Tag Archives: africa

Submarine Communications Cables and Africa

August 1 09

Cable_Map_big

No really. I don’t understand. I mean, we never really learn or think about Submarine Communications Cables, we just use them all the time. I was listening to a radio program a few nights ago, and they were discussing how the west coast of Africa has only one fiber optic cable to carry high speed internet access.   When I did a web search I found numerous articles from… oh a bit over a week ago talking about east Africa just now getting a fiber optic cable.

I am having a really hard time finding information about the ownership of these cables and who pays for their development and maintenance, but I wonder what narrative could be constructed examining the decisions that led to development and lack their of in Africa.

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New Pan-Africanism and the Myth of African Unity

June 12 09

I came across the following video about the myth of African unity on YouTube from Polity. The speaker is Dr. Paul-Simon Handy of the Institute for Security Studies. I found it very interesting and thought it raised a lot of good points people don’t often like to discuss or consider. The main ones that stood out to me are that Africa is a very diverse continent that is not all black and does not have a common power to rise against any longer. Basically, we are in a post-post-Colonial world at this point, and it is up to governments, people and academics to determine that that is going to look like. I have been doing a lot of thinking on the idea of a new Pan-Africanism, wondering what it would look like and what the goals would be.

From the YouTube video description:

The idea of Pan-Africanism should be revisited, with the aim of reorienting it towards service delivery, performance and efficient governance.

The French text on the backdrop says “Knowledge emancipates Africa”.

Knowledge and access to that knowledge has been shown time and time again to have a positive impact on society. That is one of the reasons I feel so passionately about making sure that young people are able to use the internet, provided they have access to it, to look up meaningful information and connect with each other. I believe that with more and more dialogues happening, there is no limit on the ideas and solutions people are capable of coming up with. Knowledge does emancipate, and it also opens up new worlds.

When I think of the original Pan-Africanism, it had strong links to slavery. This meant that it reflected the entire diaspora. Where do black people from outside of Africa fit in to this new Pan-Africanism? If the global coverage of Obama showed anything, it is that even if we are not necessarily unified, we do look at major success stories and see our own potential, regardless of our background or country of origin. We see it and think that we can and will do better and know that we are the writers of our future. Our common histories link our successes, failures and futures.

I hope that in the future I am in a position where I can help create a future filled with knowledge and access.

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Sex for Grades

February 11 09
[caption id="attachment_426" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Students in the central region of Daloa, Côte d'Ivoire © ONUCI"]Students in the central region of Daloa, Côte d'Ivoire © ONUCI[/caption]

I was reading the news and thought I wanted to research on the electricity problems in Benin, but I came across an article focusing on Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) that got to me more.  Apparently, due to the economic crisis following the rebellion in 2002 there has been massive unemployment.  As a result, girls are turning to sex with the teachers to get better grades and money and sex with strangers to get money to pay schools fees, at times with the blessing of their parents. It started out with a story of a girl who would find people to have sex with in exchange for money on the internet.

This article also linked to another article from October of 2008 titled “Sexually-transmitted grades’ kills quality education” that discusses how widespread and common the situation of students (both male and female) having sex with teachers is in West Africa (not just Côte d’Ivoire).  It is so common that students have even come up with a lexicon for the actions.

This article came after Learn Without Fear, and interesting organization that people should check out, released their report on Sexual Exploitation in West Africa on “Increasing visibility and promoting policy action to tackle sexual exploitation in and around schools in Africa”. It is available as a free PDF download from their site and is only 32 pages.

Anyway, I am going to go finish reading the report, but it is all very interesting. I am not sure how widespread this situation is, and neither are the writers of the report as there weren’t official statistics kept at the time the report was written. Hopefully though, the heightened awareness will lead to action and preventive measures, and the social situation in the countries where this is happening will improve so families and children don’t have to turn to these type of practices just to try and get an education.

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JICA, West Africa and Education

February 10 09

It is amazing what we find if we actually make a determined effort to look, and what we miss out of sheer laziness.  I confess to my laziness.   I often refer to myself as an average, overeducated, underachiever… however, I am working on this.   I have set up many filters to get information I would otherwise miss that is of interest to me, so I can continue to be lazy but still catch the stuff I would normally miss.  This brings me to the article I came across today from the African Press Agency.

Basically, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a humanitarian agency out of Japan. I love their vision/mission statements. Here is a small snippet but the whole thing is great:

Vision
Inclusive and Dynamic Development

“Inclusive development” represents an approach to development that encourages all people to recognize the development issues they themselves face, participate in addressing them, and enjoy the fruits of such endeavors.

Anyway, here is the quote that got me from the APA article:

The head of JICA office in Dakar was speaking at the opening of an international training workshop on school data collection and processing, with the participation of over 30 education experts from Burkina Faso (7), Niger (6) and Senegal (10), as well as JICA and Senegal’s Education ministry representatives.

It is amazing to see what other countries are doing to help with education in places. I believe I will be following JICA and what they are doing in my quest to be a little less lazy as well.

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Madagascar

January 29 09

Madagascar has been one of the most interesting places to me on the planet since I learned that the native language is Malayo-Polynesian when I was in undergrad in Hawaii. As languages have always been of interest to me, learning the actual reach of the polynesian family of languages, and what that means for this history of all the people across the globe that speak those languages makes me squee a little. Anyway, I am getting off the point of me making this post.

I am not sure why, but we never hear anything about Madagascar… even after that movie was made. Even in my studies, while we discussed a lot about North Africa and a little bit about sub-Saharan Africa and even less about Indochina (mainly Vietnam… who cares about Laos and Cambodia?), Madagascar, and all of the other little places (even the ones that are still part of France as DOM/TOMs… I am more interesting in the TOMs as those are newer acquisitions), were kind of, sort of, totally left out. So, with everything that is happening now in Madagascar, CNN’s ticker is happily reporting how many people died daily without really going in to details about what is going on there.

Madagascar is a former French colony. I found an interesting article on Le Monde that gave some hard French facts about it. There are 20,000 people with French Passports still there and there is a heavily vested French interest in Tourism to the island nation. Apparently this past summer, they kicked out the French ambassador yet, and have refused to reinstate him. As a result, France closed the French schools there and put the country on the list of places to avoid visiting. As a side note, the article says the president doesn’t want to bring the ambassador back because he is “superstitious”… hahahahaa really?

So, what is leading to the random death count ticker on CNN? Marc Ravalomanana’s government (the current president), is accused of misspending funds and threatening democracy. So people are protesting the government. Would that have been so hard to put across the news ticker? Going just a little further, Andry Rajoelina, the mayor of the capital city, is apparently a leader in these protests. He had a TV station that he started to help his campaign (he ran as an independent), and the government shut it down last month after he ran an interview of the former president (who had ruled Madagascar for 25 years). Apparently, another plan in the works that has upset people is a plan to lease farmland to Daewoo (the South Korean company). Anyway, here is a Reuters article with some key facts about the two main players in all that is going on.

Regardless, I am upset that, rather than actually talk about what is going on in Madagascar, the new outlets seem to be focusing on the deaths and looting. I suppose it is normal though.

As an aside, here are some other places that are actually still associated with France that I never heard enough/anything about in school: French Polynesia (Austral Islands, Bass Islands, Gambier Islands, Marquesas Islands, Society Islands including Tahiti and the Tuamotu Archipelago), New Caledonia, Réunion, Territorial Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Clipperton Island, Mayotte, Wallis and Futuna, French Antarctica (Saint-Paul Island, Amsterdam Island, Crozet archipelago, Kerguelen archipelago and Adélie Land).
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