A fascinating piece from Mothusi Turner (Think Africa Press) on how the Chinese (from China's Fujian province) succeeded in Lesotho may hold for our own entrepreneurs:

Rather than being in some way tied to Chinese state assistance to Lesotho then, migrants come to Lesotho under their own steam, lured by rumours of easy profits. But they do not arrive as hostages to fortune, without a plan and alone. Rather, given that kinship networks are the main pull factor behind Fujianese migration to Lesotho, new arrivals usually have links to one of the local Fujianese business associations before they even land.

[view whole blog post ]

"Prejudice," warned former Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo in the judgment of Hoffmann v South African Airways, "can never justify unfair discrimination". This means that a church can never justify discrimination against a gay or lesbian minister, pastor or priest, because it wanted to protect itself against the homophobic prejudices of its congregants. But this seems [...]

[view whole blog post ]

This is a guest post by Emily Mellgard, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. Demand...

[view whole blog post ]

In production from Back Page, a film adaptation of Wole Soyinka's novel, Ake. :

[view whole blog post ]

My colleague Hemant Purohit at QCRI has been working with us on automatically extracting needs and offers of help posted on Twitter during disasters. When the 2-mile wide, Category 4 Tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, he immediately began to collect relevant tweets about the ... Continue reading →

[view whole blog post ]

As part of QCRI's Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Elections (AIME) project, I liaised with Kaggle to work with a top notch Data Scientist to carry out a proof of concept study. As I've blogged in the past, crowdsourced election monitoring ... Continue reading →

[view whole blog post ]

Memory Gumbo is a mother, an "ordinary woman", living in Harare, Zimbabwe. Tsitsi Dangarembga is an internationally recognized writer and filmmaker, living in Harare as well. Both agree on at least one thing: That "No to loitering," sold to the public as a 'crackdown' on sex workers, has nothing to do with sex workers. In [...]

[view whole blog post ]

Egyptian Ahmad Khalil tweets [ar]: الكهرباء قطعت من الساعة 9.5 وبالتالى النت قطع ، لعلك سعيد يا ريس مرسى ؟؟ نحن نعيش فى العتمه والقادم اسؤأ @ahmad_khalil:The electricity has been out since 9.50am and as a result there has been no Internet. Are you happy President Morsi? We are living...

[view whole blog post ]

*By Jimmy Kainja* Last week we had a public holiday in Malawi. May 14 is "Kamuzu Day," when the nation celebrates the life of its founding president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda whose autocratic rule lasted between 1964 and 1994. The day has been there since Kamuzu's reign, during which it was celebrated as his birthday. This despite [...]

[view whole blog post ]

Martin Feldstein has some interesting reflections on China's new strategic direction under leadership of President Xi Jinping , Premier Li Keqiang and Finance Minister Liu. He observers that recent appointments signals a shift that may be less favourite to slower growth which in turn would reduce demand for commodities :

Taken together, these appointments demonstrate the new Chinese leadership's emphasis on pro-market reforms and a shift from heavy industry to greater reliance on consumption and services. That shift is likely to mean a slower rate of GDP growth than the annual rate of nearly 10% that China achieved during the last three decades. But a slowdown to 7% annual growth would still double China's GDP over the next decade.

[view whole blog post ]