Benjamin Bathke

2,800+ words profile of Gambian asylum seeker Yahya Sonko. The kindergarten teacher apprentice has become a linchpin for information who helps thousands of fellow Gambian migrants in Europe. However, it remains unclear whether he can stay in Germany.

Fireside chat with Plan A's Lubomila Jordanova at TechChill 2020 in Riga about her personal motivation to help companies calculate, monitor & reduce their carbon footprint, hair-raising examples of greenwashing, why the cleantech sector lacks funding and whether there will be any humans left on Planet Earth in 300 years.

For refugee children who have missed school, participating in classes can be challenging, especially in a foreign language. A Berlin-based initiative tries to fill their knowledge gaps with free tutoring in Arabic on the weekends. InfoMigrants visited a class in Berlin to find out how the project is helping them get back on track.

“You can’t finish a news feed, but you can finish Zetland, and that is just very nice, you know: ‘OK, that was the lesson for today, now I’m off out in the sun, talking to a friend.'”

Migration caused by natural disasters and violent conflict is on the rise: In the first half of 2019 alone, more than 10 million new people lost their homes due to extreme weather and political instability. Humanitarians and activists are warning of a "climate apartheid" and an "unprecedented" threat to human rights.

Q&A with Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid about the reasons for the rise of far-right EKRE party, how to counter anti-Europe sentiments, and Estonia’s role as a digital peacekeeper.

Despite its record of abuses, Libya’s EU-funded and -trained coast guard is the bloc’s preferred partner to prevent migrants from reaching European soil. Having intercepted some 20,000 people in 2017 alone, the coast guard in the Mediterranean is efficient; it is not as good, however, at abiding by the law. Article for InfoMigrants looking at the funding, training and questionable monitoring of the loosely organized force whose members are often former militia.

Panel moderation at TDS with Joanna Bryson (University of Bath), Peggy Lynn Hicks (United Nations Human Rights Office), Eileen M. Lach (IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous & Intelligent Systems), Nanjira Sambuli (World Wide Web Foundation), John Newham (government of Ireland), Morten Kruse Søland (government of Denmark) and Bertrand Pailhès (government of France).

Video interview with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi for InfoMigrants about tackling the root causes of migration and refugee flows, the current rhetoric around people on the move, and Europe's political response.

Radio piece for German public radio (Deutschlandfunk) about the dangers of doxing, the Internet-based practice of researching and broadcasting private or identifying information (especially personally identifying information) about individuals or organizations, and how journalists can better protect their data online.

Radio piece for German public radio (Deutschlandfunk) about the 'time well spent' movement, the war for attention, what (social) media consumption does to our brains, and how a 'digital detox' might help to escape the permanent seductions of social media.

I visited an 'anchor center' in Schweinfurt, Bavaria to talk to asylum seekers from Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Somalia — countries with a low 'protection rate'. Most of them thus don't have good chances of staying in Germany, regardless of the personal suffering many of them have endured to make it to Europe.

How dangerous is AI's exponential growth? Is any job immune to automation? I spoke to technologists and historians to better understand some of the technological and societal upheavals humanity is facing.

“There’s a diversity of talent from around the world coming to Vietnam because of all this excitement and because it’s easy to bootstrap stuff here."

63-page report in German about Vietnam's economic rise. I spent 3 months on the ground in Vietnam conducting 70+ interviews thanks to the Heinz-Kühn-Foundation.