The roughly 2.5 billion people in the world who live on less than $2 a day are not destined to remain in a state of chronic poverty. Every few years, somewhere between ten and 30 percent of the world’s poorest households manage to escape poverty, typically by finding steady employment or through entrepreneurial activities such as growing a business or improving agricultural harvests. 

The Ugandan president committed to meeting with American “experts” on homosexuality to try to change his mind about the Anti-Homosexuality Act signed into law last month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday during a forum at the State Department moderated by BuzzFeed.

Gambia will drop English as an official language soon because it is a colonial relic, President Yahya Jammeh has said, without indicating which language the tiny West African country would use in its place. "We no longer believe that for you to be a government you should speak a foreign language. We are going to speak our own language," Jammeh said in an address in English last week that was broadcast on Tuesday. 

It is just after 8am and Sheikh Abu Abdullahi is busy inspecting what he refers to as his latest "anti-NGO" project: workers digging new canals in Bulo Mareer, a town in Somalia's Lower Shabelle province. The diggers have been at work since 6am, as part of a province-wide canal-building project that was launched about two and a half years ago.

In honor of International Women’s Day, the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center asked a diverse group of experts from business, politics, media, and civil society to contribute to its third annual report on women’s status in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The publication, “MENA Women: Opportunities and Obstacles in 2014,” includes entries from forty-three women across twenty countries in the region and beyond, offering a broad and timely set of perspectives on the future of women in the Arab world.

In most African countries, if you send an email across town it makes a long and circuitous journey to North America or Europe or even Japan before arriving in the inbox of the intended recipient. That costs money in international connection charges and also results in a myriad of latency issues.

The choice of the topic is itself germane. In today’s turbulent world, diplomacy means that a country must take steps to achieve political goals and to promote its image in the international arena. It is becoming old fashioned for any country to rely solely on military and economic means in its relationship with other countries of the world. Countries interact with each other through diplomatic channels.

It had been years since a crowd this big gathered for an event like this. Hundreds filled Khartoum International Community School's amphitheatre, a posh school for children of the city's elite, some even crammed on its stairways. A white screen slowly descended and after short introductions, a film began rolling.