Carolina for Kibera (CFK) inspires and nurtures youth leaders in the slum of Kibera, Kenya through a unique model of participatory development.  CFK recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it.  CFK's long-term initiatives provide youth opportunities to learn and serve while addressing a wide range of community needs including healthcare, education, waste recycling and reduction, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, and girls' empowerment.  CFK's model of participatory to fight abject poverty, and prevent ethnic, gender and religious violence has been internationally recognized, earning awards as a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation "Hero of Global Health" and the 2008 Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Reflections of Hope Award.  CFK is a major affiliated entity of UNC based at the Center for Global Initiatives.

Salim Mohamed Salim Mohamed co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Carolina for Kibera for eight years. At the age of 16, he was involved in the development of MYSA - the largest youth sports program in Africa based in the Mathare slum of Nairobi.  Salim has helped launch community based sports and development programs in Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria and presented at the International AIDS Conference. He serves as a director for Shoe 4 Africa, an advisor to Global Education Fund and a YES! facilitator.  A TED Africa Fellow, he is currently pursuing a master's degree at the University of Manchester.

Rye Barcott  While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001, Barcott founded CFK with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed. Barcott served five years in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.  In 2006, he was named an ABC World News Person of the Year.  A TED Fellow and member of the UNC Chancellor's Innovation Circle, Barcott is writing a book that juxtaposes community organizing and counter-insurgency (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).

In 2005, a national referendum returned Uganda to multi-party competition, lifting a ban on the activities of political parties that had been in place since the National Resistance Movement took power in 1986.

The decision to restore formal pluralistic competition was arrived at in large part by international pressure on the government of President Yoweri Museveni.

However, five years later, as Uganda heads into its second round of elections under a multi-party system next year, the country is less “democratic” and has been described as a virtual one party state.

In some instances, observers have commented that the Ugandan parliament under the single-party “Movement” system had more bite than the current multiparty plebiscite, which is little more than a rubberstamp of the ruling National Resistance Movement.

What explains the apparent failure of the multi-party era to advance real democratic reforms in Uganda?

Angelo Izama is an investigative reporter at the Daily Monitor, Uganda's only independent newspaper, as well as a radio talk show panelist, researcher, consultant and analyst on security and governance in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. In his 7-year career in the media he has also worked as a radio producer, host, news manager and multi-media journalist for the Nation Media Group in Uganda. He has been a frequent commentator on current affairs for international news agencies including the BBC, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, AFP and African-based organizations. Mr. Izama was a fall 2007 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he proposed and assessed regional options for peace in Northern Uganda regarding the Lords Resistance Army. In 2008 he founded Fanaka Kwa Wote, a Ugandan-based think tank, to advance research on human security and democracy in the Great Lakes region.

In the course of his career, Mr. Izama has covered topics including national elections in 2001 and 2005, the conflict in Northern Uganda, internal security, corruption, and most recently, issues surrounding the discovery of oil in western Uganda. In 2009 he filed a case using Uganda's Access to Information Act to compel the government to make public the details of oil Production Sharing Agreements signed with foreign oil companies. The case was dismissed in February, on the same day Mr. Izama was arrested and charged with criminal libel in Ugandan courts over his critical writing.

Join the Stanford Association for International Development in exploring issues of development and post-conflict health on February 20th in Annenberg Auditorium with Andrew Natsios, the Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2001-2005, and four expert panels of academics, NGO organizers, and government officials. Panels include:
 

1. Humanitarian Intervention: The Question of Sovereignty
2. The Spread of Infectious Disease in the Wake of Conflict
3. The Psychological Scars of War
4. Refuges and Refugees: Children in Conflict Zones

We are excited to have thirteen expert speakers, a large and talented staff, and all of you as our guests. We hope to see you there!

Made possible by our sponsors: Office of Global Health; Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law; Stanford Association for International Development; Bingham Grant; VPUE; Humanities & Sciences; Stanford in Government; ASSU Undergraduate Senate; ASSU Speaker's Bureau

Steven Robins is an anthropologist from Stellenbosch University in South Africa whose research covers issues of governance, citizenship, and social mobilization in post-conflict societies. Robins will give lectures and seminars based on his forthcoming book, From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movement, NGOs and Popular Politics.

Co-sponsored with African Studies

Made possible by our sponsors: Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law; Stanford Association for International Development; Bingham Grant; VPUE; Humanities & Sciences; Stanford in Government; ASSU Undergraduate Senate; ASSU Speaker's Bureau.

San Francisco State University will host a conference September 16-17, 2010 exploring the question and place of rights in history, politics, and society.

Rights, both individual and collective, have long been a theme in American society, often seen in conflict with state power. The conference welcomes papers on assertions of rights by insurgent groups, resistance to rights claims, and governmental efforts to suppress or promote rights, in areas including but not limited to: civil liberties; disability rights; labor and economic rights; feminism and antiracism; immigration; environmental justice; access to healthcare; the prison industrial complex; sexual orientation; the stateless; and human rights.

The goal is to bring together a wide variety of people from a range of academic, activist, legal, and community spaces to examine the place of rights within the context of American society (as situated within a boarder global political community). To that end, the conference is open to historians, both senior and junior scholars, graduate students, community advocates, archivists, and lawyers.

The deadline for submission of proposals, consisting of an abstract of 1000 words for panel and workshop proposals or 300 words for individual presentations and a one-page CV for each participant, is March 15, 2010. Send your proposals to

Christopher Waldrep
Department of History
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California 94132

or via email to cwaldrep@sfsu.edu.

More information is available at this link.

Stanford STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition seeks to use advocacy, awareness-raising and fundraising to address the conflicts in Sudan, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Burma. Our mission is to empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

At this workshop, Mark Goodale will be delivering a talk entitled "Human Rights in an Anthropological Key." Mark is an anthropologist who specializes in legal anthropology, human rights and culture, comparative ethical practice and epistemology, the anthropology of morality, and conflict studies. He has been conducting research in Bolivia since 1996 and during 2003-2004 (as a Fulbright scholar) he studied Romania’s efforts to reform its political and legal institutions in preparation for accession to the European Union in 2007. He came to George Mason's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in the fall of 2003 after serving as the first Marjorie Shostak Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at Emory University. His Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001).

He is the author of two recent books: Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2009) and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2008). He is currently at work on two new books: the first is an ethnographic analysis of sociopolitical change and the moral imagination in Bolivia based on three years of research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the second is a volume of essays on human rights and moral creativity.