Archive for the ‘NGOs’ Category
Your Crib Sheet for Covering African Elections, in Congo and beyond
We’re all watching the DR Congo with baited breath. The recent presidential election, or process that has borne the name, has sparked unrest and violence, inside the country and in the diaspora. It’s a grave situation, certainly, and a gloomy one. But I’m having total post-electoral depression, especially when I read this piece in Foreign [...]
If you work in human rights, go to this talk
A few years ago, I wrote about Patrick Ball for the Christian Science Monitor. It’s one of my favorite stories, in part because he’s such a compelling talker, in part because this data stuff is so critical. Get thee to New York! Crunching Numbers for Human Rights: the Promise and Perils of Data and Statistics [...]
A chorus of truth-telling: On hegemony, Africa and the news
Forget h/t. An out and out handshake to @sonjasugira for a link to The Revolution Will Not Come By PowerPoint, a very unsentimental essay by Martin Kimani at the role of rational thinking (read: development) in Africa that left me profoundly moved. Every paragraph had me thinking deeply about something. I’ll highlight just one section: [...]
The alleged power of one
Tom over at aviewfromthecave offers a critique of a recent Washington Post article about a couple, the Hughses, who went on safari in Tanzania and then decided to start a bike charity for residents of Karatu, a village near the safari site where the couple stopped at a local school and learned the kinds of things [...]
Why Enough will always get Congo “wrong” — and why we should maybe thank them for it
I’m going to go straight to it: Because advocacy is politics. Advocacy is aspirational; it is rhetorical; and it is manipulative. And none of those things is prima facie bad (though there are better and worse ways to do them). It seems to me we should no more expect advocates to offer a nuanced and [...]
How to tell a fake NGO from a real one
The Rwandan government is set to release a report on sham NGOs operating in the country, according to the New Times. The report paves the way for what the newspaper calls a “crackdown” by the Ministry of Local Government on all unregistered NGOs in the country. The ministry’s director of planning explains: “It means there [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [