The issues discussed in this blog are ongoing. What is written here is a snapshot of the situation, but the developing world is always, well, developing. These issues don’t disappear when we stop talking about them. 

So, as this will be the last blog post of the semester, I thought it would be fitting to revisit some of the issues discussed in the previous months to see how they have developed in the time since.

This past week, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda announced that it is increasing pressure on Paris to reveal the actions of their embassy during the 1994 African genocide.

People talk a lot about the development ‘puzzle’ in reducing global poverty. The analogy refers to the fact that there are lots of different pieces necessary to building economies in the developing world. These pieces may be anything from the support of good governance to the distribution of malaria nets. For a while, it had been hoped that official development aid – loans or grants from rich countries to poor ones – could fund all these various puzzle pieces. However, decades of development aid have produced surprisingly small effects, and it is becoming clear that this aid on its own is not working.

Jean Paul Sarte once famously said, “When the rich make war, it’s the poor who die.” And it’s true, to an extent. From the beginning of history to our modern conflicts, war has been declared and organized by people with power – and fought by those without.

Paul Kagame is one of the West’s favorite African leaders. The current president of Rwanda, he was the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front when it ended the genocide in 1994. He has ruled over the reconciliation of as fractured a country as there ever has been, prevented the nation from falling into a prolonged civil war that once appeared inevitable, and has enjoyed robust economic growth for the last decade and a half.

Sweatshops are pretty easy to hate. They are crammed full of oppressed impoverished people working twelve, or fourteen hours a day in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. They get paid a dollar a day, and have no workplace representation. It’s dangerous, unhealthy, and exploitative.

Yesterday, I made a loan to Ephraim, a man running a hotel/restaurant in Ntungamo, a small town in Uganda where I spent a few weeks last July. He’ll be using my money, along with the contributions of a number of other westerners, to offset the impact of recent high food prices on his business.

In Malawi, a boy named William Kamkwamba powers his village by hooking a windmill that he built up to a generator. In Ethiopia, a woman named Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu runs a business making “SoleRebel” shoes, an answer to Nike and Adidas that produces zero emissions.

Hosting the Olympics is no easy feat. It requires the infrastructure to stage one of the world’s greatest events, and the ability to host, protect, and entertain the masses of athletes and fans that descend upon the city in the days preceding the Opening Ceremonies.