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Tag: development

A brief tale of Covid priorities in Africa

What Africans have been telling me about Covid this year The arrival of the Omicron variant has finally, although rather unfairly, brought some of the focus in the pandemic onto Africa. There is at least now more discussion of the inequalities in the system that is putting profit before people, leaving Africans at the bottom of the vaccine supply chain. Having spent this year living in Africa and I ought to add, living with Africans, entirely disconnected from any expat…

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I checked the headlines on China’s role in Afghanistan. This is what I found

After ten days of scanning the coverage of China’s potential role in Afghanistan, it’s clear that there is one voice missing from western media reports: the Afghans themselves. In no article did anyone consider the concerns of the Afghan people, what they might want or expect from a future where China will certainly play a prominent role. This only echoes the US led intervention, where, as always the local people only ever play a walk on part in a plot…

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Village life in Ivory Coast

  Why would you want to stay in an African village in a country like the Ivory Coast? There’s little immediately evident appeal: no big sights to see; limited or no electricity and certainly no plumbing –  your shower will come out of a bucket and if you want a crap you’ll have to squat over a pungent hole in a dingy shack that’s steaming hot in the day and roach infested at night; you’ll get to sleep on an…

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Liberia, the land of signs

I’d hesitate to recommend a decent, well publicized war as a development policy but ten years of aid after the country’s horrors have seen improvements due to foreign agencies which would never have occurred otherwise. Few indications of the war remain, only the occasional abandoned ruin, some graced with the pockmarks of bullets and shrapnel, forlornly waiting for their former owner to return, in the slim hope they may still be alive. If there is one thing aid agencies love…

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Guinea

It has taken much time and effort to find just the right words to encapsulate the true essence of this country and after much consultation of dictionaries and  thesauri, contemplating adjectival comparisons and literary metaphor I believe I have captured concisely the quintessential Guinea: absolutely fucked. For a nation that hasn’t suffered war it suffers a level of decrepitude rarely matched in African nations. If you have not had the opportunity to become a connoisseur of relative levels of fuckedupness (this is my opening bid…

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