Climate change to Ebola: what happened next? – podcast transcript

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jan/02/climate-change-to-ebola-what-happened-next-podcast-transcript

Version 0 of 1.

HM: Hugh Muir

JV: John Vidal

SG: Suzanne Goldenberg

JW: Jonathan Watts

EGH: Emma Graham-Harrison

MM: Monica Mark

SB: Sarah Boseley

MA: Morie Amadou

MR: Mustafa Rogers

RS: Dr Ramona Sunderwirth

CDM: Clément Besse Desmoulieres

DS: David Smith

ADS: Alex Duval Smith

AOdB: Anton Op de Beke

CB: Coumba Bah

[Jingle: The Guardian]

HM Hello and welcome to the Global development podcast. I’m Hugh Muir. This month, something different. We’ll be returning to some of the people and issues we’ve talked about this year and finding out what happened next. We’ll also be touching on what we can expect in 2015. We’ve updates on Ebola in west Africa and how the world looks after climate change talks in Peru. Here’s what happened after we uncovered corruption in Mali; Nato’s pulled out of Afghanistan, how will that impact on development there? All of that coming up and more on this bumper Global development podcast from the Guardian.

And we begin this month’s podcast where we left the last: Lima and the Cop 20 climate change talks in Peru. You’ll have read the gist of it by now. Pretty hopeful. A key first step but plenty left to do. Let’s unpick that summary now with the Guardian’s US environment correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg. She’s in Peru now. And our environment editor, John Vidal, he’s here with me in London. Hello to both of you.

JV Hello.

SG Hi.

HM Suzanne, let me start with you. We expected a compromise, one that no one was really happy with, that got us closer to a deal. Is that basically what we’ve got?

SG Oh yeah. I mean we’ve got an agreement that came out at the eleventh hour that everybody is unhappy with. So if that’s the definition of a compromise then this is a compromised deal.

HM Is that what was likely, that everyone was going to come out of this happy? One would have thought not?

SG Oh no, no everyone’s unhappy. Everyone’s a little bit unhappy.

HM Isn’t that what you thought going into it, that’s where we would be?

SG You know, what I think happened is that everyone’s optimism was boosted going into the talks because there had been this deal between the two biggest carbon polluters, the US and China. And they agreed between them to cut emissions. Money had begun to sort of dribble into the green climate fund. There was a sense of momentum. So then people thought, well, maybe for once we can actually accomplish something at these talks. And then, the inevitable roller coaster arc of these things, we thought the talks would collapse. And they did actually emerge with something that ticked the boxes for the big constituent blocks here. So I think there are some good things that come out of this judging by the very modest standards that we have come to expect from such meetings.

HM John Vidal here in London, all countries will have to make cuts in carbon use – is that enough? Is that enough to make you happy?

JV Yeah. It probably is a very good thing, but frankly these are voluntary cuts, so every country will be able to choose effectively what it wants to do, what it can do. So we’re going to get lowest common denominator stuff and we’ve no idea if that’s going to be in total anywhere near enough to get us down to the maximum of one degree or two degree centigrade rise in temperatures, which the cuts will need. I can’t personally see it happening. So all countries by end of March are going to have to say what they’re going to cut. And then, by November next year, the UN will have crunched those figures and we’ll be able to see exactly whether we’re on target or not to keep the temperatures down. And I feel we’ll be well, well, well away – and there’ll be an almighty confrontation in Paris next year.

HM Is voluntary not binding? Who do we have to keep an eye on; who are likely to be the laggards here?

JV Take your pick!

SG Everybody!

HM I suppose it’s good that they had some sort of agreed text but it does seem to water down previous commitments, Suzanne, on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. You’ve written one particular phrase “common but differentiated responsibilities” – what’s that about?

SG Basically, 20 years ago, when the international community began dealing with this issue, there was this idea that the countries responsible for the problem – which is the US and Europe, the rich countries, the industrialised world – should take responsibility for climate change, that they should be the ones that should cut emissions. Now what’s happened since then is that countries like China, India, Brazil have begun to develop, and they’ve begun to do so and to grow their economies on a very polluting pattern. In fact, China now produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the United States.

So the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe, has managed to reshape the nature of these talks so that, from hereonin, China, India and other countries are going to have to cut their emissions as well. So that’s a big deal, that that language is in there. You also see a sub-clause in there, so common but differentiated responsibilities means that China and the other emerging economies don’t have to do as much as the US. And then there’s another sub-clause that says, well, they actually do have to do something. So that’s a big deal.

HM That’s the devil in the detail though, isn’t it John, the differentiated responsibilities – one could see people and countries arguing about that until the year dot.

JV Hugh, it’s the key to the whole thing because what’s happened is they’ve built up this enormous resentment by the poor countries, which now are absolutely furious that the rich countries are not going to have to lead anymore. And this is unjust. This is a climate injustice of the first order. And so they’re not going to let them get away with that in Paris next year.

HM That’s interesting, because when you read the headlines you kind of think that’s good everyone has a common level of responsibility. But in one way it’s just the big countries palming off some level of their responsibilities to smaller ones, isn’t it?

JV What you’ve got is historical responsibility as well. The mess we’ve got ourselves into now is not actually very much to do with China and India, it’s much more to do with what happened 50-100 years ago in Europe and America and the industrialised countries. Now in the past, those countries took historical responsibility and said they would lead the world out of this mess. And now what’s happened is, as Suzanne has rightfully said, it’s everybody’s responsibility.

HM But doesn’t that just mean no one’s leading?

JV Well, exactly. The poor countries don’t mind cutting their emissions, that’s not a great problem, I mean they want money to help them and everything like that. But they do mind if the rich countries don’t take a lead, and that’s what we’re not seeing and that will be the faultline later on, I sense.

HM Suzanne, is that the nightmare, that the poor countries go away with a piece of paper and it all looks very good, and then they get home and they read it and they think, “Oh, this is not what we thought it was, this is not as good as we thought it was”?

SG What I found interesting about this particular Cop, which is what they call these annual meetings, was that I don’t think you can, and this is a success from US and European diplomacy in a way, in that I don’t see that those distinctions quite so clearly between rich and poor countries. You’ve got the alliance of poor countries that has begun to fracture in all sorts of different ways. So you have big developing countries such as India, China, Brazil and South Africa. Then you’ve got this group of Latin American countries such as Peru and Mexico and Colombia that are going along with the US line quite clearly, to the extent that they’re putting money into climate finance. That they are not in some intermediate rich/poor group where they are helping to pay for other countries.

So you’ve got India, China the big developing countries; you’ve got the middle countries; and then you’ve got the poorest of the poor countries that have also been co-opted a little bit by the United States. So the big divide of rich country/poor country is shifting around a bit. And I think that is why the US and Europe have been able to reshape this conversation into this idea that everybody has to do their fair share rather than [say]: “Look, we’ve been the cause of the problem.”

JV I think the danger is we’ve got now very little negotiating time left before we get this supposed final deal in Paris. And it’s not in anybody’s interest to sign up to a deal which is not going to help them in any way. The big other elephant in the room is the finance, the money. And here the rich countries have really come up with derisory offers. Suzanne wrote a very good piece about this.

HM Give us some idea.

SG Basically, it’s a quarter of what they raised before. In 2010, 2011, 2012 they managed to get $10bn a year. Now after saying, “Woo-hoo Green Climate Fund”, they’ve managed to get $10bn over four years. And some of that is not new money, some of that is just moving money from one pot to the other, especially with Australia. And yet developing countries are supposed to take from this some kind of reassurance that somehow the rich countries and the middle-income countries are going to mobilise enough money to reach $100bn every single year by 2020. That’s a huge gap.

HM What is that gap going to mean, John Vidal?

JV The gap is getting bigger, not smaller – that’s the whole point. It means that unless they come up with real, cast-iron assurances by October/November next year, unless we see real money on the table, these talks will collapse. I’m absolutely certain of it.

HM Suzanne, you’re leaving Lima this afternoon along with delegates and negotiators from around the world. What happens next?

SG Well, what happens next is that people have until March officially to really show what they’re going to do. They have to put forward a figure for emissions reduction targets. Now you’ve seen the targets coming forward from the US and from the European Union and from China; now the pressure is on for others to begin to put forward those targets. And countries are crunching those numbers and seeing what they can offer. And so by the end of March, hopefully, we’ll get an idea of how serious countries are.

HM Quick prediction from you, John Vidal, what do you think will happen in the next year?

JV There’s going to be some grotesque arm-twisting, in fact call it bullying, from the rich countries over the poor countries. And money will be offered and there will be blood on the tracks.

HM OK. Suzanne Goldenberg, John Vidal thank you very much. We will be here, we’ll monitor and see if those predictions are right, here on the Global development podcast.

JW Hello, this is Jonathan Watts, I’m Latin America correspondent for the Guardian. For me this has been a year that’s been a mixture of elections on the political side, of course the World Cup on the sports and entertainment side; but underlying them all and dearest to my heart it’s been a story of increasing deterioration of the regional environment. And by that I mean we’ve seen more and more mining companies, hydroelectric companies, roadbuilders, loggers, drug dealers using the Amazon, the world’s biggest forest, pushing through it and transforming some of the world’s most biodiverse areas. Even in the best case scenario, all that will have happened is that the rate of deforestation has slowed down; it hasn’t stopped, it’s just slowed down. So more and more of the Amazon is being cleared. I’ve been here in Latin America now for two and a half years. The longer I’m here, the more often I’m visiting the Amazon and the more I’m coming to realise just how threatened it is and how it’s being broken up by all of these different projects that are now taking place. And we’re seeing this transformation not just in Brazil but in Peru and in Ecuador. So the news on the environmental front has pretty much been negative across the border, unfortunately.

Some of the most striking stories of the year, although they didn’t always make the front pages, have been about new infrastructure projects. And in particular last week and the week before that, I’ve seen the two biggest projects in Latin America. The biggest one currently taking place is the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in Pará state, Brazil. This is well under way, and by August next year the engineers are saying that they will be able to close off the river and a few months later the first turbine will start to produce electricity, and the whole project will be finished by 2019. There’s been a lot of impact already. You can see swaths of area deforested.

The indigenous people have essentially given up the battle. In return, they’ve been compensated with new motorboats, four-wheel drives, iPods – you name it, they’ve been given everything that they asked for. But at the same time they’re saying, “Well you’ve given us all these things from your culture but we’re losing the essence of our way of life”, which is running water and a means of food because they used to fish in the river. So you’re seeing a lot of destruction from that project, although it will provide a phenomenal amount of electricity, 11,000 megawatts, which Brazil definitely needs. The argument, of course, is whether that’s the best way to get it and environmentalists would definitely say no. But it is a climate friendly, if you like, if not environment friendly way of producing electricity.

The other really big project that I went to report on, although it hasn’t yet started, is the plan for a new canal across Nicaragua. This will be a rival to the Panama Canal – it will stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It will be, if it gets underway – and everybody in Nicaragua that I spoke to said it will get underway – very, very much bigger than the Panama Canal. It will be longer, more than twice as long. It will be wider, it will be deeper. And it will involve a greater removal of earth than any other project that has ever taken place, according to the engineers who are planning this. This will be an utterly transformative project; the whole GDP of Nicaragua is no more than $12bn a year. This project alone promises at least $40bn to go into the Nicaraguan economy. So you’re going to see a transformative effect that should propel development in Nicaragua, which is the second poorest country in Latin America. But at the same time you’re going to have a huge impact on the environment, particularly Lake Nicaragua, which is the biggest source of fresh water in Central America.

So these two projects – and there are many others that I could cite, but let’s just concentrate on these two – for me these are absolutely spectacular developments that are changing the face of Latin America. Yes, lifting living standards but at the same time putting a lot of extra pressure on the environment.

EGH My name’s Emma Graham-Harrison, I’m international affairs correspondent for the Observer, but I’ve just moved back to the UK after living in Afghanistan for more than four years.

The way the Afghans participated in the election, the turnout of the people in the polling stations – women and men in bad weather conditions – that was a fantastic slap in the face of enemies of Afghanistan, and a big punch in the face of those who believe Afghanistan is not ready for democracy.

So 2014 was a pretty historic year for Afghanistan because you had the first ever peaceful, largely democratic transfer of power. The outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, had ruled Afghanistan since 2001. A lot of people had expected that he would try to hold on to power one way or another, perhaps do something like Putin and Medvedev did and create a prime ministerial role for himself or arrange for a puppet candidate to win the election. But in fact he relinquished power.

However, things haven’t been entirely resolved by the fact that he’s handed over power because although you have a new president, Ashraf Ghani, a very interesting man who’s a former academic, but he’s now got to move from the world of academia and theories into putting them into practice in a very, very difficult environment.

“This is the aftermath of an attack on the Afghan Intelligence Agency in Jalalabad. Six people were killed and over forty wounded when two suicide car bombers …”

EGH I think he’s got two main things on his to-do list: one is don’t be defeated by the Taliban, don’t let your government collapse. And number two is sort out the country’s finances; Afghanistan is almost bankrupt. It’s heavily dependent on foreign aid. Well over half of the national budget is provided by donors. The taxation system is very inefficient. The economy’s feeble. And he also has to deal with terrible, terrible corruption. I mean, Afghanistan a couple of years ago had the world’s biggest bank scandal, if you look at the size of the bank relative to national GDP; a bank called Kabul Bank nearly collapsed. The theft was nearly a billion dollars, $925m had gone missing.

Ghani, one of the very first things he did when he came to office was order the arrest of two of the main people responsible for that; the guy who had been chairman of the bank and another senior official. And that was a very clear way to send out a signal that he was serious about tackling corruption.

“The threat here in Afghanistan was from al-Qaida and al-Qaida training camps. That has been removed, and that is real progress.”

EGH But the Taliban definitely see this as a chance to assert themselves militarily to perhaps try and put the Afghan army, the Afghan police on the back foot. You know, very recently, there was a day where Kabul opened the day with a suicide bombing on an army bus that killed several people. And then the day ended with another suicide bombing, this time on a play. One of the very few cultural venues left in Kabul; they were actually performing a play about suicide bombings and the impact of them. And during the performance a teenage bomber detonated a suicide vest, killing at least one person and injuring many more. And the Taliban said afterwards in a statement that they specifically targeted that play because it was spreading lies about jihad and about what they were doing. So I mean you can see with an attack like this the Taliban are sending a very brutal but very sophisticated message.

HM That was Emma Graham-Harrison; and before that Jonathan Watts in Brazil.

Now to Africa. Monica Mark is the west Africa correspondent for the Guardian. She has contributed to many of our reports this year including our coverage of Ebola, and she’s on the line now. Monica, how has Nigeria coped with the outbreak?

MM Nigeria was basically able to draw on its polio surveillance system that’s in place because it’s one of three or four countries in the world where polio is still endemic. So that system could also be used to track people down … I think tens of thousands of contacts.

HM So it just had a better infrastructure to start with?

MM It had a better infrastructure as well … The Liberian man when he flew in he went to a private clinic because doctors were on strike for much the same reason that doctors are on strike in Sierra Leone right now: they’re not being paid enough and they work in dismal conditions. So doctors happened to be on strike in public hospitals so that meant that only one small clinic was dealing with this Ebola case and they reacted – it’s hard to tell what might have been the case if Sawyer had been exposed to a lot of people.

HM Let’s broaden out a bit because obviously the worst thing Nigeria needed I suppose was a medical emergency at the same time as all the other problems, particularly the security emergency that there’s been throughout a lot of the year. Talk to me a bit about that and how that’s evolved?

MM It’s been a bad year for security. Nigeria has had a problem with Boko Haram in the north of the country for about five years now, so it’s nothing new. It was this year that 200, almost 300, schoolgirls were kidnapped. We’ve never seen anything on that scale before. So that was pretty terrible. But the thing was in context, those girls being kidnapped, not on that scale, but it’s something that’s happening every day. It happened earlier this week, I think about 40 women were kidnapped from a village in the north.

HM Once they’re kidnapped are they staying kidnapped or are they drifting back and we’re just not really monitoring the story properly?

MM Part of the reason why Boko Haram continue unchecked is because they’re almost sort of like Nigeria’s dirty secret. It’s almost as if they want to wash it away. And obviously Nigeria is a country of 180 million people, it’s a big country, and people worrying about their own issues on a day-to-day level; infrastructure’s bad, there’s no electricity, running water is patchy. So they try not to think about what’s going on elsewhere because it’s just sort of too much.

HM Those girls, we all read about those girls, their plight went around the world, are they still in the clutches of Boko Haram to any large degree, in large numbers?

MM To date, apart from girls who were able to escape in the initial hours of their school being raided, only one girl … has been reported to have escaped. So yeah, it’s not a straightforward situation for the government because obviously they have to consider do they want to set a precedent for doing hostage swaps, and it’s very difficult to rescue even just one person who’s being held by Islamists who are not worried about killing their hostages; they have nothing to lose by killing them. So obviously if you have 200-odd girls, it’s pretty much impossible to successfully rescue them. So it’s tough for the government.

But one thing they don’t, as far as we can tell, progress hasn’t been made is in terms of dialoguing with this group. Again it’s hard to dialogue with a group that has the ideals that Boko Haram does. There seem to be moderate elements in the group and it does seem their brutality is kind of making people turn against them who initially may have sympathised with some of their ideals. And the government were not aware that they are reaching out to these elements, more moderate elements and making progress with them.

HM Is this is on the front pages there in Nigeria; isn’t there a continuing scandal?

MM It’s not front-page news any more, it’s just sort of a background … It is covered, but it’s not really front-page news. With the elections coming up, obviously security is going to be one of the main campaigning issues so that might change over the next few months. And what we’ve seen even just in the runup to the primaries is a spike in bomb blasts going off in major cities rather than rural areas, which is where Boko Haram has been concentrating.

HM Is it really possible that good Goodluck Jonathan’s government can go into an election with 200-odd girls kidnapped, not having got them back, and still win an election?

MM In Nigeria that is entirely possible, and it’s likely as well that the incumbent will win. Not least because people are sort of, better the devil they know, that’s kind of their attitude.

HM Monica, obviously you’ll be looking forward to the elections in Nigeria but what else are you looking forward to, what will be the other big stories in the region?

MM It’s a big year for elections across Africa, and west Africa in particular. Togo, Benin and Ivory Coast will be particularly interesting to watch. Their first elections since Alassane Ouattara came into power in 2011, that election basically it triggered a sort of bridge that … civil conflicts that was the culmination of years of conflict that had been building up. So it will be interesting for the first time in a really long time to have a democratic election in Ivory Coast to see how people feel about the incumbent, Ouattara, who was when he came in he was an IMF, French-educated, former IMF director, a real technocrat. Some people had high hopes that he could restore Ivory Coast to the position it had once been in, which was the shining star of west Africa. So it will be interesting to see what issues come up around his election and how he handles that. And particularly in context of Burkina Faso’s recent political troubles. Blaise Compaoré who has been president for 27 years tried to extend the constitution and that led to his being swept out. So there’s a whole generation of young people in Burkina Faso who have grown up with just one president.

HM I’m sure it will be good and bad, and fortunes will rise and fall, but do you go into 2015 optimistic for Africa?

MM Realistically, it’s hard to imagine there’s going to be any sort of dramatic changes, but I am hopeful that quite a lot has been learned in what’s been quite a tough year, and that that will have a positive impact going forward.

HM Monica, thank you. I’m sure we’ll hear from you on our Global Development podcast throughout 2015 but for now, thank you very much.

Let’s stay with west Africa, because the Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, has just been in Sierra Leone and Liberia. She’s been speaking to local health workers and NGOs on their continuing struggle against the Ebola epidemic. This is her report.

SB In large letters, on a hoarding at a traffic junction is a public health warning. It runs: “Ebola is real. ABC – avoid body contact. NHS – no handshake.”

MA “We’re trying to bring in some food items as well as non-food items to households that are quarantined. They are locked up, they cannot move out in search of food. So they rely on what we supply them.”

SB Mori Amadou is a project manager for Plan International. He distributes food to villages in quarantine. Are people happy to stay in their homes if they get the package of food?

MA There is … for them to go in search of food to get their daily livelihoods. If they are quarantined and they are given proper support then definitely there is no reason for them to feel bad about staying home in order to prevent the further spread of the infection. That’s basically why Plan International is helping with all this food and non-food items with support from …

SB Is it difficult sometimes to get to these homes because they’re built in places that are hard to access?

MA Yes, it is really very difficult – as you saw today. In fact, most of the locations you really have to mind your steps, it’s rocky and bumpy and the footpaths are really narrow and they’re full of steps. It’s really difficult. There’s no car access. People have to help carry the load, so bring it as close as the street can take us to, or the car can take us, and then we go meet the people discuss with them, give them their papers, sensitise them on their package and what it entails and the reason why we are giving the package. And then we tell them to ask their neighbours who can afford to come and help them collect their food stock on their behalf.

SB Sierra Leoneans are being asked to make fundamental changes to their behaviour. It goes beyond funerals, where families now know, although they do not all accept, that they must not touch the body of those who have died. A hug or a handshake is now considered dangerous. That is hard in a tactile society.

MR Today, I’ve already picked two bodies.

SB And what sort of people were they?

MR Male. They are men.

SB In the western areas of Freetown, Mustafa Rogers works for the Red Cross burial teams explaining to families why their loved ones must be taken away.

MR My job is … beneficial communication. I always talk to the people who’ve lost their loved ones, encourage them, talk to them – just give them encouraging talks so that they will not feel bad of what is happening now or what has been going on in Sierra Leone, this Ebola crisis situation.

SB And I think you talk to them and also to all the rest of the community about the dangers of Ebola and how to keep safe.

MR Yes I did that because at any time we arrive at a community since this Ebola breakout come in this country, we have other people who have been telling communities about the dangers of Ebola. So when we come as volunteer Safe and Dignified Burial team, we’re also emphasise on it again that you should keep away from Ebola, don’t touch body contact – we have to tell them, you see, just for them not to come in contact of Ebola. And we break the chain; we try to cut the chain of Ebola so that the country will be free from Ebola.

SB Does the community get very upset when you pick up the bodies or do they accept this now?

MR No, they accept us because we are the volunteers of the Safe and Dignified Burial team. Whenever we reach a community we try to talk to them in a manner so that they will not get annoyed at us. So they appreciate … very much picking bodies in the communities.

SB This is Dr Ramona Sunderworth, an emergency paediatric physician working in Lunsar.

RS I have a bit of an advantage, since I grew up in Brazil, but it is very hot. Even before you get into … you’re sweating, and then once you get into it you have 10 pieces of equipment that cover you from head to toe, including goggles and masks and gloves – double, triple sets of gloves. So it gets quite wet in there, I must say. And in the tents where the temperature is a good 10 degrees higher than even in the ambient air, it can get quite drippy, I would say.

SB It isn’t the usual way round that things are in medicine. The patient doesn’t come first, actually, the rest of the community comes first. Because there’s no treatment, people have to be kept away if they have the virus so the rest of us are safe. And a lot of the doctors out there struggle slightly with this. This is public health rather than medicine. Obviously, everybody’s doing as much as they possibly can for those people who fall ill, but they have no treatments, there are no drugs. And so at the moment all they can do is to keep them apart.

RS We don’t stay in there for more than two hours maximum, usually about an hour and a half, maybe an hour 50 minutes – in the middle of the day that’s about all one can really be functional in those suits. But a part of it is just staying focused on the job you’re doing and being safe, being very aware of where you are, not focusing on the heat. Because the main issue is not the heat, it’s the safety of the healthcare providers and the care that you’re giving the patients, so that helps forget about the heat for a little while.

SB You can see the emotional danger they’re in. They want so much to cure these young people, and the older ones too, and are investing so much by coming here, that the deaths hurt, badly. They can still make the odd joke about Ebola – they need to be able to. One suggests a new way to get rid of persistent but unwanted male admirers back home: give them a kiss on the mouth and remark, “I’ve just come back from working in an Ebola treatment centre!”

But it’s not just Ebola that they’re fighting in western Africa. In Liberia, Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, is about to distribute malaria tablets to almost two and a half thousand families living in West Point, a slum area of the capital.

Malaria kills more people than Ebola, particularly pregnant women and small children. The symptoms are identical to Ebola – fever, headache, vomiting. That means there is a risk somebody suffering from malaria will end up in an isolation unit where they may pick up the lethal virus from those who really do have it. Claimonbes des Moulier is a logistician with MSF who has planned these early morning hand-outs in incredible detail.

CDM Today’s situation went pretty well. We started at 5:30 it’s now ten to seven and we almost distributed 2,300 kits, so for 2,300 families. People were well respecting the no-touch policy, which is great to avoid any cross-contamination. This is our main challenge.

SB You have to take some very serious precautions, don’t you, before you come into these areas.

CDM The challenge is about gathering people together. We have to make sure that they will not come all together after they reach the distribution spot to make sure they will not push each other, rush, fight and, especially, touch each other and trying to avoid, as much as possible, any contact. This is for all the beneficiaries. But on the other side, for the people that are working on the site, the distributor, the sensitisation team, drivers, supervisor, is to protect themselves from any contact as well. So we are following very strict rules of protection, prevention with some safe area where we are working in. We have some buffer area to avoid any direct contact with the people, especially at the distribution point.

SB And what is the reason for doing this; is it just to do with malaria or is it about Ebola?

CDM It’s about both at once. So malaria is still here and is killing a lot of people every year. Also malaria first symptoms – fever and weakness and vomiting – are quite similar to Ebola. So first of all that was to help the Ebola treatment unit to have less people in the … centre and in the transit centre. Now the idea also is to avoid cross-contamination for people who are suspected of having Ebola, but who actually get only malaria. And in case they are brought to the suspect area, they can be contaminated and become some Ebola cases.

SB MSF tells its staff: don’t touch anybody, don’t touch anything, don’t sit down. It’s not as easy as it sounds. A small crowd of women gather as I speak to one or two, and move in close. Then one of them, impatient of my attempts to understand the spelling of her name, grabs my pen and writes it in my notebook. Does it matter? Very likely not, but I felt obliged to spray the pen with chlorinated water afterwards, as well as the hand she touched.

HM Sarah Boseley there. And you can follow her Ebola diary at theguardian.com/global-development.

DS I’m David Smith. I’m the Africa correspondent of the Guardian and I’m based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

2014 the narrative of “Africa rising”, as it’s often described, really continued. There were many conferences for investors where they liked to hold up the cover of the Economist magazine from 2000, which described Africa as “a hopeless continent” and then about a decade later a headliner “Africa rising” or “the hopeful continent”. And particularly in terms of development, I think the two stars that are often held up as models tend to be Ethiopia and Rwanda. Both of these countries have done very well on many of the millennium development goals. Rwanda in particular, where we are slashing maternal mortality and great improvements in education and on other counts.

What of course does not get mentioned at these conferences, even the words are almost taboo, are issues like democracy and human rights. And human rights watchdogs are extremely critical of both the Ethiopian and Rwandan governments.

What we also are very concerned to watch and worry about is the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. In December, it will be one year in South Sudan since the outbreak of civil war and there’s been a slight lull in the fighting really because of the weather, due to seasons, but a lot of the international aid agencies are warning that they expect a resurgence in fighting there.

And I should also mention Kenya: the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, had charges against him dropped at the international criminal court. In the meantime, a year after the terrible attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, there was no let-up from the al-Shabaab militants. More attacks, dozens of people killed in cold blood, sort of raising questions about the Kenyan military operation in Somalia.

Despite that, actually, you could argue Somalia was very unusually one of the happier notes of 2014. Still some terrible atrocities going on, but actually in Mogadishu itself a gradual incremental change for the better. Journalists love writing stories about the first florist, the first laundrette; this year we saw the first cash ATM in Mogadishu and I think the first postal service for 20 years. But clearly still a long way to go there, despite the glimpses of optimism.

ADS I’m Alex Duval Smith. I did a podcast in September looking at how corruption is affecting development in Mali.

“There’s also been some flaws.”

ADS Are you referring to the presidential jet?

“Yes the presidential jet. So it’s created a lot of talk around it.”

ADS The podcast looked at the impact of the purchase by the Malian government of a presidential jet and the extension of a credit facility of $200m for the purchase of defence equipment. This irritated the donors, in particular the IMF, which froze its direct budgetary support to the Malian government. It mainly looks like accountants are now happy with the 2014 books that Mali can present. It’s not entirely clear that the government is going to be any more transparent in future, even though it’s pledged that it will be.

AodB We, the IMF, we don’t generally take issue with specific spending items, but you can imagine if you were a donor you may want to reconsider your budget support.

ADS In the podcast we heard from Anton Op de Beke, who is the representative of the IMF here in Mali, and he’s become quite a celebrity. He’s seen by local civil society groups as really having produced the biggest shock to Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s government since it was elected in August 2013. Another person we heard from was Coumba Bah. Interestingly, Coumba Bah has now moved on to have quite a prominent role in civil society, leading a good-governance NGO which is making waves.

CB Yes the Malian diaspora send a lot of money in. But I have a feeling that 90% of the money that is sent by diaspora is … for no business development whatsoever.

ADS I think it’s going to be interesting to watch the extent to which aid manages to penetrate northern Mali. There are attempts, constant attempts, to restart work on a road which is EU-funded, which will eventually connect Bamako and Timbuktu on tar – which is very important for the opening up of northern Mali; and in the process of opening up northern Mali, development aid, but also investment can reach the north. At the moment the north is still very much in the hands of smugglers and a parallel economy which essentially dominates the north.

CB But has anybody done an evaluation, an audit, of the productivity and the meeting of a goal. We put 30bn in this agriculture sector to have this much done in rice. Can we go and see if that rice has been produced. And if the rice has been produced, has it been stored properly? What is meant to be shipped out of the country, sold, to have value added, is that being done? But the government just sits and sends you a report.

ADS Since the election of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita at the end of 2013, Mali has emerged very much as a country whose hand is being held by France and the international community, in terms of its sovereignty, its defence and its development aid. The government has no social programmes whatsoever. It would be interesting to see if more pressure was put on the government to live up to, for example, the Abuja declaration, to spend more money on social issues such as health, such as education, which is still very much considered, it seems, by the government as somebody else’s problem; in other words the international community’s problem.

HM That was Alex Duval-Smith. And you can follow her stories from Mali on Twitter. That’s @AlexDuvalsmith. As for our estimable Africa correspondent, David Smith, you can follow him, that’s @SmithInAfrica.

And that’s it for this roundup of 2014. Remember, all of our programmes from this year are still available on theguardian.com/global-development and on iTunes, SoundCloud and all podcasting apps. We’ll be back in January. My name’s Hugh Muir. The producer is Matt Hill. Thanks for listening in 2014 and goodbye.

[Jingle: For more great downloads to theguardian.com/audio]