Ernest Yeboah Acheampong, University of Education African footballers have long been attracted to careers abroad. This is easy to understand considering that many come from backgrounds of poverty and high unemployment rates in countries with repressive governments that mismanage resources. Rural life also poses challenges to aspiring sportspeople, such as a lack of playing grounds and other facilities. These factors tend to hinder football development on the continent. The European football market offers footballers better conditions and socioeconomic benefits. Foreign leagues provide considerably better earnings than what players earn in their domestic leagues. The evolution of the European football market…
Author: Pride Team
Glen Jankowski, Leeds Beckett University As the dating app Tinder turns five, new research shows men who regularly use the app have more body image concerns and lower self-esteem. The research found Tinder users reported lower levels of satisfaction with their faces and higher levels of shame about their bodies. And users were also more likely to view their bodies as sexual objects. This is hardly surprising given that Tinder’s “evaluative factors” have the potential to intensify preexisting cultural beauty ideals. The app’s “swipe right to dismiss” facility, along with the limited number of words a user can write on…
Iwa Salami, University of East London The eight Francophone states that form the West African Economic and Monetary Union have agreed to drop the use of the CFA Franc. Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo will soon start using new currency, the ‘Eco’. The currency is scheduled for launch in June 2020. These eight states are members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a wider regional economic community, which also has a plan to introduce a single currency in 2020. The decision by the francophone countries marks a break with their colonial…
Monica Grady, The Open University Katherine Johnson, who has died at the age of 101, was an amazing woman. But up until a few years ago, hardly anyone had heard of her or her achievements. She was a mathematician and she worked for NASA. But on paper neither of those facts would make her stand out from the crowd. Add a few more facts – she was a woman, she was black and working in the US in the 1950s to early 1960s – and the scale of her success becomes more apparent. Johnson’s story and significant contributions to the…
Richard Gunderman, Indiana University Few topics arouse as much interest and controversy as sex. This is hardly surprising. The biological continuance of the species hinges on it – if human beings stopped having sex, there would soon be no more human beings. Popular culture overflows with sex, from cinema to advertising to, yes, even politics. And for many, sex represents one of the most intimate forms of human connection. Despite its universality, sex and its purpose have been understood very differently by different thinkers. I teach an annual course on sexuality at Indiana University, and this work has provided opportunities…
A report launched in London this week revealed the yawning digital gap between high and low-income Commonwealth countries while offering solutions to tackle the imbalance. Digital divide The report, titled ‘The State of the Digital Economy in the Commonwealth’, shows only 18 per cent of people living in low-income Commonwealth countries have internet access, compared to 85 per cent in high-income countries. In fact, just six members – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Singapore and Malaysia – account for 85 per cent of total online sales to customers, worth US$354 billion in 2015. The same six make up 98.8…
My Dear Daughter, A story is told that when the Baboons and Monkeys heard that the man who used to chase them away from the maize field had died, they hysterically celebrated. The following year, there was no maize. That was when they painfully realized the dead man was the Farmer! So, what are we to glean from this tale? The person you have perceived as hindering you from achieving your set objects may actually be your enabler. Don’t be quick to jump to conclusions. Learn to live with your so-called “enemies” and sometimes the reality is that not all…
There are times when our career journey doesn’t start the way we envision it, but these wrong turns sometimes lead us to the right path and our Woman Crush Wednesday, Tolu Olanipekun, proves this. Starting off her career in Elizade Toyota Nigeria in HR/Admin, she soon realized this was not the field for her, which led her into her successful journey in marketing. According to her, “I moved on to Reckitt Benckiser in January 2011 which was when my marketing journey began. I started off as a Management Trainee and was promoted to Assistant Brand Manager responsible for Durex, Gaviscon…
Evan Thomas, University of Colorado Boulder; Jean De Dieu Ngirabega, Ruli Higher Institute of Health, and Thomas Clasen, Emory University Unsafe drinking water and household air pollution are major causes of illness and death around the world. This is also the case in Rwanda, where most people living in rural areas drink untreated water and burn firewood on open stoves to cook their meals. More than 80% of Rwandans rely on firewood as their primary fuel source. After neonatal disorders, pneumonia and diarrhoeal disease are the two leading killers of children under five years of age in Rwanda. Unsafe drinking…
Jan Fichtner, University of Amsterdam; Eelke Heemskerk, University of Amsterdam, and Johannes Petry, University of Warwick A silent revolution is happening in investing. It is a paradigm shift that will have a profound impact on corporations, countries and pressing issues like climate change. Yet most people are not even aware of it. In a traditional investment fund, the decisions about where to invest the capital of the investors are taken by fund managers. They decide whether to buy shares in firms like Saudi Aramco or Exxon. They decide whether to invest in environmentally harmful businesses like coal. Yet there has…