By Innocent Hitayezu and Ella Duncan
How can peacebuilding programs get a better understanding of trust? This question is at the heart of Innocent Hitayezu’s work with women and issues of reconciliation, and continues to shape his work as a peacebuilder and evaluator in Rwanda.
Innocent was working with a reconciliation project that brought together widows of victims of the Rwandan Genocide with …
By Celestin Nsengiyumva and Ella Duncan
“Rwandan society has suffered the wounds of genocide. To make sure that the heart of the community is healed, to know that there is no more fear in society, we must work in peacebuilding evaluation.”- Celestin Nsengiyumva
When asked how he was introduced to M&E, Celestin Nsengiyumva says that he “joined accidentally”. After graduating university with degrees in applied …
By Zacharia Diing Akol and Ella Duncan
“It is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be older than your country, to raise it and help it grow.” – Zacharia Diing Akol
The crisis that broke out in South Sudan in December 2013 has multiple root causes. A broken sense of national identity and lack of trust in the state at the national level, coupled …
Check out how Mira Gupta, one of the star alumna of our courses on Mapping for International Development and Technology for Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E), used her just-in-time TechChange trainings to develop her team’s maternal and neonatal health project in Ghana.
This past week I had the amazing privilege of meeting and working with 15 fellows from across the African continent who came to Addis Ababa Ethiopia for a two-week training organized by the UPEACE Africa Program with a supporting grant from IDRC Canada.
The training covered a variety of areas related to strengthening research capacity for governance and security in Sub-Saharan Africa and was designed to provide these fellows with critical support for carrying out their PhD work at various institutions of higher education across the continent.
In the last month, I’ve witnessed an exciting shift in how development in Africa has been treated in the media, especially with regards to mobile phones (Including this excellent post by Ken Banks in BBC). For the first time, we’re seeing the perspective shift from how the US needs to intervene to assist the helpless and needy, to a new frame of what lessons the US and the rest of the world can learn from the many innovations in high tech and mobile technology taking place across the African continent.
Call it a social experiment or just plain crazy, but I refuse to buy a cell phone. This mobile-addict is detoxing. Not long ago, I was a slave to my Blackberry. I even started putting it next to my pillow to check emails before bed only to reach for it hours later to cut off
Then I went to Cameroon.
In case you missed any of it, there have been a few very interesting developments recently on how technology is being used, developed and shared for social change purposes. Below are three cases that may tickle your fancy and are definitely worth spreading the word about.
Google Africa has a new Manager of Policy – Ory Okolloh.
Okolloh, co-founder of the very successful crowdsourcing platform, known as Ushahidi, recently announced that she will be stepping down as Executive Director, and stepping into the new position with Google.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia was established in 2005 as part of the country’s transition of bloody civil war into an emerging democracy. Considering the mass destruction of basic services and infrastructure, however, lack of physical access to the capital of Monrovia for many Liberians has posed a serious obstacle to the objective of the Commission. A solution has come from an unlikely source in Atlanta, Georgia, …
Share this post