Africa

Convergence of two complementary agendas motivated collaboration between two universities (in Zambia and Finland) to establish a Centre for Promotion of Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa (CAPOLSA), focused on initial literacy learning in indigenous languages. The project’s mandate and activities are closely related to Zambia’s national context of literacy and educational provision, emerging trends in Information and Communication Technology, and the University of Zambia’s institutional context of research and development on literacy, child development and education. The Centre has afforded opportunities for enhancing the working relations between the national university and government, and for contributing to the development of institutional linkages and consultative fora. Collaboration between various disciplines, institutions and economic sectors characterises CAPOLSA’s activities. Important growth points include institutional development, growth of a sustainable community of researchers whose collective efforts will increase the scale of Africa’s contribution to international knowledge, and evidence-based planning at the interface between humans and technology.

This intervention study was conducted to document conditions under which a computer based literacy game (GraphoGameTM) could enhance literacy skills of first grade learners in an African city. The participants were first grade learners from Government schools (N=573). These learners were randomly sampled into control (N= 314) and various intervention groups (N=259). GraphoGameTM was administered on cellphones to children at their schools under supervision. Each learner in the study was assessed using a battery of locally developed cognitive tests that measured emergent literacy skills (orthography test), decoding competence (spelling test), vocabulary (picture vocabulary test –PVT) and arithmetic (Zambia Achievement Test – ZAT). There was a positive effect of the game for the spelling test – which targeted most closely the skill GraphoGameTM is designed to promote. The most effective intervention combined exposure of both the teachers and the learners to the game. Initial letter knowledge was a good predictor of final letter knowledge on GraphoGameTM.

Continuous growth is a paradigmatic aim of successful tourism development. Crucial conditions therefore are unlimited cheap energy as well as the freedom to travel, security and peace. In reality, it is already proven that the era of cheap energy, delivered by oil, is slowly coming to an end („Peak Oil“). To come along with this constraint, dominant governments like the USA are forced to intervene to ensure their access to oil in the short and middle term, as shown on the example of the „War against Terror” of the USA in North- and West Africa. An unwanted side-effect of this strategy is the destabilization of the concerned regions, followed by growing pressure on the resources Freedom of travel and security for western travellers. Thus, in consequence of shrinking oil reserves, international tourism has to face a growing potential of conflicts, which finally means: We are approaching the end of unlimited tourism growth.

Journal of African History 55:3 (Nov 2014), 401-421
The rhetoric of development served as a language for Sotho politicians from 1960–70 to debate the meanings of political participation. The relative paucity of aid in this period gave outsized importance to small projects run in rural villages, and stood in stark contrast to the period from the mid-1970s onwards when aid became an ‘anti-politics machine’ that worked to undermine national sovereignty. Examination of the democratic period in Lesotho from 1966–70 helps explain the process by which newly independent states gave up some of their recently won sovereignty, and how a turn to authoritarianism helped contribute to this process.
Copyright Cambridge University Press

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of CODESRIA, an institution from the Global South devoted to taking responsibility for the production of social science knowledge, this article explores what it means to pursue such a task under the threat of colonial imposition at methodological and disciplinary levels, which, the author argues, carries dangers of disciplinary decadence marked by the fetishisation of method. The author offers alternatives through what he calls ‘a teleological suspension of disciplinarity, and raises the question not only of the decolonisation of knowledge but also norms.

This paper explores the role of strategic foresight on the African continent through an examination of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project Foresight for Development website and taking a meta-perspective on 3 other papers: Green economy in Africa, by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA); Women in Africa, by Southern African
Women in Dialogue (SAWID); and State of foresight in Africa, by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). The paper begins with a critical examination of the site as it  presently exists through seeking to understand the systems, worldviews, and images which underlie its design; thereafter we will explore possible alternative futures for this website stemming from an integrative transformative vision for a renewed Africa. As such, the narrative we will weave here has a fractal quality, the FFD platform serves as a focal point,  but when we zoom in we can tap into a broader narrative surrounding Africa and the world’s understandings of the roles of Africa in the present and future.
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As more wake up from the world built in patriarchal structures, the linear ways in which we’ve been trained to think, are questioned. While ‘the bottom of the pyramid’ marketers (trained in prestigious business schools, some of which are even here in Johannesburg) sharpen their knives and devise their strategies, funded by global corporations with bigger bank accounts than several African countries combined, to enter the feast of untapped markets; while the lifestyle and value systems of the developed world spew into millions of African homes via television and other mainstream media, twisting hopes and aspirations, definitions of self and value; while land-grabs in Africa and fiscal alliances are made in the back-rooms of five star hotels and internet lords devise schemes of how to get ‘those millions of Africans’ connected to ‘their pipe’, it would be prudent to question what, exactly, it is that FFD wants to teach/show Africa about the future and how  best to impart critical foresight skills to equip the people who still remember - still know - what it means to be a human being.

Understanding the challenges of modern cites as resulting from complex and inter-related factors, the key innovation of Joburg's 2040 vision is to move away from a narrow sectoral approach toward a more thematic one, to which all targeted City interventions can aim. But high-level frameworks alone can never bring such a complex conceptual map into being. Enabling environments must be supported on a number of levels, as they filter knowledge both 'upwards' and 'downwards', build interdisciplinary capacity, and value creativity and spatial thinking.

Cape Town, like other cities in South Africa and globally, has begun speaking a discourse around 'sustainability'. The renewable energy industry in South Africa is already one of the fastest-growing in the world, but increasingly a balance will need to be struck between returns for the private sector investment required and the needs of the broader society. If left unchecked, 'green' ventures may well turn into a new kind of hegemony, justifying further investment in the wealthiest areas at the expense of the poorest.

This article traces the rise and decline of the Somali jihadi-insurgent group al-Shabab from 2006 to 2014. Particular attention is paid to the group’s implementation of a philistine and coercive interpretation of Shariah in areas under its control, the political economy of insurgent violence, local governing administrations, and internal schisms and recent deadly infighting. The group’s potential future trajectory is also assessed.

Please see the references (end notes) at: http://www.turkishreview.org/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?sectionId=360&newsId=223635

Oprindelig  publiceret hos Afrika360.dk i 2013. Det er en ganske hurtig analyse af Ghanas Højesterets afgørelse, hvor de støttede Præsident Mahama, at han vandt valget i 2013. Den beskriver også hvordan den tabende part og dennes supportere modtog dommen.

Sagen startede d. 16. april, og sluttede d. 29. august, 2013.