Small Wars Journal

Could British Army Counterinsurgency Techniques Help Reduce Poverty in Africa?

Tue, 06/25/2019 - 12:33am

Could British Army Counterinsurgency Techniques Help Reduce Poverty in Africa? By Adrian Blomfield - The Telegraph

If the traders in Wangige, a grimy market town on the outskirts of Nairobi, were ever surprised to see a pipe-smoking former guards officer striding through their midst, they were too polite to show it.

Ramshackle, overcrowded and mostly poor, Wangige is not the sort of place that usually attracts white expatriates, who rarely stray far from the Kenyan capital’s greener suburbs.

Yet Wayne Hennessy-Barrett has become an accepted fixture in Wangige over the years after seeing it as an opportunity to develop an unusual approach to tackling poverty.

A major who served in Afghanistan with the  Coldstream Guards, Mr Hennessy-Barrett wondered if the counterinsurgency techniques adopted by the British army in Taliban strongholds could somehow be repurposed to make the poor richer.

The idea may seem whimsical, even gimmicky. Wangige is hardly Helmand, nor, by his own admission, did counterinsurgency work particularly well in either Afghanistan or Iraq…

Read on.

Comments

SamHudson

Tue, 11/23/2021 - 9:56am

To my mind, the problem of poverty is very spread today. I've made an investigation for college and have read a lot of content, including https://blablawriting.net/essay-examples/poverty on that topic. I think that there are many countries with a great gap between poor and rich people; I mean, there is no middle class. It's a matter of the world economic politic, and I'm sure it can be changed. The world society must help people in demand.