IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Fiber masks from Boni village (Burkina Faso) perform in the Regional Stadium of Dedougou. Music is essential, played with traditional African nstruments, accompanies very ritual and ceremony.

  • Happy St. Patrick’s day, how about some qualitative macroeconomic research explaining Irish attitudes towards austerity? (Summary: early on, the Irish public was surprisingly accepting of austerity measures, which may come down to an Irish Catholic moral principle of “you should reap what you sow” but that’s changed recently with a water tax that’s seen as unfair.)
  • An AP investigative report concludes a flashy San Fransisco company contracted by the Sierra Leone government and WHO to work on the Ebola response completely bungled it, with errors in testing and confusion in its facilities.
  • Some beautiful photos (including the one above) from the FESTIMA festival held in Burkina Faso, celebrating masks from six West African countries.
  • A paper (PDF) suggests that urbanization of African populations has driven a quiet revolution in the agricultural supply chain. Senegalese prepackaged ready to cook meals which started out for the Dakar market can now be found in stores in the US and France.
  • Via Kim Yi Dionne, drones are being tested for delivering HIV blood test samples in Malawi, where road travel is difficult and a diagnosis takes an average of 11 days. (Meanwhile, USAID funded go-pro equipped vultures in Lima, and London is using Pigeons with tiny sensor backpacks for pollution awareness).
  • The creator of one of the most sampled beats in all of hip-hop is a political scientist (10:15 into the video, and more on him here) h/t Jad Abumrad.
  • Korea really wants a Nobel Prize for literature and is trying to industrialize literature production the way it has electronics.

For your next paper, consider a trailer (h/t Catherine Rampell).

Also, from the paper, they apparently didn’t get the grant:

Papernote

 

 

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