mPedigree

mPedigree is known for our work in sensitive and critical consumer goods supply chains such as pharmaceuticals, agro-inputs, cosmetics, and automotive parts. From our start in the anti-counterfeiting space, we have long been associated with quality assurance and certification through a consumer safety and regulatory support lens. But our platforms like Chiron have long expanded that scope. It is best to see our contribution as offering a "Trust Engine for the Social Economy". Case in point: our partnership with Oryx in Tanzania is driving the uptake of clean cookstoves. Working with them and relevant government agencies to shift consumers from dirty fuels demonstrates the power of mPedigree's technologies to impact both climate response and health (dirty fuels = soot in lungs) in far-reaching ways. Trust is the ultimate currency of social change. #CantFakePassion

Join our Bright and a group of international analysts discuss and debate the economic impact of China's Belt & Road Initiative at Georgetown University this Friday.

An interesting outcome of Mayor Sadiq Khan's visit to Accra last summer is this fascinating event held today at the Bank of Ghana with the FCDO partnering. Some of the issues tackled include how to empower the Ghanaian diaspora to serve as a bridge between Ghana and the UK, and to surface opportunities. Bright reminded the audience that London and Accra both need each other. London's youth employment rate is about 25% higher than the UK national average, making it one of the most critical issues for the city. Accra likewise has a booming youth population with many struggling to find jobs. The opportunity here is to boost services trade between the UK and Ghana. Currently the UK accounts for just 0.1% of Ghana's global services imports. And the reverse direction is equally underwhelming. If post-Brexit UK and post - DDEP Ghana are going to find new growth poles to boost job creation, this is clearly a place to look. London is an established gateway, and Accra is an emerging gateway. One can spark the other to keep itself evergreen.

A defining recognition for Bright Simons, featured in the 100 Most Influential Africans in 2025. He is an innovator and policy thinker known for speaking evidence-based truth to power, combining technology, rigorous analysis and civic advocacy to challenge weak governance and flawed public policy across Africa. ➡️ Read his full profile on MIA 2025 and join the conversation by sharing your thoughts. 🔗 Discover more on MIA 2025: eu1.hubs.ly/H0qFZL80 @BBSimons

Highly recommended weekend/holiday read. From the Pwalugu Dam to the United Petroleum Price Fund (UPPF) and the never-ending galamsey fight, this paper explains ‘katanomic’ democracy, using Ghana largely as a case study. High political accountability, low policy accountability. Same failures on repeat. No national learning. Just political noise and vibes. The paper argues that this persistent policy failure is what’s giving democracy a bad name.

A nice shout-out to our compatriot, Bright, as he makes the List of 100 Most Influential Africans by New African Magazine, a staple of the annual African highlights calendar. 🌟👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽🌟 Full list: 100.newafricanmagazine.com/?utm_source=Ma…

BREAKING NEWS:  The #G20 Africa Expert Panel consists of leaders from various industries worldwide. This panel focuses on growth, debt and development opportunities for a new African partnerships.  ​ This is who our panelists are. #PartneringForAfrica​ #G20SouthAfrica

🔔 In conversation with: @BBSimons — “Navigating ‘Katanomics’: Youth Leadership in Africa’s Governance Transformation” 📅 Thu 6 Nov 2025 | 🕒 3PM GMT (4PM WAT | 5PM SAST | 6PM EAT) 🎤 Moderator: @HafouToure (NGN) 👉 Register: mif.link/katanomics

Massive cuts to development aid, geopolitical upheaval, and the erosion of support for multilateralism have upended global development. The World Economic Forum has thus convened a council of leaders co-chaired by Bright & Sara Pantuliano to explore fresh ideas for progress.

I had a great time chatting to Tobi Lawson & Feyi Fawehinmi on the Ideas Untrapped show. We talked about a wide range of subjects across innovation, political economy, & systems thinking. I know you're busy. I won't be pitching this if I didn't feel you'd like it. 😊

Question: "If we were building the global development, solidarity and cooperation model afresh, would you vote for anything in the current one?" Wilton Park, a think tank based in Sussex, is challenging leaders to think hard about the moral and intellectual choices that have led us to the world as we know it.

70 years today, a conference was held at Dartmouth University in the US, at which the term artificial intelligence was cannonised and many of the principles underlying AI born. The mini-conference was funded with a $7,500 grant from Rockefeller Foundation to cognitive scientist John McCarthy. Today, the combined market cap of the top 65 AI companies is roughly $14 trillion. It is bleeding obvious that strategic philanthropy can unlock tremendous value over time. OpenAI's first $137m in funding came from grants (free philanthropic money). Over the last decade, roughly $500m in grants has been poured into initiatives to make AI good and benign by philanthropists. But it is also blindingly obvious that philanthropy struggles to capture enough of the value it creates when it sparks big new trends. That denies grant givers the chance to shape those trends towards the original expectations of social good.

Bright speaks to CGTN about data integrity in Africa following the IMF's update on the Senegal public accounts. In Sept 2024, the new government revealed that public debt had been misreported. Instead of 74% of GDP, it was more like 118%. youtu.be/ccB8uGJ6teo?si…

We are privileged to have Bright Simmons as one of our speakers for Future of Energy Conference 2025. Bright Simons is the President of mPedigree and the Vice President for Imani Center for Policy & Education. He is also an ardent policy activist working at the interface of economic governance and social welfare. In pursuit of these causes, he has served as a member of the External Advisory Board of European biopharma company, UCB, as Vice Chair of APHRC, as a member of the Boards of Salzburg Global and Care International, and on Microsoft Africa’s inaugural advisory council. He also served on successive World Economic Forum Global Agenda and Future Councils, was an inaugural TED Fellow, and has held the Cheng and Mallinckrodt fellowships at Harvard. Join us! 26th – 27th August, 2025 Labadi Beach Hotel, Accra – Ghana Register now: acep.africa/fec-2025-regis… #ACEP #FEC2025 #FutureOfEnergy

Event Alert! Realigning German International Cooperation: Perspectives from Ghana and Senegal Bright Simons | Dr. Sokhna Rosalie Ndiaye | Dr. Bernhard Braune |Joshua Kwesi Aikins As Germany takes on its new role as the world's largest bilateral donor and discussions about reshaping international cooperation gain momentum, it is crucial to understand diverse African perspectives for fostering effective partnerships. To address this, APRI is organizing a webinar that will showcase timely analyses and concise policy options for reshaping bilateral cooperation between Germany and Ghana, and Germany and Senegal - three countries where recent democratic elections and changes of government open up potential opportunities for new modes of partnership. This webinar provides a unique opportunity for policy-focused debate on the future of German international cooperation, featuring presentations from Senegalese scholars Dr. Sokhna Rosalie Ndiaye and Selly Ba (LASPAD), who authored regional draft APRI paper on Senegal-Germany relations, and thought-leader Bright Simons, who wrote on Ghana-Germany relations. This is followed by a panel discussion featuring representative, Dr. Bernhard Braune, of the BMZ’s (German Federal Ministry for Development Cooperation) Division 202 Sahel, West Africa I housing the Senegal desk and an audience Q&A session. The papers will be released following the event. 📅 Date: Tuesday, September 2, 2025 ⏰ Time: 14:00 - 15:30 CEST 📍 Location: Virtual (Berlin) 🗣️ Language: English Speakers: 🎙 Dr. Sokhna Rosalie Ndiaye (LASPAD) 🎙 Bright Simons (Ghana paper author) 🎙Dr. Bernhard Braune (BMZ - Division 202 Sahel, West Africa I housing the Senegal desk) Moderator: Joshua Kwesi Aikins – Senior Fellow and Head, Economy and Society Program at APRI Don't miss this opportunity to engage in a critical conversation in reshaping international partnerships. Register now: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… #GermanCooperation #InternationalCooperation #Ghana #Senegal #PolicyDialogue #APRI

1. When the Berlin - Abuja based African Policy Research Institute (afripoli.org) asked that I reflect on Ghana's engagement with Germany over the years from a development policy lens, the challenge was what to leave out. 2. From the crazy colonial German - Dagbon - Kokomba wars in the late 19th Century to German missionary forays into health and education in the Volta region in the early 20th century to West Germany - East Germany competition in the early post-independence era to the present GIZ-driven explorations in social innovation, there is just too much to say. 3. Too few people are familiar with how Ghana's first president, the Osagyefo tried to play East against West Germany, to extract maximum capital for industrial development plans, and how he ended up inviting a female German ace fighter pilot to set up Ghana's first pilot training program. 4. The roller-coaster relationship once heavy on the use of German export credits to build factories in Ghana seems to have settled on a somewhat boring formula. The usual "development cooperation" template that has lost colour, and favour, among Africa's new elites. 5. Don't get me wrong, it is nice to invest in technical and vocational education (TVET) and if German money would get a few more Ghanaian electricians ready for the electrical vehicle era, who am I to downplay the impact? 6. But my sense is that Ghanaians have moved past that style of engaging with Europe. There is a desire for rubbing shoulder to shoulder and shifting the relationship from the "Europe helping Ghana develop" mindframe. 7. The way most engaged Ghanaian observers see it, European countries like Germany and African countries like Ghana are facing equally massive upheavals in a volatile global system that is sparing no region from having to reckon with its lack of preparedness. 8. Germany may have more infrastructure and a bigger skills base than Ghana, for sure, to deal with these upheavals TODAY, but how much of that infrastructure and skills base would be relevant TOMORROW? 9. With some old advantages like the settled trans-atlantic bulwark (Euro-American western solidarity) and Europe's knowledge economy edge fraying rapidly under the weight of geopolitics, AI, demographics, and global value chain disruptions, Africa and Europe may not be in the same boat but they are facing some serious common headwinds. 10. There are examples of intercontinental relationships that can serve both as examples and warnings of asymmetrical relationships like that between Ghana and Germany. The US' relationship with certain Latin American countries, for example. China's relationship with Sri Lanka is another. But in geopolitics, it is the specificity of the timing, opportunity, and constraints that drives any realistic strategy. 11. Let's not make any bones, though, about the fact that Germany has a population of 83 million and a GDP 50% bigger than the whole of Africa's. Its population has barely budged since 1990, but its nominal GDP has grown by 160% since then. Africa, on the other hand, has seen its population double over the same period so that even though GDP has tripled, average income (weighting for other factors) seems stagnant. Bearing in mind also that average income in Africa barely shifted from 1960 to 1990. African countries like Ghana are thus definitely more stressed than Germany. And more impatient for big changes. 12. But let's not make it about the drag of the past. Sound strategy requires us to focus more on the momentum of the future. On 2nd September 2025, we shall be having a webinar to explore these themes further. Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

The African Union is pushing for wider adoption of a world map that corrects the wrong impression about Africa's real size created by more popular maps based on the 16th century Mercator projection. I argue that whilst this a brilliant geopolitical marketing campaign, it misses the policy dimensions of mapping. Especially in the digital domain. Why are the "inaccurate" maps still used by Google and others? How will Africa's backing for a new Australian-American map design change those underlying policy challenges? Why were there no policy consultations across Africa to dig deeper into a more comprehensive fix? In light of these unanswered questions, I raise concerns about the elevation of geopolitics above geopolicy in Africa. Read it here: semafor.com/article/08/25/…

"Why didn’t the African Union launch a consultation with Africa’s digital and mapping communities to better evaluate a popular new map," asks @BBSimons for @SemaforAfrica The problem with AU’s bigger map proposal ...or politics over policy. semafor.com/article/08/25/…

Ongoing at #FEC2025 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚, 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚: 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐄𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐲 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 This thematic discussion brings together thought leaders and experts to explore how Africa can build integrated value chains that turn its mineral wealth into real economic power. Join the conversation as we move from consumption to competitiveness in Africa’s clean energy future. acep.africa/fec-2025-live/ #ACEP #FutureOfEnergy

How can cash-poor countries, many of them in Africa, finance their development if the international system is like a Shylock strangulating them with neck-twisting interest rates? Before we attempt an answer, though, we do need to diagnose the condition properly. Obsessing over the bias of others can blind us to real challenges, some of which may be in our power to fix. Take hard currency foreign debt, for instance. Like Eurobonds. What happened between 2003 and 2021 in Africa is that in major regional economies - like Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zambia - hard currency liabilities started to make up more than 30% of external debt. This was a major shift in fiscal burden that required sophisticated strategies to manage. Luckily, the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 90s had taught emerging markets important lessons in exposure. Thailand, for instance, went from nearly all foreign obligations (sovereign debt owed to non-residents) being denominated in hard currency to ~0.8% today. Roughly 3% of Malaysia's external sovereign liabilities are Eurobonds-like. Singapore doesn't even allow external sovereign public debt. More permissive Asian major economies like Indonesia and the Philippines have Eurobond composition of external debt at around 17% and 21% respectively. Africa's hard embrace of external hard currency liabilities must be matched with exposure-management sophistication. Between 2000 and 2021, about 21 African countries issued more than $155 billion in Eurobonds. Few had invested in a new policy infrastructure to manage the exposure. Some of them barely had a developed domestic government securities market to start with. Perhaps, this is where pooling and regional infrastructure (some kind of "afro-bond") may have helped. Well, hindsight. If Eurobonds and other hard-currency financing tools are how African countries are going to fund their governments, then the hard work of collectively fixing secondary liquidity; and individually mastering the relationship with rating agencies, and taking portfolio and maturity analysis out of the control of politicians, must be done. Even as we also deal with any residual foreign biases. Listen here: odi.org/en/insights/th…