Africa

Archived link

Kenya is hosting unprecedented lawsuits against Meta Inc., the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Mercy Mutemi, who made last year’s TIME 100 list, is a Nairobi-based lawyer who is leading the cases. She spends her days thinking about what our consumption of digital products should look like in the next 10 years. Will it be extractive and extortionist, or will it be beneficial? What does it look like from an African perspective?

Question: Behind the legal battle with Meta are workers and their conditions. What challenges do they face in these tech roles, particularly content moderation?

Mercy Mutemi: Content moderators in Kenya face horrendous conditions. They’re often misled about the nature of the work, not warned that the work is going to be dangerous for them. There’s no adequate care provided to look after these workers, and they’re not paid well enough. And they’ve created this ecosystem of fear — it’s almost like this special Stockholm syndrome has been created where you know what you’re going through is really bad, but you’re so afraid of the NDA that you just would rather not speak up.

[...]

Content moderation work, annotation work, and algorithm training, [...] in its very nature involves a lot of exposure to harmful content. That work is dumped on Kenya. Kenya says it’s interested in digital development, but what Kenya ends up getting is work that poses serious risks, rather than meaningful investment in its people or infrastructure.

[...]

When the initial version of ChatGPT was released, it had lots of sexual violence in it. So to clean up an algorithm like that, you just teach it all the worst kinds of sexual violence [...] if you ask ChatGPT to show you the worst rape that could ever happen, there are now metrics in place that tell it not to give out this information because it’s been taught to recognize what it’s being asked for. And that’s thanks to Kenyan youth whose mental health is now toast, and whose life has been compromised completely

[...]

Big Tech is not planting any roots in the country [of Kenya] when it comes to hiring people to moderate content or train algorithms for AI. They’re not really investing in the country in the sense that there’s no actual person to hold liable should anything go south. There’s no registered office in Kenya for companies like Meta, TikTok, OpenAI.

[...]

Instead, what you have are these middlemen. They’re called Business Process Outsourcing, or BPOs [...] It’s almost like they’re agents of big tech companies. So they will do big tech’s bidding. If the big tech says jump, then they jump. So we find ourselves in this situation where these companies purely exist for the cover of escaping liability.

[...]

[The workers'] mental health is destroyed – and there are often no measures in place to protect their well-being or respect them as workers. And then it’s their job to figure out how to get out of that rut because they still are a breadwinner in an African context, and they still have to work, right? And in this community where mental health isn’t the most spoken-about thing, how do you explain to your parents that you can’t work?

[...]

I think when you give people work for a period of time and those people can’t work again because their mental health is destroyed, that doesn’t look like lifting people out of poverty to me. That looks like entrenching the problem further because you’ve destroyed not just one person.

[...]

MM: Let me just be very categorical. My position is not that this work shouldn’t be coming into Kenya. But it can’t be the way it is now, where companies get to say “either you take our work and take it as horrible as it is with no care, and we exploit you to our satisfaction, or we, or we leave.” No. You can have dangerous work done in Kenya, but with appropriate level of care, with respect, and upholding the rights of these workers. It’s going to be a long journey to achieve justice.

[...]

[Edit typo.]

• South African retailers have urged the government to plug tax loopholes that they fear are being used by Chinese e-commerce platform Temu, and Shein, another Chinese online platform,

• Etienne Vlok, a national industrial policy officer for Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union, said the government should consider urgent changes to tax rules on small items to ensure fair competition for local businesses.

• Temu, the online shopping juggernaut backed by China’s PDD Holdings Inc. has offered huge discounts in South Africa since its launch in January. The firm has expanded its global footprint to 49 countries and recently took out ads at the Super Bowl to try and sustain growth among US consumers.

Several African countries depend on China as their main technology provider and sponsor of large digital infrastructural projects.

Under the so-called “EPC+F” (Engineer, Procure, Construct + Fund/Finance) scheme, Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE oversee the engineering, procurement and construction while Chinese banks provide state-backed finance. Angola, Uganda and Zambia are just some of the countries which seem to have benefited from this type of deal.

The Chinese government’s expectation is that mobile applications and startups in Africa will increasingly reflect Beijing’s technological and ideological principles. That includes China’s interpretation of human rights, data privacy and freedom of speech.

Researchers like Arthur Gwagwa from the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University (Netherlands) believe that China’s export of critical infrastructure components will enable military and industrial espionage. These claims assert that Chinese-made equipment is designed in a way that could facilitate cyber attacks.

Human Rights Watch, an international NGO that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, has raised concerns that Chinese infrastructure increases the risk of technology-enabled authoritarianism. In particular, Huawei has been accused of colluding with governments to spy on political opponents in Uganda and Zambia. Huawei has denied the allegations.

In the long term African countries should produce their own infrastructure and become less dependent.

In order to attract investment, Nigeria will offer a range of incentives to investors, including tax waivers for importing mining equipment. Enhanced security measures will also be implemented to ensure the safety of mining operations.

However, the granting of mining licenses will be contingent upon companies presenting a detailed plan outlining how they intend to process minerals locally.

This requirement reflects the government’s commitment to creating jobs and benefiting local communities through value addition activities.

[Edit typo.]

While China has built infrastructure throughout the continent, though China’s promising projects are typically faulty or incomplete, revealing its self-serving goals.

Ethiopia is a prominent example of African countries’ challenges. As Ethiopia lacks the funds to build a seaport in its ally Djibouti. China started investing in Ethiopia and agreed to construct a railroad from Addis Ababa to the Port of Djibouti. China gave Ethiopia a $1.3 billion loan with 3% interest and a 6-year repayment period. The modernization project covered 750 km and cost $4 billion. China’s state-owned EXIM bank, one of the primary lenders for BRI projects, covered 70% of the cost with Ethiopia paying the rest in loan installments.

Because China now owns 32.9% of Ethiopia’s external debt, the African country heavily depends on loans from state-owned banks linked to China’s state-controlled market, and is thus affected by China’s economic health.

As repayment amounts are denominated in China's currency yuan, a weaker currency means inflated repayment costs, straining these indebted countries even more.

The overall economic leverage is primarily attributed to a system of high-interest, high-risk loans, as countries fall into a “debt trap” caused by unsustainable debt that continuously accrues.

China has tried to alleviate concerns by highlighting debt-restructuring agreements with African countries. These agreements aim to help struggling countries repay loans, but they’re vague and don’t adequately help countries overcome the debt trap.

Adding to Ethiopia’s woes are corrupt activities by Chinese companies. To get projects in Ethiopia, these firms have bribed corrupt politicians. When they start constructing in Ethiopia, Chinese companies fail to deliver their promises of high-quality infrastructure. In contrast, as Ethiopia’s debt increases, reports have appeared of faltering infrastructure due to lower quality materials than initially promised.

China has built similar projects in other African countries like Kenya and Zambia, with similar attractive promises, like the Nairobi-Mombasa railway and Mongu-Kalabo highway respectively. All these projects require large loans to often opaque conditions.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10465689

The Irish government will intervene in the case taken by South Africa and argue that restricting food and other essentials in Gaza may constitute genocidal intent, the foreign minister Micheál Martin said on Wednesday.

“We believe there is a case, given how this war has been conducted,” Martin said.

“We will be inviting the court to consider the issue of broadening how you determine whether genocide has taken place or not on the basis of an entire population being collectively punished.”

A clear pattern of behaviour had impeded humanitarian aid, resulting in widespread suffering, he said. “Half the population of Gaza is facing famine and 100% is experiencing food insecurity.”

Investigating Sino-African labour relations at the Karuma hydroelectric dam in Uganda and published recently by Cambridge University Press, researchers Robert Wyrod and Kimberlee Chang urge African countries to introduce stronger worker protections to avoid situations as at Karuma "where [labour] abuse seems systemic".

"Unless African governments take a proactive role in monitoring and enforcing standards in a sector they define as strategic, Chinese state capital operates like any other form of transnational capital," they say.

Their findings suggest that there may be something at work beyond more classic labour conflicts related to pay, benefits and safety. They also stress that the abuse is not simply a language barrier issue.

Dams became some of the most controversial development projects, criticised especially for their environmental damage, displacement of communities, and loss of local livelihoods. Due to such criticisms, by the turn of the millennium the World Bank, along with other Western funders, had reconsidered how dams figured into their development portfolio, essentially retreating from this sector.

This shift in the role of hydroelectric dams in Western development funding coincided with the rise of a new player in global dam construction, particularly China. As part of China's ‘going global’ strategy aimed at finding new international markets for China's state-owned and private companies, China began promoting overseas dam construction, along with other large-scale infrastructure projects.

The researchers focuse on the Karuma Hydropower Project, a 600-megawatt power station on the Nile River in northern Uganda. When completed, the Karuma dam will be the largest in Uganda and one of the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. While Uganda is a relatively small country, it has forged a strong partnership with China in recent years. This has resulted in an outsized range of China funded and/or constructed projects in Uganda.

In the past decade, more than 63,000 deaths of migrants have been recorded by MMP. Notably, more than one in three of those identified come from countries in conflict, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Ethiopia. With that said, more than two-thirds of those whose deaths are documented in the MMP dataset in the last decade have little to no information on their identities, meaning that each one of these tens of thousands of individuals are unidentified.

Tanzania is experiencing a fearful atmosphere caused by strict measures enforced against individuals who oppose the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). The suppression tactics reached an alarming level when Tanzanian police summoned and questioned nine Project-Affected People (PAPs) from EACOP-affected villages for several hours on March 11th.

French multinational oil company Total and the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) are the project’s main proponents and stand to profit the most from the pipeline’s construction. Both Total and CNOOC hold the licenses to extract oil in Uganda.

EACOP leaders, TotalEnergies, and CNOOC are urged to take immediate action to denounce these violations while valuing community rights and environmental preservation above all else, says StopEACOP an umbrella organization of over 260 human rights and environmental protection groups trying to stop the project.

"EACOP threatens to displace thousands of families and farmers from their land and has already disrupted the livelihoods of many, rip through some of the world’s most important elephant, lion and chimpanzee nature reserves, and will fuel climate change by enabling the extraction of oil which will generate over 34 million tons of CO2 emissions every single year," the groups add.

The head of the African Development Bank is calling for an end to loans given in exchange for the continent’s rich supplies of oil or critical minerals used in smartphones and electric car batteries.

“They are just bad, first and foremost, because you can’t price the assets properly,” Akinwumi Adesina said in an interview with The Associated Press in Lagos, Nigeria, last week. “If you have minerals or oil under the ground, how do you come up with a price for a long-term contract? It’s a challenge.”

Linking future revenue from natural resource exports to loan paydowns is often touted as a way for recipients to get financing for infrastructure projects and for lenders to reduce the risk of not getting their money back.

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41586-024-07208-3

DOI for the highseas: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07208-3

Adaptive foraging along dry-season waterholes would have transformed seasonal rivers into ‘blue highway’ corridors, potentially facilitating an out-of-Africa dispersal and suggesting that the event was not restricted to times of humid climates. The behavioural flexibility required to survive seasonally arid conditions in general, and the apparent short-term effects of the Toba supereruption in particular were probably key to the most recent dispersal and subsequent worldwide expansion of modern humans.

In order to contribute to restoring the debt sustainability of the Federal Republic of Somalia, Paris Club creditors committed to cancel USD 1.2 billion in nominal terms under the Enhanced HIPC Initiative framework.

In addition, Paris Club creditors confirmed their willingness to grant additional debt cancellation on a bilateral basis for an amount of USD 815 million.

The Paris Club consensus and the expected additional bilateral efforts would result in a reduction of more than USD 2.0 billion, representing 99% of the debt of the Federal Republic of Somalia owed to Paris Club members as of January 2023.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9754345

The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C. by nongovernmental organization International Right Advocates. It alleged that two mining companies, British company Glencore and Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, supplied cobalt to the companies.

The tech giants who purchased the cobalt were “aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo mines.

In February, Ethiopia’s federal parliament extended the state of emergency in Amhara region, which had been in place since August and affords the government sweeping powers. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that four of the eight journalists in detention as of early 2024 were detained under these emergency powers.

These latest arrests demonstrate that in Ethiopia today, no one is safe from arbitrary arrest and detention. Ethiopia’s long-time partners should condemn the spate of wrongful detentions and challenge the government’s growing intolerance of peaceful dissent.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9595787

Ten years into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, the expansion of corporate investments in the global agri-food system has reached new heights. As evidenced by China’s plans in agriculture, fisheries and e-commerce in Africa and Asia, it is hard to find anything “green” or small-scale about the BRI.

China seems to be caught in a vicious cycle: the more its BRI expands with its large-scale agricultural techno-fixes for the profit of a few large Chinese conglomerates, the more dependent it becomes on food imports, increasingly undermining its own food sovereignty.

[Edit typo.]

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9489915

The 7,600 tonnes of wheat flour donated by Ukraine will be provided to Sudan families, many of whom have fled their homes due to the fighting and are struggling every day to meet their food needs, the UN says.

The shipment was made possible by the German Federal Foreign Office, which covered the entire €15 million operating costs, including the transportation of the wheat from Ukraine to Sudan and the implementation and distribution within the country.

At the end of December, a civil claim was filed against Fresh Del Monte by a group of human rights organisations on behalf of 10 individuals, who alleged they were stabbed, stoned, tortured and raped by the company’s guards.

Del Monte, whose fresh fruit is a global staple, is the largest exporter of Kenyan produce to the world, and one of the East African country’s biggest employers.

It’s important, though, to distinguish the position of the African Union from the position of individual member states. So, while the union itself has been consistent and has always held the line that Palestinian independence was an integral part of the African Union’s foundational documents and foundational position in international relations, various African nations — because there is no impetus from the African Union for there to be always a single position within each country, various African nations do have different relationships with both Israel and Palestine. So, for example, while every single country in Africa except one recognizes the state of Palestine, the recognition of the state of Israel has varied. There was a time after that 1972 war where African nations wholesale declared that they would not recognize the state of Israel, but that has changed considerably.

The statement issued by the U.S. Department of State on 17 February 2024 fundamentally distorts these realities, and stands in puzzling contradiction with the substance and tone of the confidence-building process initiated by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in November 2023, which created a productive framework for de-escalation. Rwanda will seek clarification from the U.S. Government to ascertain whether its statement represents an abrupt shift in policy, or simply a lack of internal coordination.

An Abbey spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper: “The Dean [David Hoyle] and Chapter has decided in principle that it would be appropriate to return the Ethiopian tabot to the Ethiopian Church. We are currently considering the best way to achieve this, and we are in ongoing discussions with representatives of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. This is a complex matter, and it may take some time.”