Ethiopia is holding parliamentary elections on 21 June at a time of immense domestic turmoil and foreign pressure. This is due to, in particular, the Tigray conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic and other ethnic-based violence. Ethiopia has always been a complex and volatile country, but the confluence of these pressures in 2021 is unique, and dangerous. Still, the elections are better held than delayed again, Jan Abbink writes in The Conversation.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia in the Netherlands, Jos Damen, head of the ASCL Library, was interviewed by EenVandaag (TV and radio) about Wikipedia's added value. The ASCL Library has uploaded more than 4,000 images from its (donated) Africa photo collections to Wikimedia Commons.
Western media have never really been interested in the severe environmental damage caused by huge mining projects in Sierra Leone, many of them Western. So why is there suddenly so much attention for the ‘catastrophic Chinese support’ for building a fisheries harbour in Sierra Leone, near the paradisiacal Black Johnson Beach? Read Ton Dietz's latest blog.
André Leliveld has won a grant of 100,000 euros within the Comenius Senior Fellow programme for the project ‘Learning globally, acting locally: co-creation of an international multidisciplinary online learning environment around Frugal Innovation'. André is academic coordinator of the LDE minor 'Frugal Innovation for Sustainable Global Development'.
Starting in Tunisia in December 2010, in the first months of 2011 a wave of protest spread across the Arab world. On the 10th anniversary of the “Arab Spring”, the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier on its history and impact on the African continent. The dossier consists of titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue, complemented by sources available through the broader Leiden University Library collection. The dossier is introduced by Dr Abeer Abazeed. Read the web dossier.
