jra's thoughts

Category: Africa

  • In Search of Deviants

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    jra
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    Positive Deviance is a somewhat unnecessarily complicated name for something deeply humane and useful: In every village, there is at least one woman (usually a few) whose children are healthier than the rest. For whatever reason, that woman is better at navigating the complexities of village life and child nutrition. That woman has knowledge and…

  • Ethan Zuckerman’s Rules for Innovation

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    Ethan just posted some rules for innovation which are interesting. The one that speaks most to me right now is #7, which states, “problems are not always obvious from afar”. That’s a big problem with the kind of “innovation” that happens with first-world government-funded NGO IT for Development work. It is easy for a programmer…

  • Shame and Aid Work

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    This is a story a bit like mine from Chad, though we were not faced with bandits/rebels/soldiers directly. The feelings of shame and regret she has are related to the complicated feelings I had on leaving Chad as well. In my case, we had nothing to be ashamed of — we took good care of…

  • When Not In Control, People Imagine Order

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    Science Friday did an interesting story recently: New research shows that when people perceive they have no control over a given situation, they are more likely to see illusions, patterns where none exist and even believe in conspiracy theories. The study suggests that people impose imaginary order when no real order can be perceived. The…

  • A Call for Help

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    Something very wrong is going on on South Africa, and the world is missing it: “It is better for us to be here than go for reintegration. The South Africans want to kill us and the government is trying to kill us. Reintegration’s a death sentence. We’d rather die here together,” said Johnny Kaka. MSF…

  • Same conversation, different venue

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    The dirty secret of aid work… it always comes down to this… the navel-gazing, “why am I here”, “why is it so ineffective” conversation. Usually it happens around the campfire, over a bottle of locally made beer, or perhaps for the lucky coordination team in the capital city, at the nearby expat-only restaurant over a…

  • Let’s Map Africa!

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    I found a great post on Google’s Africa blog today announcing Map Maker, a wiki-like way of increasing Google Map’s coverage of places where there’s very little data available for them to start with. As with everything Google, the launch version is a little not-smooth, and it is hard to understand how the moderation feature…

  • I’m Back!

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    After an extended downtime due to lack of give-a-shit on my part, my blog is back, and I am back to blogging. Expect something here daily, which is my goal. Lots and lots of news… where to start? I suppose at the last post. Since then, Marina and I were evacuated from Chad due to…