Democracy In Africa

ON THE MARK: OXFAM'S INSIGHTS INTO THE ARMS TRADE TREATY

Why do you think the international Arms Trade Treaty is so important?
From an ethical perspective, the trade in arms is not the same as the trade in other consumer goods.  Arms are specifically designed to kill, injure, or destroy. As such, the trade in arms needs to have tight controls, because the costs of misuse are counted in lives and livelihoods.  Our report, Africa’s Missing Billions, estimates that conflict costs Africa $18 billion every year, a staggering amount. The best estimate of casualties is that conflict and armed violence kill 2,00 people every day.  An instrument with global reach, legally binding, and comprehensive in its scope and criteria are the key elements of what an effective Arms Trade Treaty would look like. These elements are absolutely critical.
 

Without them, the ATT will not be able to bring the international arms trade under effective regulation, and will not achieve its goal of reducing human harm.
 

Biometric Voter Registration Arrives in Ghana

The use of technology to prevent electoral fraud is becoming increasingly common, with Kenya one of the latest countries to begin piloting the possibility of biometric voting. But is the technology good enough and reliable enough, and can it be made to work effectively in countries with a limited national infrastructure. Here, Kojo Pumpuni Asante, a Senior Research Officer at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, discusses the move towards biometric voting in Ghana.

On 24th March 2012, the Electoral Commission of Ghana (ECG) commenced a process to compile a new voter roll for the upcoming 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections in Ghana. In a departure from the past and following the election trend across the world, the ECG is using biometric technology to capture prints from all 10 fingers of each prospective voter. The exercise will take place in over 23,000 polling stations in Ghana for a period of 40 days.  It will be undertaken by over 50,000 permanent and temporary Electoral Commission staff. The main objective of adopting biometric technology is to eliminate double registration and improve the accuracy of the voter register...

Should the Arab Spring Become a Turkish Summer?

In the wake of the Arab Spring, there has been an avalanche of analysis trying to delineate what its causes were and its consequences should be. Here, Cameron Thibos, a DPhil student at the Oxford Department of International Development, identifies a misleading trend in this analysis.

Ever since Muhammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation on December 17^th, 2010 catalysed the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, the question has been, ‘how best shall the new governments in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt proceed?’ In answer to this, many politicians,commentators, academics and journalists have held up Turkey as an attractive model for the future. To make their case they have variously pointed to Turkey’s functioning democracy, its strong economy, and to the ‘lessons learned’ from the mistakes it has made (and continues to make) in its own maturation process. Turkey may possess all of these attributes, but the reasons why it is being promoted as a possible model are flawed. They rest on political opportunism in a post-9/11 world and on the tired trope that what is true for one Muslim is equally true for another. I argue that the Turkish experience may serve as a valuable source of inspiration and insight for the countries of the Arab Spring, at times counter intuitively, however it makes little sense to suggest Turkey is somehow more appropriate because of its majority religion...

WHY LESS AID GOES TO POOR COUNTRIES THAN YOU WOULD THINK

According to a report by MPs on the International Development Committee of the UK Parliament, too much European Union development aid is going to middle income countries and not enough is going to the world’s poorest people. Does this mean that European governments are pulling the wool over our eyes by claiming to maintain aid levels when in fact they are diverting spending to projects that most of us wouldn’t actually consider to be aid at all? To get the answer to this question, we interviewed he Chair of the Committee, the Rt. Hon Malcolm Bruce.

What is the International Development Committee and what does it do?

The IDC was elected by Parliament to monitor and hold to account the work of the Department for International Development. It consists of 11 members - 5 Conservative, 5 Labour and 1 Liberal Democrat who is the chair elected by the House. It is entirely up to the committee what enquiries it holds and how it organises its terms of reference and appropriate field visits. We average 10 to 12 reports a year.