Archive for February 2009
My work as education adviser involves frequent travel around the old northern region, principally to meetings with programme staff and representatives of State Ministries of Education, but whenever possible to schools. Road travel in the north of Nigeria initially seems easy - straight, flat, tarmac roads that allow travel at Western motorway speeds and with [...]
Bangui in the Central African Republic has not got much in common with Hollywood, except the imposing sign on the hill above the city. City? Well, not really. 10 minutes of driving takes you from one edge to the other; it has a cosy, friendly feel; colourful, gently bustling, untidy, with avenues shaded by trees, [...]
I am standing on the bridge over the Chari, the river which forms the border between Chad and Cameroon. I came here as a sort of a pilgrimage – one year ago today, this bridge was a jostling mass of people; 30,000 people crushed across to escape the fighting in N’Djamena. Today, at dawn, it [...]
One of my team's largest projects is the Medicines Transparency Alliance (MeTA). Launched last year, it aims to improve the quality and availability of drugs in 7 pilot countries, while also making those drugs more affordable. It does this by bringing together government with pharmaceutical manufacturers and civil society (NGOs, cooperatives, trade unions, faith groups etc) [...]
I’ve been downtown twice in the last couple of weeks now, so I thought it might be interesting to set down some impressions of the city (as well as some photographs). Now that security has improved, we’re out and about in town on a regular basis. One of my trips included a long drive into [...]
I joined DFID to work in Nigeria as the Education Adviser in the summer of 2007. Basically I oversee DFID's education projects and programmes in the Northern States, where the human development indicators, such as out of school children and infant mortality rates are poor and some people are still suspicious of Western ideas such as [...]
A few rapidly snatched possessions, some sketchy shelters made from branches and grass and barefoot children being herded out of sight by fearful parents. You have seen it before on TV: another population fleeing from a vicious low-level war. But this group living in the bush somewhere east of Abeche in Chad is not quite [...]
I had a really interesting meeting at the end of last week on how we might increase the participation and voice of civil society in both health and HIV/AIDS policy in Mozambique. The meeting took place in the DFID office, the air-conditioning was on high, as it is high summer and hot outside, but it was a [...]
No, not the Scot generally regarded as the father of economics, I'm talking about the Scot who works as a policy officer in DFID's Business Alliances Team (although working with a group of economists provides endless 'merriment' relating to me and my namesake). I joined the London based Business Alliances Team (BAT) in March 2008. [...]
