The UN is pessimistic about the situation in Guinea. In Tambacounda last night, in the south-eastern wastes of Senegal, I met a World Food Programme employee...
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.
Piracy is good for fish
Last December I wrote about a Somali pirate's justification for his choice of career. A former fisherman, like many of his countrymen, his main gripe was with...
Does HIV cause AIDS? How much more evidence do you need?
It beggars belief that a decade after Thabo Mbeki and other AIDS denialists were completely discredited by a mountain of evidence (see a good summary here if...
Wake up Nigeria: lessons from Sierra Leone
While researching my upcoming book on the world's poorest countries last week, I came across David Keen's 'Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone,' an...
Kill human rights workers
More depressing news from West Africa - surely the world's most unstable region - as Gambia's Big Man president Yahya Jammeh declares he wants to kill human...
Tories use girl’s death to score (invalid) points
When the story broke on Monday that a young British schoolgirl, Natalie Morton, had died after receiving the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer, I wondered why...
Africa’s new Big Man shows his true colours
Back in December, when Moussa "Dadis" Camara seized power in Guinea in a bloodless coup, he promised to hold elections and return his country to democracy...
More unrest in Nigeria
The BBC reports that the weekend's violence in the city of Bauchi has spread to other parts of northern Nigeria, including the sleepy northeastern town of...
A new war in Africa? Or just a new political ploy?
Cross-border wars in Sub-Saharan Africa have been few and far between since the end of the colonial period. Instead, the continent's disaffected have fought...
Death in the desert
Back in February, I gave a talk on security in West Africa at a Demos leadership masterclass on International Security and Counter-Terrorism. Yesterday...
More on African land deals
Article on rich-country land acquisitions in Africa
Russia’s government goes street
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has launched a video blog, in which he appears in shirt and jeans (none of Gordon Brown's ill-fitting jackets and terrifying...
Swine flu – far from over
A worrying factoid from CNN (courtesy of Chris Blattman): In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was...
Piracy hits the Middle East
Two major cruise lines - Fred Olsen and MSC Cruises - have announced that they are dropping their Indian Ocean routes to avoid Somali pirates. From now on,...
No secrets (even in Madagascar)
Just a quickie on the Madagascar coup from a Royal Africa Society talk I attended on Tuesday. According to Volatiana Rahaga, who is president of the...
Landgrab map
Further to Alex's recent posts (here, here and here) on wealthy countries' purchases of arable land in the developing world, here's a map from Le Monde...
Some pirates are better than others
The International Maritime Bureau's live piracy map is worth a look. In 2005 (see here for 2005 map), there were many more attacks in South East Asia than off...
Firing the first shot
The piracy saga in the Indian Ocean has taken a nasty turn, as France's new Napoleon, Nicolas Sarkozy, has decided capital punishment is the best way of...
Spoof you for the Presidency
They do things differently in West Africa. It turns out, according to the Kansas City Star, that Moussa "Dadis" Camara won the Guinean presidency after the...
Science and society: the need for openness
The think tank 2020health has just released my report on UK vaccination policy. 'Not immune: UK vaccination policy in a changing world' was written in...
More from Global Dashboard
A Blueprint for Black Lives Matter in the Development Sector
Over the past few weeks – in the wake of COVID-19 and the killing of George Floyd – we have seen development, aid, and humanitarian institutions try to respond more effectively to racism. Racism is rooted in a combination of prejudice and power, and action to combat...
COVID-19 – Five lessons for improving future economic and social resilience
The COVID-19 crisis is another timely reminder of the need for building resilience into our social, economic, and financial systems – locally, nationally, and globally. COVID-19 demonstrates the extent of globally inter-linked systems of trade and finance, and reveals...
Love, Inequity, and Development Policy in a COVID-era?
All COVID-response pieces begin with a tumbling wave of “blah crisis blah opportunity blah uncertainty”. We don’t know enough to know enough. Just hold on until we get the facts. Competing scenarios. Duelling facts. Whatever your flavour – please assume that’s true of...