From our url to the leader of the free world's mouth!
Philip Gourevitch is not the only one who's traveled to Rwanda recently and appreciated the extent to which it's "a country looking and moving forward, not back." This eyes-on-Singapore approach is particularly evident in the field of technology. The UN Foundation's Claire Thwaites reports on one of Rwanda's more encouraging public health-related tech developments:
Supported by the Rwandan Ministry of Health, Voxiva, and the Treatment Research and AIDS Centre (TRAC), TRACnet is an electronic records system that can be uploaded to mobile phones. In Masaka it is being used to track and record the distribution of anti-retroviral medications, ensure drug adherence, electronically create and submit patient reports, and access the most up-to-date information about HIV/AIDS care and treatment.
[snip]
In Masaka, I was guided through the health clinic by the local program manager, Hareuhana Diaedonne. During the tour, Hareuhana spoke at length about the simple but significant benefits that have been brought about by the introduction of mobile phones to the local healthcare system. Using TRACnet, he reported, data entry that used to take months to record and aggregate now can be collected in just 5 minutes.
President Paul Kagame has made a point to emphasize that he thinks Rwanda's way forward is through investment, not foreign assistance. Pushing mobile health technology seems like a perfect opportunity to both attract investment and improve the quality of the country's public health care system.
Over at Tapped, Josh Linden asks whether the American strategy of "weaponizing the IMF" through blocking a loan to Sri Lanka is enough to stop the ongoing crisis there.
The way I see it, the immediate concern should be two fold. 1) stop the government shelling of the densely populated warzone. 2) Let international humanitarian organizations into concentration camps that are holding many tens of thousands of Tamils who have managed to flee the conflict zone. (As it stands now, the military is running the camps and preventing the media and groups like the International Committee for the Red Cross from accessing the facilities. If you have any doubt about the deplorable state of these camps, see this Channel 4 report.)
The question is: how can these twin goals be achieved?
Remember that whole swine flu H1N1 virus thing? Well, it's still around -- with a few thousand cases, according to the WHO. Might the ridiculous panic that surrounded the disease actually have been a net positive? Well, it's good to know the WHO was prepared (even "excessively" prepared), but on balance, no, I don't think irrational fear-mongering was a beneficial idea either.
Joe Queenan eagerly mocks environmental messaging, but doesn't seem to make a point beyond the fact that it would be silly to start calling the ozone layer "that awesome thing in the sky." Not far below his sarcasm is a telling reality -- that WSJ readers can laugh contentedly at environmentalists' rebranding efforts only shows that they too believe that the fight for what to call something is one of the most important in the anti-environmentalist's crusade.
And a case against Bono and Bob Geldof -- or "Bondof," as one confused taxi driver in Ethiopia offered -- as stereotype-perpetuaters and usurpers of African voices. Fair point, and "Do they know it's Christmas in Africa?" still always makes me cringe.
If you couldn't get enough of my soot coverage this morning, here's more. Everything you need to know about black carbon in 2:14.
Russia might be lukewarm on the ICC, but, according to Russia Today, it is more open to the idea of a pirate court, as its Prosecutor General's office is pushing for the creation of a UN special tribunal to try Somali pirates.
The UN has responded with refreshing unanimity on the pirate issue, but I don't think a Yugoslavia or Rwanda-style tribunal is in the offing just yet. Those institutions -- in addition to being a little on the costly side -- are also meant for national reconciliation. Creating a pirate court, on the other hand, would do little to help reconstitute Somalia's shattered law and order system and curb the piracy pandemic. Existing methods of justice, involving extradition to countries with reliable court systems, will likely prevail for now.
Just imagine what Samuel L. Jackson could do in a good pirate court scene, though.
This is perhaps telling. Since the United States made its intention to run for a seat on the Human Rights Council known, about a month and a half ago, skeptics have wondered whether it could gain enough votes in the supposed "dictators' club" of the General Assembly. These murmurings persisted even after the United States and New Zealand -- ahem -- agreed that the former would run unopposed, lowering the standard for membership to a simple 50% confidence vote. Would all the America-haters in the world fiendishly cast their ballots against the U.S., rebuking its much-publicized attempt to re-engage with the Council?
Based on yesterday's vote, not even close. The United States got a whopping 167 votes out of the 192 member General Assembly (just ten fewer than Belgium, and only 12 fewer than that global pariah, Norway). Seems like a pretty good sign that the rest of the world is happy to see the U.S. coming back inside the tent. (Unless, of course, countries voted the U.S. in simply to lull it into a sense of false security before unleashing their dastardly agendas – but even the paranoia-mongerers haven’t gone that far.)
(In the two competitive elections yesterday, Hungary was able to defeat Azerbaijan, but Kenya fell short of unseating any of the five incumbent African nations.)
As I was cleaning out my feeds this morning, I stumbled across this brilliant article on Black Carbon, part of a series on "stopgap measures that could limit global warming."
Black Carbon, aka "soot," produced by primitive cooking stoves in the developing world, accounts for up to 20 percent of global warming according to some scientists and represents "low-hanging fruit" -- the most possible bang for the buck (in regard to both cost and effort) in confronting climate change.
Not two minutes later, this report popped up on BBC tv (BBC, why no embed?) about researchers at Nottingham University who have discovered a way to make fuel out of banana peels (abundant in many parts of the developing world) and sawdust using no specialized equiptment. Aside from dramtically reducing the occurrence of comic accidents, burning banana peels could also reduce the use of firewood as fuel, limiting deforestation and, therefore, addressing climate change.
Count me skeptical that, if this is as cheap and easy as the researchers suggest, savvy entrepreneurs in the developing world wouldn't have already figured it out. Nonetheless, I like this coverage because it focuses on access to cheap, renewable, and environmentally friendly sources of energy in the developing world, an issue that doesn't get enough air time and dramatically affects both climate change and the MDGs. The real answer? I like solar cookers, but that may just be because I'm loathe to disagree with the Boonstra.