Sockhna #3 (2015), Vincent Michéa. Check out the rest of his gorgeous Senegalese portraits at True Africa
- The bridge to Sodom & Gomorrah — beautifully written article about daily life in one of the largest informal settlements in Accra, by Yepoka Yeebo
- Reggie Ugwu has written a moving story of his family’s return to Nigeria to complete the house his father began building
- Selam Gebrekidan has a gripping article on the extended family networks used to pay smugglers bringing Eritrean refugees to Europe. An underdiscussed aspect of the refugee crisis is the degree to which it’s facilitated by mobile phones, for both communication and money transfers
- Grieve Chelwa writes about the necessity of decolonizing the economics curriculum in South Africa. Pair with these one-sentence summaries of the latest economic research in Africa from CSAE (part one and part two)
- Liberia has outsourced its entire primary education system to an American company. I’m of two minds on this. Public education is a phenomenal achievement, in historical perspective, and I’m hesitant to embrace wholesale privatization. On the other hand, Liberia’s system is performing so poorly at the moment that private providers probably can’t be worse than the current public standard. It could be a good opportunity for innovation
- Meet 15 of Africa’s brightest young scientists at the Next Einstein Forum
- No street address? No problem! A Nigerian startup promises delivery of packages from major retailers and shipping services anywhere in Lagos in less than three hours
- My favorite new African newsletter is This Week in Africa, run by Jeff Paller and Philip Dube
- In the US, there’s new evidence that an old welfare program produced measurable benefits for its participants. Further challenging received wisdom on social policy, a former advisor to Nixon has admitted that the War on Drugs was conceived largely as a way of suppressing black communities
- Video of the week: I can’t stop watching Major Lazer’s stunning new video for Light It Up. Endlessly danceable song, stunning visuals from southern Ghana, cameo from poet Kwado Nkita-Mayala – a clear early candidate for best video of the year
