Seye Abimbola, a research fellow at the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Abuja, Nigeria, uses the case of a country without a proper health system (Nigeria) to reflect on how one might build a health system for the 21st century: The world is at a watershed, on the brink of monumental change in what… Read More »
This is a guest post by Keith Hart (cross-posted). It is partly in response to Benson Eluma’s piece here on Achebe and Hart. You can leave your comments here or at Hart’s blog. Benson’s post refers to my previous one, Africa’s hope, which in turn took off from Chinua Achebe’s NYT oped piece. I will not… Read More »
A guest post from Benson Eluma, a NigeriansTalk contributor. WHAT ARE THE differences between Achebe and Hart? Achebe says we have to go back 500 years to understand the problem of Africa; Hart says no, the required span is ‘the last century’. I feel that by the time we get to the start of Hart’s… Read More »
Chinua Achebe, one of the greatest writers Nigeria has ever known, recently wrote an op-ed article titled Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope for the New York Times. The piece starts out with the injustices of colonisation and how Africans had no idea about what to do with independence after having gained it. The following two excellent… Read More »
FT’s Gideon Rachman thinks that the answer to that question might be Yes: The backlash against immigration is particularly visible in Europe. In Britain, the new coalition government has promised to reduce the number of immigrants from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. International banks and multinational companies are already complaining that their businesses are… Read More »
Keith Hart, the economic anthropologist who, from his research with urban slum dwellers in 1960s Ghana, coined the term ‘informal economy’, announced his intention a couple of days ago to kick-start the writing of a book, Africa’s Urban Revolution, with a series of blog posts. The first in the series appears today, and it is an… Read More »
By keith Hart. The conclusion: The euro is the most tangible symbol of the European Union, but not co-extensive with it. For the last century or more, member states had supplied their citizens with a monopoly currency that served both as the reification of the national economy and as their principle link to the world… Read More »
Since I have a background in Development Studies, and I am currently trying to develop a research plan for an ethnographic study of the Nigerian financial sector, the following, from Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, University of California, Irvine, resonates quite powerfully with me: Because European systems of… Read More »
From Joshua Keating of FP: Taken together, the moral of these studies could be that colonalism isn’t great for a country’s future political and economic wellbeing, but if a country is going to be colonized, they’re better off with the British than the French. Of course, the ideal would be not to be colonised at… Read More »
Head over to Texas in Africa for the full gist. Suffice it to say here that you should support the initiative if you can.