by David Steven | Feb 8, 2011 | UK
Important – and exciting news from the UK Foreign Office – the BBC World Service is being closed down. Newsbiscuit has the scoop:
The BBC World Service is to be replaced by a rolling 24-hour radio show presented by Foreign Secretary William Hague.
‘I have always dreamed of being a DJ,’ said Mr Hague, ‘as a small boy I would regularly spin classic vinyl of the speeches of Winston Churchill. I can’t wait to get down and funky with the global massive.’
The World Service, which is funded through the Foreign Office, recently announced that it was axing 650 jobs and would be cutting five of its language services.
‘I can easily do the jobs of these people,’ insisted Mr Hague, ‘I may not be fluent in 32 different languages but music is a universal language. Listeners will soon forget their need for an impartial news service when I start playing them tunes from my Abba collection.’’ […]
The show will feature regular phone-ins allowing the 180 million listeners worldwide a chance to engage in light-hearted jovial banter with Mr Hague about war, famine and global hegemony. There will also be exciting new competitions in which people can win foreign aid, an arms shipment or military intervention.
by Claire Melamed | Feb 7, 2011 | Africa, Economics and development
What will happen if mobile phone use carries on expanding at its current rate in Africa, but literacy rates don’t improve? This graph, using data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, gives us the answer:
If (and it’s a quite colossal if), the projections in this graph are correct, then by the end of next year there will be more mobile phone subscriptions in Africa than people who are literate. That’s when illiteracy, and not lack of access to technology, might be the thing that stops people communicating.
You need a minimum of literacy to be able to use a mobile. And if mobile phones become the main way that people access the internet, which may well happen as people leapfrog straight to smartphones, then illiteracy and not lack of technology may become the barrier to internet access too.
Mobile phones can help with literacy, of course, and there are already many pilot programmes testing out how this could work in different contexts. But at the moment the trend seems pretty overwhelming.
This graph shows another source of widening inequalities open up in front of our eyes. People who cannot read will be excluded from the information and opportunties offered by mobile phones and, soon, the internet, as well as those offered by paper and ink.
Of course there are many reasons why it probably won’t happen exactly as predicted by this graph. The people who are hardest to reach with literacy programmes will be the ones least likely to get access to mobile technology too. And the spread of mobile phones may slow down. And data from Africa, particularly when added up across the whole continent, is notoriously unreliable (there are just two data points for adult literacy, for example, in 2000 and 2008, so that line at least may well be a bit off).
But it does show a problem. This graph shows that while we’re probably right to get excited by the possiblities offered by new technology, those same technologies might make the old problems more rather than less important.
(with thanks to Alex Evans, it was a conversation with him back in September which got me wondering about this)
by Jules Evans | Feb 7, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Nice to see Keith Olbermann reads Global Dashboard. In January, shortly before MSNBC fired him, Olbermann did a story on the US Army’s ambitious resilience training programme, which I reported on back in October 2009. Olbermann reports that some atheist soldiers are objecting to the ‘spiritual fitness’ aspect of the programme, which rates to what extent soldiers feel ‘connected to humanity’ and guided by ‘a sense of meaning’ etc. Olbermann then quotes my interview with the programme’s director, Rhonda Cornum, where she says ‘every time you say the S-P-I-R word you’re going to get sued’. If you look really carefully under the photo of Cornum, you can see ‘Source: globaldashboard.org’.
To be fair to Cornum and the programme’s designer, Martin Seligman of Penn University, I would not say the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme is ‘religious’, or ‘Christian’. Martin Seligman is Jewish, for one thing. But he does believe, and has evidence to show, that part of being a resilient person is having a sense of meaning in one’s life. That’s not the same as religion. I would have thought atheists could see that…
But I thought that the politics of wellbeing would get into these problems. As soon as a liberal government backs one version of the Good Life, it’s going to be accused of violating the freedom of conscience and religious belief. That’s the challenge facing pluralist, multicultural societies – how to create a sense of unity, cohesion and common values in our society (including in our armies) without being accused of forcing your beliefs onto other people. Still, this seems a pretty unbalanced news story to me.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNfBPXi5rUA[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Feb 7, 2011 | Economics and development, Influence and networks
Over at the World Bank blog, Adam Wagstaff’s been playing with Google Trends data from 2004 to today, to try to determine whether anyone’s actually paying any attention to flagship development reports like the World Development Report and Human Development Report.
He has some interesting findings on the relative popularity of different reports (the WDR only got googled 60% as often as the HDR from 2004 to now, for instance) – but what stands out most is how searches for international development per se have fallen. The graph below illustrates relatively frequency of searches, with 1 as the average over the full seven year period:
By contrast, searches for a control group – Wagstaff uses internet searches for a range of German cars – stayed pretty much level.
by Andy Sumner | Feb 5, 2011 | Economics and development
Quite a bit it seems judging by the poverty projections in the new Brookings paper that shows what’s possible if inequality is unchanging. In short, much, much faster poverty reduction (and thus a cheaper aid budget too).
Not surprising perhaps, inequality seems to be very much back on the political radar judging by recent voices in the Economist, the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile the UN are promoting equity approaches to the MDGs with both UNICEF and UNDP leading the wider UN body.
The main trends are said to be rising inequality within many countries but falling inequality in some highly unequal countries across Latin America thanks to a mixture of cash transfers to the poor and expansion of education.
Inequality matters to poverty reduction because rising inequality reduces the effectiveness of growth for poverty reduction as well as having linkages to greater fragility/conflict via horizontal or group inequalities.
But exactly how much does inequality matter to global poverty reduction? Now we have a something of an answer – in an interesting study by Chandy and Gertz at Brookings.
(more…)
