Mobile technology: moving past the gatekeepers by Gavin Davis Opposition parties in Africa have struggled for decades in a media environment that favours incumbents. Of 54 African countries measured in the Freedom House 2012 press freedom index, only five were considered to be “free”. Press censorship and pliant public broadcasters mean that elections can be fixed before the first vote is counted. State control of the media is not the only hurdle preventing parties from getting their message to the electorate. Many face the invidious choice of either giving journalists “petrol money” or having their press conference ignored. “It’s a…
Gavin Davis
South Africa: beyond the doom and gloom by Gavin Davis In the early 1950s, South Africa’s minister of native affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, said: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu [black] child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” Such deep-seated prejudice drove the apartheid policy that denied black children the same standard of education as white pupils. Today the legacy of Bantu education continues to haunt policymakers tasked with providing a decent education to children whose parents were denied it in the past. Despite spending a fifth of its national budget on education (and dispropor- tionately more…
