Posts Tagged ‘aid’
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 [...]
Does charity work like carbon offsets?
First, let me just say that it sounds like carbon offsets are a guilt salve more than anything else. If you saw the piece in Harper’s Magazine, it’s hard to be optimistic that offsetting carbon does much more than make lay people feel guilty and make smart people scheme about how to create another [...]
So you wanna help Africa? Here's how. (Hint: It only takes $10. But you gotta be fast.)
Some of you might remember my series on grassroots reconciliation in Sierra Leone. Fambul Tok is a local program in every sense–started by a Sierra Leonean, run by Sierra Leoneans, and welcomed by villages that want to use their traditional culture to help overcome the legacy of war. It’s not a requirement of [...]
Vox Populi. Maybe, sort of.
For all the information swirling around about Congo these days, this map is interesting. It’s from Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, a site designed to aggregate crisis information sent by ordinary people, via emails or–here’s the specialness–SMS. Because cell phones are ubiquitous here, and virtually nothing else is, the SMS is the [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [