Different oppressed groups in South Africa, having been promised for years that great things will happen to them during the World Cup, are now waking up to the fact that 30 days before kickoff their lives are unlikely to improve.

Those who work as taxi drivers, hawkers, and vendors have recently been displaced from their places of work amidst the different cities’ last minute frenzies to shut down entire streets in order to create tourist-friendly walkways. They say they are realizing with a shock that the World Cup will not only fail to bring the promised positive change, but that it has made their lives demonstrably worse.

Today, central and southern Somalia are being ravaged by one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Since US-backed Ethiopian troops invaded the country in late 2006, shattering months of peace and stability, the conflict has left more than 1 million people internally displaced and 3.5 million on the brink of starvation. Although armed resistance forced the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces in early 2009, Somalia still finds itself contending with the turmoil unleashed by this most recent foreign intervention. 

Touted as the solution to women’s poverty, microfinance is anything but. Often it is a trap where vulnerable women become mired and indebted in an economic system in which they cannot compete. Former “development” worker Maria Diarra of Mali talks here about the problems of microfinance and offers alternative solutions.

The thing that makes me scared is micro-credit. People think that cash is the only way to get out of poverty, and the only place to get cash is micro-credit because the bankers only give to the rich. When the micro-credit industry first came to Mali, the programs spoke of fighting poverty, but that’s not what they’re doing.

The introduction of mobile phones in Africa over the past decade has transformed people’s lives.  Unlike in the West, where there was already an existing network of communication through landlines, mobile phones in Africa provide communication where previously there was none.   What makes the mobile phone such a dynamic tool for supporting social change is its sheer range of actual and potential functionality, making it an extremely versatile technology.