Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Adouma Alghoubas writes about the life of nomads in the desert of Niger [fr] :

Nomadic people do not have the technological means at their disposal to get their bearings, but what they do have is knowledge of astronomy, inherited from their ancestors. They navigate their way as they travel by looking at the stars. At first nightfall, it is the Pleiades constellation (“the ladies of the night” in Tamajeq) and Orion ( “the guide” in Tamajeq) that shows them the way East. Then, it is Venus (tezzug wulli aka “goat milking” in Tamajeq) that points them to the West.

With both big technology players and local partners in Ghana, we’ll be hacking together our “crap map” using existing open source tools and software paired with meaningful offline facilitation around behavior change in sanitation.

Molly Norris of Ideo.org explains the objective of the Crap Map project: “to stimulate collective action to improve community-wide behavior and pressure the public sector and others to make investments in improved sanitation solutions.” On World Toilet Day, it's worth noting that in West Africa, only 37 percent of inhabitants can access a clean toilet, posing important issues of public health and human dignity. The WHO/UNICEF joint monitoring program (JMP) estimates that Eritrea and Niger have the highest ratio of population forced to defecate in the open.

Seven African nations of ECOWAS namely Nigeria, Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Togo have agreed with Malian government [fr] to send 3,300 soldiers a year to Northern Mali to take back control of northern Mali from Islamist fighters. Other nations outside the ECOWAS might also send in troops.

Bark Biiga writes on Fasozine [fr] that  following the floods that plagued Niger and Burkina Faso, 80 people have succumbed to Cholera in the Western Region of Niger. The disease also threatens to spread into neighboring Burkina Faso.

Mauritanian writer and diplomat Mohamed Mahmoud Weddady writes a series of posts in his blog entitled: “Papers about Azawad” [ar], about history and people of Azawad region. This post, for instance, focuses on the relationship between the Azawad and Libya.

Our Africa is a project which lets children across Africa film education and jobs in their countries the way they see them.