Your podcast discovery platform
Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
piqer for: piqd Boom and bust Climate and Environment Global finds Globalization and politics Health and Sanity Technology and society Doing Good Deep Dives
Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Lake Chad: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of
In this feature piece, New Yorker journalist Ben Taub examines one of the most underreported and complex humanitarian ongoing crises in the Lake Chad region of Central Africa.
Climate change, Boko Haram, various predatory armies and extreme hunger are converging on the population living in the Lake Chad Region — which was divided by colonial powers into several different states — making their resolution all but impossible.
The factors leading to this humanitarian disaster are complex; islanders who used to live on Lake Chad, which connects Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon, used to be able to live on the bounty from the lake; however climate change combined with a plague of Tsetse flies has decimated these resources, leaving the communities that rely on the lake in poverty.
Such poverty — particularly climate-induced poverty, when invaluable resources are shrinking — can lead to fierce and violent conflict, and the Lake Chad region is no different. Taub reports that farmers are fighting each other for access to shrinking pastures. Local militias have gotten involved.
The terrorist group Boko Haram has also preyed on that poverty, recruiting youth into their ranks; they promise Islamic education (which many have never had access to), and bountiful wealth. Soon, Boko Haram began bringing terrorism to the islands; attacking markets and popular gathering places.
But while Nigerians who flee to Chad to avoid the violence of Boko Haram crossed an international border, making them eligible for refugee status (and the various financial resources that come with it), internally displaced Chadians have no such luxury. Left with no way to secure a livelihood, internally displaced people (as well as people displaced by climate change) are even more vulnerable to recruitment into terrorist groups.
As Taub eloquently shows, it’s an impossible situation, with no easy solution.
