By Madiha Hussain, junior researchers at ZEF During the COVID-19 pandemic, political priorities have been shifted immensely in Germany. The situation offers a good opportunity to explore how the post-pandemic political participation could look like during elections. Moreover, the case of elections 2020 highlights the future of democracy, where politicians and citizens cannot have direct…
Looking back a bit… The “Waterfront Metropolis Abidjan” project [see project website here] ended in November 2019 after 24 months of intensive research. Thinking about the economic capital of the Côte d´Ivoire and the relevance of informal urbanization have continued, though. My book manuscript on Abidjan has advanced, but is not ready for publishing yet….
Do you know how much am I fond of the Wright brothers ?? So much that I could spend the whole night talking about the endless documentaries, books and articles I read about them. The Wright brothers were nothing but genius entrepreneurs who where way ahead of their time. They began their experimentation in flight…
Blog post by Dennis Avilés-Irahola, Tina Beuchelt, Christine Schmitt, Sarah Nischalke, Eva Youkhana and Franziska Geiger. The authors are members of the Gender Group at ZEF. One would not have expected a vicious virus causing a respiratory disease to discriminate in its life-threatening passage. Yet, according to conventional wisdom, inequalities are revealed when disaster or…
Blog post by Katelene Delgado*) When you think of the uninhabited Islands of Cape Verde, you probably immediately imagine large sandy beaches, blue sea and sun. However, the Raso and Branco Islets, both belonging to Cape Verde, look a bit different. There is an even greater treasure in these islets: the Cape Verde giant gecko…
Photos by Jorge Alberto Torres Castillo A couple of weeks ago, I finally landed in my home country, Honduras. I had spent 18 months as a doctoral researcher at ZEF, Bonn, Germany including two North Rhine-Westphalia winters in a row away from my tropical homeland. Like many others that choose to leave for better opportunities,…
Kenyan coffee is world-famous for its good quality. The major coffee-growing regions are located around Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Range, where the soil and altitude provide the best conditions for growing premium coffee. Kenyan coffee is one of the main contributors to the country’s foreign exchange earnings after tea and horticulture, and around 75%…
Setting off to southern Malawi The sun scorched us mercilessly as we got out of the Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series. The water that we had just bought from the nearest town 30 kilometers away was as hot as our morning coffee. It was an October morning in Nsanje, the most southern located district of…
ماضٍ فيَّ حُكمُك عَدْلٌ فيَّ قضاؤُك “I was able to push from within, I had an innate desire to succeed.” Joan Benoit A bit before I was born and on February 1984, astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart were the two men ever to walk untethered in space for the first time. Six…
