From Africa to the Americas: The odyssey of a black migrant running away from war in Cameroon
Julliana Essengue arrived in Tapachula, Mexico, from São Paulo, Brazil, in March 2020. She was broke but determined to reach the United States. After nearly two months traversing rain forests, borders and rivers by bus, car, boat, and foot, she needed money. At first, Essengue and her travel companions squatted....
Age should not be a barrier to pursuing a PhD: Nutritionist in Kenya shares advice for prospective students
Rose Okoyo Opiyo is a Kenyan nutritionist at the University of Nairobi and was a panellist at a webinar held last month titled Pursuing a PhD in Africa: Bridging the gender gap. The webinar was organised by the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA), a group of research...
Banning books undermines young people’s ability to engage in meaningful and complex discussions about history and literature
Maya Mackey, an 18-year-old college freshman in Texas, said reading Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” last semester was transformative. “You can learn about the plantation system, the horrors of slavery, the generational trauma, but you’re not going to get the full impact until you actually see it on an individual level, which...
Banning books in US school libraries: ‘Education is about teaching the facts, teaching science, teaching what’s right’
Growing up in the Baltimore area, Zach Koung didn’t have many opportunities to learn about the gay-rights movement, or to read books featuring queer characters and love stories. Such topics and learning materials weren’t a part of his schools’ curricula. Koung became depressed as a teen – and, in retrospect,...
In ever-widening tempest of climate change, Haiti cries out for support to end hunger-related human strife
Yet even before the 2010 earthquake, farmers in Haiti had “no financial back-up, no technology, no education”, says Fritz Alphonse Jean, president of the Haitian Public Policy Institute (INHOPP) and a former governor of the Haitian Central Bank (BRH). “If you look at the credit allocated to the agricultural sector...
Haiti was largely food secure until mid-1980s when US and foreign agencies forced it to liberalise its economy
Hunger was never far away when Angeline Annesteus was growing up. The daughter of subsistence farmers in Bercy, southern Haiti, she remembers going for days without much food. That was more than 30 years ago. Food insecurity is even more pressing now. Around 4.3 million people, more than one in...
Planned 2023 elections is a remote hope in South Sudan where violence is the currency in which political power is traded
Loans from the International Monetary Fund over the last two years have helped stave off a total collapse of the government of South Sudan, but the state has nevertheless almost entirely withdrawn from the provision of services and wages for regional authorities. In Warrap, the government is conspicuous by its...
South Sudan: We won’t get to elections, the only people who want elections are international community…it’ll be disaster
Keen to proclaim South Sudan as on the cusp of becoming a peaceful country, international actors have claimed that there has been a marked reduction in political violence since the signing of a peace agreement in 2018 and the formation of a power-sharing government two years later. But analysts, conflict...
Cybercrime: More often in Africa, states crack down on whistle-blowers who use government data to report crime
Digital repression is on the rise in many parts of Africa. Over a dozen African countries have recently experienced politically motivated internet shutdowns. Roughly the same number have been identified as operators of military-grade spyware (such as Pegasus, RCS and FinFisher), which they use to track domestic political opponents and...
Covid boosters: Endless shots might not be a viable strategy, nor is it how vaccines were meant to be used
Late last year, studies showed that third shots (boosters) of Covid vaccines were effective at providing a little extra protection from infection – particularly in the face of the Omicron variant. Some countries are now offering fourth doses, but scientists say that endless boosting might not be a viable strategy,...
