No education crisis wasted
The “business model” of Bridge International, the organization which claims to solve Africa’s education problems, comes under scrutiny.
34 Article(s) by:
Alice de Vries
Alice de Vries studies and writes about international development and globalization with a focus on gender inequality.
Profits and bleeding hearts
We speak to an aid worker and trade unionist at the forefront of campaigns to halt the transnational corporate education reform movement.
Corporate tax is a feminist matter
Across Africa, the working poor often end up carrying the burden of raising tax revenue while the multinationals go scot-free. And women bear the brunt of it.
Africa’s austerity apocalypse
The rowing acceptance of what critics of structural adjustment programs have been arguing for decades, (seems to have had minimal impact on the IMF’s actions.
Hillary Clinton’s ‘African Development’
The Clintons have long been entangled with this corporate development agenda.
What would a Hillary Clinton win mean for Africa?
Ever more extraction and exploitation, nicely packaged in the optimistic promise of sustainability, ‘good business climates’, partnership, democracy and ‘change’.
Does the Development Industry really need new clothes?
One critical problem of the new combined agenda of agencies like the UN or World Bank is that their goals lack a clear rationale on what they’ll accomplish and how.
Invisible labor in plain sight
South Africa has 52 million people. Around 1.1 million are domestic workers. 54,000 of those are under the age of fifteen.
On The Way to School
A new documentary film offers a dignified and moving counterweight to how we in the West think – in static, sometimes pathologizing images – of kids elsewhere.
Are Corporations Colonizing the UN?
If market-focused empowerment becomes the norm in development, who will want to learn about politics or find out why their countries are poor in the first place?
Tis the blackface season in the Netherlands
Zwarte Piet is just more evidence of how the Dutch majority silences and denies racist realities, especially that of black people there.
South Africans lack table manners and posture.
The country’s first School of Etiquette situated in one of Johannesburg’s rich northern suburbs is more evidence of how much its public culture has slid to the right.
White Schools in postapartheid South Africa
“Former” white schools propose color blindness to tackle racism against its new black students, invariably leading to alienation and discomfort on the part of the latter.
Oscar Pistorius’ anxiety spectacle
Biased media reporting won’t advance popular and professional understandings on how psychiatric conditions interact social and economic sources of stress.
Save The Children tries models and sex appeal
The real problem with the low appeal of “sustainability” and other dry development talk: they’re vague, impersonal and detached. Not lack of dancing models.
The Economist sees a bright side of Oscar Pistorius’ trial
For accurate, detailed and nuanced information about violence against women in South Africa, don’t read The Economist.
Know your Dutch history
It is important that the Netherlands’ history of slavery gets anchored in Dutch history curriculums in the same way that the Second World War is.
Nelson Mandela and the Dutch
The mainstream view is that the Netherlands was a staunch supporter of South Africa’s liberation movement? The story is a bit more complicated.
The care you are entitled to
Why do the middle classes in South Africa – regardless of race or ideology- pay their domestic workers such low wages?
African Radio’s growing and enduring popularity
Growing numbers of radio stations, across the continent, are training young people to deliver news to their peers themselves.