Kofi Annan has just agreed to head the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Africa: Green Revolution or Rainbow Evolution?
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Africa
Debate on Microcredit
Foreign Policy In Focus asked the Microcredit Summit Campaign’s Sam Daley-Harris to respond to the question of whether microcredit is the solution to global poverty or whether its benefits have been oversold. Robert Pollin, who also provided this FPIF analysis of microcredit’s plusses and minuses, responds to Daley-Harris below. Finally, Felicia Montgomery also of the Microcredit Summit Campaign responds to Pollin.
Microcredit: False Hopes and Real Possibilities
Making credit accessible to poor people is a laudable aim. But as a tool for fighting global poverty, microcredit should be judged by its effectiveness, not good intentions.
Saving Darfur or Salvation Delusion?
Banner of hands for Darfur, from September 9, 2006 rally in Washington, DC. Courtesy of Genocide Intervention Network.
Mr. Hardball Goes to the World Bank
Nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I opened up The Washington Post and stared right into the flinty mind of one Robert B. Zoellick, the Bush administration’s pick for new World Bank president.
Focusing the Struggle
The World Social Forum’s primary achievements are gathering the multiplicity of movements fighting neoliberal capitalism and imperialism, and maintaining the open space to keep alive mutual education and networking. But aside from the kinds of adverse power relations critiqued by grassroots activists in Nairobi, the WSF’s main disappointment remains our inability to converge on strategy, generate agreed-on joint actions, and forge cross-sectoral ties.
The Best and Worst of Nairobi
The World Social Forum’s greatest achievement in Nairobi was creating this space where over 70,000 people representing social movements from all over the world could gather and reflect on successes and strategize for the future. One key thing that came out was the formation of the Africa Water Network. It was just an idea at the beginning of the week in Nairobi. But over the week, leadership evolved, ideas evolved, and a network was born. That’s the WSF at its best. Many people from many different countries can come together to create synergy and in this case a concrete network fighting the privatization of this critical resource, water. The network includes not only activists but engineers and people linked to governments as well.
60-Second Expert: Western Sahara
In recent years, the Moroccan government has championed the idea of autonomy as a solution to its territorial dispute with pro-independence advocates over Western Sahara. Rabat has said it is willing to consider an autonomous, locally elected government in Western Sahara, which would have powers independent of the central government, albeit circumscribed by Morocco’s ultimate sovereignty. The movement for Western Saharan statehood, the Polisario Front, has rejected autonomy. It continues to claim the right of self-determination, to be exercised through a final status referendum among the territory’s indigenous ethnic Sahrawis. As the diplomatic stalemate worsens, conditions on the ground in Western Sahara are pointing toward renewed armed conflict.
Memo to the Somali Government
Imagine a reconciliation process in Iraq that fails to include militias or Sunni and Shia hardliners? How about a reconciliation process in Afghanistan that sidelines violent Pashtos in the south? The chances of either process succeeding would be slim. In both cases, the excluded parties comprise a powerful majority and thus must be included for reconciliation to produce a lasting peace. Keep anyone out and they are bound to want in. That type of exclusion is exactly what is being proposed in Somalia. The country remains in turmoil following the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion in December that toppled the Islamic Courts Union. Ethiopian troops continue to fight resistance in the capital Mogadishu and elsewhere in the country. Yet, amid this violence, Somali leaders in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) refuse to include the former Islamic leadership, along with other sectors of society, in forthcoming talks. This grave mistake is bound to instigate further violence, much like Mogadishu has witnessed in the last months as hundreds have died in clashes in the city. As long as the current Somali government continues to exclude parties that are more popular than the TFG, Ethiopia, and the United States combined, reconciliation will be a mere façade.
IMF Confidence Crisis
As International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials engage in their joint semi-annual meetings in Washington, the Fund has a nettlesome new task: convincing its shareholders (most of the world’s governments, represented at the meeting by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) that the institution should continue to exist.