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Germany

Quote of the Week: Angela Merkel

Sina Odugbemi's picture

"I am regarded as a permanent delayer sometimes, but I think it is essential and extremely important to take people along and really listen to them in political talks.”

- Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and the leader of the Christian Democratic Union(CDU), a German political party, since 2000. She is the first woman to hold either office. Merkel entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989 and was formerly a physical chemist in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
 

Is There Support for International Development?

Anne-Katrin Arnold's picture

Foreign aid has always been a contentious issue – especially when donor countries are in recession or trying to struggle out of one, while (some) formerly developing countries emerge with a stable and growing economy. From the viewpoint of policy makers in donor countries, the issue certainly has two sides: allocating support to the poorest countries in the world or those plagued by hunger and conflict, or stocking up much needed domestic programs for the poor and disadvantaged at home. Pressure from national interest groups is likely to push policy-makers toward domestic programs.

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

One
The Promising Game-Changers in Global Development: Social Innovators

“Turning on a light, warming a house, and using an appliance are activities that most of us take for granted. But in many parts of the developing world, access to electricity is scarce. Enter “sOccket,” a soccer ball that harnesses the kinetic energy of play to generate electricity. When kicked, it creates energy that can be stored and then used later to charge a battery, sterilize water or light a room.

SOccket has received a lot of attention recently – from the likes of Aneesh Chopra, the first White House chief technology officer, to former President Bill Clinton, who called sOccket “quite extraordinary.” The attention isn’t surprising – the invention is clever, it’s creative, it’s relatively cheap, and it takes on one of the biggest challenges in the developing world.”  READ MORE

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Kiwanja
Putting data integrity on the map

"To kick off the discussion around the new guide, we hosted a panel discussion at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, where FrontlineSMS’ Sean McDonald joined Jon Gosier of metaLayer, Development Seed’s Paul Goodman, and Internews Vice President for New Media Kathleen Reen, who moderated the event. This research effort, based on FrontlineSMS user input and research by Kristina Lugo and Carol Waters, focused not on mobile system security, a critical issue better addressed by others, but more on the ways that contextualized program design and implementation can improve data quality and reduce user risk. Above all, we learned through the process, context is key. Understanding the needs and norms of the target population, and the goals of the project itself, is vital in determining the proper tools and approach to designing a FrontlineSMS workflow that can achieve those goals." READ MORE

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

Anne-Katrin Arnold's picture

November 9th is an ambiguous day for Germany. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis killed 400 Jews, arrested about 30,000 more, destroyed over 800 synagogues and thousands of homes and businesses in the Kristallnacht, a pogrom against German and Austrian Jews.

About half a century later, on November 9, 1989, Germans in East and West Berlin stormed the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War, and brought down the Iron Curtain, literally with their own hands. I lived in East Germany when people started going out into the streets, chanting "We are the people" and demanding more freedom from the communist government. In September 1989 the first so called Monday Demonstration brought people out onto the street in Leipzig, first to pray for peace, then to demand freedom. I remember the exhilarating feeling when those demonstrations spread through other cities and drew more and more people until hundreds of thousands of East Germans protested - peacefully, without violence - for their rights.

Media For Ethnic Minorities - Media Segregation?

Anne-Katrin Arnold's picture

Hürriyet, a Turkish newspaper that has a special edition that is published in Germany for the Turkish diasporaWe're using the summer to work hard on putting the finishing touches on our forthcoming publication, Public Sentinel: News Media and Governance Reform, edited by Pippa Norris from the Harvard Kennedy School. In this book, we will discuss the news media's roles as watchdog, agenda setters, and gatekeepers to the public forum. We will present studies and cases from all over the world that show the effect that media can have, but also what constraints can hinder the media in fulfilling these roles. When we started putting this work together, I was struck by how little examples and evidence we could find on the media as public forum, as a platform that gives voice to diverse social groups, even those on the margins of society. Now that I'm proofreading the final chapters, I'm reminded of a study I was once involved in that looked at the media's role for Turkish migrants in Germany - a group that qualifies as marginalized indeed.