[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJAcj46TtZY [/youtube]
Mark Weston
Mark Weston is a writer, researcher and consultant working on public health, justice, youth employability and other global issues. He lives in Sudan, and is the author of two books on Africa – The Ringtone and the Drum and African Beauty.
Things they don’t teach you at business school: Grow Facial Hair
The New Year brings news of a boom in facial hair implants in Istanbul. Follically-challenged men are coming from all corners of the Middle East to bolster...
Was the Washington Consensus right?
Michael Clemens and co-authors have just won this year's Royal Economic Society Prize for a paper on aid's role in pushing economic growth (ungated version...
Early adopters: Africa’s hunter-gatherer Pygmies go hi-tech to combat loggers
If you were asked to rank the peoples of the world in terms of their enthusiasm for the things of the 21st century, it is a fair bet that Singaporeans,...
No power? No computers? No smartphones? No problem. Blogging by blackboard in Liberia
How a Liberian uses low-tech to solve his community's information deficit: Many people in the West African city of Monrovia can't afford to buy newspapers or...
Politicians quick to take advantage of Ghana’s oil windfall
In The Ringtone and the Drum, my recently published book on West Africa, I described how diamonds have proved a curse rather than a blessing to Sierra...
West Africa: piracy’s new frontier?
News is emerging that an oil tanker has been hijacked off the Nigerian coast. This appears to be part of a growing trend, and one that was predicted in these...
The Enemy at the Gates
On a beach in Málaga the other day I asked a Senegalese handbag seller if the collapse of Spain's economy, whose effect on business has made life increasingly...
The end of impunity for bankers? How Spain’s indignados are using crowdfunding to bring them to justice
Following the collapse of the bank he was running until earlier this year, Rodrigo Rato probably thought he would be able to slip into a quiet, if tarnished...
Sympathy for the Devil: Charles Taylor and his Apologists in the West
Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who was last week sentenced to fifty years imprisonment for crimes committed in Sierra Leone's civil war, was a...
The biology of poverty traps
By way of catching up on my popular social science, I have been reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee's Poor...
A complex coup in Guinea-Bissau
Last Friday, just as West Africa watchers were recovering from the excitement of the coup d'état in Mali a couple of weeks back, little Guinea-Bissau piped up...
Should we give up on girls? Or how misrepresenting evidence can set back gender equality
Earlier this week I argued on here for men to be brought into discussions and policy-making on gender and development. I did not expect to be arguing just two...
Men and Development: Why gender should not just be about women
Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon ("registers of...
An Agenda for the North, or How to Avert Civil War in Nigeria
Northern Nigeria is in turmoil. Last week's attacks in the main northern city of Kano, which left at least 180 dead, are the latest in a series of bombings...
Another turbulent week in Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau is one of the world's unluckiest countries. Ravaged by the slave trade, stifled by Portuguese colonisers (when the latter were forced out, only...
Armenians in Turkey: an unextinguished light
To find out how world peace was coming along I rose early this morning (not easy after a New Year's Eve engaged in one of the marathon rak? and cards sessions...
North Koreans in creepy mass cry-in over Kim Jong-il
Posted without comment: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWN6Qj98Iw&feature=g-upl[/youtube]
Was the boom worth it? The global view
Doug Saunders of Canada's Globe and Mail has an interesting post on whether the economic boom that lasted from the early 1990s to the late 2000s was worth it....
How policy encourages the banks to fleece us
Yesterday's El País carried what to me was an extraordinary story about repossessions of Spanish homes. The recession has seen the number of repossessions in...
More from Global Dashboard
Justice is missing the boat
The year 2020 will go down in history as the year when much changed. One thing seems to remain constant: the fact that the justice sector is slow to change. As a consequence, it seems to be missing a rather big boat. Good things often come out of bad things. It is no...
An emerging ministers of justice movement
Since April, we have been calling for justice leaders of the world to get out of their national cubby holes and come together to share fears, failures, successes, and strategies, just like public health ministers are doing. The COVID-19 crisis is too big and too...
Un mouvement émergent des Ministres de la Justice
Depuis le mois d'avril, nous appelons les leaders de la justice du monde entier à sortir de leur cagibi national et à se réunir afin de partager leurs craintes, leurs échecs, leurs succès ainsi que leurs stratégies, comme le font les ministres de la santé publique. La...