Digital Archive....

Pormes: 'Asociaal, onbegrijpelijk en onbeschaafd' Vice Versa Sam Pormes is door Personele Samenwerking in Ontwikkelingslanden (PSO) uitgezonden naar de Molukken in Indonesië. Vice Versa ontmoet hem op Ambon, de plek waar zijn wortels liggen en hij bijna anderhalf jaar heeft gewoond en gewerkt. Door de bezuinigingen kan hij zijn werk niet meer voortzetten en moet hij het eiland verlaten. Pormes uit felle kritiek op het Nederlandse ontwikkelingsbeleid en de ontwikkelingsorganisaties. Door de bezuinigingen van het vorige kabinet kan Sam Pormes (54) zijn werk niet meer voortzetten en moet hij het voor hem bijzondere eiland Ambon in Indonesië verlaten. De plek waar hij zich echt thuis voelt. 'Voor het eerst in mijn leven hoef ik mij niet te legitimeren, wie ik ben en waar ik vandaan kom', aldus Pormes die in het verleden onder meer voor GroenLinks in de Eerste Kamer zat. Sinds 1989 is hij betrokken bij OS en de Molukken. Op dit moment is hij voorzitter van stic...

Is China Really Building 100 Dams in Africa? China in Africa: The Real Story I've just a short article on the website of the Oxford University China-Africa Network stating that Beijing is involved in "more than 100 dams" in Africa. Really? Here's what the author, Dr. Harry Verhoeven, says:  "Beijing especially is using its formidable technical expertise in hydro-infrastructure and immense foreign reserves to resurrect dam-building overseas: in half of all African countries , from the Sudanese desert and the Ethiopian lowlands to the rivers of Algeria and Gabon, Chinese engineers are involved in the planning, heightening and building of more than 100 dams . The tens of billions of US dollars and thousands of megawatts involved in these projects have so far remained off the radar in the China-Africa debate, but are possibly more consequential for the future of the African continent than the exports of oil, copper and other valua...

The Last Hunger Season: a fine but flawed study of poverty in rural Kenya – Review by Magnus Taylor African Arguments Reporting Africa is too often a game of big politics: elections, coups, terrorists, oil deals and Julius Malema. You can easily be an expert of all these things by reading everything available online, but as well-informed as this may make you, you still won't have the faintest idea what it's actually like to live the life of a person who lives there. This, however, is the great strength of Roger Thurow's new book: The Last Hunger Season: a year in an African farm community on the brink of change. It also happens to be its weakness. Here's why. Roger Thurow cares about Western Kenya. In authoring The Last Hunger Season, he spent enough time in the region to really know what living there is like. Thurow sought to write a book that followed the fortunes of 4 small-holder farmers as they negotiated the challenges another year brought t...

Safaricom & CBA Launch MShwari Bankelele This week saw the launch of what is likely to be a revolutionary mobile phone product  called  M-Shwari . It comes from two long term partners - Kenyan mobile company Safaricom, well known for it's world famous  mobile money product - MPesa, and a local bank, the Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) who have been custodians of M-Pesa funds for years MShwari is a savings and loan product that is immediately accessible to the 15 million users of Safaricom's  MPesa. It gives them access to banking services – savings and loans without having to walk into a bank hall or fill out a single form. It allows them to save as little as 1 shilling (earning interest of between 2-5% a year) or borrow as little as 100 shillings (Kshs 100 is equivalent to about $1.17) and attracts no account maintenance fees or transfer fees.  It will be a great product for people who run informal businesses and take money home at...

China and Mauritania: Whatever Happened to the Railway? China in Africa: The Real Story In 2007 and 2008, many of us read in the Western and Chinese media that a Chinese-Sudanese joint venture was going to build a railway to Mauritania's phosphate deposits in the border town of Kaedi, and that China Eximbank had agreed to finance 70 percent of the $686 million project. This project was listed in the World Bank's 2008 study of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa, Building Bridges , and has been assumed by many to be ongoing. I was more skeptical about this project, as there was no further word about it after 2008. I didn't include it in my 2010 book, The Dragon's Gift . But I always wondered what had happened. Now we know, and the answer is: nothing . In an April 2012 article, " Phosphate of Bofal: Dream or Reality? ", a Mauritanian journalist,  Ahmed Yahya Kowri, solves the puzzle. He writes that he'd been hearing about the po...

Deborah Bräutigam, Professor and Director of the International Development Program at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, debunks common myths surrounding Chinese investment in Africa The West is worried about Chinese investment in Africa. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton regularly makes veiled references to the danger of Africa's "new colonialists". Last summer, UK prime minister David Cameron warned Africans about the risks of partnering with authoritarian China. Why? Everyone knows that the Chinese are aggressive newcomers to Africa, only interested in resources, including land to feed China's growing population; bringing in all their own workers in countries desperate for employment. Yet much of what "everyone knows" about Chinese investment in Africa is simply wrong.   In July, as rain beat on the roofs of the Chinese-run Eastern Industrial Zone outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, I walked along the production lines where more than 80...

http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2012/11/19/visualizing-the-arms-trade/ (verzonden vanaf tablet)

Slowing population growth in Malawi is essential for poverty reduction strategies to work Eldis Ageing Populations Malawi adds over 400,000 people each year to its population. Without a reduction in the average number of births per woman, health, education and employment ...

Inequality and the rise of the global 1%: great new paper by Branko Milanovic From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green Ricardo Fuentes on an important new paper . Tomorrow, Ricardo and I continue the conversation The rich in the West are getting richer. Many countries have experienced a sharp concentration of incomes over the last three decades. The top 1% of Americans have doubled their share of national income (from 8 to 17%) since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated 32 years ago – see graph, source here . The elite in other advanced economies, including, Australia, the UK, Japan and Sweden, have also gotten a larger share of the pie. We have been able to understand the concentration of incomes at the national level thanks to the study of tax records by enterprising scholars such as Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Picketty and Sir Anthony Atkinson. But until recently, we didn't know much about the global concentration of incomes (there's no global tax collector with a similar...

How Africa's first commodity exchange revolutionised Ethiopia's economy | Lauren Everitt Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Eleni Gabre-Madhin on how a market has empowered Ethiopian farmers by focusing on distribution as well as production While government leaders, NGOs and corporations devise strategies to churn out more food for future generations, Eleni Gabre-Madhin is taking a different approach. Concerned by a 2002 famine in her home country of Ethiopia that followed bumper crops in 2000 and 2001, the Stanford-educated economist decided it was time to go beyond food production and take a hard look at distribution. The result? Africa's first commodity exchange. As the founder and outgoing CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange ( ECX ), Gabre-Madhin established a reliable interface for buyers and sellers to meet – an idea that has inspired other African countries to follow suit. Gabre-Madhin won the Yara award at the African...

How do people die? Global mortality and causes of death visualised Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk What kills people around the world - and how does it vary from place to place? Simon Rogers

How committed is Europe to development really? Owen abroad This joint post with Alice Lépissier and Liza Reynolds first appeared on Views from the Center .  It  announces the launch of the Europe Beyond Aid initiative and presents a summary of the research and preliminary analysis in its first working paper . Europeans more than pull their weight in aid to developing countries. Last year Europeans provided more than €60 billion ($80bn) in aid, more than two and a half times as much as the United States. European members account for just 40% of the national income of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) but give more than 60% of the aid . Furthermore, Europeans have reason to be proud of the quality of aid they give. They tend to focus on poverty eradication and sustainable development, and have largely shaken off the vested commercial interests in tied aid. But development cooperation means more than effective aid. The partnership agreed a yea...