Africa
Israel planning to transfer Palestinians to Congo
Ethnic cleansing plans outed further but still ignored by western ‘mainstream’ media
Image: ActionAid
Israel is negotiating with Congo – it is unclear from reports which of the two neighbouring Congos – and other African nations to transfer the Palestinian people, according to reports in the Times of Israel and its sister site Zman Israel.
Both the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) regularly see serious human rights violations, including massacres. A 2022 US Department of State report on human rights in the Republic, which is commonly known as Congo Brazzaville after its capital city to distinguish it from its neighbour – states that:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference
and more.
In the DRC, human rights groups have noted massacres and other human rights violations. Amnesty International said in 2022 that the DRC:
continued to experience serious human rights violations, including mass killings in the context of armed conflict and inter-communal violence, a crackdown on dissent and ill-treatment of detainees. People from regions affected by armed conflict, including eastern DRC, were particularly affected amid mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis. The authorities continued to show a lack of political will to hold the perpetrators of human rights violations to account. The right to education was violated.
The Times quoted a ‘senior’ security cabinet source and comments by Israeli minister Gila Gamliel:
Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.
“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security cabinet tells [journalist] Shalom Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi quotes Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel saying at the Knesset yesterday: “At the end of the war Hamas rule will collapse, there are no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.”
The UK government has disgraced itself by continued attempts to transfer desperate refugees to Rwanda, attempts continually blocked by the courts – but the Israeli regime was the first to do it, sending around 4,000 Black refugees fleeing war in Eritrea and Sudan to Rwanda between 2013 and 2018 before discontinuing what it called ‘voluntary’ departure – similar to the ‘voluntary emigration’ euphemism it uses for its ethnic cleansing plan, alongside ‘humanitarian migration’.
Israel has an appalling record toward Black people, even Black Jews – and last year threatened to deport them, too. The SAGE Race & Class Journal notes that:
Ethiopian Jews who have been brought into Israel in several mass transfer operations, have found themselves relegated to an underclass. They are not only racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion, but have also been unwittingly used to bolster illegal settlements.
Now, as well as the already-outed plan to force huge numbers of Palestinians out of Gaza into the Egyptian desert, Israel is actively working on plans to force more out of the Middle East altogether and into Africa. The Israeli regime’s war crimes continue to pile up.
Despite the similarities with the UK’s racist government, at the time of writing the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media have not reported Israel’s plan – as has been the case with much of Israel’s racism and criminality.
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Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola: The Untold Story – review
In Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola: The Untold Story, Benjamin Black gives a first-hand account of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and the efforts of communities and healthcare workers to save the lives of pregnant women at risk. Black’s gripping exposé indicts the slow and inadequate response by international health agencies and argues for better-resourced healthcare systems, better reproductive healthcare for women and valuing local expertise to prevent future epidemics, writes Susannah Mayhew.
Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola: The Untold Story. Benjamin Black. Neem Tree Press. 2023.
Find this book: 
Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola, the Untold Story has the fluidity and compulsion of a novel while providing fascinating insights into frontline action and research on the effects of Ebola on pregnant women and how to protect them. Written by obstetrician gynaecologist and aid advisor Benjamin Black, the book arises from his years spent with Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) before, during and after the devastating Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone between 2014-2016. Structured in three parts, it first takes us through the desperate early months of epidemic response in which healthcare staff charted unknown territory as they managed the “mindboggling” (77) complexities of caring for pregnant women with Ebola. We then return to Sierra Leone a few months later to an improving situation in which Ebola in pregnancy could safely be managed, but local learning was ignored by international responders (who had eventually arrived). Finally, as the epidemic declines, we witness the ongoing post-Ebola tragedy of maternal death.
The book is both a powerful story of how medics of all nationalities strived to save lives against the odds and a deeply personal, sharply political book about the existing inadequacies of women’s reproductive healthcare which were tragically magnified during Ebola.
The book is both a powerful story of how medics of all nationalities strived to save lives against the odds and a deeply personal, sharply political book about the existing inadequacies of women’s reproductive healthcare which were tragically magnified during Ebola. The book swings back and forth in time as Black juxtaposes his London experiences of maternal care, particularly during Covid, with the raw accounts of actions in Sierra Leone. This sets the desperate inadequacies of facilities in Sierra Leone in stark relief against the smooth functioning, highly resourced facilities of the UK. It also highlights, in both situations, the dangerous consequences of arrogance when it drives decision-making by those in positions of political and medical power. The lived experiences of Black’s narrative provide a quietly damning judgement on the world’s response to Ebola and the ubiquitous failure to listen to and learn from those in the frontlines of crisis response – both medics and ordinary citizens.
The lived experiences of Black’s narrative provide a quietly damning judgement on the world’s response to Ebola and the ubiquitous failure to listen to and learn from those in the frontlines of crisis response – both medics and ordinary citizens.
Part one of the book plunges us into the thick of the epidemic as local and international staff struggle to the point of frustrated exhaustion to deal with the pace and scale of an epidemic which “should never have exploded […] It had all happened in slow motion and was totally predictable”, yet the world ignored it – “I felt like we were screaming into a vacuum.” (166). Black gives us rich insight into the extent of grass-roots medical efforts in responding to the disease and gathering hitherto undocumented data on the impact of Ebola on pregnancy. He reveals a world in which “[r]oulette, not medicine, became the order of the day” (40) with staff operating in an ethical “no-man’s land” (65). They faced daily dilemmas: what do you do with a pregnant woman in critical condition who might have Ebola but without immediate obstetrics intervention would not survive the time it took to get the Ebola test-result back? Frontline doctors kept their own notes and shared their own learning, creating some of the first (and only) research on how Ebola affects pregnant women and their unborn foetuses, and how to manage such pregnancies safely.
Frontline doctors kept their own notes and shared their own learning, creating some of the first (and only) research on how Ebola affects pregnant women and their unborn foetuses
The slowness and inadequacy of the international response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic is well known, but the book still shocks with its detail of the nature and consequences of the wider response. Seven months after the first officially diagnosed case the international “cavalry” arrive, prompted by concerns of a risk to global health security, and ironically but predictably “in synchronicity with declining transmission” (210). In Part Two Black describes the shameful in-fighting between international responders desperate to make their mark and claim territory. He and his colleagues in the field joked darkly of “Ebola tourists”, the “EOAs (Experts On Arrival)” (181) and the “hot-headed rigidity and lack of pragmatism” of the UK military response (215) all of whom sometimes put patients at risk despite available lessons that could have avoided this.
The WHO ignored local learning and produced guidelines for the Ministry of Health that directly undermined the management of pregnant women post-Ebola, and failed again to listen when frontline MSF doctors voiced their concerns.
Even in the final throes of the epidemic (Part Three), when so much should have been learned, there are distressing illustrations of the power of arrogance. The WHO ignored local learning and produced guidelines for the Ministry of Health that directly undermined the management of pregnant women post-Ebola, and failed again to listen when frontline MSF doctors voiced their concerns. This lead directly to unnecessary deaths before the guidelines were finally repealed – truly, “Egos can kill” (324). This approach that discounts local knowledge has been seen repeatedly, including in Democratic Republic of Congo’s biggest Ebola outbreak just two years later despite attempts to improve feedback from communities, and in the UK’s own Covid response as lessons were “forgotten, wilfully ignored or recycled for the next emergency” (239). The damage that ignoring important lessons can do is agonisingly exposed in the many unnecessary deaths of pregnant women that Black describes. He notes that though experimental drugs and vaccines were promising, they could not “replace basic hygiene, health promotion and community engagement” (167) – and to achieve this trust in health workers is key.
Trust in healthcare cannot be built by a ‘revolving door’ of international medical health workers and ‘experts’; it is built through local health staff working tirelessly on the ground
Although not explicit in the book, the breakdown of trust has longstanding repercussions that echo through the book’s narratives of both Ebola and UK Covid responses. Trust in healthcare cannot be built by a “revolving door” (9) of international medical health workers and “experts”; it is built through local health staff working tirelessly on the ground: “As the outside world, with all its resources and capability, held back in fear and self-protectionism, these individuals stood firm, and […] played a part in saving us all.” (159). Yet, these people were largely ignored when the world was congratulating itself on saving the day (329), though some, like Black’s trusted local colleague Morris, gave their lives.
During the epidemic, pregnancy was seen as an explosive risk […] but afterwards, maternal mortality and morbidity – like much of women’s health – were too often invisible
The question of how to tackle the underlying “protracted health crisis” (113) of high maternal mortality rates haunts the third part of the book. Black and his colleagues were acutely aware that, “[t]he end of Ebola was not the end of the emergency, just as the start had never been the beginning.” (316). During the epidemic, pregnancy was seen as an explosive risk (a potential “Ebola bomb” ch.25), but afterwards, maternal mortality and morbidity – like much of women’s health – were too often invisible so “if you didn’t look for it, you didn’t see it, and if you didn’t see it then there was no emergency” (254). This meant that even MSF’s hierarchy failed to acknowledge the absolute necessity of supporting family planning as a critical preventive measure for high-risk pregnancy and maternal death.
There is an urgent need to rethink humanitarian approaches in light of Black’s insights, to humbly learn from and work with frontline responders to strengthen health systems and protect the health of all women and young children.
Following Ebola, Sierra Leone overtook Sudan and Chad to suffer the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. The colonial and neo-colonial legacy of aid-dependent, resource-poor health systems unable to respond to major shocks like Ebola undoubtedly contributed to this protracted health crisis, but arguably the superiority mindset of many international responders compounded and perpetuated it. There is an urgent need to rethink humanitarian approaches in light of Black’s insights, to humbly learn from and work with frontline responders to strengthen health systems and protect the health of all women and young children. In making this case, Belly Woman is an extraordinary book – a visceral, harrowing but ultimately life-affirming read.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Samenwerkende Hulporganisaties on Flickr.
The Unequal Effects of Globalization – review
In The Unequal Effects of Globalization, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg looks at globalisation’s effect on inequality, emphasising regional frictions, rising corporate profits and multilateralism as focal points and arguing for new, “place-based” policies in response. Though Goldberg provides a sharp analysis of global trade, Ivan Radanović questions whether her proposals can effectively tackle critical issues from poverty to climate change.
The Unequal Effects of Globalization. Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg (with Greg Larson). MIT Press. 2023.
Find this book:
Glancing at the megalopolis on the left and abandoned building on the right side оf the book cover, I made an assumption about its narration: from the 1980s onwards, trade unions and states were blamed for rising inflation and unemployment. Fiscal cuts, deregulation and privatisation replaced public interest with private ones: maximising profit, firms outsourcing manufacture. What at first went alongside and later instead of promised economic efficiency was wealth accumulation at the top and the surge of corporate profits. As workers’ real wages fell behind, inequality grew.
As an academic specialising in applied microeconomics, Goldberg investigates globalisation’s many dimensions and complex interactions, from early trade globalisation to the rise of China, from western deindustrialisation to its effects on global poverty, inequality, labour markets and firm dynamics.
I was wrong. As an academic specialising in applied microeconomics, Goldberg investigates globalisation’s many dimensions and complex interactions, from early trade globalisation to the rise of China, from western deindustrialisation to its effects on global poverty, inequality, labour markets and firm dynamics. The book does concur with my assumption, but it engages with it in a more unique way.
According to Goldberg, the increase in global trade is due to developing countries’ entry into international trade since the 1990s.
Starting from an economic definition of globalisation, the author emphasises the lowest ever levels of (measurable) trade barriers and, consequently, the highest global trade volumes. According to Goldberg, the increase in global trade is due to developing countries’ entry into international trade since the 1990s. It is inseparable from global value chains (GVCs), complex production processes that – from raw material to product design – take place in different countries. The author argues that “the increasing importance of developing countries in world trade reflects their participation in GVCs” (6). That is the creation story of hyperglobalisation. For Goldberg, it is observable by the total export share in global GDP: “being fairly constant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it began rising after World War II and accelerated dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s.” That is exactly when the World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded, and many multilateral trade agreements were signed. The key was trade policy.
But not everyone agreed. Some economists, including Land Pritchett and Andrew Rose, contended the growth was not due to trade, but the development of technology and fall of transportation costs. Goldberg rejects this argument, pointing out that technology was developing long before. Hyperglobalisation started because trade policies encouraged multilateralism; “Trade policy – especially the creation of a predictably stable global trading environment – was at least as important as technological development“ (17).
Since international trade is largely about distributional gains and losses, the key question is whether the recent tensions and protectionism – such as Brexit, Trumpism and American trade war with China, to name the most visible examples – are just blips in irreversible globalisation, or signs of deglobalisation.
This is important because international trade is a perennial source of discontent within globalisation, and exploring its causes is the primary focus of this book. Since international trade is largely about distributional gains and losses, the key question is whether the recent tensions and protectionism – such as Brexit, Trumpism and American trade war with China, to name the most visible examples – are just blips in irreversible globalisation, or signs of deglobalisation. It depends on policy choices.
In the second half of the book, Goldberg turns to inequality and differentiates it into global inequality and intra-country inequality. From the global perspective, the author points out two major contributions. The famous “elephant curve“ developed by Lakner and Milanovic (2016, p. 31) showed very high income growth rates for world’s poorer groups from 1980 to 2013. This primary observation is accompanied, however, by the almost stagnant income of the middle classes in developed countries (the bottom of elephant’s trunk) and high rates of growth for the world’s top one percent (its top). But how high? The answer came five years later, when Thomas Piketty and colleagues concluded (2018, p. 13) this elite group captured 27 per cent of global income growth between 1980 and 2016.
Analysing internal inequalities, Goldberg states that globalisation affects people twofold: as workers and as consumers.
This still does not refute that income rose for all groups, remarkably reducing poverty. But what about inequalities? Goldberg further investigates whether there is a trade-off between global inequality and within-country inequality. Analysing internal inequalities, Goldberg states that globalisation affects people twofold: as workers and as consumers. These effects are well-researched in developed countries like the USA, where trade liberalisation with China since the late 1990s brought multi-million job losses. Citing scholars such as David Autor, Gordon Hanson, David Dorn, and Kaveh Majlesi, Goldberg finds this trend disturbing for ordinary citizens. One could suppose that although jobs were lost, this was compensated by lower consumer prices which benefitted everyone. However, that’s exactly what did not happen in the US. Firms took almost all benefits, which meant that greater trade did not reduce consumer inequality. Crucially, even if it had, it would not compensate for the negative effects on the labour market. Therefore, as Deaton and Case argued, it is no surprise that the millions of jobless, low-educated Americans whose quality of life and even life expectancy is in decline oppose globalisation.
But the advent of trade with China cannot fully explain this issue. There are severe labour mobility frictions that prevent people from moving to another town, county or state to find a better job. That is an American trademark since, as Goldberg suggests, “Europe normalized their trade with China much earlier and in a much more gradual manner“ (55). In other words – a policy problem needs policy solution.
[Trade’s] adverse effects, such as the exceptionally high benefit claimed by the top one percent and the stagnation of the middle class in the Global North, cannot be attributed to trade per se, but to a lack of policies that absorb disruptions.
Goldberg is an optimist: poverty has fallen throughout the world, pulling hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty (defined living on or below 1.9 international dollars per day) particularly in countries that plugged themselves into GVCs. Trade, therefore, played a positive role. This implies that its adverse effects, such as the exceptionally high benefit claimed by the top one percent and the stagnation of the middle class in the Global North, cannot be attributed to trade per se, but to a lack of policies that absorb disruptions. More than tariffs, this includes workforce development, social protection, corporate taxation, and other policies that protect people from unregulated market forces. This is where real improvement lies, with broad and sincere international cooperation.
[Goldberg] seems to suggest that the global economy is functional; it just requires a little fix here and there in order to fight climate change as one of the ‘challenges of tomorrow’
The author writes from a “middle position“, so neutral that there is no mention of the word “capitalism“ in the whole book. Goldberg is aware of inequalities, but still emphasises dynamic poverty reduction. She seems to suggest that the global economy is functional; it just requires a little fix here and there in order to fight climate change as one of the “challenges of tomorrow“ (90). (This might be ok if climate change was a challenge of tomorrow – but it is not.) The evidence has been mounting for decades: polar ice caps melting, rising sea levels, deforestation and biodiversity loss, desertification and soil depletion, plastic pollution and fishery collapse. Our world is dying today, and the consequences are fierce and unequal. While the common poverty-reduction argument based on $1.9 a day is severely disputed, economic equality is highly correlated with desired outcomes including higher longevity rates, political participation, better mental health and life satisfaction.
This position, which one could view as reinforcing a profit-centred status quo from the former chief economist of the World Bank does not surprise. Her monograph has certain strong points, namely its neutral overview, its in-depth analysis of trade and and its insight into new, relevant literature. But writing about globalisation today demands more. To confirm that a problem exists is not enough. We need immediate action.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Donatas Dabravolskas on Shutterstock.
California Redwoods Are Swiftly Recovering From Wildfire
Three great stories we found on the internet this week.
Greening up
In 2020, a wildfire tore through Big Basin Redwoods State Park in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, charring the bark of the park’s namesake trees to an ominous black. But today, almost all of those towering old-growth redwoods are showing substantial new growth.
Not all species in the park are faring equally well: Researchers note that some birds and fish, including coho salmon and steelhead trout, are still many years from recovery. But the difference in the redwoods themselves is dramatic and encouraging.
Steam rises from burned trees in the park in November 2020. Credit: Dale Elliott / Flickr
In photos from April 2021, “All these trees are brown, they have no green foliage,” said biologist Drew Peltier, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “I pulled the image from today and I almost didn’t recognize it. The trees are so bushy now.”
Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel
Hair and care
Ever open up to your hairdresser about what’s stressing you out? Lots of people do. “We hear everything,” as Adama Adaku put it.
Adaku is among the 150 hairdressers in West and Central African cities who have recently earned the honorary title of “mental health ambassador” after undergoing mental health training. This training is an effort to fill in a massive gap: According to the World Health Organization, for every 100,000 people in this region, there are an average of 1.6 mental health workers (compared to the global median of 13).
Organized by the nonprofit Bluemind Foundation, the three-day training equips hairdressers with skills such as asking open-ended questions and picking up on nonverbal signs of distress. “People need attention in this world,” said Tele da Silveira, another hairdresser who completed the training. “They need to talk.”
Read more at the New York Times
Health is wealth
Cash assistance programs have been shown to improve children’s health and well-being by alleviating early childhood poverty and food insecurity — issues that disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. That’s why a Seattle-based nonprofit has created the first-ever guaranteed basic income program exclusively for Indigenous families.
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Called the Nest, the program will provide monthly cash assistance to 150 families for the first three years of their child’s life. It will also offer other support, including doula services and a financial sovereignty class.
The program also seeks to combat the high maternal mortality rates among Indigenous people in the US. “There are high disparities that are rooted in historical trauma and collective violence from colonization, genocide, forced relocation and boarding schools combined with lack of access to basic health care,” the Nest’s director, Patanjali de la Rocha, told High Country News. “Guaranteed income helps not only on an individual level, but it also helps people heal intergenerationally.”
Read more at High Country News
The post California Redwoods Are Swiftly Recovering From Wildfire appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
Women’s Economic Empowerment and Control over Time in Sub-Saharan Africa (Nov 1-2)
November 1–November 2, 2021
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent losses in lives and livelihoods are looming over Sub-Saharan Africa. As in the rest of the world, the pandemic has exposed the enduring inequalities and injustices in stark terms, including those based on gender and those intersecting with gender, such as economic deprivation. There is a growing realization that collective action to overcome the long-term and ongoing challenges requires greater engagements between researchers, civil society organizations, and policymakers. Accordingly, we are organizing a two-day virtual workshop that will feature research and policy discussions that address economic aspects of gender inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa from various angles. Part of the research to be presented is work conducted by scholars at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in collaboration with scholars from Sub-Saharan Africa with the generous support of the Hewlett Foundation. The workshop will also highlight recent research by leading scholars in the region. The presentation of research will be accompanied by a free-wheeling exchange of ideas between scholars and participants. A policy roundtable with a select group of prominent members of the academic, policymaking, and civil society communities will conclude the workshop.
The workshop will be held between 13:00 and 15:30 (GMT) on November 1, 2021 and between 13:00 and 16:00 (GMT) on November 2, 2021.
This event is free and open to the public.
The complete schedule and information for participants is available below:
Participation Instructions
The workshop will be hosted on Zoom. Please use the following links to participate:
November 1
https://bard.zoom.us/j/81117573608?pwd=Z3gyaXlkY0pSSkpGY1JHQlBNQmt5UT09
November 2
https://bard.zoom.us/j/88110321894?pwd=TWFiTnVPUklzN0VLWm5uQ0JUNm81Zz09
Program
GMT
EDT
13:00–15:30
9:00–11:30
Day 1: Women’s Decision-making Power and Patriarchal Structures in Sub-Sharan Africa
Welcome and Overview
Dimitri Papadimitriou, Levy Economics Institute
Luiza Nassif Pires, Levy Economics Institute
Measuring Patriarchy: Meso-level Variations in the Strength of Patriarchy in Sub-Saharan Africa
Ajit Zacharias, Levy Economics Institute
Fernando Rios-Avila, Levy Economics Institute
Women’s Decision-making Power in Ghana
Thomas Masterson, Levy Economics Institute
Discussant: Nkechi Owoo, University of Ghana
Discussant: Beatrice Kalinda Mkenda, University of Dar es Salaam
Q&A
Closing Remarks
Thomas Masterson, Levy Economics Institute
Day 2:
13:00–14:05
9:00–10:05
Session 1:
Opening Remarks
Ajit Zacharias, Levy Economics Institute
Asset Ownership and Egalitarian Decision Making Among Couples: Some Evidence from Ghana
Abena Oduro, University of Ghana, Legon
Nthabiseng Moleko, University of Stellenbosch
Women Economic Empowerment in East Africa: Policy and Practice Focus on Ethiopia (Oxfam Program)
Ankets Petros, Oxfam Ethiopia
Q&A
14:15–15:55
10:15–11:55
Session 2: Policy Roundtable: Challenges in Achieving Women’s Economic Empowerment
Opening Remarks
Chalachew Getahun Desta, Center for Population Studies, Addis Ababa University
Flora Myamba, Women and Social Protection, Tanzania
Sadou Doumbo, Demographic Dividend National Observatory, Ministry of Economy and Finance, Mali
Patricia Blankson Akakpo, Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana
Mamadou Bobo Diallo, UN Women
Q&A
15:55–16:00
11:55–12:00
Closing Remarks & Thank Yous
Thomas Masterson, Levy Economics Institute
Biographies
Patricia Blankson Akakpo is a Programme Manager of the Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT) – a women’s rights and economic justice advocacy network. Patricia holds a BA in political science with philosophy; MA in development studies with specialization in human resources and employment; and gender studies; and a diploma in development leadership. Patricia joined NETRIGHT in 2003. She has over twenty-five years of experience in gender and development in Ghana working with women and vulnerable groups, young women collectives, and women’s rights organizations (WROs). Patricia is a past cochair of CPDE representing the feminist sector and currently the Africa regional coordinator for CPDE’s Feminist Group (CPDE Africa FG).
Chalachew Getahun Desta (Ph.D. in socioeconomic development planning and geography) is assistant professor of population studies, socioeconomic development planning, geography, and environment at the Center for Population Studies (College of Development Studies, Addis Ababa University). He teaches courses on human geography (including population, economics, and urban and regional geographies), population and development, and research methods. His areas of research interest include women, fertility, and household well-being (maternal labor force participation, maternal time allocation, consumption); urbanization, rural–urban migration, employment, and the informal sector; forced migration, refugees, and internally displaced persons; labor migration, diasporas, and return migrants; and population, resources, and the environment.
Mamadou Bobo Diallo is an economics specialist on macroeconomics, in the economic empowerment section at UN Women. Bobo’s areas of focus include capacity development/technical support and research on gender, macroeconomics, gender-based inequalities, poverty, the care economy, and social protection. Prior to joining UN Women, he was an actuarial analyst for Manulife Financial in Boston, a research fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis in New York, a macroeconomics consultant for two with the World Bank’s Governance and Public Policy Division, a policy specialist for UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa in New York, and an economic affairs officer with the UN Economic Commission for Africa in Ethiopia. Bobo holds a bachelor of science degree in mathematics from Salem State University (Boston) and a Ph.D. in economics, with a focus on development, growth, and econometrics from the New School for Social Research (New York City, NY).
M. Sadou Doumbo is the general director of the National Demographic Dividend Observatory in Mali and the coordinator of the national transfer accounts (NTA) team. He is also involved in doctoral studies based on the lifecycle deficit financing (Generational Economy Regional Research Centre and Centre de recherche en Economie et Finance Appliquée / Université de Thiès).
With about 15 years’ experience in development planning activities in several structures such as the ministry of development planning and UNFPA, M. Doumbo developed great competencies in advocacy and communication for the integration of population and demographic issues in national policies, strategies, and demographics. Since 2015, he has participated in the definition and monitoring of the Sahel Women Empowerment and Demographic Dividend project (SWEDD). He is very involved, as a resource person, in several national and international population and development frameworks, working with UNFPA, PRB, and UNECA, among others, to highlight the need to invest in youth, girls, and women.
Thomas Masterson is director of applied micromodeling and a research scholar in the Levy Economics Institute’s Distribution of Income and Wealth program. He has worked extensively on the Levy Institute Measure of Well-being (LIMEW), an alternative, household-based measure that reflects the resources the household can command for facilitating current consumption or acquiring physical or financial assets. With other Levy scholars, Masterson was also involved in developing the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP), and has contributed to estimating the LIMTIP for countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. He has also taken a lead role in developing the Levy Institute Microsimulation Model.
Masterson’s specific research interests include the distribution of land, income, and wealth, with a focus on gender and racial disparities. He has recently published articles in The Review of Black Political Economy and The Journal of Economic Issues. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Beatrice Kalinda Mkenda is a senior lecturer and acting dean of the School of Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Göteborg University in Sweden. She teaches international economics and macroeconomics at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels.
Prior to joining the University of Dar es Salaam, she worked as lecturer at the University of Zambia, and later worked as a research fellow with the Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF) under the “Globalization in East Africa” project. She participated in teaching a postgraduate diploma course in poverty analysis that was jointly offered by the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University), Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA), and ESRF.
Her recent research has looked at diverse areas such as indigenous knowledge and employment generation among women; empowering women in tourism micro, small, and medium enterprises; determinants and constraints of women’s sole-owned tourism micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Tanzania; why it is imperative for Tanzania to industrialize; informal sector employment; regional integration for accelerating industrialization in Tanzania: opportunities and challenges in the East African community; and ability of SMEs to penetrate export markets. She is currently working on a joint research proposal to examine the gendered impact of food safety compliance: the case of Tanzania and Uganda’s exports to the EU market.
Nthabiseng Moleko is a development economist who is a core faculty member at the University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB) where she teaches economics and statistics as a senior lecturer since 2017. She also serves as a commissioner for the Commission for Gender Equality appointed by the president in 2017 and is currently the deputy chairperson of the commission. She completed her Ph.D. in development finance at USB on pension funds and national development and is the first South African woman to be conferred a doctorate in this discipline. Dr. Moleko regularly appears on various network’s programming on economic and business coverage as a thought leader.
Flora Myamba is a senior specialist on social protection and gender based in Tanzania. She has consulted for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Center for Global Development, UN Agencies, EU-OECD, World Bank, and Government of Tanzania, among others. Flora is a master trainer for the African Union–owned TRANSFORM Training for Social Protection Floors. She earned her doctorate from Western Michigan University, and has published in local and reputable international journals including Oxford Development Studies, Cambridge University Press, Global Social Policy, and African Development Review. She is currently leading a project on gender, financed by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and collaborating with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College on a study on women’s economic empowerment and control over time, among other works.
Luiza Nassif Pires is a research fellow working in the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Institute. Her research interests include gender and political economy, distributional aspects of gender discrimination, gender and racial aspects of development, and input-output methods. Her recent research relies on statistical equilibrium and game theory to formalize the impacts of gender and racial segregation in the labor movement with an application to the United States. Nassif Pires has also written on intersectional political economy with a focus on the impacts of social conflict for the labor theory of value and the long-run profit rate. She is also collaborating with Prof. Katherine Moos at University of Masschusetts, Amherst on a feminist input-output project.
Nassif Pires has taught microeconomics, macroeconomics, and political economy at the New York City College of Technology and at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School for Social Research. She holds a BS and MS in economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Ph. D. in economics from The New School for Social Research.
Abena D. Oduro is associate professor in the department of economics and is currently director (Ghana) of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana, Legon. Her current research interests are in the areas of unpaid household work, poverty, inequality and vulnerability analysis, gender-responsive budgeting, and African regional integration. She is associate editor of Feminist Economics and a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics.
Nkechi S. Owoo is a senior lecturer at the department of economics at the University of Ghana. She is also a research associate with the African Centre of Research on Inequality Research (ACEIR) and a senior research fellow at the Environment for Development institute. Dr. Owoo’s research focuses on spatial econometrics in addition to microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, health, agriculture, gender issues, and population and demographic economics. Her current research focuses on the effects of the internalization of patriarchal attitudes by women and male partners on women’s labor market outcomes in Nigeria. Dr. Owoo received her BA in economics from the University of Ghana in 2006 and received a master’s degree in Economics from Clark University in 2009. She completed her Ph.D. in Economics from Clark University in 2012.
Ankets Petros has over 15 years of work experience in the development sector in Ethiopia. She holds an MA in sociology and BA in political science and international relations from Addis Ababa University.
Ankets has worked with Oxfam Ethiopia since 2016 as a gender specialist and currently in the capacity of gender program manager since 2019. She is responsible for developing and managing women’s empowerment projects, providing technical support to mainstream gender in Oxfam programs (humanitarian and long-term development) and specifically leading an influencing project called we-care (women economic empowerment and care).
Before joining Oxfam, Ankets worked with Consortium of Christian Relief and Development Associations (CCRDA) for two years as a networking and partnership senior officer overseeing more than 350 local and international NGOs who are members in the association in Ethiopia. She has also worked in policy engagement roles as gender program officer in ActionAid Ethiopia, engaging in designing and implementation of various women’s empowerment projects at the grassroots and regional levels.
Fernando Rios-Avila is a research scholar working on the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being under the Distribution of Income and Wealth program. His research interests include labor economics, applied microeconomics, development economics, and poverty and inequality.
As a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, Rios-Avila worked as a graduate research assistant to Felix Rioja, and interned in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, working under the supervision of Julie L. Hotchkiss. He formerly served as a researcher at the Social and Economic Policy Unit (UDAPE)—a government advisory unit and public policy think tank in La Paz, Bolivia—on issues of development, impact evaluation, and social expenditure, with an emphasis on children’s welfare. His research has been published in The Review of Income and Wealth, Industrial Relations, Southern Economic Journal, Applied Economics Letters, Stata Journal, and Business and Economics Research.
Rios-Avila holds a Licenciatura in economics from the Universidad Católica Boliviana, La Paz; an advanced studies program certificate in international economics and policy research from Kiel University; and a Ph.D. in economics from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
Ajit Zacharias is a senior scholar and director of the Levy Institute’s Distribution of Income and Wealth program. His research primarily focuses on the theory, measurement, and analysis of economic well-being and deprivation.
Along with other Levy scholars, Zacharias has developed alternative measures of economic welfare and deprivation. The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) offers a framework that accounts for how changes in labor markets, wealth accumulation, government spending and taxes, and household production shape the economic determinants of standard of living. Levy scholars have utilized the LIMEW to track trends in economic inequality and well-being in the United States. The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty is aimed at revealing the nexus between income poverty and unpaid work. This measure has been applied to the study of poverty in several Latin American countries, Turkey, South Korea, Tanzania, and Ghana.
A Concatenation of Rumour
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Named after the original title of Richard Rathbone's book on Nana Ofori Atta I, the King of Akyem Abuakwa in Ghana, this talk will be the first that celebrates the paperback edition of Nana Oforiatta Ayim's celebrated novel The God Child. Both books have the kingdom as their centre, with Nana Oforiatta Ayim's book drawing on that of Richard Rathbone, as well as on her family's memories, for her fictional narrative.
In this live event the two discuss the interplay of academia and fiction and how narratives are shaped and reshaped according to the telling. They also talk about the nuances of privilege, leadership, and of royalty within a West African kingdom and how this has evolved through time.
Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is Special Advisor to the Ghanaian government on Museums and Cultural Heritage, leading the country's museums restructuring programme. She is also Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in 2021. She has made award winning films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New Museum, and lectures a course on History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, is a Principal Investigator on the Action for Restitution to Africa programme, and was appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020.
Richard Rathbone
Richard Rathbone was born in war-time London. His father and mother worked for the BBC but during the war his father was an RAF pilot and he was killed soon after my birth. His childhood was largely spent in and around London. In 1964 Richard began his research career at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he worked under the pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Oliver. He was appointed o teach in the history department at SOAS in 1969, where he worked until early retirement in 2003. During that time Richard served as Chairman of the University of London's Centre for African Studies and as SOAS' Dean of Postgraduate Studies and was promoted to a chair in modern African history in 1994. Life was episodically interrupted by a series of research trips to Ghana and a variety of fellowships to universities in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Harvard and Princeton as well as for shorter periods to Bordeaux, Lesotho and Toronto.
Richard's current appointments include Emeritus professor and professorial research associate at SOAS and honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University. He has also served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, most recently as one of its vice-presidents. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
Chaired by Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven
Dr. Laura Van Broekhovenis the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professorial Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Previously she led the curatorial department of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, was Senior Curator for Middle- and South America and was departmental lecturer in archaeology, museum studies and indigenous heritage at Leiden University. Laura strives to develop a more equitable decolonised praxis in museums including issues around shared and negotiated authority; restitution, reconciliation and redress and the queering of exclusionary binaries and boundaries with relation to social justice and inclusion. Her regional academic research has focused on collaborative collection research with Amazonian Indigenous Peoples and Maasai communities from Kenya and Tanzania; Yokot’an Maya oral history, Mixtec Indigenous market systems and merchant biographies, and Nicaraguan Indigenous resistance in colonial times. She serves on numerous advisory boards, is a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN) and the European Ethnographic Museum Directors Group and is co-chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network.
Live Event: In Conversation with Maaza Mengiste
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
In conversation with Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King.
This event is also part of the North-east Africa Forum at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.
Hosted by Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English (English Faculty, University of Oxford). Professor Boehmer is currently the Director for the Oxford Centre for Life Writing (OCLW) based at Wolfson College, and former Director of TORCH (2015-17), and also leads on the 'Writers Make Worlds' project - https://writersmakeworlds.com/
Biographies:
Maaza Mengiste is the author of the novels, Beneath the Lion's Gaze, selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books; and The Shadow King, a finalist for the LA Times Books Prize, a New York Times' Notable Book of 2019 and one of TIME's Must-Read Books of 2019. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and LiteraturHaus Zurich. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, amongst other publications.
In conversation with:
Birhanu T. Gessese
Birhanu was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and is now studying Humanities at Kenyon College, USA. He is currently on a year abroad studying English Literature at Exeter University, UK. He likes to compose stories, work with the camera, and illustrate in ink pen. Along with Korranda Harris, he recently interviewed Maaza Mengiste for Africa in Words.
Professor Richard Reid (History Faculty, University of Oxford) is a historian of modern Africa, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With a particular interest in the culture and practice of warfare in the modern period, part of Professor Reid's research interests includes the more recent armed insurgences, especially those between 1950s and the 1980s.
https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-richard-reid
Professor Tsehai Berhane-Selassie
Tsehai Berhane-Selassie taught social-anthropology, gender, and development studies in Universities in Ethiopia, the USA, the UK, and Ireland. She has published on Ethiopian Warriorhood, and gender issues in Ethiopia.
'The Shadow King' Synopsis:
Published by Canon Gate.
'DEVASTATING' Marlon James, 'A MODERN CLASSIC' Andrew Sean Greer, 'INCREDIBLE' Lemn Sissay, 'BRILLIANT' Salman Rushdie, 'MAGNIFICIENT' Aminatta Forna, 'EPIC' Mary Morris, 'WONDERFUL' Laila Lalami, 'UNFORGETTABLE' The Times, 'REMARKABLE' New York Times
ETHIOPIA. 1935.
With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.
Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy's most vicious officers?
The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.
A History of Algeria
James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.