalition of Azawad separatists.
Relations between Algeria and Sahelian countries broke down further after the drone dispute last year, which led the Alliance of Sahel States—comprising the junta-led nations of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—to withdraw their ambassadors from Algeria.
Algiers is particularly concerned about Abu Dhabi. In September, it severed diplomatic relations with the UAE, accusing the country of “provocative and hostile acts” and destabilizing the region by backing rebel factions in Sudan, Libya, and the wider Sahel. “Wherever they set foot, blood flows,” Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said of the UAE in July.
According to analysts, Algeria is now intervening more readily in its neighbors’ affairs, both militarily and economically.
This shift is perhaps most evident in Niger. In August, Algeria sent four Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets, a refueling aircraft, and a military transport plane to Niger’s military government in a rare show of force to help it thwart an internal coup attempt.
The same month, Sonatrach, an Algerian state-owned energy firm, began drilling in Niger’s Kafra oil block, reviving a project that had stalled for years. And in June, construction began on the Trans-Saharan gas pipeline, which seeks to transport natural gas from Nigeria through Niger to Algeria’s Mediterranean coast for export to Europe.
At the United Nations General Assembly last month, Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Mahamane Lamine Zeine commended Algeria as a “kindred and neighboring country,” adding that Niger was “standing on its own feet today” because of Algeria’s support.
Algeria is not the only North African nation that has stepped up engagement in the Sahel and the surrounding region. In 2023, Egypt sent military equipment to Niger to help combat jihadi groups. Currently, Nigeria is pursuing a military technology transfer deal with Egypt.
The biggest push, however, comes from Algeria’s rival Morocco, which is hoping that stronger regional ties will support its plan for Western Sahara, the disputed territory it claims sovereignty over. (Algeria hosts the Polisario Front, the group fighting for the territory’s independence.)
Morocco’s historical ties with West African nations date back centuries but became strained in the 1980s over rising support for Sahrawi independence. Since rejoining the African Union in 2017, Rabat has increasingly turned to economic diplomacy to boost its position in the region.
Construction is expected to begin in the next two years on the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline, a project to transport Nigerian natural gas through 12 countries before reaching Morocco, which will export gas to Europe. Morocco is also working with Mauritania on plans to connect landlocked Sahelian nations to the Atlantic Ocean via Morocco’s Dakhla Port in Western Sahara.
Still, Fakir said viewing these regional developments merely through the prism of Algeria and Morocco’s rivalry would be too simplistic.
“Morocco is not anymore the only actor involved in Sahel security,” she said. “So whatever Algeria does is not only to respond to Morocco but … to respond to a number of different changing circumstances.”
Wednesday, Oct. 14: The U.N. Security Council holds a briefing on its mission in Libya.
Wednesday, Oct. 14, to Friday, Oct. 16: African Mining Week is held in Cape Town, South Africa.
Friday, Oct. 16: The U.N. Security Council holds a briefing on Sudan.
Friday, Oct. 16, to Thursday, Oct. 22: The ruling on the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final between Morocco and Senegal is expected from the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Ethiopia’s conflict. Ethiopian-Eritrean relations continue to deteriorate as the two trade accusations of military aggression. In a leaked letter to the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, Addis Ababa accused Eritrean troops of invading its territory in “blatant act of aggression that engages Ethiopia’s inherent right to self-defence.”
Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel responded by claiming that Ethiopia had started an “unprovoked war of aggression.” In a separate letter, Eritrea asked the United Nations to intervene against “deceitful attempts” by Ethiopia “to rationalize its brazen acts of war.”
Eritrean troops remain in disputed territories in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which they seized during the 2020-22 Tigray war. Foreign journalists and independent observers are restricted from entering Tigray, and no media outlet has been able to physically verify any new border incursions.
Meanwhile, conflict has continued in Tigray since the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and allied groups declared war against Ethiopia’s federal government last month. In recent weeks, federal forces and allied militias have repelled the initial gains made by the TPLF, which Addis Ababa claims is supported by Asmara. (The latter denies the accusation.)
Without immediate third-party intervention, the prospect of a wider proxy war in the Red Sea continues to threaten the region. Already, the United States has begun engaging in diplomacy; U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a phone call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Wednesday urging both sides to de-escalate.
Zambia’s health deal. On Thursday, Zambia signed a five-year, $1.5 billion health financing agreement with the United States. Lusaka previously rejected a $2 billion deal with Washington in May after Zambian civil society groups pushed back on clauses that required direct sharing of patient data and biological specimens as well as attempts to tie medical aid to commercial access to critical minerals.
The new deal includes limited data sharing but not pathogen sharing. “There was this [agreement] on health and another on critical minerals, and we were saying that these need to be decoupled, and this has been done,” Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe said.
Ghana in BRICS? Ghana formally applied to join BRICS last week as a partner country in a bid to diversify trading partners. Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said on Oct. 6 that Ghana wants “resource sovereignty” to move beyond exporting raw materials “without being boxed in by conditionalities from a few international institutions,” as reported by Ghana’s Daily Graphic.
Ablakwa added that Ghana has close economic relationships with two BRICS founding members, noting that China is one of its key economic partners, while Ghana-India trade has more than doubled from $3 billion in 2024 to nearly $7 billion in 2026. In May, China removed tariffs for imports from all African countries except Eswatini (which recognizes Taiwan’s sovereignty).
BRICS currently has 10 full members—including Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa—and 10 partner nations. If successful, Ghana would be the third African partner nation in the bloc, joining Nigeria and Uganda.
Ambush in Congo. At least 20 foreign mercenaries were killed or wounded during an ambush in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo last month, according to a Reuters report.
The mercenaries worked for Vectus Global, a security company led by Erik Prince, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump and founder of the now-defunct private military firm Blackwater. Prince’s forces had been contracted to help Congo recover revenue lost through minerals smuggling.
Prince has reportedly taken on an expanded role in eastern Congo to protect mineral-rich areas as the Congolese government tries to curry favor with Trump and secure implementation of a U.S. peace deal brokered by the Trump administration last year, in which Washington would provide security support in exchange for preferential access to Congolese minerals and mining sites.
Further complicating the conflict, former Congolese President Joseph Kabila announced on Monday that he would lead a new armed rebel coalition that includes the Rwanda-backed M23 group.
Nobel spat. Navi Pillay, a South African lawyer and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize last week for her lifelong work defending international law and human rights.
Pillay chaired the U.N. commission that concluded Israel had committed acts of genocide in Gaza. Her award triggered an angry social media rant from Trump, who said he should have won for having settled eight wars, instead of a woman “no one ever heard of.” Fighting in eastern Congo and Ethiopia’s rift with Egypt were among the conflicts Trump cited—both of which are ongoing.
After learning of the award, Pillay joked, “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.” She later directly criticized Trump’s comments, stating that “heads of countries have a particular responsibility to spell out the principles [of the International Criminal Court], which is that you respect the law, you respect international law.”
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Data center protests. In Rest of World, Danai Nesta Kupemba examines why South African civil rights groups are protesting the rapid expansion of data centers owned by U.S. tech giants.
South Africa has the most data centers in Africa, and as Kupemba writes, activists are demanding a moratorium on further construction until stricter regulations are enacted to address their impact on the country’s scarce water supply and electricity.