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Ebola and the power of film: How my students and I saved lives by making movies

By: Divine Anderson, as told to Julia Belluz. This article was originally published by Vox. Divine Anderson runs Liberia's first and only film school, the Liberia Film Institute. The 37-year-old started making movies in 1996 and has stuck to the medium because he thinks it's the best way to reach his fellow Liberians, many of whom can't read. When the Ebola outbreak was peaking last fall, he turned his attention to creating public-health awareness films that he spread through a mobile cinema — essentially a motorcycle retrofitted with a cart that carried him, his students, and a TV. We talked [...]

2015-03-10T00:00:00+00:0010th March 2015|

What Liberia Can Teach The U.S. About Quarantines

By: Jina Moore, BuzzFeed News World Correspondent. This blog post was originally published by BuzzFeed News. They don’t really work. And there are much better, more proven ways to fight Ebola. On a Tuesday evening in late August, Thomas Tweh was part of a team pleading with the Liberian government not to lock down his community. The government was planning to quarantine West Point, an informal neighborhood where Ebola cases were on the rise, and an angry crowd had overrun a newly opened transit center for suspected patients. Tweh and the 20 others negotiating with the government didn’t dispute the need for [...]

2014-10-30T00:00:00+00:0030th October 2014|

Can We Kick out Corruption From the World Cup and Beyond?

By: Blair Glencorse and Seren Fryatt, Executive Director of L.A.C.E.S. This blog post was originally published by HuffPost Impact. Excitement for the Word Cup in Brazil is building, but the tournament has got off to a bad start even before the first ball has been kicked. Stadiums, airports and roads are still not finished, with just a day to go until the opening ceremony; and over10,000 of Brazil’s poorest people marched in Sao Paulo recently in protest against the cost of the event when so many Brazilians live in poverty. At the heart of these problems for football’s biggest tournament is corruption [...]

2014-06-11T00:00:00+00:0011th June 2014|

Design Thinking for Accountability

By: Blair Glencorse. This article was originally published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. A new community justice system in Liberia emerges from a design-thinking approach. Last year, in the West Point township of Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, an enterprising community leader named Thomas Tweh found himself with a serious problem. West Point crams more than 75,000 citizens into a square mile patch of land by the Atlantic Ocean—and life is very hard. Space is limited, incomes are low, formal jobs are few, and basic services are almost non-existent. The issue Tweh faced was central to the causes [...]

2014-04-28T00:00:00+00:0028th April 2014|

Battle hymns

By: G.P. | ABUJA. This article was originally published by The Economist.Protest music in Liberia GIRLS in tight skirts and bright tops hold bottles of beer as they weave their way down the sandy lane towards Bernard’s Beach in Monrovia, Liberia's capital. A throng of young Liberians have gathered at one of the year’s biggest parties and most revellers are celebrating the growing popularity of Hip Co, a musical movement in the long-troubled West African country. The beach stage is propped up against a skeletal building, a memory of more than a decade of civil war. The performers face out to [...]

2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:0014th January 2014|

Accountability in Liberia: How the music industry is creating change

By: Blair Glencorse, Executive Director of the Accountability Lab and Nora Rahimian, an organiser who uses the power of music to effect change. This blog post was originally published by the ONE Campaign. “If we don’t speak up against the ills in society, who will?” asks Takun J, Liberia’s Hip Co King, in front of thousands of screaming fans at a concert in Monrovia. He then launches into “Police Man” a song about police corruption, which several years ago had the artist arrested and beaten by the authorities. Hip Co – which emerged in the 1980s – blends hip hop with Liberian English.  Born in the [...]

2014-01-07T00:00:00+00:007th January 2014|

Innovating in Development Through Accountapreneurship

By: Blair Glencorse. This article was originally published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. How one organization is combining the best elements of accountability and entrepreneurship to redefine development paradigms of the past. The Hyatt Hotel in Kathmandu is a serene place, with beautiful Newari architecture, lush gardens, and impeccable service. It is also about as far removed as possible in Nepal from the real lives led by ordinary Nepali citizens—an executive suite can cost $800 a night while the average Nepali earns just over $600 a year. As I sat in one of the hotel’s magnificent conference rooms several [...]

2013-12-17T00:00:00+00:0017th December 2013|

Putting local justice first in Liberia

By: Blair Glencorse and Anne Sophie Lambert. This blog post was originally published by the Local First Blog. For many Liberians living in the low-income, high-density neighborhoods of Monrovia, life is a daily struggle. Land disputes, drug problems, domestic abuse, and a lack of basic services, among other issues, are pervasive. When citizens face legal challenges, the lack of legitimacy, affordability, accessibility and timeliness of the formal justice system often prevents any feasible recourse. Extensive bureaucratic red tape coupled with transportation and legal costs, lawyer fees, and opportunity costs of foregone work make the justice system not only physically but [...]

2013-11-14T00:00:00+00:0014th November 2013|
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