Today on Here and There we talk with reporter Jacob Kushner, who has spent recent months and years in Haiti, where the President now rules by decree…the Parliament has passed its re-elect-by date and gone home, where hundreds of thousands are still homeless, and disputes over who owns land threaten to paralyze economic development.
Listen to the full interview.
Reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
Field logo from ‘Futbol Americano’ game © NFL
The NFL’s Global Blitz
By Jeff Kushner and Jacob Kushner
Football is America’s most popular sport, but gaining fans abroad has been more brutal than a January playoff game in Green Bay.
While other American professional sports leagues have made inroads into Europe, Asia and Latin America, the NFL has won over dedicated fans in only a few select countries.
With the Super Bowl attracting more viewers each year than any other sporting event in the world, what has the NFL done to try and win the hearts and minds of sports fans abroad?
Read the full Timeline and photos at Timeline.com
IlE-A-VACHE, Haiti — One day in October, 81-year-old Mascary Mesura was working in his garden of corn and coconut trees when the mayor of this small island off the southern coast of Haiti approached and told him to get out of the way.
“He said ‘the tractors are coming. We are going to build a lake to grow fish,’” says Mesura. “I asked for an explanation. I told him all the things we grow there. I was standing in my garden and he told the tractor to advance.”
The mayor, Fritz César, stood and watched while police handcuffed Mesura and his wife, forcing them to watch as their livelihood was uprooted, all 28 of their coconut trees toppled to make room for a fish pond to feed tourists.
The demolition was part of the Haitian government’s $260 million plan to develop Ile-a-Vache into a Caribbean tourism destination akin to the Bahamas or St. Martin.
Five years after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake ravished an already troubled nation, Haiti’s leaders hope tourism along with mining, manufacturing and agriculture will help the country leave its legacy as an impoverished nation behind.
Read the full GroundTruth story on GlobalPost.
Reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
Vocativ
One Wisconsin couple have been vacationing in troubled Haiti for 50 years, and they reckon it’s high time you made the trip
January marks the 5th anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. The country’s leaders are trying to move the nation past the “recovery” phase and into the future as a middle-income nation that attracts tourists and their money. Across the border in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, tourism is the No. 1 driver of GDP, and Haiti wants a piece of the action.
Beset by a string of misfortunes and natural disasters, Haiti isn’t many people’s idea of a fun Caribbean getaway. But one Wisconsin couple have been vacationing there for half a century, through all the troubles, and they just can’t figure out why they’re a rarity.
Read the full story at Vocativ.
To get the fuel she needed to cook her food and warm her home, Kenyan Nancy Wambui, 54, used to buy charcoal made from chopped-down trees. But recently, she was given a new set of briquettes to try, that looked just like regular charcoal but worked even better. The secret ingredient? Human poop.
These briquettes just might be a promising new way to curb deforestation, reduce the daily expenditures of low-income families, help solve an energy deficit facing the country, and support sanitation improvements in areas where they are desperately needed. More than 2.5 billion people in the developing world lack access to toilets, and a child dies every 15 seconds from diarrhea, usually the result of food or water becoming contaminated by human waste. Each year, 200 million tons of the world’s poop also goes completely untreated, ending up directly in lakes, rivers, and oceans.
Read the full story at TakePart.
Emmanuel Tshiteta crouches over a pile of copper ore he recovered near a mine in Kolwezi. / Jacob Kushner
Journalists often consult a range of sources as possible to get an accurate picture of their subject. But sometimes there’s a single source who seems to know almost everything—an expert who’s the ‘gatekeeper’ to a castle of information and contacts on the business or deal the reporter is investigating. Enlisting the help of this person can unlock access to dozens of key sources and documents all at once.
This happened to be the case when I was reporting my master’s thesis for Columbia Journalism School about China’s rise in the Democratic Republic of Congo, now an eBook. I was investigating a $6.5 billion “infrastructure for minerals” deal in which the Chinese state-owned companies partnered with Congo’s state mining agency to mine an incredible 6.8 million tons of copper and 427,000 tons of cobalt over the subsequent 25 years. In exchange for the minerals, the Chinese companies would spend $3 billion to build roads, hospitals and universities throughout Congo. That investment was not structured as a gift, but a loan: every dollar spent will eventually be paid back in copper revenues.
Johanna Jansson
The more I reported, the more the name Johanna Jansson came up: It seemed like every journalist, academic and business insider I spoke with about the deal would refer me back to her. Jansson is a Swedish PhD candidate who has spent years researching the specific megadeal I was reporting on, called Sicomines, for her dissertation at a University in Denmark. In January 2013, I approached her in Kinshasa to ask for help understanding the deal—and for her contacts to some of the most powerful and knowledgeable stakeholders in Congo. My eBook, supported by the Pulitzer Center, would not have been possible without the information and contacts she provided me.
But what motivated her—an academic expert and a business insider—to open up to me—a journalism school student and someone with relatively little knowledge of the subject? What inspired her to hand off to me information that she had spent years gathering?
Nearly two years later I called her to discuss what a journalist can do to gain the trust and help of an expert– and what that expert often expects from the journalist in return.
Jacob Kushner: By the time we met you’d already spent years of your life studying this deal. It was your ‘baby’ so to speak, and you had years to go before your dissertation would be completed and published. Why would anyone in that position be willing to share?
A Chinese employee of a major, Chinese state-owned construction company watches over a Congolese employee in Kinshasa. / Jacob Kushner
Johanna Jansson: I was a bit scared in the beginning, to say ‘oh no, someone will be toe-treading me.’ But I’ll take the risk of sharing because I know I get stuff back from people. If you trust people then you really get stuff back. I deal with journalists in the field and those people that I talk to are real professionals, they know what the rules are. If you steal information you’re dead—professionally dead and reputationally dead.
Kushner: But what do you mean by steal? The very goal of the journalist is to publish everything he or she can learn, right?
Jansson: I mean without credit. In academia people go over the top to say this came from that person and this person did that…If you want to use my currency, which is thinking, then I would appreciate to be acknowledged by that. It’s good for me for my reputation to be mentioned as an expert.
But engaging with media or the public gets you nowhere in your career. The only thing that promotes you is your academic work and your teaching. So any engagement with journalists is on your spare time…that’s why so many academics don’t do it. They have kids, they need to publish.
Kushner: When I first came to you I must have sounded like I didn’t know what I was talking about. What gave you confidence that, at the least, I was really committed to figuring it out?
A man rids his bike across the vast mining lands outside Kolwezi in southeastern Congo. / Jacob Kushner
Jansson: I probably thought, ‘wow this is a big topic to try to bridge in such a short time.’ But I was impressed afterwards because you really did do it. (At first) you were asking really basic questions for someone who was trying to grasp something so big. (But then) you ran around like somebody on speed, talking to everyone in a second, and then you produced something that was really good.
Kushner: Many journalists are hesitant to let a source review what they intend to write or publish. But would you have spoken to me so freely if I hadn’t offered to do that from the start?
Jansson: I wouldn’t talk to a person that doesn’t do that. Because most conversations flow off and on the record, and it would not be possible.
Kushner: What about sharing your contacts—were you nervous about sharing them with me, especially one particular high-up government official?
Jansson: I didn’t connect you—that was Lizzie (Parsons) from Global Witness who did that. But I would have. It’s about economy—if I help you then you’ll help me. The official you mention was stonewalling me, but he wanted to see you. You got some things out of him that I didn’t know. It’s an economy, a barter network. (Note: Immediately after interviewing the government official, I shared it with Johanna. Although she might see this as part of our journalist-expert ‘barter,’ she also did a service to me by double-checking that I was interpreting the interview accurately).
Kushner: What obligation do journalists have in a scenario like this—one in which they’re depending on an expert like you?
Jansson: I think journalists have an obligation not to simplify things so much as to get it wrong. I think they can meet halfway. The New York Times published a story about oil in African countries, the Chad case–you and I talked about this. The journalist portrayed it as if the Chinese were the only companies making problems in the oil sector.
Kushner: OK, but how did you know from the start that I wasn’t going to oversimplify China’s engagement in Congo as well?
Jansson: You were talking about how you learn to doubt yourself—I think journalists could really do that more. A lot is about what words you use. If you say the Chinese are doing it, or it seems like they are doing this…there’s a huge difference even in the conjugations of the verbs you use. Are you getting to sensationalism, or are you using a proper analysis?
Kushner: What’s the most important thing any business reporter should do when approaching an ‘expert’ to ask his or her help?
Jansson: Read their stuff first. Because it’s tiring when people come and say, ‘can you tell me this’…and ‘this’ is (already) in a publication. See if any of their publications are available and if they are, take the time to read. Then approach them and say ‘I read this and that,’ or ‘I’ve looked at your publications but I haven’t had time to read, but can you explain to me this and this?’ In academia you’d never ever approach professor and ask, ‘what’s your research about?’ In academia you do your homework, or you keep your mouth shut.
Kushner: Is there anything that academic ‘experts’ like yourself can learn from journalists?
Jansson: I think our jobs are not as different as people tend to think. I think that all academics should be able to convey what they’re doing. You know, the elevator pitch? All academics should have an elevator pitch.
One journalist friend of mine will comment on my stuff and say, ‘this is way too much jargon! Why don’t you just say what you want to say?!’
***
Jacob Kushner is a freelance journalist reporting on foreign aid, immigration, international human rights law, extractives in developing nations, and foreign investment in Africa. His eBook, China’s Congo Plan, was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books.
You can read Jansson’s first study, The Sicomines Agreement: Change and Continuity in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s International Relations, here. You can read Jansson’s second study, The Sicomines agreement revisited: prudent Chinese banks and risk-taking Chinese companies, here.
This interview was originally published in 2014 by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s ‘Covering Business’ blog.
Daniel Grizelj/Getty
The introduction of Apple Pay, which allows users to pay via smartphone, has generated plenty of buzz. But when it comes to mobile money, America trails years — seven years — behind another country: Kenya.
The mobile money app M-Pesa launched in 2007 and now has more than 15 million users in Kenya — plus millions more across South Africa, Afghanistan and the rest of the globe. By 2012, the value of M-Pesa transactions reached $18 billion, equal to about 41 percent of Kenya’s GDP. For those interested in emerging markets, M-Pesa has become a larger-than-life success story: It launched a hundred research papers and became a sort of holy grail for other telecom companies, which have tried — largely in vain — to replicate its model around the world.
But M-Pesa’s model may finally be spreading. Last month, Kenya’s Equity Bank introduced a new piece of technology that literally piggybacks off of M-Pesa’s success. Called a “thin sim,” the paper-thin chip slips under a standard SIM card used in mobile phones by Safaricom, the telecommunications company that owns M-Pesa. Operating like a second SIM, the device will connect to its own cellular network to allow users to make instant money transfers, just like M-Pesa.
Those in the industry are watching closely, not just to see whether another player can finally shake M-Pesa’s dominance, but also because the technology could finally make mobile payments feasible in other developing countries. If so, it could further blur the line between banking and telecom, and potentially offer market access to the hundreds of millions around the world who have a phone but no bank account.
Read more: Pay by Phone? Africa’s Got It Covered | Fast Forward | OZY
It started out as a nice idea that made a sharp left turn and then took a whole new direction. A 22-year-old Kenyan developer, getting the idea from a class at Strathmore University in Nairobi, wanted to create an app to help drivers avoid bad traffic and accidents. But when he learned that a friend had just been stopped by police at an alcohol Breathalyzer checkpoint, he decided to turn it into an app that would warn drivers about checkpoints — and it took off.
Fifty people downloaded it the first day. Three days later, 2,500. Then 5,000.
But the fun didn’t last. The police soon took notice, and Brian Osoro says an officer called him to try to persuade him to take the app down. “A friend of mine who’s doing law told me this was obstruction of justice,” he says. “In my conscience, I thought, ‘This is bad.’” He read about a drunk driver — of a bus carrying students — who lost control of the vehicle and crashed. No one died, but “I thought to myself, this could be my cousin, one of my brothers. This could get them killed.” Ultimately he took it down, and today he has a much different and successful app– one that helps, not hinders, justice.
Shannon Jensen/The GroundTruth Project
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — For 50 years, foreign do-gooders who wished to improve access to water in Africa went about it basically the same way. They’d dig a well or build a water pump for free. Then they’d hand off the project to the local community — leaving the responsibility, and the financial burden, of maintaining it up to them.
And yet, for the same 50 years, that model hasn’t worked. Wells run out of water. Fuel for electrical generators to pump water becomes expensive. Pipes spring leaks. And rural communities where most people live on less than $2 a day can’t come up with the money to fix it all.
So perhaps it is no surprise that aid money has not solved Tanzania’s notorious water crisis. But even as the $1.4 billion Water Sector Development Programme (WSDP) showed signs it was not working after five years, the World Bank and other organizations provided even more money without first investing in identifying new solutions to old problems.
Read Part Four of a four-part series produced by The GroundTruth Project
Shannon Jensen/The GroundTruth Project GlobalPost
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — The water sector in Tanzania once resembled the Wild West. The government did little to ensure that every person had access to clean and safe water.
Donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worked to solve the problem, sometimes together and sometimes on their own. But there was a flaw, explained Amani Mafuru, an engineer for rural water supply in Tanzania.
“One development partner can go to a region and then another comes to the same place,” he said. “So there was a tendency to favor certain parts of the country.”
In 2006, the Tanzanian government launched the Water Sector Development Programme (WSDP) to do things differently. When it came to constructing rural water points under the WSDP, decisions were not going to be set in Washington DC, nor in the Tanzanian capital of Dodoma.
Instead, WSDP managers would let communities decide for themselves what sort of water system they wanted to build.
Read what happened next in Part 3 of a GroundTruth Project for GlobalPost.
Shannon Jensen/The GroundTruth Project – GlobalPost
LUPETA, Tanzania — It’s a full day’s bus ride from Dar es Salaam to the district of Mpwapwa in north-central Tanzania. It is here that the earliest signs appeared of trouble ahead for Tanzania’s ambitious water development program.
Engineers dug boreholes in 2004 and 2005 to get at water trapped deep in the ground in Mpwapwa and in 13 other places across the country in a precursory step of a failed $1.42 billion water initiative supported by the World Bank, known as the Water Sector Development Programme (WSDP).
The idea was to learn how expensive it would be to create functioning water points, how long they’d take to build and how best to establish “community water councils” capable of keeping the water flowing. Leaders would learn from mistakes on a few pilot projects and work out all the kinks before the plan went national. But critics say those lessons went unlearned. Read the full story here.
This is Part Two of a series produced by The GroundTruth Project for GlobalPost, funded by the Galloway Family Foundation.
By Jacob Kushner and Tom Murphy
In 2006, the World Bank launched an unprecedented drive to fix Tanzania’s water crisis once and for all. In the past, international donors funded different projects in the country’s water sector. This time, the World Bank would provide Tanzania with the financial and technical support to organize them to pool their money together, in a grand experiment that combined rural and urban water resource management into one plan.
To date the drive has attracted more than $1.42 billion in funding from various donors and the Tanzanian government, an incredible sum for a single project in a small country like Tanzania. The initial goal was ambitious: to bring improved access to water to 65 percent of rural Tanzanians and 90 percent of urbanites by 2010, and continue until each and every citizen had safe drinking water.
By all metrics, the project has failed categorically.
Read Part One in the series: Seven years and $1.4 billion into an unprecedented, World Bank-led collaboration to improve water access in Tanzania, a grand experiment in development aid has achieved none of its goals.
Trevor Snapp/Getty
For more than two centuries, The Old Farmer’s Almanac seemed to hold the answer to every crop grower’s questions, like when is the best time to plant onions (“as soon as the ground can be worked in the spring”) or harvest potatoes (“after 10 weeks, usually in early July”).
Agnes Mwaki prefers to use an app. After the 49-year-old banana farmer in Meru County, Kenya, recently switched to growing onions — a more profitable crop — she needed help determining when to transplant the seedlings and when to harvest. Through a government program that provides her with a smartphone, Mwaki now uses WhatsApp to send a photo of her onions each week to an agronomist. “When I spot a problem, I just take a photo and send it to the agricultural officer, and she describes the drug [I’m] supposed to use and I buy it,” says Mwaki.
In recent years a growing group of mobile apps has moved in with access to real-time advice and market intelligence, and the latest of that technology is originating where this kind of data is increasingly vital: Africa.
Read the full story at OZY.
01 Sep 2006, Nairobi, Kenya — A Kenyan policeman board a minibus (Matatu) after the vehicle was stopped for a traffic offence in the capital Nairobi September 1, 2006. Thousand of Kenyans mobbed private minibuses, throwing elbows and squirming onto the loudly painted vehicles across the nation on Friday after a government push to enforce safety rules left many without transport. REUTERS/Antony Njuguna (KENYA) — Image by © ANTONY NJUGUNA/X90056/Reuters/Corbis
Even the smallest of bribes can stifle an economy when they’re magnified millions of times over.
When a police officer gets caught soliciting a bribe, most people would tend to blame the cop. In Kenya, the government is trying a new approach: clamping down on the people whopaythe cop.
And they’re going about it in a strange way, ordering that Nairobi’s public matatus— the beat-up, privately owned vans that ferry most of the city’s commuters — go high-tech. Passengers are being asked to use popular mobile banking applications like m-pesa to pay the fares. No more cash-carrying passengers, no more bribes, the thinking goes.
Many in Kenya say government officials aren’t naïve in their hope to stem corruption this way — they’re just plain lazy. High-tech solutions like digital fare cards or mobile phone payment apps abound. But Kenya may be no exception to the rule that ending bribery must begin and end with old-fashioned justice for the people who solicit the bribes.
new balance heart rate monitor
Read the full story at OZY.
(Jacob Kushner/GlobalPost)
Coca-Cola is partnering with governments, NGOs, and other companies to improve access to water, occupying a gray area where genuine charity meets corporate profit.
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — For years the Mlalakua River overflowed with garbage during each heavy rain. Homes would flood with water contaminated by sewage and trash. Even in the dry season, the narrow river had a nasty grayish hue, the product of runoff from the factories situated alongside it, residents and local water experts say.
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Some here call the Mlalakua River by a different name: the Coca-Cola River. The nickname comes from the red-brown hue of the water. But it may also reflect the fact that among those factories that line the river’s banks is a Coca-Cola bottling plant, one of three in Tanzania. As the world’s largest beverage retailer and one of its most recognizable brands, Coca-Cola goes to great lengths to protect its image. And a few years ago, someone at the company seems to have realized that being associated with a garbage-filled river was putting the company’s local reputation very much at risk.
So in 2012, Coca-Cola entered into a public-private partnership, or PPP, aimed at cleaning the river. The company — partnering with nearly a dozen government entities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other private companies — would dredge the sludge and garbage from the river, then engage the locals in a plan to keep it clean.
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But there are currents of criticism about the project — both from local residents and from a number of NGOs that focus on sustainable development. Critics wonder whether the cleanup was intended to achieve genuine and lasting change or to advance the short-term public relations goals of a multinational corporation. Indeed, most water experts and residents interviewed by GlobalPost say the Mlalakua River cleanup was inherently flawed. They say that while the river is undeniably cleaner, the project did not address the root causes of the pollution: the absence of a sewer system and trash collection for the communities along the river’s banks.
http://www.officiallouisvuittononlinestore.cc
A two-month investigation examines what happens when motives of good will and profit mix.