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Originally published on CGAP Blog: Kenya is widely acknowledged to be a global leader in mobile money. Over two-thirds of its adult population uses M-PESA, the mobile money system launched in 2007 by Safaricom. But even in Kenya, many are not using M-PESA. I know many smallholder farmers who are part of this group. They […]
June 23, 2014
Originally published by the Financial Access Initiative at NYU, and co-authored with Mike Warmington, microfinance partnerships manager at One Acre Fund: The majority of the world’s poor share one profession: farming. Most of these farmers cultivate less than 10 acres of land, far away from paved roads and with limited access to the improved seed and […]
January 29, 2014
Originally published on the Brookings Africa in Focus blog, and co-authored with Laurence Dare, East Africa policy manager at One Acre Fund: The majority of people in Africa are engaged in the same profession: farming. Most of these individuals are small-holder farmers with fewer than 5 acres of land and little access to seed, fertilizer, […]
July 26, 2010
Originally published on The New Security Beat: Driving from Kigali into rural Rwanda, the hills that flank either side of the paved road are covered with bananas, maize, coffee, and beans under cultivation. Most Rwandans are farmers, using any bit of available land to feed their families and generate income. In this country—the most densely […]
August 7, 2009
Originally published in Cato Unbound: In season three of The Wire, the HBO series on drugs and politics in Baltimore, Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin finds a way to decrease crime in his district and “clean up the corners.” His solution? A “free zone” of abandoned rowhouses where he tells neighborhood drug dealers they can peddle […]
April 25, 2008
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times: MOST Americans have heard of Darfur. Some know that it’s in western Sudan, that the U. S. has called the crisis there a genocide, and that the United Nations has authorized a peacekeeping force. Yet few understand the roots of the conflict, what is happening on the ground, […]
October 1, 2006
Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle: It is 1956 in Sierra Leone. Serah, a teenager, volunteers to serve as an officer at a polling station during the presidential election. With an hour left to go, only “two votes lay in the cavern of the ballot box, like visitors in an empty church.” She decides […]
September 24, 2006
Originally published in Newsday: In The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day, one of the stories in Haruki Murakami’s new collection, Junpei, a short-story writer, falls in love with an older woman named Kirie. She seems to reciprocate, but one day he calls her and her phone has been disconnected. Thus far, this is familiar […]
Stephanie Hanson 
June 26, 2014
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