Institute for African Development
N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba
Professor, African and African Diaspora
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Program
Role
- Faculty
- IAD Core Faculty
- IAD Advisory Council
Contact
Email: n.assie-lumumba@cornell.edu
Phone: 607-255-7839
‘Structural Poverty’ Maps Could Steer Help to World’s Neediest
Chris Barrett, IAD/SEAP
“Rapid advances in data science and machine learning haven’t gained widespread acceptance in the operational community in part because they haven’t generated estimates in a very usable form,” said Chris Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
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Decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa
Ellen Lust in World in Focus
Einaudi Center director Ellen Lust is coeditor of a new open-access book examining how decentralization affects communities in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Particularly during political transitions, citizens are accustomed to the central state playing an outsized role in governance; the state has encouraged their passivity and even ignorance.... For decentralization policies to strengthen democratic governance, all must reconceptualize their relationship with each other and actively participate in governance.”
Policymakers and development practitioners often view decentralization as a path to increased political participation and social welfare. Decentralization, Local Governance, and Inequality in the Middle East and North Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2025) gathers new research on communities in Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia to explore the ways decentralization policies affect citizens’ everyday lives.
Governance processes and outcomes vary significantly, even within countries. Focusing on changes on the ground since the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, this edited volume shows how citizens of the MENA region are experiencing decentralization locally today.
The book's chapters demonstrate the influences of individual factors like gender and education and local contexts—including relationships between central and local actors, how citizens engage in political processes, and whether representatives reflect communities' interests.
The volume offers important insights into governance, participation, and representation in the MENA region and suggests new questions for researchers. Policymakers and development practitioners will find practical directions for program design and implementation.
“We call for close attention to the design of decentralization policies—considering local networks, social structures and institutions, and the resultant power balances, as well as education for citizens and officials alike to understand their rights and responsibilities,” write Lust and coeditor Kristen Kao (University of Gothenburg). “Only by unpacking governance at the local level can we understand how decentralization policies affect citizens’ lives and, ultimately, the welfare and stability of their nation-states and communities.”
The project was supported by the Hicham Alaoui Foundation. The introduction and chapter five are available in Arabic.
Ellen Lust joined the Einaudi Center as director in January. She is Einaudi's John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and a professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and Department of Government (College of Arts and Sciences).
Featured in World in Focus Briefs
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Futures of Lushness: Innovative Efforts to Reimagine Healing as Land Relations in Tanzania
Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025 11:15am 115 Sibley Hall Stacey Langwick, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Cornell
This talk is part of a forthcoming book entitled, Medicines that Feed Us, in which Professor Langwick examines the shifting, multiple relationships between toxicity and remedy in the face of the environmental and health crises shaping the 21stcentury. Broadly, she is interested in how that which counts as “therapeutic” is shifting with the growing acknowledgment that the extractive relations, which fuel contemporary economies and animate modern life, undermine possibilities for ongoing survival. In this seminar, Langwick thinks together with TRMEGA, a small vibrant NGO in northern Tanzania. TRMEGA’s plant(ing) remedies apprehend illness as an effect of long histories of dispossession, slow violence, and social-ecological abandonment. Herbal formulas intervene not only in depleted, suffering bodies but also in the affective and material relations that concretize people’s alienation from the forces of life. TRMEGA draws on traditional medicine, global herbalism, functional foods, agroecology, organic agriculture, and food sovereignty to cultivate forms of care that draw people closer to the soil and to each other. This work suggests a redefinition of the terms of health and healing. Lifestyle diseases are re imagined through what Langwick calls landstyles. Sharing seeds and cuttings, tending to compost, and building communities of multi-species support, are activities that together address the chronic injury and persistent vulnerability that shape the distribution of disease. Through the extension of their gardens, TRMEGA unsettles the boundaries between medicine and agriculture, redefines healing (as) land relations, and conceptualizes health as a quality of lushness in everyday life.
What Does USAID's Demise Mean for Western Allies?
Rachel Beatty Riedl, IAD/Migrations
“Undercutting long-established relationships … weakens America's diplomacy and ability to compete with other global powers,” past Einaudi Center director Rachel Beatty Riedl told CBC News.
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USAID Cuts in Kenya Reveal Risks to Lives and American Influence Worldwide
Rachel Beatty Riedl, IAD
“Undercutting long-established relationships with partner countries around the world weakens America’s diplomacy and ability to compete with other global powers, such as Russia and China, for critical resources, markets, and geostrategic alliances,” says Rachel Beatty Riedl, director of the Center on Global Democracy.
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China’s Belt and Road Could Fill ‘Vacuum’ After Trump’s USAID Freeze: Analysts
Chris Barrett, IAD/SEAP
Chris Barrett, professor of agricultural and development economics, discusses the USAID freeze.
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Africa Needs Climate-Proof Cows
Mario Herrero, IAD
Mario Herrero, professor of global development, discusses creating “sustainable intensification.”
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Swahili Conversation Hour
March 18, 2025
6:00 pm
Stimson Hall, G25
Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.
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Program
Institute for African Development
Collaborative Reforestation in Malawi Supports Ag, Climate Adaptation
Rachel Bezner Kerr, IAD
Malawi is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to extreme weather, and climate change is exacerbating droughts, floods, cyclones and other natural disasters throughout the country. To help impoverished farming communities alleviate some of these impacts, Cornell researchers are collaborating with a network of academics, nongovernmental colleagues and communities in Malawi to strengthen forests.