Tag Archives: Featured

In Nigeria, Why Isn’t Broadband Everywhere?

Ibadan, Nigeria, Bolaji Adeniyi holds court in a tie-dyed T-shirt. “In Nigeria we see farms as father’s work,” he says. Adeniyi’s father taught him to farm with a hoe and a machete, which he calls a cutlass. These days, he says, farming in Nigeria can look quite different, depending on whether the farmer has access to the Internet or not.

Not far away, farmers are using drones to map their plots and calculate their fertilizer inputs. Elsewhere, farmers can swipe through security camera footage of their fields on their mobile phones. That saves them from having to patrol the farm’s perimeter and potentially dangerous confrontations with thieves. To be able to do those things, Adeniyi notes, the farmers need broadband access, at least some of the time. “Reliable broadband in Atan would attract international cocoa dealers and enable access to agricultural extension agents, which would aid farmers,” he says.

Adeniyi has a degree in sociology and in addition to growing cocoa trees, works as a criminologist and statistician. When he’s in Ibadan, a city of 4 million that’s southeast of Atan, he uses a laptop and has good enough Internet. But at his farm in Atan, he carries a candy-bar mobile phone and must trek to one of a few spots around the settlement if he wants better odds of getting a signal. “At times,” Adeniyi says, “it’s like wind bringing the signal.”

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Investigation: One small step for a few, one giant leap for the rest: how to become a European citizen

This is the first of a three-part investigation I co-reported and co-wrote with María Álvarez del Vayo, Ter Garcia, Carmen Torrecillas, and Adrián Maqueda of Civio with help from some EDJNet partners. Part 2, “Stranger in a native landis here. Part 3, “People of no nation: how being stateless means living without rights” is here. The data visualizations are only visible at the Civio website. También hay una versión en español.

Magali Varela de Torres, who moved from Venezuela to Madrid, Spain, in 2017, is the only member of her nuclear family who is not yet Spanish. Her husband was Spanish and now her daughter, son and granddaughter are Spanish, too. Varela de Torres, a retired social worker who has official recognition of disability due to her Alzheimer’s, has lived in Spain long enough to apply for citizenship, too. But Spain’s Ministry of Justice has not processed her requests for a health exemption from the culture test required for naturalisation. Her daughter Adriana Torres has submitted three requests over the last three years and keeps getting the same robotic reply from the ministry asking for information she has already submitted. After listening to her daughter tell the story, Varela de Torres says, “It’s as if I don’t exist.”

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Europe Expands Virtual Borders To Thwart Migrants

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.

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¡Aguas, CDMX!

This is my first piece of data visualization journalism in a long time. It was fun to work with the editors and illustrator to bring it together. It’s also great to cover a topic near to my heart and the part of my family that live in Mexico City. Someday I’d like to report more on the social side of Mexico’s water situation.

Meantime, I recommend checking out the print edition of Technology Review [pdf] to see the spread but there is also an online version for subscribers.