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"Africa"
“Marrying off young girls is a tradition here… People [in rural areas] perceive a girl child as a source of wealth, and would rather give the girl into marriage to raise funds for educating the boy child,”–Pascal Salimu, an UNFPA gender officer in Luapula Province, Zambia
After reading “African academics ‘slow to use online journals’” over at SciDev, I couldn’t help but read deeper into the story. The importance of increasing academic research in Africa really cannot be overestimated. Research is crucial not only for the advancement of knowledge on the continent itself, but also for Africa’s economic and academic participation [...]
While catching up on some of my blog feeds the other day, I stumbled on a great post by Ethan Zuckerman about his recent trip to the iHub in Nairobi. Ethan did a wonderful job, in his often wordy manner, portraying the essence of the iHub from a bird’s eye view. I am very interested [...]
“It is now 11 years since our country returned to democratic rule, but the expected fruits are not visible; the economy is not generating jobs to match the rapidly growing population. Public education at all levels has collapsed. Cholera and other easily preventable diseases are ravaging the countryside, and infrastructure critical to economic development and [...]
Update (11/9/2010): As luck would have it happen, my paper is coming along very nicely and I have a wealth of data to analyze. This can work both ways. Too much data can make your conclusions more cloudy if you’re not careful. Too little data is an easy problem to understand. I seem to have [...]
“The most valuable part of comparative work in another culture is the chance to be shaken by it, and the experience of struggling to understand it.”-Susan Goldberg, Infant Care and Growth in Urban Zambia, 1977
Having just read “America’s South Sudan Conundrum” on the FP Passport blog, I couldn’t keep quiet. Some great questions are asked in this post regarding how “America’s hands are tied” with South Sudan’s upcoming January 2011 Referendum quickly approaching. The general idea of the post is that South Sudan is not ready to stand on [...]
What happens when you cross mobile payments with education in Africa? You get Bridge International Academies, a new and innovative for-profit franchised network of low-cost schools in Kenya that collect payment strictly by mobile phones. This is one of the more innovative ideas I have seen in quite some time that really challenges the status [...]
“Africans don’t see a reward system in place for being entrepreneurial. In fact, they view it as a matter of survival, not an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty. Rather, what they learn at a very early age, is that in order to make good money, they should learn to speak English incredibly well [...]
Hard to believe that this month it has been 5 years since I visited Africa for the first time. I volunteered for a span of two months setting up solar-powered satellite Internet stations in South Sudan. These stations were to be used by local NGO’s, government, schools, etc for communication and educational purposes. Over the [...]
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