Mariya Ivancheva in CriticAtac To make an analogy between Chávez’s social democracy and the “totalitarian” socialism in Eastern Europe is an easy task mostly for the representatives of organizations and media who side with the Venezuelan opposition. Students and NGO activists sponsored by international organizations have traveled across the Western world campaigning against the so-called… Read More »
Zoë Keating performing Escape Artist. This is her website.
Finally, something that I can agree with. If we want to fetishise numbers we should at least try to get them right. Morten Jerven at FP: Today, due to the uneven application of methods and poor availability of data, any ranking of countries by GDP is misleading. The basic problem is that many countries have… Read More »
Via Africa is a Country’s Top Ten African Music Videos of 2012.
Of course they are: A paper from the Centre for the Study of African Economies suggests that savvy Chinese companies have set up shop in Africa as a route to get their products into the US, with the added incentive of all those juicy AGOA benefits. The logic is impeccable. Not only does an Africa platform get… Read More »
From a new report by the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa on external funding of infrastructure projects in Africa: In 2011 total external financial commitments/investments in African Infrastructure declined to 2009 levels. Overall commitments totalled US$41.5billion – a decline of 26% compared with 2010 figures. Commitments from ICA Members declined by 56% to US$11.9billion as compared to 2010… Read More »
You’re not alone. The abstract of a journal article by danah boyd and Kate Crawford: The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups… Read More »
LSE PhD student Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed researches domestic workers, a.k.a. househelp/housemaid/houseboy, in Lagos: My research is an account of the lives of male and female domestic workers in Lagos, Nigeria. It looks at the forms of control they experience in their daily interactions with their employers, as well as the multiple ways they respond to such… Read More »
Hat/tip to @funlayo
Jolyon Ford of Oxford Analytica: I wonder if we should perhaps think of sub-Saharan Africa as a collection not so much of jointly emerging markets, but of diverging ones. Last week I was privileged, under the umbrella of the commendable ‘Invest in Africa’ initiative, to join experienced businesspeople in London discussing endemic inaccurate negative perceptions by outsiders of… Read More »