News & Events

Establishing a university specialised in the Nile affairs from an interdisciplinary perspective; Creating basin-wide legislations on the environment; Launching a sustainable farming catalogue and forming a basin cooperative for small farmers. These are just some of the future strategies that were developed during the workshop on water and land acquisition in the riparian countries of the Nile, that took place on 20-21 February. 

Just before the corona crisis, the ASCL Library acquired a number of books from CERDOTOLA (International Centre for research and documentation on African traditions and languages), based in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Volume 2 of the Atlas linguistique du Cameroun is a bibliography on Cameroonian languages that includes references to works of different disciplines. And in the collective work The Grassfields of Cameroon researchers examine the construction of the identity or maybe identities of this region. Read the latest Library Highlight!

Spouses in Eastern Province, Zambia, are willing to compromise household-level earnings in order to maintain individual control over money. Wives, but not husbands, are more likely to compromise household-level earnings in order to maintain individual control over money, when they can keep that money and their actions hidden from their spouses. These are some of the preliminary findings of the project 'Financial decision-making, gender and social norms in Zambia' by Prof. Marleen Dekker and others.

Ton Dietz, former director of the ASCL and Platform Member of INCLUDE, wrote a blog about an interesting article in the Financial Times. ‘Only victory in Africa can end the pandemic everywhere’ it is called, and its subtitle: ‘World leaders call for an urgent debt moratorium and unprecedented health and economic aid packages’. Dietz is especially surprised about the European (e.g. Dutch PM Mark Rutte) and African leaders that signed it. Read his blog post!

On the occasion of the Africa 2020 year, the ASCL has created Infosheets about the countries that became independent in 1960. Of the seventeen colonies gaining independence in that year, Madagascar was the fourth one: on June 26th. Madagascar had been a French colony from the 1890s.