Featured series 
Tag: Africa
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Campus & Community
Committee on African Studies awards 51 summer travel grants
Through its Africa Initiative, the Harvard Committee on African Studies has awarded 51 grants to Harvard students for travel to sub-Saharan Africa during the summer of 2009. The grants fund internships, language study, senior thesis research, master’s thesis research, and doctoral dissertation research. Twenty-four undergraduates and 27 graduate students were awarded grants, the largest number…
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Campus & Community
Nick Rizzo ’09: Have compassion, will travel
Nick Rizzo ’09 has been certain since the second grade that crimson is his color. The young sports fan from Kingston, Mass., used to travel to Boston with his father to cheer for Harvard in the annual Beanpot hockey tournament. When it came time for college applications, there was no question: early action to Harvard.
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Nation & World
Talking terror
The two men sit close, knees almost touching, in a mud-walled hut in the Congolese village of Katokota.
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Nation & World
Looking horror in the face
Imani was just 15 when soldiers from the rebel group Interahamwe found her on the road in a remote region in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
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Nation & World
Simulating chaos to teach order
A troubled piece of Africa came to North Andover, Mass., last weekend (April 24-26) as more than 50 students from a collaborative, three-university humanitarian program took part in a hands-on outdoor field course that simulated an emergency on the border between Chad and Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.
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Nation & World
Eastern Congo nexus for many conflicts
Unrest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) eastern border region stems both from what the nation has and from what it lacks.
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Nation & World
Michael VanRooyen: Rebuilding places that peace abandoned
“When they put the gun in my mouth, I decided it wasn’t so ridiculous after all.”
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Nation & World
Jocelyn Kelly: Seeking the whole picture of Congo violence
Jocelyn Kelly stood alone at the airport in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, wondering whether anyone would meet her.
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Nation & World
Congo: Panzi-HHI partnership
Harvard’s partnership with a Congolese hospital seeks to understand the causes of the violence against women that hangs like a toxic cloud over a huge swath of this enormous country in Africa’s midsection.
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Nation & World
Semester’s series ends with daylong panels
Sixty years ago this month, the United Nations released to a war-shocked world the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a catalog of norms understood to apply to all human beings.
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Health
Dybul urges partnering with governments, communities to fight AIDS
In honor of World AIDS Day (Dec. 1), Ambassador Mark Dybul, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator who is leading the implementation of the $48 billion President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), spoke Dec. 4 in Sever Hall.
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Health
Rights, AIDS, past and future
Sixty years after the United Nations declared health care a basic human right, the AIDS epidemic highlights how much work remains to be done as the disease rages on among populations with little access to quality care.
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Science & Tech
Students looking to light African night
Some current and former Harvard students have joined forces in an effort to apply new technology to an old problem: how to light Africa’s rural areas far from modern power supplies.
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Health
Early success highlights need for more progress
Many of the 500,000 African babies born infected with HIV each year won’t live past age 2, a fact made even more appalling by the fact that doctors know how to halt mother-to-child HIV transmission.
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Nation & World
Nigerian lawyer is a champion of women
In 2002, a young Nigerian woman by the name of Amina Lawal — pregnant and unmarried — was tried for adultery under Shariah, Islam’s traditional law. She was sentenced to be stoned to death, a fate that briefly riveted the attention of media worldwide.
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Nation & World
Images of terror through the eyes of children
Basma was 8 when Janjaweed fighters on horseback swept into her village in the Darfur region of Sudan. Above them, helicopter gunships joined in the attack.
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Arts & Culture
Achebe celebrates African literature with poetry
Chinua Achebe, the esteemed Nigerian novelist and poet, delivered this year’s Distinguished African Studies Lecture at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Greeting the standing-room-only crowd in Tsai Auditorium earlier this week (Nov. 17), Achebe surprised the group by announcing that he had an unusual program in mind.
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Nation & World
Rights champion Goldstone speaks
In human rights terms, Richard J. Goldstone, the 70-year-old veteran of South Africa’s highest courts and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, has walked the walk and talked the talk — chiefly by having a role in a number of this generation’s most important humanitarian events.
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Nation & World
Post-colonial wars parsed at Radcliffe
Last week, a two-day interdisciplinary conference on post-colonial wars got under way at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Oct. 30-31 event was the capstone of two years of private meetings at Radcliffe by high-level experts on the wars that followed independence movements in Africa and Asia after World War II.
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Campus & Community
HSPH expands HIV/AIDS work in Tanzania
Nearly 150 years ago, the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam was known by another name — Mzizima, meaning “healthy town” in the local language. But over the decades, the city and the country of Tanzania have experienced mounting challenges to that health.
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Campus & Community
Du Bois Institute announces new fellows
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced the appointment of 18 new institute fellows for the 2008-09 academic year.
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Nation & World
Attacking the ties that bind poverty, illness
Jim Yong Kim remembers the drive home from the airport with his father, a dentist in the small Iowa city where Kim was raised. His dad asked Kim, who was on a break from Brown University, what he’d decided to study.
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Nation & World
A pandemic’s front lines
Jim Yong Kim walked out of the small cinder block room where an underweight boy of 5 lay, his heart rate down to 115 from the dangerous 150 beats per minute at which it had been racing moments earlier. Kim stripped rubber gloves from his hands. “That was incredibly gutsy,” he said flatly…
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Nation & World
Nasredeen Abdulbari: ‘Lawyers are the cement of society.’
Nasredeen Abdulbari identifies no particular “aha!” moment when he knew what his life’s work would be.
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Nation & World
South Africa: Edendale Hospital
On a hill in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province, near the hall where Nelson Mandela delivered his last speech before prison and the station where Mahatma Gandhi was tossed off a train to begin his life’s work, stands Edendale Hospital.
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Nation & World
Surgeon describes horrors that ensue when rape is a ‘weapon of war’
Denis Mukwege, a recent visitor to Harvard, is slow-spoken, weary, and grave. And well he might be. For nearly a decade, Mukwege has been doctor to thousands of women raped in the course of a long civil war in south central Africa — in effect, that continent’s World War II — which has so far…
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Nation & World
Zoellick wants to ‘retool’ the World Bank
World Bank President Robert Zoellick reiterated his call to retool the organization to better meet the new set of development challenges across the globe during a discussion Thursday night (April 3) at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Arts & Culture
Conference brings out pacific potential of African hip-hop
Harvard and hip-hop. One is the famous university, the other the music style marked by rapping, rhyming, and a synthetic backbeat. Both begin with the letter “h.” Nothing else in common, right? Wrong. Harvard last week (March 13-15) hosted a three-day conference on African hip-hop, a musical style that experts say not only makes audiences…