News

When driving from Kigali International Airport into and through Kigali it is hard to imagine that this country has experienced a genocide 1994. Kigali is now a green, clean and beautiful city inviting people, countries and investors for rapid modernization. With assistance, me and the photographer Evelina Rönnbäck met several representatives for the Rwandan society. Everyone showed hospitality and interest. I can recommend a visit to Rwanda for many reasons, but do not forget Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre. Kwibuka Rwanda.  

Together with a team from Robertsfors Municipality and the unique entreprenur Jonas Forsberg - founder of Red Q and advisor for sustainable business - we join a stakeholder meeting with representatives for Busia Municipality, government, civil society and others for a dialogue on how these parties could support the development for sustainable livelihood in Busia. The project - funded by Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy (ICLD) will continue until 2018 as mentioned in earlier news.

Through an urgent need to get closer to contemporary realities in The Middle East - a region and a concept which is politically defined rather than just geographically - I decided to visit Jordan due to its location and for the possibility to meet senior research fellow and team-leader Adel Elsayed Sparr at WANA Institute who works with human security - one of the pillars at the institute. Thank you Jordan for your beauty and Adel for interesting dialogue around several areas.

In two programmes with workshops and study visits in Homa Bay County, Kenya and The County of Västerbotten representatives from Homa Bay County Government and The Center for Rural Medicine in Storuman Municipality have worked to identify areas of cooperation in an application to Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy (ICLD). The partners, who have an interest of using and developing telemedicine to enhance health, will work with and include different stakeholders, for example Nordic Health Innovations Ltd and Microsoft.

Through work with county governments in Kenya and other local authorities in other countries me and partners have been invited to meetings with Council of Governors from Kenya as well as people working in different roles for sustainable cities. The framework is The SymbioCity Approach - a Swedish Government initiative run by Business Sweden and SKL International. It is now well stated that work for sustainable cities is urgent and necessary for reaching global sustainability.

Besides of Whole Earth? Day - held at Umeå University September 18th, 2015, I have also managed other events in the framework of Hard Rain Project which is founded by the photographer Mark Edwards. These events also took place at Umeå University (2010 and 2012) in collaboration with regional organizations as well as Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). These events have been made possible through the collaboration with Dag Jonzon - an environmental journalist from Sweden.