Episode 8
Featuring Koffi Kouakou
Open source episodePart two of a North-South dialogue with Koffi Kouakou examines critical minerals, China's role, Western assumptions, and whether Africa can turn resource demand into leverage rather than another extraction cycle.
Koffi Kouakou and Michael Brown discuss Africa's youth surge, technology, and the competing paths toward transformation or instability.
Michael Brown concludes a three-part North-South dialogue with longtime colleague Koffi Kouakou on African realities, American assumptions, and the China factor. They examine Africa's youth surge, technology adoption, political risk, and the race between transformation and instability.
Read episode pageSource episodeA North-South dialogue on Africa's future, outside assumptions, China, and the limits of single-story narratives.
Michael Brown sits down with longtime colleague Koffi Kouakou for a North-South dialogue on African realities, American assumptions, and the China factor. They challenge single-story narratives about Africa and look at what outside observers routinely miss.
Read episode pageSource episodeIs foreign aid charity — or one of the cheapest instruments of power a country has? Dr.
Is foreign aid charity — or one of the cheapest instruments of power a country has?
Dr. Samantha Nutt, physician and founder of War Child, has spent thirty years working in Somalia, Sudan, eastern Congo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Michael Brown has spent fifty on land and natural resource governance in many of the same places. In this conversation they take on the questions the aid debate usually avoids:
— Should NGOs be working themselves out of a job — and why is it still so rarely national staff running them? — Being at the table isn't enough. Why local communities need leverage, and what happens to their voice without it — Is civil society making progress anywhere at war? — The resource curse, and whether the US–China competition over Congo's minerals changes anything for Congolese people — Aid as soft and hard power: something to fight, or something to accept? — Why gutting USAID isn't charity withdrawn — and what it has to do with the next pandemic — Can the current cynicism about foreign aid be overcome — and what's actually in everyone's best interest?
The Unpopular View challenges assumptions and takes positions many in the aid and development world don't like. Host Michael Brown is the author of Redeeming REDD+ and Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South.
Dr. Samantha Nutt is the author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid.
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