Brand new podcast episode on ‘In Conversation with Street Child’

This month, we speak to Jummai Musa, Street Child’s Country Director for Nigeria, and Matthew Page, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, and former Nigeria expert for the US intelligence community.

It’s been a decade since the armed group Boko Haram kidnapped more than 250 girls from a school in Chibok, around 90 of them are still missing. Abductions in the northern regions of Nigeria have become a recurrent theme – whether for ransom, or to pressure the government to meet certain demands.

Last month alone, the country faced another ‘kidnapping crimewave’ with dozens of people snatched by bandits. We discuss further how the continued abductions are challenging President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government, which promised to tackle insecurity while also managing the country’s growing economic crisis.

Listen to the full podcast through the link in our bio.

#bringbackourgirls #chibok #nigeriasecurity #nigeria #chibokgirls #inconversationwithstreetchild

Listen in to our latest episode of ‘In Conversation with Street Child’ featuring award winning Times photographer Richard Pohle, Times reporter Poppy Koronka, and Street Child’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Alice Lowden.

Following Street Child’s hugely successful collaboration with The Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal, we discuss the importance of storytelling, photography, and humanising global issues – in a world of increased conflict and crisis, it’s easy to forget the real people behind the statistics. The appeal helped bring those issues to life – putting faces to the stories that often go unreported.

Joining us this week is Doctor Jessica (Jess) Espey, political economist, and lecturer at Bristol University in south-west England. In the early part of her career, Jess worked for an international NGO, her focus was on women and children’s rights and how to advance them in policy development. During this time, she was given the opportunity to serve as a special adviser on the post-2015 sustainable development goal agenda within the office of the President of Liberia – this, she tells me completely altered her view on priorities for sustainable development.

“At the beginning of the process, had someone said to me we need a goal on cities and urbanisation, I would have laughed them out of the room.” Today, she tells me, “urban expansion is fundamentally transforming the face of our world.”

Following her time in Liberia, Jess took up a position as Associate Director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network in New York. Being a part of the development agenda negotiations “was an incredible experience” she says. “No other negotiation in the history of the UN lasted this long.”

Asked if the goals are ambitious, she tells me “If they hadn’t been, it would have been a waste of time. They are aspirations – and we must strive to reach as many as we can.” As for the global institutions themselves, she says they’re crucial, but totally out of date, as people grow and change, it’s time for our global governance to do the same.