How is it possible that in 2011 the world failed prevent famine in the Horn of Africa? The signs of disaster were present: two years of drought, no food storage, political instability, civil war and banned foreign assistance, but no one acted until it was too late. Now, three months later, thousands of people […]
Tag: Africa
Take a look at a satellite photo of Africa at night. Apart from a few specks of light over the largest cities, the continent is dark. Millions of rural Africans live without any electrical power at all, and the U.N. Development Program estimates that on a yearly basis the 19.5 million people of New […]
In recent articles, I’ve been arguing that America has a teenager’s worst attitude about climate change: We need to stop slouching to our rooms and slamming doors shut, and start engaging developing countries on the issues that matter to them, like adapting to climate change within those countries’ borders and mitigating it within our […]
For the last week and a half, I have been in Ethiopia, conducting research on climate change and adaptation. Rambling around Addis Ababa and the Central Rift Valley has been an exercise in patience and flexibility, but also enormously informative and enjoyable. Ethiopia is a country that has been particularly hard-hit by climate-related disasters, […]
In July 2010, Ethiopia’s Environment Protection Authority declared it would have a carbon-neutral economy by 2025. What? An entire country? Carbon neutral? While I know that developing countries emit considerably less carbon than countries like the United States do, this is a hard claim to swallow, especially in such a short timeframe. Indeed, it […]
On December 15, 2010 the International Criminal Court (ICC) revealed the names of six Kenyan government officials involved in the 2007-2008 post-election violence in the country. The highly publicized announcement had been long-awaited by the Kenyan population. Citizens stopped their daily activities to tune into the announcement made by chief ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. […]
Recently, the Republic of Congo reported more than 150 deaths from polio, as well as more than 200 cases of paralysis due to polio. This comes as a shock to members of developed countries in which polio remains just a story of older generations. To the progressively more vaccine-averse generations of the United States, polio […]
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Health’s Deadline: 2015
At the turn of the millennium, world leaders decided the new era should see the end of extreme poverty and other basic development problems. In order to facilitate a worldwide focus on this broad aim, they crafted the Millennium Development Goals to set up detailed goals to be achieved by 2015. Out of the eight […]