Exploring ways to get fish on the table in Bolivia. People in Bolivia don’t eat much fish — among South American nations it has the lowest per-capita consumption — despite having a large number of lakes and rivers. But local, sustainably sourced fish could be a good source of protein and help reduce food insecurity, […]
international development
Defusing the rumour mill, digitally
The text-messaging technology that’s helping quash misinformation and save lives in Kenya. In southeastern Kenya’s remote Tana River Delta, bad information can be deadly. For six months starting in the summer of 2012, violent clashes between two of the region’s main ethnic groups, Pokomo farmers and Orma herders, killed about 170 people and displaced as […]
Fighting malaria in Northern Peru
When large-scale irrigation came to Peru’s north coast in the 1960s and 1970s it brought with it an explosion in agriculture, in particular rice cultivation. But it also brought a new disease to the area — malaria. “The north coast is a semi-arid area, the only reason there is malaria there is because of irrigation,” […]
Questions raised about whether compulsory licenses get best prices
The use of so-called ‘compulsory licenses’ by developing countries to obtain cheaper drugs for HIV and AIDS by circumventing patents has not been the best strategy for achieving the lowest prices over the past decade, a new study claims. Instead, the best prices were often obtained by countries that procured their drugs through voluntary negotiations, […]
UK foreign aid turns to research
£375 million from development budget will be redirected to science partnerships with middle-income economies. The United Kingdom has launched a five-year, £375 million (US$630 million) fund to support science and innovation partnerships with researchers in developing countries that will focus on economic development. Read more in Nature.
What can ‘frugal innovation’ do for development?
Last summer, Jessica VanderGiessen did something unusual. The bioengineering student from Santa Clara University in California, United States, spent two days travelling the rough dirt roads of West Bengal state in India, testing the drinking water in rural villages for arsenic contamination. But instead of taking water samples back to a distant lab for analysis, VanderGiessen simply put […]
AuthorAID to add online courses for social scientists
AuthorAID, a network that helps scientists in developing countries publish and communicate their work, is seeking partners to help develop courses specific to social sciences. These would be online courses, following the success of the recent move to do more courses online instead of face-to-face — expanding the initiative’s reach while reducing costs. “We want to […]
Low-tech data access is still needed
Here at the World Social Science Forum 2013 in Montreal, Canada, scientists are still calling for innovative, low-tech methods that will enable people in developing nations to capitalise on data. In recent years there has been a surge in the amount of linked data: networks of connected data sets that can be combined to create powerful repositories of knowledge. […]
Researchers get down with the kids
Kids in Sub-Saharan Africa are getting involved in social sciences — and not just as the subjects of research. A project led by Gina Porter, an anthropologist from Durham University in the United Kingdom, is using ‘child researchers’ to help academics study how mobile phone technologies are changing the way young people travel and interact. Read more in SciDev.Net.
Canada’s CIDA reform could aid innovation work
Innovation and technology development could be boosted by the controversial merger of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) with the country’s foreign affairs department, according to the head of a group that represents Canadian NGOs. But CIDA should be careful not to neglect development at the expense of foreign affairs and trade interests through the new arrangement, says Julia Sánchez, […]