Our guest blogger today is Serginho Roosblad from Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Their My Song series is a weekly multimedia show that tells the personal story behind Africa’s most inspiring songs.  In April 2011, when Ugandans began ditching their cars and public transport to protest disputed elections and rising food and gas prices, Burney MC was getting inspired. The Ugandan rapper wrote the song “Walk to Work” for the same-named movement. In this video edition of My Song, the rapper talks about the urge he felt...
As Bill and Melinda Gates said in their 2014 Annual Letter earlier this month “By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient.”  Yet despite this fact, you’ve probably heard a lot of myths that paint a more depressing picture, especially around food and agriculture. “African countries can’t grow enough food to feed themselves” or “All farmers in Africa are poor”....
With the death of Nelson Mandela, we have lost one of the few genuinely world-changing figures of our time. For although seen narrowly, Mandela’s principal achievement – and lifelong goal – was to bring freedom to his own country, his ideals, his language, and the principles for which he stood inspired countless millions far from South Africa, and continued to do so – and this is a key point – in new terrains and with new dreams after South...
ONE’s co-founder Bono took aim at the oil industry today for trying to kill new US rules that would help prevent corruption by requiring oil, gas and mining companies to make public what they pay for the rights to extract natural resources in developing countries.   Speaking on a panel moderated by President Bill Clinton at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, Bono called out Exxon and Chevron, along with the rest of the American Petroleum Institute, for...
This infographic from the OECD Development Assistance Committee projects which countries will be home to the world’s poorest people by 2015, and compares this to the picture in 2005.  Part of their report Fragile states 2013: Resource flows and trends in a shifting world it reveals that by 2015, half of the world’s people living on less than USD 1.25 a day will be in fragile states.   And while poverty has decreased globally, progress on Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1 to halve...
The World Bank’s recent report, Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience, underscores the urgency of supporting African farmers now so that they can better cope with the potential impacts of a changing climate. Turn Down the Heat finds that an increase of 4 degrees Celsius worldwide would spell increased droughts, more frequent flooding, and shifts in rainfall in Africa, jeopardising the region’s food security and economic growth. Here are some of the report’s findings. What...