As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working fourteen hour days in the desert-heat - where Western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees - for 500 durhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.
Kathleen Noreisch on 25 Sep 11This website has some great data on various developing countries' rates of adoption of ICT (in particular, mobile phones, internet, radio and television) - click on "country profiles" to see which countries are available. While there is slightly less data available for Haiti, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, the dedicated mini-sites for each of the other countries include data on access to various forms of "traditional media" (newspapers, radio) and "new media" (internet and mobile phones). There is also data on usage of the various forms of media by age group, gender and socio-economic status. I particularly like the annotations on the graphs, which will hopefully help students focus on the key data and show them how annotations can help add clarity and further information to figures (graphs, maps etc).
