Donald L Sparks, PhD, is Director of the Distinguished Scholars Program and Emeritus Professor of International Economics at the Citadel (Charleston, South Carolina) and Visiting Professor of International Economics at the Management Center Innsbruck (Austria). He served as a staff assistant to US Senator Ernest Hollings and later senior economist for the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium where he directed their Indian Ocean Initiative. Prior to that he was the regional economist for Africa in the US Department of State's Office of Economic Analysis. He has received Fulbright awards at SOAS University of London, the National University of Laos, the University of Maribor in Slovenia, the University of Swaziland (now Eswatini), and at the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He also chaired the Economics Department at the American University in Cairo for a year. Dr Sparks has published widely, including authoring the 'Economic Trends' chapter in Africa South of the Sahara (Routledge, annual) for each edition for the past 35 years. He has written extensively on blue economy issues in the western Indian Ocean, and edited the 2021 volume for Routledge, The Blue Economy in Sub-Saharan Africa: Working for a Sustainable Future.