African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant » About the Site

We apologise for the inconvenience

Rav Casley Gera — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:19:31 +0000

The more attentive of you may have noticed I haven’t updated this site for some time. I am still intending to finish trawling through the various plans for Saving Africa that are out there, as well as the many criticisms of those plans. But life keeps getting in the way.

If you think you’d like to help out, I’d love to hear from you. You could summarise a book or research a topic. No specialist knowledge needed - that’s the point!

Email me at africa @ brasstacks.org.uk if you can lend a hand. Or just sit tight - I’ll get back to it soon, I promise.

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Have a look around

Rav Casley Gera — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:10:30 +0000

I’ve made a few, subtle, ultra-geeky changes to the navigation of the website to make it easier to find your way around. When you’re looking at a tag, a category, or a date archive, you should now see a list of posts with introductory excerpts rather than all of each. That should make it easier for you to find what you want, then just click on the title of each post to read it.

If you’ve no idea what tags, categories and date archives are, have a look at the new Using This Site page.

The bad news is this means the whole post won’t appear in the RSS feed either, so if you get posts by email you’ll need to click through to read the whole thing. But links in the emails weren’t working properly, so that’s good in some ways.

Hopefully it’ll be easier to get around and find what you need. Comments welcome!

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Welcome

Rav Casley Gera — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:41:42 +0000

I wrote this to be a very professional intro for the site. Then I decided I didn’t like it.

Everything you asked in the pub about African poverty, but nobody knew the answer

In July 2005 the world came together in a rare display of consensus and brotherhood.

Politicians, rock stars, activists and economists stood up together and promised an end to the crushing poverty affecting one billion of the world’s people. Some things even got done as a result.

But underneath the apparent consensus of Make Poverty History lies a seething mire of dissent and disagreements. It’s a world where economists accuse each other of selling out the poor and of voodoo economics; where senior World Bank economists tell their predecessors, “your ideas are at best dangerous and at worst, snake oil.” And where no issue - even the extent of the problem itself- isn’t met with disagreement.

And the media doesn’t make it any easier. Even when it decides to worry about Africa, as it periodically does, it rarely gives a detailed or balanced discussion of the issues, preferring a lazy mixture of platitudes and cynicism, with dissenting opinions thrown at each other without explanation or qualification.

Well, we’re sick of it.

This is too important an issue to allow confusion to reign. Millions of people around the world have made it clear they want action taken to alleviate the suffering of Africa. But to make up their minds, they need a full, fair account of the facts, the disagreements, the plans, the budgets. In plain English. This, in short, is what we have set out to do.

You can track our progress at the blog.

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