Aid and Development Archive

In mid-April, a spokesperson for the Ugandan government admitted that the country’s only functioning cancer treatment machine had broken earlier that month. The radiotherapy machine, donated by China to Uganda in 1995 and housed at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, is now considered beyond repair. While the government did acquire a second radiotherapy machine in 2013, it has not been operational because of delays in allocating 30 billion shillings—just shy of $9 million—to construct a new building to house it. The funding delay has lifted, but the machine won’t be up and running for at least six months. The government has […]

Two years ago, the Egyptian people spared no adjective in praise of their savior, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who in turn framed his lightning-fast rise to power as an expression of the people’s will. When he was named defense minister in 2012 by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader elected Egypt’s president that year, el-Sisi vowed to keep the military out of politics. But the general, with strong popular support, eventually overthrew Morsi in 2013. He then retired his military post and announced he was running for president, winning in a landslide the following year. But now the honeymoon is over. The […]

For most of 2015, it looked as though Nguyen Tan Dung, Vietnam’s prime minister since 2006, would succeed in his audacious bid to succeed Nguyen Phu Trong as the head of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). In the end, however, he was outmaneuvered in skirmishes over party rules, and undone by a whispering campaign that painted him as a dangerous opportunist. The contest was over even before the party’s 12th Congress convened on Jan. 21, 2016. Contrary to the dominant narrative in international media coverage, the showdown in Hanoi had very little to do with how to handle ties […]

Earlier this month, Jordanian authorities shuttered the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Amman, capping several months of troubles for the Islamist group in the country. Its political arm, the Islamic Action Front, is Jordan’s main opposition party. The Brotherhood’s legal standing has been up in the air since last year, when it lost its official registration for failing to comply with new government regulations. But the group has also been split internally—both among its members in Jordan and over its affiliations with the embattled Egypt-based Brotherhood. With the Islamist group banned outright in other Arab countries, Jordan’s closure of […]

Denunciations of French President Francois Hollande’s government know no geographic boundaries these days. In Paris, students are protesting a labor reform bill; in Mali, demonstrators ransacked an airport, decrying arrests made by French forces there. And since March 30, strikes and protests have paralyzed the French department and former colony of Mayotte, as residents demand “real equality” with the rest of France. Mayotte, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean situated between Madagascar and Mozambique, is one of France’s overseas departments; its residents are French citizens with parliamentary representation. But in many ways, Mayotte is far behind other overseas departments and […]

The Philippines’ upcoming presidential election in May comes at a critical time for Southeast Asia’s second-most-populous country and fifth-largest economy. After decades of anemic growth rates, the Philippines seems to have begun to turn a corner over the past six years under reform-minded President Benigno Aquino III. Yet as Filipinos prepare to go to the polls, it is unclear if the next government will be able to both sustain the progress made thus far as well as confront challenges old and new in the political, economic and security realms. Breaking With the Past Although the Philippines has been a democracy […]

The rise of a global middle class has been one of globalization’s great victories, but the surge in income and consumption in the developing world may be more of a temporary anomaly than a long-term trajectory. Some developing countries have ridden a commodities super-cycle to middle-class status, but most never made it or were far too late with the investments that might have converted the boon into more sustainable growth paths. Commodities are cyclical, and the global middle class may prove to be so as well. From 2001 to 2011, there was an unprecedented surge in the number of people […]

Last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the Czech Republic, where he signed more than 30 deals worth nearly $4 billion. In an email interview, Richard Turcsanyi, the deputy director of the Institute for Asian Studies, Bratislava, discussed Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe. WPR: How extensive is Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe, and what factors are driving China’s investment strategy there? Richard Turcsanyi: To begin with, it is extremely difficult to establish unequivocally the amount of investments from one country in another’s economy. Various statistical sources notoriously show differences. Putting together the numbers from a range […]

Last month, authorities arrested Zambian opposition leader Erick Chanda after he accused President Edgar Lungu of using public funds on a vacation. In an email interview, Nick Branson, a senior researcher at Africa Research Institute in London, discussed politics and the state of the opposition in Zambia. WPR: What is President Edgar Lungu’s record so far in office, and how popular are he and the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) ahead of August presidential and parliamentary elections? Nick Branson: Lungu has admittedly only been in power for a little over 14 months, having been elected in January 2015 to serve the […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Jim Della-Giacoma is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on leave until early April. Peace and the United Nations go together; at least that’s what its founders intended. But in the meeting rooms of the organization’s New York headquarters, diplomats often argue over the buzzword vocabulary of compound words and phrases for advancing the U.N.’s peace mandate. They parse whether an operation is a special political mission or a peacekeeping mission. They worry that calling something a “peace operation” is too imprecise. When they cannot agree whether something should be peace building or “sustaining the […]

Since taking office last November, Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli—a former minister of works known as the Bulldozer for his ability to push through his agenda—has seemed to adopt a new title: the broom. He wants to sweep away the country’s reputation for endemic corruption and poor public service. Magufuli has identified three areas of priority for his government: cutting wasteful and unnecessary expenditure; improving public services; and tackling the corruption that has long plagued public life and placed Tanzania 117th out of 168 in the Transparency International 2015 corruption index. From the start, these commitments have been matched with action. […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and host Peter Dörrie discuss the changing definition of official development assistance, Burkina Faso’s security threats, and hawks and doves in the U.S. presidential campaign. For the Report, Bertil Lintner joins us to talk about the current situation in Laos in the run-up to U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to the communist Asian country in September. Listen:Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant articles on WPR: New Aid Rules Are an Opportunity to Bridge Security-Development Divide After Attacks, Burkina Faso Walks Fine Line Between Security and Liberty In U.S. Presidential Campaign, […]