Africa Archive

Gambia will vote in a presidential election on Dec. 4 for the first time since former President Yahya Jammeh was defeated in December 2016 by incumbent Adama Barrow, ending 22 years of oppressive rule that was marked by widespread human rights violations. The ballot is expected to be a critical test for the country’s ongoing transition from dictatorship to democracy, amid concerns that interference from Jammeh, who is in exile in Equatorial Guinea, could threaten national cohesion and stability.  “We are facing a very uncertain moment,” Fatou Jagne Senghore, the West Africa director for the human rights NGO Article 19, […]

As he watched his country flail early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer argued that only by taking a dramatic, concerted step, carried out simultaneously nationwide, would the United States be able to stop the spread of the virus and contain its spiraling costs. At the time, in April 2020, Romer said that the United States should commit an estimated $100 billion dollars to a crash national testing program that would allow the quarantining of people who were positive and thereby stop the spread of the pathogen to others. This, he argued, was a pittance compared […]