July 13th 2010 is the 25th anniversary of the Live Aid concert, and we are again reminded of the importance and scale of foreign aid provided to developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  The latest issue of ESRC Society Now (Summer, Issue 7) features an article titled First Aid or Lasting Aid?, in which a panel of commentators explores the landscape of foreign aid in the 21st century, including:

• The demand for effective aid
• Tacking the barriers to growth
• Povery, aid and security
• Empowering the poor
• Aid in the global recession

Further challenging discussions and interviews can be found on the 21st Century Challenges website, which features interviews with Sir Bob Geldof and Kofi Annan talking about Africa in the 21st Century.

For teaching resources, the Geography Teaching Today website has a range of resources, including Africa: a continent of contrasts (KS3).  To improve students’ knowledge of Africa, consider using these online interactive tutorials: The Scale of Africa, Africa’s contrasting environments, and What do you know about Africa?.  For a different perspective to the impact of foreign aid and economic development in poorer countries, look at the resources on Globalisation (KS4/5), and the interactive tutorial on the widening global wealth gap.  Looking back, the Geography in the News website has teaching resources examining at the G8 summit in 2005, which included a discussion between some of the world’s richest countries about Africa.  The pack includes details of the Live 8! event, the Make Poverty History campaign, and discusses the complex geographical issues that surround making decisions about wealth, poverty and foreign aid for the world.

Geography has been at the heart of the 2010 General Election, with voting having taken place across the United Kingdom on Thursday 6 May.

In an article in Geography Compass, Johnston and Pattie propose that elections are a “geographer’s delight” (2009: 1865) with plenty of spatial data to be analysed and cartographically represented.  This got us thinking about what we might be able to find out: ‘Election time, geography time’, posted on Geography Directions, 8 April 2010.

This includes the key role of geographical data in how the political parties campaign targeted ‘key voters’, as well as shaping how the new boundary map of Parliamentary constituencies has changed to better reflect our changing population.   A post on the RGS-IBG website highlights some of the ways in which geography informs our understanding of the electoral system and voting preferences.

The BBC website has an interactive results map showing the results by region – you can drill down to electorate level for more detail.  During the course of the election campaign, the Guardian newspaper website had a series of interactive maps looking at the general election: Which are the safest seats in Britain? and Election map & swingometer.  In addition, there is a team at Sheffield University that undertakes exploratory mapping of British general election results using cartograms and other formats, while the Spring Issue of ESRC’s Society Now looked at the fairness of the electoral system.

Voters were bombarded with information and policies from all the political parties on how, when elected, they proposed to manage some of the most pressing geographical issues of the day, such as climate change, energy, migration, and our response to natural disasters.  If you were elected, how would you address these issues?

The ESRC Society Today website has series of resources on voting, looking at some of the factors people take into account when voting and how men and women might be different in what they look for.  In the lead-up to and after the election, the ESRC British Election Study team will try to describe and to explain why people vote, why they vote as they do, what affects the election outcome, and what are the consequences of elections for democracy in Britain.