UNRISD Director to take part in the ‘Ghana Speaks Lecture Series’ on June 18

UNRISD Director, Thandika Mkandawire, will be speaking at the Ghana Speaks Lecture Series in Ghana on 18 June 2008. The event, organized by the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG), represents an opportunity to create a public platform for informed debate on the development challenges that the country faces and to identify its strengths and weaknesses, discuss the challenges and obstacles it faces, and then to consider the different solutions.

Thandika will be the first non-Ghanaian African to speak at the Lecture Series. His lecture will focus on the critical but controversial role of the state in addressing Africa’s development crisis, and in lifting the African continent out of poverty. The speech aims at locating Ghana’s development crisis within the larger global framework and at moving the debate from the narrow national confines to the larger African context.