Hello, I am Fraol (frectonz). Today, I would like to announce the start of a new publication, Overdue Progress.
Overdue Progress is a publication dedicated to understanding how progress happens and how to make more of it, with a focus on Africa.
Let me explain what I mean by that. Why does progress happen in some places and not others? Why does one country build reliable electricity and another doesn't? Why do some institutions work and others collapse into corruption? Why do some economies create broad prosperity while others stay stuck, decade after decade, despite having land, people, and resources?
These aren't just academic questions. If you live in Addis Ababa, or Lagos, or Nairobi, you experience the consequences of these questions every day. The power goes out. The roads flood. The bureaucracy doesn't work. And yet, at the same time, you can send money to anyone in the country from your phone in seconds. Progress is happening and not happening at the same time, often in the same place. Understanding why is the first step to changing it.
The publication will feature rigorous, long-form essays that take these questions seriously, with a natural emphasis on Ethiopia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the broader developing world, while remaining open to any topic that illuminates the mechanics of progress.
Africa is undergoing the most significant economic and demographic transformation on the planet. The continent has a median age of 19. Urbanization is accelerating. Mobile money has leapfrogged traditional banking. Sub-Saharan Africa now has more than half of the world's mobile money accounts. Solar energy is reaching villages that never had grid power. Progress is actively happening, in real time, and almost nobody is documenting it with the rigor and optimism it deserves.
Africa is also lacking transformation in a lot of areas. Insufficient infrastructure. Weak institutions. Extractive governance. Underutilized young labor forces. Foreign exchange systems that create more problems than they solve. Land systems that trap value instead of releasing it. While the share of people in Sub-Saharan Africa living in extreme poverty has declined, the total number has actually increased. There are a lot of issues like these limiting progress on the continent. This publication will document and provide deep analysis of these issues.
We believe progress in Africa is largely overdue. This publication is dedicated to providing answers to why it is overdue, what blocked it, and how we catch up. The publication will provide essays that are specific rather than general, that combine research with original thinking, and that think like engineers, not just commentators. Diagnosis is welcome, but prescription is better.
I have been interested in the study of progress for a couple of years. There is a growing intellectual movement, sometimes called "progress studies," built around a simple idea: that we should systematically study how progress happens, and then use that understanding to speed it up. This idea was outlined by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison in their 2019 Atlantic essay "We Need a New Science of Progress." Their argument is that we have sciences that study the natural world and sciences that study human behavior, but we don't really have a field dedicated to understanding why civilizations advance and what we can do to make it happen more.
Since that essay, new publications and organizations have emerged to contribute to this intellectual movement. Roots of Progress, Stripe Press, Works in Progress, and others. They have done great work. I have enjoyed and still enjoy the output of these institutions.
But progress studies currently has a blind spot. The existing institutions are overwhelmingly focused on American and European progress. When they discuss development, it's through the lens of "why did the West get rich first" rather than "what does progress look like when it's happening right now in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, or Kigali." Although I appreciate and have learned a lot from the work of these existing institutions, I wanted to create one that will look into and investigate the nature of progress in my continent and my country. From the inside, not from a distance.
We will publish long-form essays about how progress happens.
An essay about Kenyan solar panel proliferation belongs here because it's a case study in how progress spreads through a society. An essay about why Ethiopian Airlines became the most successful airline in Africa belongs because it's a story of institutional success in a context where that's rare.
Topics can come from anywhere. Agriculture, finance, technology, urban planning, healthcare, education, trade, energy, housing, governance, history, culture, logistics, manufacturing. What matters is the quality of the thinking, not the subject.
The scope is broad. The standard is high.
I'm a software developer based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I have built civic tools like rep.et, a web app for finding your elected MP in Ethiopia's parliament, and audit.et, a project that visualizes audit reports from Ethiopian state-owned enterprises. I host a tech podcast called Devtopia and I write essays at frectonz.et.
I started this publication because I couldn't find one that does what I think needs to be done. So I'm building it.
Overdue Progress is just getting started. If you're the kind of person who thinks seriously about why things are the way they are in this continent, and wants to be around other people who think the same way, this is for you.
To kick things off, we are starting with an essay competition.
Fraol (frectonz), Addis Ababa, March 15, 2026