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|

nepal and liberia: diverse contexts, shared lessons

By: Blair Glencorse. This article was originally published in Beed Life magazine. In June 2007, I took a trip to Nepalgunj to meet representatives of the Madhesi community. I wanted to try and understand more about political dynamics in the Tarai. While sipping chia, the groups I chatted with explained vociferously, often for hours at a time, the difficulties they faced on a daily basis, which ranged from issues of exclusion, to poverty, to inequality. I have two enduring memories of that visit. First, Nepalgunj is very, very hot. Second, it was driven home to me that societies cannot function [...]

2013-09-20T00:00:00+00:0020th September 2013|

Testing new tools for accountability in higher education

By: Blair Glencorse. This article was originally published in Transparency International's 2013 Global Corruption Report: Education (Section 4.14). The international community has rarely engaged coherently on issues of corruption within higher education, focusing instead on issues such as building teachers’ capacity, infrastructure development and programmes to increase access. The learning to be garnered from testing new accountability approaches therefore has important implications for the future of universities and colleges. Higher education in what are called ‘fragile states’ suffers from a host of issues that manifest themselves in different forms – from a lack of strategies and plans, to absent regulations [...]

2013-04-12T00:00:00+00:0012th April 2013|

Emerging Voices: Glencorse on Higher Education in Liberia

This blog post was originally published on the Council on Foreign Relations' Development Channel. Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Blair Glencorse, Founder and Executive Director of the Accountability Lab. He analyzes the challenges of integrity and accountability in Liberia’s colleges and universities, arguing that failures in higher education threaten the country’s progress toward peace and development. You can follow Glencorse on his blog and on Twitter at @blairglencorse. Under the leadership of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia and its international partners have focused on several [...]

2012-08-20T00:00:00+00:0020th August 2012|
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