For 35 years, researchers have been working to develop an effective malaria vaccine. Now they are beginning to approach the goal. Read the original story at Bistandsaktuelt (Norway), or an English translation.
News by Publication
Scientists hope a new vaccine will reduce malaria in Africa. But is it worth the cost?
National GeographicThe End of an Epidemic
The GuardianTen years after UN Peacekeepers introduced cholera to Haiti, against all odds, Haiti’s cholera crisis now appears to be over.
Read: How Haiti Curbed Cholera
Supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Haiti farmers eager to receive compensation after ‘groundbreaking’ land deal
Reuters PLACEFarmer Remy Augustin, 54, prepares the ground to plant maize on a plot owned by his niece near Caracol, Haiti, December 10, 2019. Handout by Allison Shelley
A decade after an earthquake killed more than 200,000 people, farmers in Haiti are waiting to receive compensation for their land used to build an industrial park. Located in Haiti’s northern region, the $300 million Caracol Industrial Park opened in 2012 and now employs approximately 15,000 people, most of whom work in clothing factories there.
In 2018, farmers who had been evicted from their land in 2011 struck a rare deal with the IDB to provide Caracol’s 100 most vulnerable families with new, titled land.
Read the full story at the Thompson Reuters Foundation (PLACE). Reporting supported by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
The Pernicious Power of American Promises
The New York Times‘They paid a guy to kill me’
The GuardianIn Uganda, a lesbian activist helps straight people fight stigma of a disease once thought of as ‘gay.’
Read: The Guardian
Haiti and the failed promise of US aid
The Guardian
Jacob Kushner
A decade after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, nothing symbolises America’s failure to help the nation “build back better” than a new port that was promised, but never built.
After sinking tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into an ill-advised plan to build a new seaport, the US quietly abandoned the project last year. It is the latest in a long line of supposed solutions to Haiti’s woes that have done little – or worse – to serve the country’s interests.
Read: The Guardian’s The Long Read

Supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Overseas Press Club: A Conversation with Jacob Kushner
Overseas Press Club of America
Cynthia, a lesbian who fled Burundi, and Sulait, a gay man from Uganda, share their stories from their refugee hideout in Nairobi, Kenya. Both have since been resettled abroad. Photo: Jake Naughton
A longtime source of mine once tried to convince me that “We are all refugees, wherever we are. Anything could happen tomorrow, and I’d have to be on the run.” But my life couldn’t be more different, I countered – there’s nothing on the horizon forcing me to flee. His concept of home was so impermanent: “No matter how much you want a place to be home, it’s not going to be forever.”
I think what draws me to people in flux is the chance to understand a nomadic life that’s so different from my own. “That’s one thing I learned – not to get hung up about home,” he told me. “To make home wherever you are. To not have too many expectations.” That last phrase stuck with me – the idea that the world’s displaced may have given up expecting anything from the rest of us. I hope that my reporting draws some attention to their plight.
Read: The Overseas Press Club
The Chinese Company Eradicating Malaria in Africa
The AtlanticIn 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced an ambitious endeavor: To eradicate malaria across the globe.
It was late to the game. That year, Chinese scientists working with a Chinese philanthropist had already begun eradicating malaria from the small African nation of Comoros. Now they’re setting their sights on a more ambitious location: Kenya, the East African nation of nearly 50 million people.
Read: The Atlantic

Listen: The China Africa Podcast
The British Empire’s Homophobia Lives On
The AtlanticThe first anti-gay laws on the African continent have become the target African LGBTQ-rights activists, who argue that homophobia, not homosexuality, was an import from the West.
Read: The Atlantic
Kenya Could be the Next Country to Strike Down a Colonial-Era Law Against Homosexuality
WNYC The Takeaway
Jake Naughton
The law in question is a colonial-era ban on “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” is part of the penal code in dozens of former British colonies. Many of them are former British colonies with the exact same law on the books.
The activists who brought the case contend that the law is used to exploit and extort, and that it is used to justify discrimination against LGBT people. Opponents have said they will consider alternative measures if the law is overturned, including, potentially a referendum.
Joining The Takeaway to explain what’s at stake is Jacob Kushner, a freelance journalist based in East Africa. Listen to the full interview at WNYC’s The Takeaway. Produced by Beenish Ahmed.
When Traditional Reporting Isn’t Enough (argument)
Overseas Press Club of America
“Solutions journalism” is built around understanding not just what’s failing, but also what is working–and why. Too often we report singularly on problems without taking the time to explain when viable solutions to them exist. Solutions journalism doesn’t argue against covering abuses of power, conflict or corruption. It merely asserts that unless we also shed light on potential solutions to those problems, we haven’t quite finished the job.
Read my piece on the importance of Solutions Journalism in international reporting in Dateline, the magazine of the Overseas Press Club of America. Learn more at SolutionsJournalism.org
Citizenship shift leaves Dominican-Haitians stateless (PBS Newshour)
PBS NewshourThe Dominican government made headlines when it ended birthright citizenship for children born in the D.R. To undocumented parents.
Watch the segment I field-produced, or read the full transcript, at PBS Newshour.
Nowhere Left to Go
Harper'sAfter Uganda passed what became known as the “kill the gays” bill, hundreds of LGBT Ugandans began fleeing across the border to Kenya, where they lived in hiding while applying for asylum—but a few Kenyans, like Lucas, fled in the other direction.
Read: Harper’s Magazine
Gay-Rights Activists Hoping for a Legal Victory in Kenya
The New Yorker
Simon Maina
Kenya’s penal code punishes acts “against the order of nature”—usually interpreted as sex between men—with up to fourteen years in prison. It also prescribes up to five years in prison for “gross indecency with another male person,” which is often interpreted as other, undefined sexual acts between men. Worldwide, at least seventy nations—more than a third of all countries—still outlaw homosexuality, and it remains illegal in more than thirty of the fifty-four African countries.
L.G.B.T. activists in Kenya are taking on these laws. Changing a society’s values would take generations, they reasoned, but striking down an unjust law could be accomplished in just a few years. Read: The New Yorker












