World Unites in Grief after Ethiopian Airlines Crash Kills 157
The
World Food Program of the United Nations says seven of its employees died. Six
employees from the United Nations office in Nairobi were killed, and two from
the International Telecommunications Union also. The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva said three of the agency’s staff died.
Addis Ababa and Nairobi are home to United Nations offices. But the flight
between the cities may have been carrying a particularly high number of United
Nations workers because it was the day before a session of the United Nations
Environment Assembly, described as the world’s highest-level decision-making
body on the environment. Meanwhile, the flight recorders from the Ethiopian
Airlines plane that crashed on Sunday have been recovered by investigators. The
devices recovered from the crash site are the Boeing 737 Max 8’s cockpit voice
recorder and the digital flight data recorder. Several airlines have grounded
the model following the disaster.
SOURCES: NEW YORK
TIMES | BBC
Sombre Mood in Nairobi as Delegates Discuss the World’s Environmental Future
An assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
has opened in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, under a dark cloud cast by the Sunday’s
plane crash that killed 157 people, including 22 UN staff, many heading for the
annual event. On Monday, delegates arrived at the event with the UN flag flying
at half-mast, and the flags of the UN members that usually adorn the UNEP
headquarters having been taken down. Nairobi hosts the global headquarters of
the UNEP and is the regional seat for many UN agencies. The annual UNEP
assembly gathers heads of state, ministers, business leaders and civil society
representatives to work on ways to slash pollution and build a greener global
economy.
SOURCES: AL
JAZEERA
A First of its Kind List by Forbes Woman Africa
The New Wealth Creators is a collection of female entrepreneurs
on the African continent running businesses and social enterprises that are
new, offbeat and radical. These 20 women have been selected because they have
created significant impact in their respective sectors by transforming a market
or company, or innovating a product or service, and are pioneering their
organization(s) in generating new untapped streams of income. They may be
wealth creators but their businesses, ironically, did not stem from a need to
make money, but rather from the need to solve Africa’s persisting
socio-economic challenges. These women come from across the continent, from the
villages and the suburbs, and are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. They have all
adopted sustainable development initiatives in one way or another to help solve
Africa’s problems.
SOURCES: FORBES
AFRICA
Algeria’s Youth take on Ailing President
Students have been at the heart of protests and a decision to
start spring break on Sunday — instead of March 21 — will affect many whose
family homes are far from campuses which are set to close over the holidays.
“Algeria free and democratic!” cried students at the University of Science and
Technology Houari Boumediene in Algiers, where around 2 000 gathered to rally
against the holiday decision and to keep up their protest against Bouteflika as
more protest strikes shut down the capital’s public transport system and many
schools across the country. The ailing president returned to Algeria from
Switzerland over the weekend, his return comes as the country prepares for the
April 18 elections. At 82, Bouteflika suffered a stroke in 2013, he left
Algeria on February 24 for what the presidency on Sunday once again described
as “routine medical checks”.
SOURCES: MAIL
& GUARDIAN AFRICA
Exposing Child Labor in Ghana
A top Ghanaian official has promised action following a CNN
report into child slavery on Lake Volta. Around 20,000 children work on the
lake; enslaved by fishermen they call “master.” Most of them come to
the lake from hundreds of miles away. They are sold by their desperately poor
parents to human traffickers, sometimes for as little as $250. “It’s a
heartbreaking story, and it’s a matter of concern for the government and the
people of Ghana,” Ghana’s Minister of Information Kojo Oppong Nkrumah told
CNN. He promised specific action “aimed at rescuing the victims,
rehabilitating them, reintegrating them into society (and) prosecuting persons
responsible.” In 2017, the country hosted its “National Child Labor
Day” in the lakeside town of Kete Krachi, to call awareness to the issue.
There is also an effort to register all the boats on the lake, which could make
it easier to track down and punish fishermen using child slaves.
SOURCES: CNN
The Decline of Nigeria’s Universities
Higher education in Nigeria includes universities (federal,
state and private) as well as polytechnics (skills-intensive and experiential
learning programmes) and colleges of education. With over 160 universities, 128
polytechnics and 177 colleges of education, it constitutes the largest higher
education system in Africa. Researchers have found that the country’s
universities lag well behind equivalent emerging global economies like South
Africa, Egypt, Thailand, Turkey and Brazil. They also lag behind traditional
world leaders. Part of the problem is that the education budget in Nigeria has
seen little or no change over the last few years, and government funding of
education remains low. In 2018, it was just over 7% of the national budget.
This level of funding, as a percentage of the total budget, has remained
stagnant since 2009 when it was 7.25%.
SOURCES: THE
CONVERSATION
The Hidden Economic Costs Of Displacement
While the impacts of displacement on wellbeing are well-known,
one group has pointed to the equally burdensome economic costs for those
displaced as well as host communities. In a new report,
the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) examines the
financial costs of internal displacement across major crises around the world,
raising awareness of the importance of preventing future displacement as well
as responding to such situations efficiently. The report also notes that
the impacts of internal displacement are far higher in low-income countries,
partially due the lack of capacity to minimise impacts of crises. The
Central African Republic (CAR) is one such low-income country, with over 70
percent of the country estimated to be living in poverty. CAR has seen
decades of instability and violence, and its most recently conflict has
resulted in an ongoing, dire humanitarian crisis and the displacement of over 1
million people, more than half of whom have stayed within the country’s
borders.
SOURCES: AFRICA.COM
How to Decipher Zimbabwe’s Economic Crisis
While policymakers use technical vagaries to explain away the
crisis, an ordinary Zimbabwean has created the most succinct explanation
through a two-minute animation. “I created it because I had the impossible task
of explaining what happened to the money to my daughter’s Grade 7 class,” Kuda
Musasiwa told Quartz Africa. The animation achieves what policymakers and
analysts have struggled to do: distil the crisis to its simplest form.
Importantly, it explains how the banking system affects consumers. In it,
dollars are cows and bond notes are goats, and Musasiwa tries to explain how
the Reserve Bank forced consumers to believe they held the same value. It takes
a tragicomic turn when Musasiwa has to explain Zimbabwe’s use of mobile money
due to a currency shortage. Musasiwa, a rapper who also runs a vegetable delivery
service and an advertising agency, knows the very serious consequence of the
currency shortage or a crash in the mobile service network.
SOURCES: QUARTZ
AFRICA
The Big Wins on Cairo’s Stock Exchange
An exchange-traded fund focused on Egyptian equities had the
biggest weekly inflow since 2014 as foreigners increased bets on this year’s
second-best-performing stock market. The VanEck Vectors Egypt Index ETF
attracted $11.5 million in the five days ended March 8, more than any other
week since September 2014. The assets under management climbed to $52 million,
the highest since August. The U.S.-based fund invests more than 40 percent of
its assets in real estate, chemicals and telecommunications shares trading in
Cairo.
SOURCES: BLOOMBERG
Screenings, Parties and Debates over the Future of African Cinema
Burkina Faso, known as the spiritual home of African cinema,
values film: taxi drivers can recite the festival schedule, for the pan-African
film and television festival of Ouagadougou, with precision, and one of its
most prominent roundabouts (often prestigious spaces in African cities) is a
tower of cinema reels represented in orange and green-painted cement, with
statues of previous best picture winners nearby. But cinemas across the African
continent have closed in droves as they are expensive to attend compared with
watching pirate versions on the mobile phones that more and more people own, or
on televisions in informal “video clubs” in residential neighbourhoods.
SOURCES: THE
GUARDIAN