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The United Nations Convention on International Mediation Settlement Agreements, also known as “The Singapore Convention on Mediation” is a convention that applies to international settlement agreements resulting from mediation. It sets out a legal framework for the right to invoke the mediation settlement agreements as well as for their enforcement among the member states. The Convention facilitates international trade by using mediation as an alternative and effective method of resolving commercial disputes. The Singapore Convention on Mediation (the Convention) was adopted in December 2018 in Singapore and Uganda was among the first countries to became signatories to the convention on 7^th August 2019. 

The divisions and tensions in some parts of ex-Yugoslavia appear to be boiling up again. The leadership of the Serbian mini-state, Srpska, which comprises 49% of Bosnia’s territory, appears to be challenging the governing entity of Bosnia, founded at the end of the civil wars that raged in ex-Yugoslavia, 1991-2001. In a peculiar compromise, this sliver of Serbian territory was confirmed as part of Bosnia, but with its own self-government at the local level. Twenty-seven years later its hardline leaders are set on joining up with Serbia proper. 

The woman was strikingly pretty and in a tight-fitting denim skirt. Some of the passengers gawked at her when she was boarding the bus at the Bus Park. She was thirty something, about five and a half feet tall, and about fifty-five kilograms or one hundred twenty pounds. She was in an aisle seat, on the left-hand side of the bus, four rows in front of me on the opposite side from where I was sitting.

Africa is full of promises. It has immense untapped natural resources and a growing human capital base estimated at one billion three hundred million Africans, mostly young. Its potential is constrained by poor governance, corruption, and massive illicit outflow of capital, tribal conflicts, and terrorism. Conflict ridden and war-torn Ethiopia represents Africa’s promises and pitfalls.