Michael Kevane

The math here… 40,000 units housing, say, 5 people each, can house 200,000 people.  The population of Burkina Faso is 16 million, and growing at, say, 3% a year.  So every year there are about 500,000 more people in the country!  So I hope the government is talking about a funding model where it can do this housing program every single year for the next 20 years.  The scale of the urban housing crisis in Burkina Faso will quickly become immense.

The government of Burkina Faso on Monday officially launched a program of construction of 40,000 houses by 2020, costing more than CFA 500 billion francs in a bid to make “housing affordable to all Burkinabe.”The National Housing Program (PNCL) aims to “establish a sustainable mechanism for the production of decent housing accessible to the majority of the population with low incomes”.

Source: Burkina Faso launches 40,000 housing program – Journal du Cameroun

Puerto Rico’s fiscal control board will hold its eighth public meeting Friday, June 30, in the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel in San Juan, a spokesman for the board confirmed to Caribbean Business. During the meeting, the panel is expected to certify a budget for the government of Puerto Rico for fiscal year 2018, which begins July 1. After the legislative approval of a government spending plan over the weekend, the board is currently evaluating it to determine whether to certify the document or impose its own version, as provided by the federal Promesa law. The board held its last meeting April 28 in New York, where it laid out the process for the eventual filing of bankruptcy cases under Title III of Promesa.

Source: Puerto Rico fiscal board to meet Friday in San Juan – Caribbean Business

He came up with the idea of making an architectural version of a big tree in Gando, where people could gather in its perforated shade. Its structure is a festival of triangles, with curved walls beneath the orange-ish roof in complementary deep blue.  The design has a lot to do with weather, which – as the pavilion opened in last week’s African temperatures, but will remain until 8 October – could be many things. Spreading from a central ellipse of steel supports, a layered canopy of timber and translucent polycarbonate filters the sunshine. The blue, curving walls provide degrees of breeziness and shelter from the wind. Rainwater, something which Kéré thinks the British appreciate too little – “you don’t know what you have” – will slosh from the canopy into a central void formed between the supports, at speed and with volume, to make temporary elliptical waterfalls. That is mostly it, bar a few other touches. The deep blue, for example, is a colour worn in Burkina Faso on special occasions and to impress, when going on a date, or some other time when “you go to meet your dream”. The walls, made of stacked triangular assemblies of simple timber sections, are meant to have the look of a textile. But, despite Kéré’s talk of being awed by his predecessors, this is a Serpentine Pavilion that (unusually for the genre) doesn’t try too hard. It provides congenial places for gathering and pausing. It improves the climate. It nicely collages with the lush greenery around. Its shapes and colours have a simple, direct appeal. It is well made. It feels less lavish than previous pavilions, some of which benefited from large donations of building products from their manufacturers. It breathes.

Source: Serpentine pavilion 2017: Francis Kéré’s cool shades of Africa | Art and design | The Guardian

It was a language that Simone spoke fluently. She was forty-one when she first landed at Robertsfield International Airport, her twelve-year-old daughter Lisa in tow, their belongings—clothes, books, records—packed into the belly of a Pan Am jet. Six years had passed since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; nine since Simone had belted out protest songs during the Selma to Montgomery voting-rights march. Although black America still saw her as a talented political performer, a civil-rights revolutionary armed with loud and furious song—“Oh, but this whole country is full of lies, you’re all gonna die and die like flies,” she sang in “Mississippi Goddam,” berating the go-slow politics of the Johnson administration—she had seen little racial progress. Two of the big six were dead, as were her friends Langston Hughes and Malcom X; Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were in jail. The rhythm of the civil-rights movement had ebbed, and Simone wondered if her cris de coeur for a more just racial order had fallen short. “The America I’d dreamed of through the sixties seemed a bad joke now, with Nixon in the White House and the black revolution replaced by disco,” she wrote in her memoir, I Put a Spell on You.

Source: Nina Simone in Liberia – Guernica

The dispute between COFINA bondholders and Puerto Rico’s general obligation bondholders took a new turn Wednesday, as the former parties asked the federal judge overseeing the commonwealth’s restructuring to let Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court determine once and for all whether tax-backed bond issuer COFINA is even constitutional.The bondholders of COFINA, or the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp., are confident the island’s high court will uphold the 2006 law that established the government-owned corporation, which issues bonds backed by a portion of the island’s sales tax.Puerto Rico’s general obligation bondholders have been adamant that interest on their instruments should be paid first, saying even sales tax revenue is fair game if that is what it takes, despite the fact that the revenue is promised to COFINA bondholders.But the COFINA bondholders said Wednesday that either the general obligation bondholders are right and COFINA is unconstitutional, or they are wrong and the law is solid. Regardless, the only way to resolve the “lynchpin issue once and for all” is to certify the question to the high court, according to Wednesday’s motion. Any ruling in the restructuring case will just end up there eventually anyway, the COFINA bondholders said.

Source: Puerto Rico Justices Must Hear Bond Issuer Row, Judge Told – Law360