Africa
Small farmers are losing their shirts over the latest coffee-bean bust. Put in hard numbers, that’s about 100 million people — both farmers and their dependents — in 40 countries across the tropics who have seen their incomes cut by two-thirds in this decade. The reduction in coffee-bean prices is due to several factors, including […]
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Between 40 percent and 70 percent of all medicine sold in Africa is fake, but a crackdown on the illicit trade by the tiny West African nation of Benin is inspiring new action across the continent. In fact, Benin’s capital of Cotonou was the site of a 2009 declaration in which a panoply of heads-of-state […]
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Dr. Boniface Igbeneghu was a respected professor at the elite University of Lagos, as well as a Christian minister. He is also a sexual predator. As part of the BBC News “Sex for Grades” investigation, journalist Kiki Mordi, posing as a prospective student, brings a hidden camera into his office to reveal a terrifying abuse […]
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International aid and service groups are caught in the crossfire of the brutal, decade-long war between Nigeria’s military and the Boko Haram terrorist organization. To date, at least 37 aid workers have been killed in the conflict. While aid workers in Northern Nigeria are predictably targeted by Boko Haram, they are also heavily criticized and […]
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Wealthy, influential political and business leaders, experts, celebrities — and the attendant press — love to jet around the world to luxurious, insulated venues such as Davos, Switzerland, where they meet to discuss and find solutions to the world’s problems. Problems such as the hundreds of millions of people still living in extreme poverty. Enter […]
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Only a decade ago, palm-oil plantations appeared likely to devastate the Africa’s tropical forests, repeating the pattern of ecological destruction they brought to Malaysia and Indonesia — including this year’s epic rainforest fires. Yet African community organizing has turned back the tide of the slash-and-burn agriculture that comes with palm oil. Exhibit A is the […]
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