Archive for the ‘West Africa’ Category
Boozing it up in the ‘third world’?: The mix tape
Update, after I got out from under my rock In one of the very active comments sections on the blogs that have taken this up, someone accused Nick Kristof of living under a rock. Accused is a strong word. ‘Asked if he did’ is better. I have been the cyber equivalent of living under a [...]
Well, that’s one way to deal with a rapist…
From the today’s reporting, at the Open Society Institute’s event “Accountability for Sexual Violence: Innovative Strategies at Work in Africa.” Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, cofounder and executive director, African Women’s Development Fund: “….She found a man standing over her daughter, in the process of raping her…She had a machete in her hand. So she did what she had [...]
Farm aid from space
This is the title of my newest Christian Science Monitor article, which is actually about weather-indexed insurance programs in sub-Saharan Africa. All kinds of cool science-and-tech stuff has come together in the last five years to allow big insurance companies to offer super-small insurance policies — low-premiums, comparatively low-payout, to the usually poor, always vulnerable [...]
African poverty is falling. (Seriously.) Maybe it’s the tourism? (Doubt it.)
The ridiculously digitally prolific Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to a new paper from an MIT-Columbia team of authors who’ve found that across the board, poverty is falling in Africa. Not just in certain kinds of countries, with certain advantageous histories or certain huge amounts of minerals…everywhere. (In a sentence that has to have [...]
How to: Be a junta!
Foreign Policy mag has an amazing slideshow up right now. Say what you will about its Gettleman piece, but “The Ultimate Idiot’s Guide to Being an African Junta” is fantastically surreal. David Crane — you remember him, surely, from his role prosecuting some of the most notorious war criminals in recent West African history — [...]
What does Africa have tons of that no one knows how to handle?
(Okay, that’s a little bit off, but these blog titles get tweeted now, so they have to be short and perky.) Land, of course! The African continent is freaking huge. Most of its inhabitants subsistence farm that land. Meanwhile, as oil bubbles up on the western coast and foreign-owned agro-farms crop up in the east [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [