Think Global: Sub Saharan Africa

     The Democratic Republic of Congo is a Sub-Saharan African country. Over the past couple decades, the DRC has been destroyed by political corruption and internal conflict. The result has left a DRC that is very poor and has high tensions. Along with this, the country's infrastructure is very weak and broken. With the last dictator and two corrupt presidents, the nation's landline telephone network is almost completely destroyed. Only 2.54% respondents in Kinshasa (the capital) reported having a landline ( Gjerstad ). A land-line isn't a very modern form of technology but this is an accurate representation of the technology in the DRC. The technology usually isn't the most innovative around. There is also many shortages and lack of technology.  There is also a lack in organization in science to improve technologies. The science community has no common representative structure such as an academy or professional associates" ( Assessment ).  Not only i...

          In Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the story starts off with the story of a girl named Rath. In the story Rath goes to Thailand to try and find work. A job agent after they had been washing dishing for a couple months took them deep into Thailand where he turned them over to some gangsters. The girls then stayed in a tenth-floor high rise apartment where they were sent back and forth with guards from a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel. There, the men told Rath and her friends that the men paid lots of money for them and they were going to have to pay the money back and then he would send them home. They weren't sure how they were going to pay the money back but that became clear very quickly when Rath was locked in a room with a customer who tried to force her to have sex with him. When she refused the man came in the room and beat her telling her that he'd kill her if she refused to have sex with the custome...

     Adichie comes out and starts the TED Talk by introducing herself as a storyteller and how she's going to tell a few personal stories. She starts off by saying her background, how she's from Nigeria, and started reading at a very young age, but how most of her pieces of writing were about white kids with blue eyes playing in the snow, eating apples, and talking about the weather. She never actually experienced any of those things because she lives in Nigeria and its always hot and they don't eat apples. She then goes to say that she is middle class and her parents both have good jobs, her dad is a professor and her mom is an administrator. The more important part of the story is that they had a house boy named Fide who her mother always told her that he was very poor, and they would go bring him food and clothes. She went over there and and saw a basket that they Fide's brother made Adichie's mom, she was surprised that he could make something so nice because sh...

       This weeks' blog focuses on the idea of humanitarian aid. In this weeks' reading which was The Crisis Caravan,  two humanitarians were discussed, Henry Dunant, and Florence Nightingale. They were two key people in the history of humanitarian aid and they kind of worked together yet had very different ideas on what should be done for the issue of humanitarian aid. Henry Dunant believed that it's a person's duty to help no matter what whereas Nightingale believed that if aid fails in its purpose, if the warring parties use that aid to their advantage"(Polman). Dunant coined the phrase "Tutti Fratelli" which means "we are all brothers" and it was a motto he stood by throughout his humanitarian aid campaign when lobbying to Switzerland's parliament. Dunant wanted to start helping injured soldiers after what he saw at the Battle of Solferino where 40,000 soldiers were killed and another 40,000 wounded. The issue was with these injured sold...

     Poverty has always been an issue in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  Over 60% of the population lives at the poverty line, 54 out of 78 million live on $1.90 a day or less. In the readings for this week, Steven Radelet informed us that the World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on $1.90 a day or less. The main result of this extreme poverty in the region comes in the form of hunger. According to the World Food Programme, a division of the UN, estimated in 2017 that 250,000 children could've starved in the region of Kasai because of the poor economic conditions. Along with the 250,000 children that were projected to die from starvation, 7.7 million people face acute hunger (Concern). Along with hunger, almost 4 million people have had to flee their homes and there's also another 600,000 refugees.      But how did the conditions get so bad? "Most the problem comes from centuries of exploitation and violent plundering by colonizer...

                   The Global Financial Crisis or Great Recession which sparked from a U.S. real estate mistake, spread like wildfire across the globe. One specific area hit hard was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC saw economic growth stop to a halt and looked towards foreign aid to pull them out of the standstill.                        The economy seized to a halt as a result of the Global Financial Crisis. The global Financial Crisis is defined as happening between 2007-2008 but most of the effects weren't felt until 2009 when economic growth declined from 6.2% in 2008 to 2.8% in 2009. Along with the economy coming to a halt, the DRC saw a sharp increase in inflation. Inflation rose to 53.4% in 2009 compared to 27.6% in 2008 and an objective inflation rate of 48.7% which was set by the government, but the target was missed and their effort to co...

    Nationalism, identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nation .  The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has a rich history of Nationalism. The start of Nationalism goes back to the late 1950s where the people of the DRC wanted independence from Belgium. The people after wanting independence wrote up the ABAKO manifesto under Joseph Kasavubu. He turned the ABAKO into an anti-colonial nationalist sediment. A nationalist wave then swept over the region leading to militant leadership and eventually independence from Belgium in 1960 ( Dennis Cordell ). After becoming independent the newly independent DRC looked to the Soviet Union for support cause the Congo Crisis of the Cold War. Since the 1960s the DRC has showed a patten of clientelism and has seen many leaders rise and fall as an ongoing war between over 250 ethnic groups allied together have been fighting each other for decad...

       Covid-19 couldn’t have hit the Democratic republic of Congo (DRC) at a worse time. Already dealing with flooding, and other outbreaks such as Ebola, Cholera, and Measles. The first confirmed case in the DRC hit on March 10, in the capital city of Kinshasa. Since then Covid-19 has ran rapid through the DRC and Kinshasa jumping to over 9,453 cases as of August tenth. Ninety percent of the cases reported in the DRC have come from the Kinshasa.      The DRC’s government put precautions in place to try and slow the spread of Covid-19. The precautions they put in effect were very similar to the U.S. They pushed out propaganda encouraging others to social distance, wash their hands, and wear masks whenever in public.   In mid-March the DRC entered a state of emergency and closed its borders. Followed by closure of schools and businesses with even a curfew put in act in areas where cases were high. One thing the DRC really struggled with was testin...