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Djehuti
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While lyinass trolls talk about country music songs, I have a far more pressing and interesting issue to address.

I recently saw an episode of the documentary series Global Voices, entitled 'Stealing Africa' which talks about the modern day colonialism on the African continent by corporations exploiting Africa's resources while leaving the natives in poverty. This fiendish system was only made possible by a government programs such as global banks and tax systems. In other words, it isn't the corporations alone but the governments that back them through their political cronies.

As one person put it, "Africa receives several billions of dollars in aid every year to alleviate poverty, yet Africa relinquishes ten times the amount in money every year in terms of resources to foreign corporations!"

It is this horrible paradox that continues to debilitate the economies of many African countries not including the political corruption or turmoils.

You can see the trailer here:

Global Voices | Stealing Africa | Trailer | WORLD

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Doug M
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quote:
Originally posted by Djehuti:
While lyinass trolls talk about country music songs, I have a far more pressing and interesting issue to address.

I recently saw an episode of the documentary series Global Voices, entitled 'Stealing Africa' which talks about the modern day colonialism on the African continent by corporations exploiting Africa's resources while leaving the natives in poverty. This fiendish system was only made possible by a government programs such as global banks and tax systems. In other words, it isn't the corporations alone but the governments that back them through their political cronies.

As one person put it, "Africa receives several billions of dollars in aid every year to alleviate poverty, yet Africa relinquishes ten times the amount in money every year in terms of resources to foreign corporations!"

It is this horrible paradox that continues to debilitate the economies of many African countries not including the political corruption or turmoils.

You can see the trailer here:

Global Voices | Stealing Africa | Trailer | WORLD

First off who created the world bank? The same countries at the Berlin Conference, ie. the colonizers of Africa. What is the purpose of the World Bank and IMF? To protect the mineral, financial and resource interests of the former colonial countries around the world.

But at the end of the day, we all know why this still goes on. And it is because African people continue to play deaf dumb and blind to the raping of their own continent. There is no way in hell that after 300 years or more of being exploited these people don't know what is going on. But every year the world bank and other agencies, including NGOs and other organizations are creating all sorts of gimmicks and scams which do nothing but steal more resources from Africa while masquerading as "saviors" of Africa.

For example: The African Green revolution (I, II and III). The only thing this scam did was made it possible for more land grabs under the guise of "food security". What does food security mean? It certainly doesn't mean feeding more Africans using African land and crops grown on African land. Nope. It means SECURING more land for global multinationals to exploit and profit off of.

The Global Warming scam: basically make Africans pay for global warming through a whole array of giimmicks and scams designed to limit African development in the name of "saving the environment".... Yet Africa is the least developed continent on earth and therefore the least able to harm the environment. Africans were living green before white people even breathed through their nostrils. Yet they use this platform to promote projects that explicitly limit Africans ability to grow and develop, while Europe and Asia can grow and industrialize all they want while stealing Africa's resources to do it. Nobody is saying that they should stop sucking the resources out of Africa. They are just claiming that if Africans start using THEIR OWN resources, it will be bad for the environment. But everyone else doing it.... thats perfectly OK.

And so forth and so on. All of these scams are ultimately supported by the world bank and their affiliated globalist organizations.

But that is what you expect from thieves who have never been punished for stealing. However, the bigger issue is that African leaders are implicit in all of this. African leaders have done nothing but become front men for the white colonists who never really left. Just like the whites haven't left South Africa and still control all the wealth, so too do whites still control the wealth in most of their former colonies. The African leaders and their governments are simply paid flunkies for white land owners. The armies in Africa aren't armies in a true sense, they are simply paid mercenaries working to protect the lands of foreigners and their interests. They are ABSOLUTELY NOT there to protect anything FOR AFRICANS.

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lamin
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You hit the nail on the head. All those dumb, cowardly, and ignorant African leaders should be hit on the head too. For these men--and a couple women--dumbness is a virtue.
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Solar energy in africa
Sudan signs euro solar energy deal

Sudan signed a 1.25 billion euro deal with a private French company on Wednesday to build three
solar
power plants in the war-torn Darfur region, a step forward in sustainable clean energy.

The project will target producing 2000 megawatts of electricity over the next 10 years using concentrated solar power to generate electricity across the country, a statement from the French Solar Euromed company said.

http://www.goodnewsaboutafrica.com/g...r-energy-deal/
____________


Tuesday December 4, 2012, 3:56 pm

BBC News Science & Environment
4 December 2012 Last updated at 02:52 ET

Ghana solar energy plant set to be Africa's largest

Matt McGrath By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News

A UK firm has announced plans to build what it claims is the biggest photovoltaic (PV) solar power plant in Africa.

The Nzema project, based in Ghana, will be able to provide electricity to more than 100,000 homes.

Construction work on the $400m (£248m) plant is due to start within 12 months.

The developers say that they are optimistic that finance for the project will be confirmed
within
six months.
Fully cooked

The initiative is being developed by Blue Energy, a UK-based renewable energy investment company.

Dozens of solar projects have been announced across Africa in recent years but few have been on this ambitious scale says industry analyst Ash Sharma at IMS Research. He says the 155 megawatt plant will increase Ghana's generating capacity by 6%.

"It is the biggest single project that's going ahead at the moment," he told BBC News. "It is not the biggest in the world, but if it goes ahead it will be the biggest in Africa."

He says that a key element in helping the project go ahead has been Ghana's renewable energy law under which the plant has been awarded a feed-in tariff for 20 years. These are premium prices, guaranteed for the working life of the site.

Project director Douglas Coleman, from Mere Power Nzema Ltd. who will build the plant, told BBC News that it was "fully cooked" in planning terms.

"The project has land, it has planning consent, it has a generating licence, and it has received a feed-in tariff," he said, "it is the right plant in the right place at the right time."

He was confident that the finance needed to build the plant could be raised in the next six months.

The company behind the scheme is majority owned and funded by members of the Stadium Group, a large European private asset and development company with £2.5bn under management.

Ash Sharma believes that the backing of this firm plus the feed-in tariff makes the idea viable.

"One of the biggest stumbling blocks has been overcome and the financing looks like it could be in a good position to succeed I would say."
Not concentrating

Unlike many other solar projects in Africa that use concentrated solar power, the Nzema plant will use photovoltaic (PV) technology to convert sunlight directly into electricity. Douglas Coleman says the characteristics of the Sun in Ghana favour PV.

"We can predict with great certainty on an annual basis, the output from the plant. That predictability means we can harmonise with the needs of the transmission network, to balance load with generation."

While concerns have been raised in recent weeks about the future of North Africa's Desertec project that aims to export solar power to Europe, researchers are far more hopeful about the prospects for local African markets.

Demand for renewable energy has been held back in emerging economies like Ghana by high costs, but a recent glut of solar panels on world markets has seen prices tumble - much to the advantage of African countries.

"The reason the technology hasn't taken off so far is that it has been too expensive," says Ash Sharma, "but the costs of solar have decreased dramatically in the last two years, they've fallen by 40% plus, and this has really enabled it to be used in emerging regions in Africa and Asia."

Installation of more than 630,000 solar PV modules will begin by the end of next year with electricity being generated early in 2014. It is due to reach full capacity at the end of 2015.


http://www.care2.com/news/member/663679641/3495604


__________________________

Solar Lights Up Villages in Senegal


Frequent power cuts have led people in rural areas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal to turn to solar energy for electricity.

Promoters of solar panels say more than 80 villages in Senegal are already benefiting from this renewable energy source; in neighbouring Mali, more than 150 communities are enjoying solar power.

According to solar manufacturer Sustainable Power Electric Company (SPEC), based in Senegal, photovoltaic cells, or solar panels, have been a potential solution for electrification in rural areas for years, with only the relatively high cost of installation preventing widespread adoption in West Africa.


But Mamadou Saliou Sow, director of SPEC, explains that a generous subsidy is now bringing the panels within reach of many more in Senegal.

"A square metre of photovoltaic cells previously cost 650,000 CFA francs (around 1,350 dollars), but with a subsidy from the government of more than four billion CFA (around 8.3 million dollars), we have reduced this. Now one can get panels and the hardware needed to install them for 300,000, even 250,000 CFA (520 dollars)," Sow told IPS.


"And solar panels also have a long life span after installation; they can last eight or ten years or more."

SPEC manufactures panels with outputs ranging from 50 watts to more than 300W, meaning they can meet nearly all needs. As well as providing lighting in homes and schools, solar panels are powering fridges, improving security, and supporting small collective enterprises and mini-power plants.

In the village of Kidira, in eastern Senegal, not far from the border with Mali, livestock owners were experiencing worrying levels of theft. Amadou Dia, a teacher at the local secondary school, says the villagers turned to solar power to light up their stock enclosures at night.

"People here are mostly livestock herders, but there was a series of stock thefts. They dipped into their own pockets, contributing 50,000 CFA per household (a little more than 100 dollars), to get solar lighting," he told IPS.

Shakir Sow lives in the area, but he opted to go it alone. He spent more than a million CFA (2000 dollars) to install solar panels at his house, but he is not complaining at the cost.

"With the installation of a photovoltaic kit, my animals are protected; and my children who are in school can also study thanks to the light. And now we have a television to follow the news. I'm a modern herdsman," he said.

SPEC also operates in neighbouring Mali, alongside another provider, Sahel Energie. In Dindiéri, in the east of the country, nearly all the houses enjoy solar energy.

"I spent 680,000 CFA (1,417 dollars) to get my solar panels. This provides power for the whole house and a bar, as well as two televisions, lamps and two fridges," said Moutakilou Bangoura, a young trader from Dindiéri.

In Kayes, a city in the west of Mali, some families have opted for solar power even though the city is connected to the national electricity grid. They say solar energy is cheaper – and it extends the life of their electrical appliances.

Khalidou Soumaré, an official with the Kayes municipalitiy, told IPS that he has used solar panels in his house for 10 years.

"Back then, people thought that it was a luxury; I was simply fed up with the power cuts, which were also damaging my appliances. I chose solar and I don't regret it. I no longer have a monthly bill to pay," said Soumaré.

"What's still a problem is getting spare parts for the device which stores solar power (in a battery). We used to buy them in Bamako (the Malian capital); now you can get them here, although sometimes the traders try to outdo each other."

According to Soumaré, there are also non-governmental organisations working to improve access to electricity in rural areas. For example, in 2009 the Monaco Red Cross installed a mini-solar power plant consisting of twelve 50-watt panels in Kayes, to support the recharging of 400 individual lamps owned by families.

"Each user receives a lamp, and can recharge it at the central point whenever they want for a monthly subscription fee of 700 CFA (1.45 dollars). The revenue from this pays for a technician and for any maintenance," Soumaré said.

"This approach has the advantage of making solar electricity immediately available to families who don't have the resources to buy a photovoltaic kit."

In Boulsa, a village in the Koupèla commune in southern Burkina Faso, a French NGO called Soleil et Développement (Sun and Development) helped 102 women install solar panels in their houses in 2009. The women have put the electricity to good use, forming a collecting which processes grain for sale.

"Solar energy can contribute effectively to the reduction of household energy bills," says SPEC director Sow. He believes the world's energy future is inconceivable without renewable energy, and solar power in particular.


By Koffigan E. Adigbli


Source: IPS News


http://www.africagoodnews.com/infras...n-senegal.html

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UNEP has developed a loan programme to stimulate renewable energy
market forces with attractive return rates, buffer initial deployment
costs and entice consumers to consider and purchase renewable
technology. After a successful solar loan program sponsored by UNEP
that helped 100,000 people finance solar power systems in developing
countries like India,] UNEP started similar schemes in other parts of
developing world like Africa - Tunisia, Morocco, Kenya projects are
already functional and many projects in other African nations are in
the pipeline. In Africa, UNEP assistance to Ghana, Kenya and Namibia
has resulted in the adoption of draft National Climate Awareness
Plans, publications in local languages, radio programmes and
seminars.The Rural Energy Enterprise Development (REED) initiative is
another flagship UNEP effort focused on enterprise development and
seed financing for clean energy entrepreneurs in developing countries
of West and Southern Africa.

“I pay 30,000 kwacha [about $6.25] as a rental charge every month to
NESCO,” Mr. Lungu told the Integrated Regional Information Networks
(IRIN), a humanitarian news agency. “For me, it works out cheaper to
use solar because paraffin is more expensive, and even if electricity
comes to Nyimba, not all the people will get connected.”

No major marketing is needed to convince African citizens to turn to
solar. The demand is high. NESCO says it has about 360 people on its
waiting list. “We are struggling to satisfy demand,” confesses Mr.
Stanislas Sankhani, the company’s project manager.
With a concerted NEPAD effort Africans will, hopefully, not languish
in line for much longer. Solar electricity, states the World Bank, is
as good as an electricity grid for rural households since they do not
consume much power. In a modest Nyimba office, 320 kilometres away
from the Zambian capital’s grid, a sign confidently announces that the
office is up to date: “Solar is good ... even in thatched houses; it
will reach you wherever you are.”

__________________________________________________________________-

some more news

The River Estate near Shamva, 70 kilometres from Zimbabwe’s capital,
Harare, boasts one of the best solar-village models in the country.
Fifty-two commercial farming families share systems; there is one
system for every two houses. Each family has two lamps and a
connection for a radio or small television set. The new lighting
systems have improved the quality of life for the community. They have
extended study hours for schoolchildren, reduced rural-to-urban
migration in the area and upgraded health standards by electrifying a
local health center.

Innovative financing

“With all their advantages, solar systems are not cheap to install,”
says Mr. Jem Porcaro, an analyst for the Energy and Environment Group
at UNDP. “A typical home system in sub-Saharan Africa costs anywhere
between $500 and $1,000 and such systems typically provide enough
power to light three to six rooms and power a black-and-white TV each
night. But the cost is well beyond the means of most African
households.”

The use of innovative financing schemes, like fee-for-service
arrangements, is one way to overcome these high up-front costs, notes
Mr. Porcaro. Installing solar panels to power multiple houses at once
can also cut down on costs. More households could afford solar power,
argues the World Bank, if governments were to remove barriers, such as
high import duties, that increase the cost of the panels. Regional
cooperation to facilitate trade is another major NEPAD goal.
African leaders are demonstrating commitment to bring solar power to
rural homes. For example, a UNDP-GEF report on solar financing and
delivery models notes that private sales, through dealers, initially
dominated the market in South Africa, but that the government, a
leading NEPAD proponent, later initiated a massive off-grid effort
that is now fully active. Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and
most countries in the region have developed solar markets, in many
cases with special funds to support consumer credit.

Boost to businesses

Besides domestic use, people are harnessing solar power to run small
businesses. Entrepreneur Abina Lungu operates a maize-grinding mill in
Nyimba, eastern Zambia. With reliable solar energy, he can work well
into the night to meet all his customers’ orders. His house, close to
the mill, is also lit by solar power. Mr. Lungu is one of the many
villagers serviced by the Nyimba Energy Service Company (NESCO), an
enterprise funded by the Swedish International Development Agency. To
get power into a home or shop, NESCO installs a system that includes a
panel, battery, charge controller and power points. The cost is
$33.33, including the contract fee. Thereafter, consumers pay a
monthly rental fee.
__________________________________________________________________________________


Renewable energy use
Solar power

Several large-scale solar power facilities are under development in
Africa including projects in South Africa and Algeria. Although solar
power technology has the potential to supply energy to large numbers
of people, and has been used to generate power on a large scale in the
U.S. and other developed nations, its greatest potential in Africa may
be to provide power on a smaller scale and to use this energy to help
with day to day needs such as small-scale electrification,
desalination, water pumping, and water purification.


The only example of a grid-linked solar power station in Africa is the
photovoltaic 250 kW Kigali Solaire station in Rwanda. The Desertec
project, backed by several European energy companies and banks, plans
to generate renewable electricity in the Sahara desert and distribute
it through a high-voltage grid for export to Europe and local
consumption in North-Africa. Ambitions seek to provide continental
Europe with up to 15% of its electricity.

Power Up Gambia, a non-profit operating in The Gambia, uses solar
power technology to provide power to Gambian health care facilities,
providing a reliable source of electricity for lighting, diagnostic
testing, treatments, and water pumping.


Solar water pumping
Kenya may be a good candidate for testing out these systems because of
its progressive and relatively well-funded department of agriculture,
including the Kenya Agricultural Research Center , which provides
funding and oversight to many projects investigating experimental
methods and technologies.

Even though this solar technology may have a higher starting cost than
that of conventional fossil fuel, the low maintenance and operation
cost and the ability to operate without fuel makes the solar powered
systems cheaper to keep running. A small rural community could use a
system like this indefinitely, and it would provide clean drinking
water at a negligible cost after the initial equipment purchase and
setup. In a larger community, it could at least contribute to the
water supply and reduce pressures of daily survival. This technology
is capable of pumping hundreds of gallons of water per day, and is
limited only by the amount of water available in the water table.

With a minimum of training in operation and maintenance, solar powered
water pumping and purification systems have the potential to help
rural Africans fulfill one of their most basic needs for survival.
Further field test are in progress by organizations like KARI and the
many corporations that manufacture the products needed, and these
small-scale applications of solar technology are promising. Combined
with sustainable agricultural practices and conservation of natural
resources, solar power is a prime candidate to bring the benefits of
technology to the parched lands of Africa.

Supplementing the well water would be collection of runoff rainwater
during the rainy season for later use in drought. Southern Africa has
its own network of information sharing called SEARNET [4] which
informs farmers of techniques to catch and store rainwater, with some
seeing increased yields and additional harvests. This new network of
farmers sharing their ideas with each other has led to a spread of
both new and old ideas, and this has led to greater sustainability of
water resources in the countries of Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi,
Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This water could be
used for agriculture or livestock, or could be fed through a purifier
to yield water suitable for human consumption.


Examples
A solar powered water pump and holding system was installed in
Kayrati, Chad, in 2004 as compensation for land lost to oil
development.[37] This system utilizes a standard well pump powered by
a photovoltaic panel array. The pumped water is stored in a water
tower, providing the pressure needed to deliver water to homes in the
area. This use of oil revenue to build infrastructure is an example of
using profits to advance the standard of living in rural areas.


Hundreds of solar water pumping stations in Sudan fulfil a similar
role, involving various applications of different systems for pumping
and storage. Over the past 10 years approximately. 250 photovoltaic
water pumps have been installed in Sudan. Considerable progress has
been made and the present generation of systems appear to be reliable
and cost–effective under certain conditions. A photovoltaic pumping
system to pump 25 cubic metres per day requires a solar array of
approx. 800 Wp. Such a pump would cost US$6000, since the total system
comprises the cost of modules, pump, motor, pipework, wiring, control
system and array support structure. PV water pumping has been promoted
successfully in Kordofan state in Sudan. It shows favorable economics
as compared to diesel pumps, and is free from the need to maintain a
regular supply of fuel. The only maintenance problems with PV pumping
[are] due to the breakdown of pumps and not the failure of the PV
devices.


The Solar Water Purifier, developed and manufactured by an Australian
company, is a low-maintenance, low operational cost solution that is
able to purify large amounts of water, even seawater, to levels better
than human consumption standards set by the World Health
Organization.[39] This device works through the processes of
evaporation and UV radiation. Light passes through the top layer of
glass to the black plastic layer underneath. Heat from the solar
radiation is trapped by the water and by the black plastic. This
plastic layer is a series of connected troughs that separate the water
as it evaporates and trickles down through the levels. The water is
also subjected to UV radiation for an extended period of time as it
moves through the device, which kills many bacteria, viruses, and
other pathogens. In a sunny, equatorial area like much of Africa, this
device is capable of purifying up to 45 litres per day from a single
array. Additional arrays may be chained together for more capacity.

The Water School uses SODIS Solar disinfection currently in target
areas of Kenya and Uganda to help people drink water free of pathogens
and disease causing bacteria. SODIS is a UV process that kills
microorganisms in the water to prevent water borne disease. The
science of the SODIS system is proven with over 20 years of research.


Wind power
The Koudia Al Baida Farm in Morocco, is the largest wind farm in the
continent, currently two others big wind farms are under construction
in Tangier and Tarfaya. There are also projects being planned in South
Africa to implement the use of a wind farm, or large, commercial scale
operations, the construction of these wind farms is being planned for
west coast, north of Cape Town.

In January 2009, the first wind turbine in West Africa was erected in
Batokunku, a village in The Gambia. The 150 kilowatt turbine provides
electrical power for the 2,000-person village.


Geothermal power
So far, only Kenya has exploited the geothermal potential of the Great
Rift Valley.[14] Kenya has been estimated to contain 2000 MWe of
potential geothermal energy[41] and has twenty potential drilling
sites marked for survey in addition to three operational geothermal
plants.[42] Kenya was the first country in Africa to adopt geothermal
energy, in 1956, and houses the largest geothermal power plant on the
continent, Olkaria II, operated by Kengen, who also operate Olkaria I.
A further plant, Olkaria III, is privately owned and operated.


Ethiopia is home to a single binary-cycle plant but does not utilize
its full potential energy output for lack of experience in its
operation. Zambia has several sites planned for construction but their
projects have stalled due to lack of funds. Eritrea, Djibouti and
Uganda have undertaken preliminary exploration for potential
geothermal sources but have not constructed any type of power plant.

Geothermal power has been used in agricultural projects in Africa. The
Oserian flower farm in Kenya utilizes several steam wells abandoned by
Kengen to power its greenhouse. In addition, the heat involved in the
geothermal process is used to maintain stable greenhouse temperatures.
The heat can also be utilized in cooking which would help eliminate
the dependence on wood burning.

_________________________________________________


other info-
In Djabula – 50 miles south of Maputo – Mozambique’s National
Electricity Fund established a photovoltaic standalone station
providing electricity for 45 residencies, a primary school and a heath
outpost. Legislators and politicians visited the project to see how
projects like this could provide answers to many of the energy and
climate change problems facing communities across Africa.

“Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” Mr. Groening said, “and
politicians are working on integrating schemes like this into their
own national energy plans.”

Small-scale projects like this are becoming more common in Africa.

“The demand for our solar kits is huge,” said Katie Bliss of Solar
Aid, a British organization that aims to bring clean, renewable power.


“In Tanzania the price of kerosene, the main energy alternative, is
rapidly increasing,” added Ms. Bliss, whose organization also has
projects in the works in Zambia, Kenya and Malawi. “Our studies found
that 20 percent of household income was being spent on fuel.”


As with other solar products targeting communities, SolarAid does not
give away its micro-solar kits. “It’s not a handout,” Ms. Bliss said.
“We want to encourage a viable trade. Solar has a huge future here,
and anyone we have trained with solar skills has a good chance of
finding employment. We also encourage distributors to take solar
products to rural villages.”


Groups like Solar Aid provide solar power kits — which typically
consist of locally sourced parts and simple construction — starting at
about $20.
But when scaled up, some community projects can challenge grid power.
In an award-winning project in Remu, Ethiopia, the Swedish Solar
Energy foundation supplied electricity to 10,000 people with an
off-grid solar photovoltaic system charging less than $2 per person.


other info
Sierra Leone
Forget the Grid. Can Solar Power Light Africa?

http://blogs.forbes.com/helencoster/...-light-africa/

_____________________

solar-panels-turning-dirty-water-clean-in-angola
http://www.africagoodnews.com/develo...in-angola.html


namibia-boosts-power-supply-capacity
http://www.africagoodnews.com/infras...-capacity.html
______________


working on sustainable cities in africa-

http://africa.siemens.com/en/siemens...ble_cities.htm


and

_________________________________________________________
uganda

http://sca21.wikia.com/wiki/Sseesamirembe_Eco-City


_______________________________________


Hacienda Kenya- Africa's First Eco City, Low Cost Housing

http://www.haciendakenya.com/


_____________________________________________________

MOMBASA | Hacienda Eco City | Under Construction

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=915968


___________________________________________________________________-

The Age of the Eco-City | We Blog The World
Jan 4, 2011 ... Midrand in South Africa's Gauteng Province, has been
working hard to turn the area into an EcoCity, which would incorporate
state-of-the-art ...

http://www.weblogtheworld.com/countr...-the-eco-city/

_____________________________________________________________

South Africa - Eco-City, an ecologically sustainable village in Johannesburg

http://www.lafarge.com/wps/portal/2_...610621438/CSEN


sustainable city in africa-
or eco cities of africa

http://sustainablecities.dk/en/city-...g-for-everyone

_____________________________________________________


http://sustainablecities.net/project...rojects/durban

___________________________________________________________

Eco-city, Johannesburg

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...U2PW15WS0SVqOQ

________________________________________________________________________________________

and

EcoCity: Johannesburg, South Africa


http://www.article13.com/A13_Content...tion&PNID=1120


________________________________________-

Ecocity 3: Yoff/Dakar, Senegal, 1996
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/ecoci...dakar-senegal/


reforestation in the sahara
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...sahara-forest/


____________________________________________________________________________-
nigeria-
Tianjin Eco-city Vs Eco Atlantic City

http://nidf.blogspot.com/2009/06/tia...ntic-city.html


_____________________________________________


Reforestation in Sub-Sahara

http://www.infospring.org/questions/...-in-sub-sahara
_______________


Africa-leads-solar-powered-laptop-revolution

http://www.africagoodnews.com/busine...evolution.html
_____________

Largest Solar Park Being Built in South Africa

http://www.africagoodnews.com/infras...th-africa.html

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Africa's Blossoming Middle Class

Published on Tuesday, 05 July 2011


Africa is often painted as a continent of misery, despair, and hopelessness. On a daily basis, news and pictures are presented by the media which perpetuate this image. Although media like newspapers cannot be faulted for presenting the public newsworthy events, they often paint a partial, biased picture of the continent. The result is distorted perceptions of African countries and circumstances, fuelled by stereotypes.


This CAI paper highlights Africa's burgeoning middle class as key to the African Renaissance. Earlier this year, the African Development Bank (AfDB) released a report entitled "The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa." The report shows that Africa's middle class has tripled over the last three decades to 313 million, or approximately 34% of Africa's population. It states that the rapid increase in the number of middle class citizens can be attributed to strong economic growth and a shift towards a stable, salaried job culture as well as entrepreneurial activity, as opposed to traditional agricultural activities. The continent is clearly developing itself and this paper serves to promote the fact.

The AfDB report emphasizes the rapid increase in middle class citizens, which has occurred since 2000. In 1980, there were approximately 111 million middle class citizens: 26% of Africa's population. In 1990, the number had risen to 151.4 million (27%), and in 2000, to 196 million (27.2%). By 2010, the number stood at 313 million (34%).(5) The North African countries of Tunisia (90%), Morocco (85%) and Egypt (80%) had the highest percentage of middle class citizens. It is therefore not surprising that both Tunisia and Egypt toppled their oppressive governments.Botswana, Cape Verde, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa also have a high percentage of middle class citizens.


Vijay Mahajan, author of Africa Rising, terms Africa's middle class "Africa 2s" and notes that Africa's middle class collectively is approximately the same size of the middle class of India or China.Vijay uses different criteria than the AfDB to measure Africa's middle class and estimates that between 300 and 500 million of Africa's population of 1 billion can be defined as middle class.


The general media has highlighted the AfDB's report. It is generally held in democratic theory that a burgeoning middle class indicates a blossoming society, and that a powerful middle class which is collectively wealthier than the elite and more numerous than the poor invariably leads to a healthy, functional, and truly democratic society which is both accountable and responsive to the needs of its citizens and centered upon ensuring the welfare of all of its citizens, which often results in greater economic growth. For example, BBC News recently highlighted the technology revolution occurring in Africa by drawing attention to Kenya's increasingly sophisticated mobile phone market, ShopAfrica53 in Ghana, and the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) in South Africa - a deep space telescope project. Africa's burgeoning middle class is a promising sign of a more prosperous Africa in the future. A burgeoning middle class is, most importantly, a sign of strong economic growth, which implies that (at least parts of) Africa have been creating the conditions that facilitate the rise of a powerful middle class.

"Africa's middle class is not only crucial for economic growth but it is essential for the growth of democracy… The middle class in Africa, like everywhere else, supports democratic governments that function well and that are accountable... Africa's middle class support states that provide public services like education, health, electricity and water… Africa's middle class is strongest in countries that have robust and growing private sectors,"Vijaya Ramachandran, author of Africa's Private Sector.


Although the AfDB noted that Africa's burgeoning middle class is far from becoming a powerful, established middle class and still faces the danger of slipping into poverty again, we must focus on the fact that development in Africa is occurring all the time. Africans are taking the initiative and taking important steps towards a brighter future, despite what is often portrayed by the media. The next century might just be Africa's.

http://www.africagoodnews.com/africa...dle-class.html


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older news


Africa’s middle class: striving to develop a continent

50 years after Africa's independence boom, middle class drives economic growth, democracy.

Andrew MeldrumMay 19, 2010 05:33

BOSTON — An investment analyst in Ghana who avoided life as a subsistence farmer by winning a college scholarship.

[IMG] http://www.globalpost.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/gp3_small_article/photos/12/Africa-Middle-Class.jpg [/IMG]


A real estate agent in South Africa who sells homes to "black diamonds," as the country's upwardly mobile blacks are known.

An assistant to a senator in Liberia who has a generator to provide her home with electric power.

These are the faces of Africa's entrepreneurs and professionals who are driving the continent’s economic growth. They give crucial support to democracy and political stability. They are members of Africa's middle class.

Fifty years after the phenomenon of African independence brought an end to colonial rule, the African middle class has taken advantage of educational and professional opportunities to improve their status and to seek better futures for their families.


The continent's middle class does not often make international headlines nor is it much studied by academics, but the group is key to the continent’s progress, according to economists and political scientists.

As the World Cup kicks off in Johannesburg on June 11, Africans around the world are celebrating that their continent is hosting the world’s biggest sports tournament for the first time. But more than that, from the Congo to Cape Town, Africans are reveling in the sign that the continent has come of age and is offering more opportunities to its people.

Since 1960, when 17 African countries achieved independence from French and British colonial rule, the continent has struggled to find its way forward. International headlines have often portrayed Africa in harsh terms of violence, dictatorships, famine and disaster. With this series on Africa’s middle class, GlobalPost is focusing on the millions of unheralded Africans who make up the center of the continent’s economic and social pyramid.

The middle class is widely acknowledged to be Africa's future, the group that is crucial to the continent's economic and political development. But it is difficult to define exactly who is in the key group and even harder still to establish how many middle class there are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The World Bank estimates that Africa's middle class is small but will grow to reach 43 million by 2030. Other experts say the middle class is much larger, at 300 million, representing the population that is between the masses of Africa's poorest and the continent's elite few.

Africa's middle class is not the same as the middle class in the U.S. or Europe. They have escaped the poverty and hunger of many Africans. They want their own homes, cars and televisions.

“Africa’s middle class is the great economic engine that will drive development across the continent,” said Vijay Mahajan, whose book, “Africa Rising,” describes the social phenomenon. “The growth of Africa’s middle class greatly accelerated after the independence of African nations in the 1960s.”

He describes the “Africa 1s” as the elite wealthy class and the “Africa 3s” are the very poor, existing on less than $1 dollar a day. In the middle are the “Africa 2s,” who, Mahajan explains, “want to do better, who are optimistic and forward-thinking. These are the nurses, teachers, small business people, civil servants, workers in the hospitality industry.”

Between 300 million and 500 million of Africa’s 1 billion people are defined as "Africa 2s" by Mahajan.


“The Africa 2s are driving the economic growth of the continent. They are building modern Africa,” said Mahajan. “They are the ones who send their kids to schools and count on education to improve their lives. And this emerging African middle class, made up of all nationalities taken together, is roughly the size of the middle class in India or China.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/a...elop-continent

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How Africa is Becoming the New Asia
How Africa is Becoming the New Asia
February 19, 2010

China and India get all the headlines for their economic prowess, but there's another global growth story that is easily overlooked: Africa. In 2007 and 2008, southern Africa, the Great Lakes region of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and even the drought-stricken Horn of Africa had GDP growth rates on par with Asia's two powerhouses. Last year, in the depths of global recession, the continent clocked almost 2 percent growth, roughly equal to the rates in the Middle East, and outperforming everywhere else but India and China. This year and in 2011, Africa will grow by 4.8 percent—the highest rate of growth outside Asia, and higher than even the oft-buzzed-about economies of Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and Eastern Europe, according to newly revised IMF estimates. In fact, on a per capita basis, Africans are already richer than Indians, and a dozen African states have higher gross national income per capita than China.

More surprising is that much of this growth is driven not by the sale of raw materials, like oil or diamonds, but by a burgeoning domestic market, the largest outside India and China. In the last four years, the surge in private consumption of goods and services has accounted for two thirds of Africa's GDP growth. The rapidly emerging African middle class could number as many as 300 million, out of a total population of 1 billion, according to development expert Vijay Majahan, author of the 2009 book Africa Rising. While few of them have the kind of disposable income found in Asia and the West, these accountants, teachers, maids, taxi drivers, even roadside street vendors, are driving up demand for goods and services like cell phones, bank accounts, upmarket foodstuffs, and real estate. In fact, in Africa's 10 largest economies, the service sector makes up 40 percent of GDP, not too far from India's 53 percent. "The new Africa story is consumption," says Graham Thomas, head of principal investment at Standard Bank Group, which operates in 17 African countries.

Much of the boom in this new consumer class can be attributed to outside forces: evolving trade patterns, particularly from increased demand coming out of China, and technological innovation abroad that spurs local productivity and growth like the multibillion-dollar fiber-optic lines that are being laid out between Africa and the developed world. Other changes are domestic and deliberate. Despite Africa's well-founded reputation for corruption and poor governance, a substantial chunk of the continent has quietly experienced this economic renaissance by dint of its virtually unprecedented political stability. Spurred by eager investors, governments have steadily deregulated industries and developed infrastructure. As a result, countries such as Kenya and Botswana now boast privately owned world-class hospitals, charter schools, and toll roads that are actually safe to drive on. A study by a World Bank program, the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic, found that improvements in Africa's telecom infrastructure have contributed as much as 1 percent to per capita GDP growth, a bigger role than changes in monetary or fiscal policies. Shares of stocks in recently privatized local airlines, freight companies, and telecoms have skyrocketed.

Entrepreneurship has increased at the same time, powered in part by the influx of returning skilled workers. Just as waves of expats returned to China and India in the 1990s to start businesses that in turn attracted more outside talent and capital, there are now signs that an entrepreneurial African diaspora will help transform the continent. While brain drain is still a chronic problem in countries such as Burundi and Malawi—some of the poorest in the world on a per capita basis—Africa's most robust economies, such as those in Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa, are beginning to see an unprecedented brain gain. According to some reports, roughly 10,000 skilled professionals have returned to Nigeria in the last year, and the number of educated Angolans seeking jobs back home has spiked 10-fold, to 1,000, in the last five years. Bart Nnaji gave up a tenured professorship at the University of Pittsburgh to move back to Nigeria in 2005 and run Geometric Power, the first private power company in sub-Saharan Africa. Its $400 million, 188-megawatt power plant will come online this fall as the sole provider of electricity for Aba, a city of 2 million in southeast Nigeria. Afam Onyema, a 30-year-old graduate of Harvard and Stanford Law, turned down six-figure offers in corporate law to build and run a $50 million state-of-the-art private hospital with a charitable component for the poor in southeast Nigeria.

Many experts believe Africa, with its expansive base of newly minted consumers, may very well be on the verge of becoming the next India, thanks to frenetic urbanization and the sort of big push in services and infrastructure that transformed the Asian subcontinent 15 years ago. Just as India once harnessed its booming population of cheap labor, Africa stands to gain by the rapid growth of its big cities. Already the continent boasts the world's highest rate of urbanization, which jump-starts growth through industrialization and economies of scale. Today only a third of Africa's population lives in cities, but that segment accounts for 80 percent of total GDP, according to the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements. In the next 30 years, half the continent's population will be living in cities.

Nowhere is this relationship between the consumer class and urbanization more apparent than in Lagos, Nigeria, a megalopolis of 18 million that has the anything-goes pace of a Chongqing or Mumbai. On Victoria Island, the city's commercial center, real estate is as expensive as in Manhattan. Everywhere you look, there is construction: luxury condos, office buildings, roads, even a brand-new city nearby being dredged from the sea that will hold half a million people. "Everything is in short supply, so everything's a high-growth area," explains Adedotun Sulaiman, a venture capitalist and chairman of Accenture in Nigeria. "In terms of opportunities, it's just mind-blowing." Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest black entrepreneur, has also cashed in on this consumer culture, with a net worth of $2.5 billion, according to Forbes. His empire, which began in 1978 as a trading business that imported, among other things, baby food, cement, and frozen fish, is focused on Nigeria's burgeoning domestic growth, producing cement for shopping and office complexes; renting luxury condos; making noodles, flour, and sugar; and now expanding into services such as 3G mobile networks and transportation. "There's nowhere you can make money like in Nigeria," says the 53-year-old Dangote. "It's the world's best-kept secret."

Not anymore. A recent study by Oxford economist Paul Collier of all 954 publicly traded African companies operating between 2000 and 2007 found that their annual return on capital was on average 65 percent higher than those of similar firms in China, India, Vietnam, or Indonesia because labor costs are skyrocketing in Asia. Their median profit margin, 11 percent, was also higher than in Asia or South America. African mobile operators, for instance, showed the highest profit margins in the industry worldwide. As a result, foreign multinationals like Unilever, Nestlé, and Swissport International report some of their highest growth in Africa. So even as foreign direct investment fell by 20 percent worldwide in 2008, capital in-flows to Africa actually jumped 16 percent, to $61.9 billion, its highest level ever, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even Chinese companies are thinking of outsourcing basic manufacturing to Africa. The World Bank is now helping China set up an industrial zone in Ethiopia, the first of perhaps several offshore centers akin to the sprawling free-trade zones that opened up China's economy in the 1980s.

Still, Africa remains at the very frontier of emerging markets. Despite its gains, the difficulty and cost of running a business there are the highest in the world, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. Couple that with pervasive corruption—Transparency International calls the problem "rampant" in 36 of 53 African states—and it's no wonder Africa is often regarded as a toxic place to operate. But World Bank president Robert Zoellick says that in the aftermath of the economic crisis, long-term investors have recognized that "developed markets have big risks too." Like China and India, Africa is exploiting that fact, and perhaps more than any other region it is illustrative of a new world order in which the poorest nations will still find ways to steam ahead.


http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/18/h...-new-asia.html

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globalism versus globalization
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What's the speed of our globalizing world?


Globalist Perspective > Global Culture
Globalism Versus Globalization

By Joseph Nye | Monday, April 15, 2002

What is globalization? In contrast, what is globalism? And how do both of these concepts shape our world? Joe Nye, the former Dean of the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, outlines the fundamental differences between these two concepts. Globalism describes the reality of being interconnected, while globalization captures the speed at which these connections increase — or decrease.

The Globalist

lobalism versus globalization? Many people would think the two terms refer to the same phenomenon. However, there are important differences between the two.

What is globalism?

Globalism, at its core, seeks to describe and explain nothing more than a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances.

Globalism seeks to explain nothing more than a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances.
It attempts to understand all the inter-connections of the modern world — and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them.

In contrast, globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. It focuses on the forces, the dynamism or speed of these changes.

In short, consider globalism as the underlying basic network, while globalization refers to the dynamic shrinking of distance on a large scale.

Globalism is a phenomenon with ancient roots. Thus, the issue is not how old globalism is, but rather how "thin" or "thick" it is at any given time.

The Silk Road: "Thin" globalism

As an example of "thin globalism," the Silk Road provided an economic and cultural link between ancient Europe and Asia. Getting from thin to thick globalism is globalization — and how fast we get there is the rate of globalization.

Of course, the Silk Road was plied by only a small group of hardy traders. Its direct impact was felt primarily by a small group of consumers along the road.

In contrast, the operations of global financial markets today, for instance, affect people from Peoria to Penang. Thus, "globalization" is the process by which globalism becomes increasingly thick/intense.

"Thick" globalism: What's new?

The general point is that the increasing intensity, or thickness, of globalism — the density of networks of interdependence — is not just a difference in degree from the past. An increasing "thickness" changes relationships, because it means that different relationships of interdependence intersect more deeply at more different points.

There are four distinct dimensions of globalism: economic, military, environmental — and social.

At the same time, it is important to note that globalism does not imply universality. After all, the connections that make up the networks to define globalism may be more strongly felt in some parts of the world than in others.

For example, at the turn of the 21st century, a quarter of the U.S. population used the World Wide Web. At the same time, however, only one-hundredth of one percent of the population of South Asia had access to this information network.

Since globalism does not imply universality and given that globalization refers to dynamic changes, it is not surprising that globalization implies neither equity — nor homogenization. In fact, it is equally likely to amplify differences — or at least make people more aware of them.

Economic dimension of globalism — and beyond

Both globalism and globalization are all too often defined in strictly economic terms, as if the world economy as such defined globalism. But other
Based on the historic evidence, we should expect that globalism will be accompanied by continuing uncertainty.
forms are equally important. There are four distinct dimensions of globalism: economic, military, environmental — and social.

Economic globalism involves long-distance flows of goods, services and capital and the information and perceptions that accompany market exchange.

These flows, in turn, organize other processes linked to them. One example of economic globalization is low-wage production in Asia for the United States and European markets. Economic flows, markets and organization — as in multinational firms — all go together.

The environmental dimension

Environmental globalism refers to the long-distance transport of materials in the atmosphere or oceans or of biological substances such as pathogens or genetic materials that affect human health and well-being.

In contrast, examples of environmental globalization include the accelerating depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer as a result of ozone-depleting chemicals — or the spread of the AIDS virus from central Africa around the world beginning at the end of the 1970s.

The military dimension

Military globalism refers to long-distance networks in which force, and the threat or promise of force, are deployed. A well-known example of military globalism is the "balance of terror" between
We should not fear that globalism will lead to homogenization. Instead, it will expose us to the differences that surround us.
the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War — a strategic interdependence that was both acute and well-recognized.

What made this interdependence distinctive was not that it was totally new — but that the scale and speed of the potential conflict arising from interdependence were so enormous.

Military globalization manifested itself in recent times in the tragic events of September 11. Here, geographical distances were shrunk as the lawless mountains of Afghanistan provided the launching pad for attacks on New York and Washington — some 4,000 miles away.

Social and cultural globalism

The fourth dimension is social and cultural globalism. It involves movements of ideas, information, images and of people, who of course carry ideas and information with them.

Examples include the movement of religions — or the diffusion of scientific knowledge. In the past, social globalism has often followed military and economic globalism.

However, in the current era, social and cultural globalization is driven by the Internet, which reduces costs and globalizes communications, making the flow of ideas increasingly independent of other forms of globalization.

Why are these divisions useful?

The division of globalism into separate dimensions, as presented above, is inevitably somewhat arbitrary. Nonetheless, it is useful for analysis, because changes in the various dimensions of globalism do not necessarily go together. For example, economic globalism rose between 1850 and 1914 — and fell between 1914 and 1945.

Based on the historic evidence, we should expect that globalism will be accompanied by continuing uncertainty.

However, at the same time as economic globalism was declining during the two World Wars, military globalism rose to new heights — as did many aspects of social globalism.

Take, for example, the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19, which took 21 million lives. It was propagated by the flows of soldiers around the world.

Does this suggest that globalism declined or rose between 1914 and 1945? It depends on the dimension, or sphere, of globalism one is referring to.

Without a specifying adjective, general statements about globalism are often meaningless — or misleading. The same applies when talking about globalization or globalism today.

Entering a world of uncertainty

Based on the historic evidence, we should expect that globalism will be accompanied by continuing uncertainty.

There will be a continual competition between increased complexity and uncertainty on the one hand — and efforts by governments, market participants and others to comprehend and manage these systems on the other.

In conclusion, we should not expect — or fear — that globalism will lead to homogenization. Instead, it will expose us more frequently and in more variations to the differences that surround us.


The Globalist
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2392


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Has Africa's manufacturing revolution started?
While most developing regions were laying the foundations of a manufacturing-driven economy, Africa continued to rely on the export of low-value raw materials. But it now seems that the trend is changing and local value addition is increasing - from cutting and polishing diamonds to exporting finished manufactured products. Sarah Rundell reports.

Eurostar, an Indian-owned diamond trading and cutting company, is one of the latest businesses to open a factory in Botswana; it cuts and polishes diamonds in the capital Gabarone. Botswana accounts for an estimated 27% of global diamond production, but until recently the delicate art of polishing and cutting happened overseas. Although Africa is home to five of the top seven global diamond producers, the bulk of exports remain rough or uncut stones.

But this is changing as a new trend begins to take root. Over the span of a few years, 16 factories, like Eurostar, have set up in Botswana while six have sprung up in Namibia. It is the beginning of a new industry, adding value to gems back home. Botswana now competes with manufacturing centres such as India, which employs one million people in the polishing business, and can now add around 40% to the value of its sparkling export. "They are taking the rough diamond and turning it into a finished product. This way Botswana is able to compete with other polishing centres and it has created a whole new industry," says Mervin Lifshitz at the Botswana Diamond Manufacturers Association.

Botswana's burgeoning diamond-polishing industry is indicative of a wider effort across the continent to add value back home and boost Africa's own manufacturing sector. Economists have said for years that without a strong manufacturing industry - South Africa has the most vibrant - countries will struggle to reduce the cost of manufactured imports, create jobs and accelerate industrialisation.

How healthy is Africa's manufacturing sector?

Companies say power supply is the biggest challenge. The World Bank's December 2009 Kenya Economic Update estimates domestic manufacturing loses almost 10% in potential sales due to power outages and transport bottlenecks. It is making Kenyan goods uncompetitive, warns Betty Maina at the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM). "With energy cost constituting over 40% of total manufacturing costs, Kenya's products are increasingly finding it difficult to compete with those from other countries, especially Asia," she says.

It is a similar story in Nigeria, where companies rely on their own generators. This helps ensure power supply but the cost is unbearable for many, causing factories to close or temporarily shut and lay off staff, says Alhaji Bashir Borodo, the president of Nigeria's Manufacturers Association.

"Manufacturing is dying in Nigeria because of the power supply," bemoans Lagosian entrepreneur Seyi Boroffice. "The government still believes it can fix the problem but it has to be driven by the private sector."

It is a call being answered. Nigerian energy firm Oando has invested Ni6bn ($i04.6m) through its subsidiary Gaslink in iookm of distribution pipeline to service over 90 customers in Lagos's industrial centres. It is part of an overall massive investment to provide Nigeria's industrial and commercial centres with a reliable and cheap fuel option, the company says.

In South Africa, where state-owned power utility Eskom produces 90% of its electricity supply from coal-fired power stations and struggles to meet demand, companies say they are exploring other power sources. A near-collapse of the grid in January 2009 shut the country's gold and platinum mines for five days and sent metals prices soaring.

The recession has not helped manufacturers. Inflation and consumer belt-tightening has led to increased competition from cheaper imports. Mohit Manglani, president of the Carpet Manufacturers Association of Nigeria urges the importance of buying local: "It is the only way to encourage manufacturers to continue to produce high quality and affordable carpets in this country. Patronising locally made carpets will save the country foreign exchange as well as create job opportunities. We believe in the Nigerian manufacturing sector and we encourage more consumption of locally made carpets," he says.

Local brands thriving
Domestic demand is fuelling new industries. Lagos-headquartered mattress maker Mouka says sales grew by 40% in 2007 and 50% in 2008 on the back of Nigeria's growing middle class and lifestyle changes. The manufacturer has three factories around the country and employs around 600 people producing foam mattresses, pillows and foam material for industrial use. Manglani says carpet manufacturers in Nigeria have invested over N5bn ($33m at today's exchange rate) in the industry in the last two years in state-of-the-art machinery and technology in response to domestic consumer demand.

Manufacturers with strong brands are thriving, argues African equity analyst Christopher Hartland-Peel at investment banking boutique Exotix. Strong sales for Nigeria Stock Exchange-listed (NSE) manufacturers of soaps and beauty products - such as PZ Cussons Nigeria, Unilever as well as GSK Consumer Nigeria (part of GlaxoSmithKline and makers of brands including Aquafresh toothpaste), prove it. "Multinationals play a big part in the domestic manufacturing sector," says Hartland Peel. "They have introduced low-cost manufacturing of valueadded products based on very strong domestic demand."

Industry research group Canadean says Nigeria is one of the top 10 fastest-growing drinks markets in the world. British drinks company Diageo manufactures and sells more Guinness in Nigeria than in any other country apart from Britain.

But it is not just foreign manufacturers that are doing well. McDonald's-style fast food chain, Mr Biggs, part of NSE-listed United Africa Company of Nigeria, has grown from io outlets to 125 in 10 years.


Breweries are amongst the strongest exporters. Kenya's East African Breweries exports its Tusker brand to markets in the UK, US and Japan. Its bottling plant exports 15-20% of production regionally.

Also in East Africa, Nairobi-listed Bamburi Cement, Athi River and East Portland Cement export 15% of their products overseas. Flower producers add value selling readymade bouquets to Europe and to new markets in Australia, Japan, Russia and America, says the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya.

Regional exporters will get a leg-up from the East African Community Customs Union due on stream in July 2010. Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi will all allow the free movement of goods, services, people and capital within the bloc. This will offer the region's manufacturers enlarged market size, economies of scale and increased intra-regional trade.

However, protectionism is stili a worry. Governments such as Uganda have already given in to internal pressures to protect their industries from imports to save jobs. Kenyan firms say they struggle to sell processed animal products and galvanised iron sheets into Uganda for example. Nevertheless, the union will enable manufacturers to target crucial regional markets, says KAM's Maina. "Last year, Kenya's exports to Africa accounted for Kshi24bn ($1.6bn) compared to $9om earnings from Europe. The value of exports to Uganda alone topped $42m - less than half of the earnings received from exports to Europe."

Expanding manufacturing base

China is also investing in Africa's manufacturing sector, relocating factory work such as toy and shoe making from China to start-up projects in Zambia, Nigeria, Mauritius and Ethiopia in special economic zones.

During the February African Union summit in Ethiopia, the World Bank's president, Robert Zoellick promised to back African manufacturing with expertise and cash. "If you look back at the growth of East Asia, starting with Japan, and then Korea and Taiwan and Southeast Asia and China, they've used the model of basic manufacturing to slowly move up the value-added chain." He said that the World Bank would look for opportunities to co-invest and build infrastructure with China.

Africa's manufacturers say governments need to do more. Tokunbo Talabi, managing director of Lagos-based Superflux International that makes envelopes, wants the government to support businesses through tax breaks and incentives. "I don't think the Nigerian government values Nigerian companies enough. It feels to us like they are happy for a foreign company to come over here and take away our business rather than to support domestic business."

Red tape and hidden costs are a common complaint. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria cites a recent hike in shipping costs by the Nigerian Ports Authority as an example.

For other manufacturers, like Botswana's new diamond polishing and cutting factories, staff training is the biggest challenge. "Investors have to put lots of time and money here," says Lifshitz.

Despite the obstacles caused by inadequate infrastructure, high transport and production costs, red tape and the lack of skills, manufacturing in Africa is still profitable thanks to a huge domestic market and a growing export market. Africa will only really begin to move towards prosperity if and when its manufacturing output matches that of the strong emerging markets. Has the process started in earnest?

Africa's manufacturers need the support of local consumers to build their businesses.

Africa will move towards prosperity when its manufacturing output matches that of the strong emerging markets
SIDEBAR

Betty Maina (right) says Kenya's regional exports outstrip those to Europe.


Domestic manufacturing loses almost 10% in potential sales due to power outages and transport bottlenecks
SIDEBAR

Africa's manufacturers need the support of local consumers to build their businesses.

Africa will move towards prosperity when its manufacturing output matches that of the strong emerging markets

http://www.allbusiness.com/economy-e...4104948-1.html
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Industrial Revolution going on in Africa.
Some people don't know that their is a begin of an Industrial Revolution going on in Africa. A lot of countries are starting to build their industry.
For example in Nigeria they now manufacture their own car parts, part of motors and in 5 years they will build for 100% their own motors.
A lot of western products are been copied. The same what happend 20 years ago in China before their Industrial Revolution is now happening in Nigeria.

Quote:
Western scientists confirm the beginning of an industrial revolution in Nigeria. For example in the city Nnewi, 300 kilometres at south of the capital Abuja, their are more then thirty industrial companies who are making car components. On average each company has a small hundred employees in service.

Industrial revolution: African tigers


Les Celliers de Meknes is one of the many industrial companies in Morocco. The firma is owned by Brahim Zniber, who produces especially foods: soft drink, cattle fodder, vegetable oil, textile. Also car components ' The industrial revolution in Morocco stands in the start block-systems

The industrial revolution in Morocco is beginning to start' , according to Bouchaara . ' Except local companies also the foreign investments are growing . Renault builds in Tanger one of the largest car factories in the world. Within ten years our economy is at the level of Spain.' The infrastructure has improved enormously. We have recently a fantastic new motorway from Tanger to Marrakesh. ' Morocco is not the only country in Africa where the industry is starting to begin. Except in a number of other countries in North Africa industrial companies are also strong in rise in particularly Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique and South Africa. In Nigeria much industrial companies rice slowly from a deep valley. Because of the enormous income from the oil-export other sectors were neglected for decades. The current government tries to change this . Johnny Ekewuba, marketing manager of the Nigerian Ibeto Group. Its company, that especially manufacters car components . ' We grow 5% a year. The products of the Ibeto Group still remain cheap. A set of their brake block-systems costs 300 naira or less than two euro, what ten times are cheaper than in the Netherlands. The beto Group even already started to exports components to the foreign countries. In neighbouring countries Cameroon and Niger Nigerian car absorbers, oil filters and brake block-systems from Nigeria are evrywhere . ' Also we export to India and Great-Britain.'


African economies grew the previous time more strongly than economies in Europe. Except with the industry also companies in the agrarian, financial sector and communication . The coming years the economies are expected further to increase.


Of lot of influential improvements have taken place the previous years in Africa, like the extension of mobile network . In a large number African countries the network were build by the Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim, director of Celtel. ' Western investors claimed that it was risky to invest in Africa ' , says Ibrahim : ' I found that fear exaggerated and decided to show that they were wrong.' Good telecommunication is very important for companies. Cable phones in Africa have always had problems ' , thus Ibrahim. ' A connection was expensive, there were technical problems'. Current mobile network is, however, more reliable.' Also Internet has come thanks the mobile network for much more Africans available. Cell Celtel was a huge success., in 2006, he sold his company to an investor in Kuwait, and the the name was changed in Zain. Ibrahim got 3.5 billion dollar,and is now one of the richest Africans in the world. Ibrahim is now seeking to invest in other things ' The foodstuff industry in Africa has huge potential'
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[QUOTE=èđđeůx;65889131]This is the 2nd newsweek article that I've seen praising African development. Nothing wrong with that though.

All of this is somewhat believable, and I fully agree that manufacturing will take off soon. Power supply has been the biggest hurdle in most countries, and once this is overcome then the sky is the limit. I'm actually placing my bets on Nigeria becoming one of the continent's first industrial giants. But unlike Asian nations, when manufacturing takes off in Africa it should be led by local companies, not large multinationals looking for cheap labor. I am sure they will come, and them being there would obviously benefit the development of industry sector, but in the long-run what African manufacturing needs is companies such as Foxconn, Hyundai Group, Mahindra Group, Huawei, and Li & Fung (though they don't manufacture). All locally grown and powerful.


Africa has the largest domestic market outside of India and China b/c it has a billion people and growing. Disregarding this I do agree with you. ALL articles I have seen on Africa have lumped the entire continent together. Thus giving you the appearance as if it's one country. This needs to stop, but I don't think it will until larger African nations grow enough to capture sole attention. Asia is still referred to as if its one many times, such as how Asia will overtake Europe and NA in wealth, etc. etc. I say give it another ten years or so before there are a batch of countries on the continent that can distinguish themselves from others.

And individually, some African nations grew faster or around the same pace as Indonesia, Philipines, Bangladesh, nations in latin america etc. Nigeria's growth was above 7% last year, Ethiopia clocked in 8.7% growth, Tanzania 6%, Mozambique 6.3%, Egypt 4.9%, Morocco 4.9%, etc. Obviously, there were countries that grew faster than Africa's as a whole 4.8% growth.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=dakhla;65889761]there is no question that africa is changing, most countries just got there independence 50 years ago, and at that time they didn't have no doctors, no teachers, no scientist.....

in 1960 for exemple morocco had only only one profesor, and we use to import teachers from egypt, syria, france..... and in that year we had the first 5 moroccan pilot....

in the first 30 years after the independence it was the cold war and african countries in between fighting for the others, morocco with algerie lybia.... angola with south africa.....

so the whole change came after 1990's, that decade was mostly for politics and the opening for the ex communist for morocco and the more liberal for countries like angola....

i think the real change didn't start coming till 2000's and i think this will be an african centry if we work togother and not against each other trying to creat new countries like in sudan, morocco..... the world is making powerful groups and not tiny countries that will be controled by foreigners.

"i choosed morocco and angola as exemple cause one was for free market and angola were for socialism, and bought are changing fast" .[/QUOTE]

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After the Asian tigers, will it be the turn of the African lions?
 -


INTERNATIONAL. Sub-Saharan Africa is likely to remain the second-fastest growing region after Asia in the near future, predicts Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, governor, Central Bank of Nigeria, but “we can catch up with Asia, as the prospect of Africa as the last unexplored territory in the world and the potential of growth remain.”

For this to happen, Sanusi says Africa needs to put in place the right policies, address its infrastructure deficit, and provide the right environment and incentives for businesses and capital to come in. “That includes policy consistency, political stability, the fight against corruption, and improved efficiency in business processes. If we did the same thing that the Asians, such as the Indonesians and the Malaysians, did and if we did it right, we should be able to repeat the experience.”

Raadiya Begg, director of INSEAD Africa Initiative, says exciting developments are taking place in Africa. Out of an increasing number of opportunities for investment in a variety of sectors, there is a focus on growth sectors related to development such as healthcare, alternative energy, logistics, finance, agriculture, technology and telecommunications.

“Take wireless telecommunications, for example. Mobile telecommunications has levelled the economic landscape, and led to the rapid growth of mobile banking and internet usage,” says Begg. “Improved access to information has had profound economic impacts such as more highly competitive pricing – farmers, for instance, are now able to access real-time prices of goods to make informed decisions on whether to participate in a trade; increased worker productivity; and business models geared towards the less wealthy segments of the population.”

Another area of development is in venture capital. “The viability of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is essential to the health of any economy and the frontier markets are no exception,” argues Begg. “It is the growing entrepreneurial companies that create a multiplier effect.

It is not possible to create sustainable business with microfinance alone. Due to a virtual absence of capital, an equity base in the capital structure, which is almost non-existent in the developing world, is required. Thus, to achieve real impact on societies, expanding venture capital opportunities is a very practical approach.”

Nigeria - a case in point

Citing developments in his own country, Sanusi says the Nigerian economy is about to move to the next level with power reforms, which will bring about rapid growth in manufacturing and processing, as well as double-digit GDP growth.

In the last six years, the economy has been growing at a rate of seven to eight per cent per annum, mainly on the back of growth in agriculture, wholesale and retail trade, and services.

Chronic power outages have, on the other hand, held back economic growth. “Once we address the power infrastructure problems and put the right policies in place, we can easily get to double-digits,” he told INSEAD Knowledge, on the sidelines of The Economist’s Emerging Markets Summit held here recently.

While Nigeria is the leading oil and gas producer in Africa, oil and gas account for only 11%-12% of GDP. So the great potential for growth really comes from agriculture, manufacturing and services, with a lot of room for diversification, says Sanusi. “In the oil and gas and agriculture sectors, there is a lot of upside in processing. This is the country that is the number one producer of cassava in the world. Besides being used for consumption, cassava is now also used as ethanol biofuel feedstock. So there are opportunities for innovation and virgin territories that have not been explored.”

Begg concurs: “As Africa’s biggest oil producer, Nigeria boasts tremendous oil resources and business dynamism. However, of greater interest, is the growth in non-oil output, which is increasing steadily -- such as telecommunications. Nigeria has the eighth fastest telecommunications market in the world and the fastest one in Africa. Together with Kenya, they account for roughly half of Sub-Saharan Africa’s total mobile telecoms revenue.”

Nigerian banks have been consistently outperforming their counterparts in South Africa and Ghana over the past two years, Begg told INSEAD Knowledge. Other sectors showing considerable growth potential include the agricultural sector, building and construction, as well as the hotel and restaurant sectors. “This is barely touching the surface of growth potential that Nigeria has to offer. It has even made a mark in the film industry -- Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, is the third largest, not far behind Hollywood (US) and Bollywood (India).”

Implications for Western competitors

Africa presents unique first-mover advantages for western organisations that recognise serving ‘bottom of the pyramid markets’ as more than just corporate social responsibility, says Begg. New markets in regions such as Africa present companies with opportunities to innovate their value chain. Companies are forced to refocus their strategic growth efforts and change the way they think about doing business, moving towards providing solutions to customers’ needs instead of ‘pushing products’.

To achieve sustainable growth, organisations venturing into markets such as Africa need to have a long-term view of doing business in the region and aim for a triple or at least double bottom line. “It is not a region for quick wins,” says Begg. “Patience and nerves of steel will take you a long way too.”

China-Africa trade

South Africa and Nigeria are now China’s largest African trade partners. The Chinese have traditionally been involved in construction, textiles and light manufacturing, however they have now gone into oil and gas in Nigeria and would also like to get into power and extractive industries, says Sanusi. “While the Chinese have been active in Nigeria, they are at this moment nowhere near being the biggest investor or trading partner of the country, but (China) is increasing its presence.” The country’s biggest trading partner is the US, followed by France.

Some have expressed concerns about China’s investments in Africa. However, Sanusi says he has never understood “why anyone should have concerns about anybody investing anywhere. We need to continue to attract investments but the investments need to be in the real economy. Diversification of investment resources is useful for African countries.”

He says he would be concerned if there were an undue concentration and over-reliance on one partner, but feels that anything that allows capital to come in from different parts of the world on terms that are not detrimental to the long-term economic interest of the country should be encouraged.

Tainted world views?

Think of Africa and many think of a region rife with crime, poverty, poor health, and poor infrastructure. Are these conditions keeping investors away? Sanusi doesn’t think so. In fact he believes these difficulties provide opportunities for people to come in and address these issues.

Poverty only gets alleviated with investments and economic growth, he argues. And if you’ve got a country in a post-conflict situation that has had an economy that’s badly managed, and it suddenly finds good governance, places like Zimbabwe, Angola, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, for example, offer tremendous opportunities for investments as things improve.

“I don’t think the reality of Africa is exactly the same as the perception; a lot of that is exaggerated, probably based on incomplete information,” says Sanusi. “I’ve had many people comment on Africa who’ve never been there. They are making comments based on what they heard many years ago and they have no idea of the amount of changes that have taken place. Go to places like Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, Ghana, Senegal. A lot is happening in terms of governance, democracy, the fight against corruption, reforms. Many people are not aware of the changes in Africa.”

So how do you change perceptions? Sanusi says one way is to continue doing the right things and doing them consistently. Another is to look the world in the eye and say this is simply not true.

With so much going for Africa economically, will it be the turn of the African lions after the Asian tigers? “I hope it will be, and the first lion will be Nigeria,” says Sanusi.

Note. The Economist’s Emerging Markets Summit was held in London September 15-16, 2010.

This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge (http://knowledge.insead.edu)

Copyright INSEAD 2010.

http://www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=49101&t=1&c=62&cg=4&mset=


Originally Posted by popa1980 View Post
Ill believe African manufacturing is booming when I see it. No predictions, just proof.

Ghanas manufacturing sector grew by 1% this year for example. The only nations in
Africa
achieving high growth in these sectors are those coming from a low base- Angola, Rwanda, Ethiopia etc. When I see counries with more established manfacturing sectors- Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania etc grow at at least 6 or 7% annually, then Ill believe.

In contrast, Vietnam is (or was before the crisis) managing near 10% annual growth in this sectot


[QUOTE=èđđeůx;65891999]Wait and see, then. Nigeria will surely see its manufacturing base increase. Everyone knows its bound to happen, Nigeria already has the entrepreneurs looking into increase their manufacturing or get into it. I wouldn't even say it's a prediction there, just something that is bound to happen. Like China overtaking the US eventually.

I am sure Kenya, and Tanzania will see manufacturing rise as well. Not everyone is like Ghana, or should be grouped in with in, in slow industrial sector growth, you know. [Wink]

And it seems like you've contradicted yourself. You've said the only countries seeing manufacturing growing at a high pace are coming from a low base. Well, isn't Vietnam coming from a low base as well? Surely it isn't as developed as China, or even Indonesia and Thailand in this sector.[/QUOTE]

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BRICS Nations Agree To Set Up Development Bank (rival To World Bank And IMF)
The BRICS grouping of emerging economies agreed Tuesday to set up a development bank that would rival Western-backed institutions, South Africa's finance minister told AFP.

BRICS consists of Fast Emerging Economics like Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

"It's done," minister Pravin Gordhan said after meeting with his counterparts from Brazil, Russia, India and China. "The leaders will announce the details," he added.

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Nostra-
Inequality in SA: Another View
For a long time I have maintained that inequality and poverty in SA is exxagarated because of populist politics, i.e. the ANC uses the redistribution bogeyman as a threat against business to keep them in line (If you don't toe the line the masses are on the verge of revolution because of inequality). My argument has been that the gini-coefficient for SA does not adequately capture the 'social wage', i.e. free schooling, income grants, free healthcare, housing etc, that are given to the poor. I think the author below sets out the argument far more eloquently and convincingly. What are your opinions?


Opinion: The truth about SA's social issues

Only 2.7% live in real poverty, and social grants aren’t the badie they seem.

In this the second part of ‘Prospects for 2013’ I deal with the troika of social challenges that are trotted out with so much monotony that it would seem that no dent has been made on any of them. But as the saying goes, “Be careful of change…. it can happen behind your back, right in front of your eyes.” This could not be more true of SA’s social challenges.

Poverty

The SA Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in the November Fast Facts 2012 reported: “Nearly 16m people are already on social grants and the number will rise to 17m in 2014/15 (substantially up from 12m in 2007/08).

According to Carol Paton, writer at large on Business Day, the average amount the government transfers to the average four-person, poor household every month is:

R1 369 for education,
R1 031 on social grants and social insurance funds,
R798 for healthcare, and
R740 for housing, free basic services, and other community amenities
TOTAL R3 938 per month

Cash grants and other transfers, along with rising real wages for those with jobs, have helped reduce the number of people living in poverty (on less than $2 a day) from 8.4m (19% of the population) in 1999 to 1.4m (2.7%) in 2011. They have also helped raise living standards as measured by the South African Advertising Research Foundation.

People on the lowest living standard measure (LSM1) have only a radio and minimal access to services, but those in LSM6 also have stoves, water, electricity, TVs, DVDs, flush toilets, fridges, and cell phones. The proportion of adults in LSM1 has dropped from 10.5% in 2001 to 1% in 2011, while the proportion of people in LSM6 has almost doubled from 12.6% in 2001 to 22.4% in 2011.”

There are two issues here:

First, commentators are nervous to define poverty. Maybe it would help to break ‘poverty’ into lower income/poor/poverty/abject poverty. If abject poverty is considered to be less than $2 a day, then we have made massive inroads with only 2.7% of the population situated there. There is no doubt that there has been a significant migration out of abject poverty, or, put differently, up the 10 LSM scales.

We must stop claiming that 40% of our population lives in poverty, its 2.7%. It is acknowledged that 40% of our population may be poor, but they are not living in poverty. The two are very different.

Secondly, it is acknowledged that social grants are largely the cause of this. Significantly though, more and more research suggests that the grants are not just being spent, they are giving rise to entrepreneurial endeavour at the bottom of the pyramid. Travel through the Transkei on any given week day and see for yourself.

Inequality

The basis for describing SA as the most unequal country in the world is determined by the Gini Coefficient. Information on the Gini Coefficient can be found on the website www.data.worldbank.org. The Gini Coefficient measures the distribution of income on a country-by-country basis. Using a simple example: If there are ten people earning R20, if all R20 is earned by one person the Gini Coefficient will be 1.0. If the R20 is earned equally amongst the ten people i.e R2 each, the Gini Coefficient will be 0.0.

The World Bank has a schedule whereby it publishes the Gini Coefficient of all countries for which it receives the information. South Africa has a Gini Coefficient of 0.65. But look at the website carefully. The last figure for South Africa is for 2009. Count the number of countries that show their highest figures for 2009. You will see there are 34 countries.

We could conclude then that in 2009 out of the 34 countries for which the World Bank has figures, South Africa has the highest Gini Coefficient out of the 34. There are about 232 countries in the world, 193 of which are members of the U.N.

In 2009 only ± 11 million South Africans received government grants for education, social grants, social insurance funds, healthcare, housing, free basic services, and other community amenities.

In 2012 this had increased to 16 million.

Here are the formulae for calculating the Gini Coefficient. The formulae are quite difficult to understand and to apply. And Like any mathematical equation - if any of the input figures are wrong, the answer will be wrong.

Important factors in the calculation:

1. In 2011 the South African Revenue Service announced an amnesty for businesses that were not registered as tax payers. According to the Adcorp website (www.adcop.co.za) 385 000 businesses voluntarily came forward and registered. This means that 385 000 individuals were operating businesses and earning money that the state did not know about. Even if one additional person worked in that business our unemployment figures would be wrong by 385 000 x 2 people = 700 000. This implies that 700 000 people were reflected in the Gini Coefficient calculations as earning no income.

2. Taxation rates. Someone earning R1m per annum pays 40% income tax. The true earnings are R600 000, not R1m. A person earning R60 000 per annum pays no tax and still earns R60 000.

3. Stats. SA does not consider government grants for education, social grants, social insurance funds, healthcare, housing, free basic services, and other community amenities as income and as part of the Gini Coefficient calculation (Bosch, Roussouw et al 2010), so 16 million recipients of these grants are not factored into the ‘input’ figures of the calculation.

These are important considerations: were they to be included we believe our Gini Coefficient would be between 0.38 and 0.45 - a very different picture, and very much average in global terms.

Furthermore why does Credit Suisse in its Global Household Wealth Report of 2012 claim that SA is one of only five countries in the world where household wealth has increased fourfold over the last ten years, putting us in the third quartile of household wealth globally?

So, when commentators claim we are the most unequal society in the world, it’s not true.

Unemployment

The official figures from Stats South Africa for 2011 show that the informal sector employs 1 613 078 people, the formal sector some 11 million people with some 8 million people ‘officially’ unemployed. Based on this figure we are told our unemployment is about 25%. Adcorp’s figures for the same period claim that in the unmeasured informal sector some 6 374 130 people who are designated as ‘officially unemployed’ are ‘economically engaged’. Were this to be the ‘truth’ our true ‘absolutely no work’ unemployment level would be no higher than 12.5%.

Some examples: The SA Taxi Industry with 300 000 taxis use a “conductor” whose job it is to entice passengers, collect fares, clean the vehicle. They earn between R50.00 and R100.00 per day. As far as the State and World Bank is concerned they are unemployed and earn nothing. Consider Car Guards at our shopping centres, Caddies at our 400 Golf Courses, waitrons at our restaurants, the ‘below-the-radar’ township entrepreneurs and even the estimated 100 000 illegal miners. All are ‘statistically’ unemployed in terms of census data.

So the question can be legitimately asked – is our real unemployment as high as 25%?

Comment

I am not suggesting for one moment that poverty, inequality and unemployment are not major social challenges in SA, and I’m not trying to be glib with the above comments. What I am saying is that we don’t know the facts, we generalise, and we don’t acknowledge the progress in this regard. For many, it doesn’t suit.

But, this is a double edged sword, so beware.

Frans Cronje of SAIRR warns:

“However, if we are right and the ANC has delivered as well as it realistically could then it has no delivery ace up its sleeve to curb the protests and instability that South Africa confronts. It has therefore come under much pressure to change policy away from redress and redistribution towards growth and employment if it wishes to remain in power. If you increase people’s living standards, as the ANC has done, it is a politically dangerous thing to do. The reason for this is that it raises expectations about future improvements. These cannot be met through further delivery but only through job creation and income growth.

South Africa’s fundamental problem is that its government has done a great deal to increase the living standards of poor people but has no means, whether through education or labour market access, to allow those same people to continue climbing the living standards ladder. The ANC and the government it leads are therefore in a wholly unsustainable position if they wish to retain their political dominance in South Africa.

Significantly there are now many leaders in government, the media, and civil society who will admit to this fact. The list of problems South Africa confronts, which depresses so many people, has therefore become the very thing that will drive policy change in the country. It is for this reason that we are able to be cautiously optimistic about future prospects for the country.”

Conclusion

This is profound, we do not have a situation where populist policies and more delivery are going to ‘fix’ our social challenges. We have to be able to provide an environment in which job opportunities will provide many South Africans with an opportunity to climb the economic ladder. And we don’t have to look far for models where this has been achieved, but it requires a radical change in our thinking, and in particular our labour practices.
http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-s...etail+no+image

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The unseen side of Equatorial Guinea
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1487602&highlight=


SPACE Thread of Africa - Intergalactic discoveries, astronomy, space travel, tourism, colonization etc.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1407344&highlight=


Rebasing to push Nigerian GDP closer to SA
Lagos - Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) figures will shoot up by around 40% in the second quarter this year, when Africa’s second-biggest economy changes the base year for its calculation to 2009 from its current 1990, a source close to the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

The recalculation will enable Nigeria to join the ranks of middle-income countries and put it much closer in size to South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy.

The source said the calculations had “taken into consideration fluctuations, availability and consistency in the data in choosing the new base year, which will be 2009”, and that it will be applied from the second quarter of 2012.

Most governments overhaul GDP calculations every few years to reflect changes in output and consumption, such as cellphones and the internet.

Since Nigeria has not done so since 1990, analysts had expected a large jump. Nobody had put a number on it until today.

The source said the recalculation would add about 40% to Nigeria’s GDP. An increase of that magnitude would boost Nigeria’s roughly $250bn economy to around $350bn.

That brings it close to South Africa’s currently $385bn economy. And with a growth rate of around 7% a year, compared with 3% in South Africa, Nigeria may eventually overtake its rival to seize the top spot.

That would most likely boost interest in stocks of consumer goods companies that are looking to unlock the potential of Africa’s most populous country and its 160 million consumers.

It will also improve Nigeria’s debt to GDP ratio, currently at around 16%.

But Nigeria’s tax revenues, seen as woeful for a country of this size, will look even smaller. Nigeria does not publish tax revenue figures but they are suspected to be extremely low, with 95% of government revenues coming from oil output.

The national accounts had been reclassified to reflect International Monetary Fund ISIC 4 standards, the source said, making it easier to compare the country’s GDP with peers.

http://www.fin24.com/Economy/Rebasin...to-SA-20120425
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Angola's businesses beat most of Europe to 4G mobile services
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This story was a few years back,so it's not so updated.

The government’s plan for blacks to own more land is flagging
Dec 3rd 2009 | Johannesburg | from the print edition


He might prefer to pick his own

WITH the fine aim of redressing the racially skewed pattern of land ownership that has existed since whites conquered South Africa hundreds of years ago, the government's land-reform programme is a shambles. Launched in 1994, the plan was to redistribute 30% of white-owned farmland to poor blacks. So far, barely 5% has been handed over. The government has run out of money. Once-productive land lies fallow. The deadline of 2014 for completing the reform has been postponed; 2025 has been mooted but even that may be too ambitious. The estimated extra cost is 71 billion rand ($9.4 billion) on top of 6 billion already disbursed.

Unlike Zimbabwe, where over the past decade white-owned farms have been seized by President Robert Mugabe's government without compensation, South Africa's post-apartheid governments have stuck to the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer” at the market price. But, as President Jacob Zuma has admitted, that model is not working, partly because of its huge cost. The government talks ominously of other “practical strategies” to acquire land “more quickly and inexpensively”, sending shudders through South Africa's 40,000 white farmers.

When apartheid ended 15 years ago, 87% of commercial farmland was owned by whites and 13% by blacks—the exact reverse of their proportion of the population. (This excludes the subsistence farms where 4m black families eke out a living.) The 30% target, adopted in 1994 by South Africa's first democratically elected government, meant redistributing 26m hectares (64m acres) of white-owned land with a deadline of five years. So far, less than 3m hectares have been transferred.


Under a separate land-restitution programme to compensate victims of forced removals over the past century, a further 2.5m hectares have been returned to their dispossessed black owners. If this is included in the 30% target, over 5m hectares, nearly a fifth of white-owned land due for redistribution, are now in black hands. The government admits that about half the farms taken over by blacks have failed, usually because of a lack of money or skill. Some put the failure rate at 70%. Since 2007 the country has been a net importer of food, after decades of
self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, white farmers with outstanding claims on their land do not know whether to continue investing in their properties. Some have gone bust while waiting for government payment. Others have abandoned their farms. Spurred by attacks on white-owned land, many are thinking of farming elsewhere on the continent. Several African governments, eager to boost their own farming output, have been signing deals with South African farmers. Agri SA, the white farmers' biggest union, says 600-800 of its members are already operating in other African countries.

The murder rate on South African farms is striking. Since 1991, 1,650 people, most of them white farmers and their families, have been killed in more than 10,000 attacks. According to a study in 2003, the main motive in 89% of the murders was robbery. A political or racial motive was found in only 2% of the cases, though Pieter Mulder, the deputy agriculture minister, who heads a right-wing party, Freedom Front Plus, is unconvinced.

Despite the government's flagging land-reform plan, there seems little chance it will resort to large-scale expropriation at below-market prices. That would prompt long legal battles, making the whole process even slower and costlier. Besides, the recession-burdened government faces more pressing demands, such as the provision of basic services to the country's increasingly turbulent poor black townships. Mr Zuma still cites land reform as one of his five top priorities. But it no longer has the
same urgency.


http://www.economist.com/node/15022632


Proposal by President Zuma on land reform 'hogwash'

EROSION OF ORGANISATIONAL DEMOCRACY IN THE ANC WILL LEAD TO ITS DEMISE: Proposal by President Zuma on land reform are hogwash and not in line with ANC policy.

Floyd Shivambu

On Tuesday, the 23rd of October 2012, a significant number of news reports pointed to a “new” land reform proposal posited by President Jacob Zuma during his address to the African Farmers Association of South Africa Congress. No one knows where these proposal come from but “It proposes that each district establishes a district land reform committee where all stakeholders are involved to be responsible for identifying 20% of the commercial agricultural land in the district and giving commercial farmers the option of assisting its transfer to black farmers". The President is reported to have further said that “In this way, land can be found without distorting markets”.

The gist of the proposal is contained in his assertion that the State will buy the land from its current owners at 50% of the market value, which is not very far from the market value. Paraphrased, this proposal says that the shortfall of the current land owner would be made up by cash or in-kind contributions from commercial farmers in the district who volunteer to participate. This sounds so profound from a President who since assumption of office as President of the ANC in 2007 and of the country in 2009 has never come up with a coherent and substantial policy proposal on how South Africa should respond to the developmental crises of poverty, unemployment and socio-economic inequalities.

President Jacob Zuma has never proposed anything coherent because more often than not, he misdiagnoses the real causes of South Africa’s challenges. In one instance he blamed high levels of crime on the abolition of death penalty and in another instance attributed unreasonable crime levels to a criminal justice system that guarantees accused citizens’ innocence before trial. When given an opportunity by the ANC to speak on what should be a broad political and ideological way forward amidst so many socio-economic crises confronting society, he feebly conceptualised the current conjecture as failure of the first transition and that the ANC needed a second transition, and provided no clear vision on the destination of the second transition. Obviously, the ANC rejected this hogwash and reminded him that the first transition towards attainment of all Freedom Charter objectives is not complete.


In the post Conference television interviews he did with the SABC after both the National General Council and Policy Conference in 2010 and 2012 respectively, President Zuma said the biggest challenge facing the ANC was ‘discipline’ of its youth, who just spoke many issues and disrespected the sitting leadership. He forgot the many socio-economic, ideological and political challenges confronting the movement, and focused on ill-discipline of the youth. Clearly ‘ill-discipline’ was never the biggest challenge facing the ANC because even after suspending and expelling these youth leaders, the crises of poverty and inequalities remained. The Marikana massacre happened even when the youth he identified as the biggest problem were not in Luthuli House. He never foresaw a crisis in the Mining sector despite the concerted calls by the ANC Youth League that the ANC should pay attention to the mining industry with the aim of extracting maximum benefit for the mining communities and workers.

Now President Zuma has come with a proposal on land reform, which is evidently not based on what the ANC said in the 52nd National Conference in 2007, National General Council in 2010 and National Policy Conference in 2012. President Zuma is making a significant detour from the 52nd National Conference’s observation which says “We have only succeeded in redistributing 4% of agricultural land since 1994, while more than 80% of agricultural land remains in the hands of fewer than 50,000 white farmers and agribusinesses. The willing-seller, willing-buyer approach to land acquisition has constrained the pace and efficacy of land reform. It is clear from our experience, that the market is unable to effectively alter the patterns of land ownership in favour of an equitable and efficient distribution of land”.

Re-affirming the essence of the observations of the ANC 52ND National Conference, the Policy Conference commission on land reform affirmed the following as pillars of consideration under willing-buyer, willing-seller; 1) Replace willing buyer willing seller with the “Just and equitable” principle in the Constitution immediately where the state is acquiring land for land reform purposes; 2) Expropriation without compensation on land acquired through unlawful means or used for illegal purposes having due regard to Section 25 of the Constitution, 3) Keep Nationalization as an option, and 4) Expedite the promulgation of the new Expropriation Act.

Now these resolutions are in the official report of the ANC to guide branches, delegates and leaders of the ANC to come with sustainable solutions to the land reform crises, which if wisely and decisively managed will be basis for thoroughgoing socio-economic transformation in South Africa. But the recent proposal by the President radically diverts from the essence of what the National Policy Conference said should guide how ANC deals with the willing-buyer, willing-seller phenomenon. The new recommendation by the President re-affirms the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle and even adds market value as a principle of determining the price of the land. The market-value principle is not even in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and the Policy Conference resolution/recommendation to introduce Land Management Commission and Office of the Valuer General was meant to address this stumbling block to land reform. Clearly the President is not aware of the Policy Conference recommendations.

The practice of ANC leaders radically diverting from key policy proposals of the Movement is unacceptable and a real act of ill-discipline and directionlessness of the leadership. Why would the ANC spend lots of money, develop perspectives, convene its members and branches across the country in a rigorous process of participative democracy and policy making, which will be undermined by how a leader feels on a certain day. It can never be correct that branches of the ANC are being undermined in the manner that is happening, particularly on the important question of land reform. The land question is at the heart of the ANC’s reason to exist and the only practical immediate way to address the massive inequalities, poverty and unemployment crises confronting society.

It appears though that there is a new right-wing movement that seek to dishonour branches of the ANC and engage in some narrow, elite policy making processes that ignores the people on the ground. Minister Trevor Manuel, who is also a member of the ANC National Executive Committee, was recently quoted as saying the ANC way of policy making does not work. He said "Involving ANC branch members in detailed decision-making assumed that they had the information and knowledge they needed for participation”. He further said "The system as it is doesn’t work because it structures a relationship between people in the government and people in the ANC, but there is an asymmetry of information between them which is quite profound. For example, we will have people in government making proposals on nuclear energy and ordinary branch members (having) no idea what they are talking about”.

Minister Manuel’s remarks are not only sickening; they grossly undermine the members of the ANC who for some time now have tried to provide solutions on how the country should move forward. Minister Manuel should also be reminded that all elite-policy making outcomes like GEAR and Growth-Path have proven to be disaster with no durability and sustainability to improve people’s living conditions. The elite driven National Development Plan will also dismally fail to reach its own objectives and forever shift the goal posts and blaming all sorts of problems on why those goals cannot be reached. Why does Minister Manuel trust ANC members on voting him, Jacob Zuma and others into office if he cannot trust them with deciding the policy direction of this country? ANC branches have given a broad, but decisive framework on what is to be done and government people should be guided by those principles contained in the resolutions and recommendations of the National Conference and Policy Conference respectively.

If the ANC is to remain embedded, live forever and guided by what the people say, it should heed Amilcar Carbral’s clarion call that “We must practice revolutionary democracy in every aspect of our Party life. Every responsible member must have the courage of his responsibilities, exacting from others a proper respect for his work and properly respecting the work of others. Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories . ..”. Anything that dishonours this clarion call will lead to the ANC’s demise.

Floyd Shivambu is an Economic Freedom Fighter and Member of the ANC Youth League and ANC in Moses Kotane Branch, Johannesburg Region, Gauteng Province.

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Africa Rising - Time Magazine
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Africa Rising June 24 2001 (Time Magazine)
Hope is Africa's rarest commodity. Yet buried though it is amid the despair that haunts the continent, there is more optimism today than in decades. Francisco Mucavele found hope last September when an armored steel Casspir rolled over the hill and began to blow up the land mines contaminating Mozambique's rich soil. Olga Haptemariam acquired it in Eritrea's war-scarred port city of Massawa when she laid down 2,000 birr for a license to open a building-supply store. The villagers of N'Tjinina are finding it as they prepare for the solemn experience of voting in Mali's first local elections. Sarah Galloway Hage-Ali is spreading hope in Ghana, where she purchased the country's sole manufacturer of sanitary napkins in 1994 and launched a feminine-hygiene crusade.

This story is not about the Africa you think you know. The usual images are painted in the darkest colors. At the end of the 20th century, we are repeatedly reminded, Africa is a nightmarish world where chaos reigns. Nothing works. Poverty and corruption rule. War, famine and pestilence pay repeated calls. The land, air, water are raped, fouled, polluted. Chronic instability gives way to lifelong dictatorship. Every nation's hand is out, begging aid from distrustful donors. Endlessly disappointed, 740 million people sink into hopelessness.

That portrait is real, all right, in places like Nigeria, Somalia, Burundi, Sudan, Kenya. But it is no longer the whole picture. Academics, diplomats and bankers who do business there talk seriously these days about an African renaissance. A grand word, it turns out, for the slow, fragile, difficult changes that are giving the continent a second chance. But the description fits. Out of sight of our narrow focus on disaster, another Africa is rising, an Africa that works: the Africa of Mozambique and Mali and Eritrea and Ghana, of South Africa and Uganda, Benin and Botswana, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Tanzania.

What's new is how some nations are figuring out ways to harness their natural and human resources into working models of development, even while others cannot. What's new is the astonishing extent to which ordinary Africans are searching out their own paths to progress. What's new is how much of the still limited prosperity and security they have managed to acquire is homegrown--political and economic advances rooted in the soil of local culture. What's new is that the enduring example of Nelson Mandela has heartened all Africans with a fresh vision of leadership, how men of their own kind can be admired, respected, even emulated.

For so long the victim of historical circumstance, Africa is finally a beneficiary. The end of the cold war freed countries from 30-odd years of disastrous involvement in the superpowers' proxy conflicts. Old ideologies crumbled, taking with them the failed socialist methods of Marx and opening the way to capitalist reforms. The demise of apartheid gave the continent a huge psychological--and economic and political--boost. A generation of African leaders who grew up to despise the exploitation of postcolonial dictators and kleptocrats has begun to supplant them.

In recognition of all that, Bill Clinton set off last Sunday on the first extensive tour of Africa by a sitting U.S. President. His aim is to cast a high-wattage spotlight on the continent's emerging democracies, economic growth and social progress and to promote a new relationship with the U.S. Of course, the Administration also sees a largely untapped market and wants to encourage American businessmen to get there first. Africans hope Clinton will show them that the U.S. is ready to be a partner instead of patron.

The good news in Africa is less in such momentary gestures than in the small stories of steady progress made, the handiwork of hundreds and thousands of individuals laying foundations for a better future. Two TIME correspondents recently spent a month traveling in four countries to look at the many ways in which Africa actually works.

Let's first stipulate some common truths. By any Western standard, Mozambique, Eritrea, Mali and Ghana are countries in awful straits. Their statistics still show an abysmal record of poverty, illiteracy, early mortality. While all four have achieved a dose of national economic success, with higher growth rates, lower inflation and more stable currencies that flow from obedience to stringent International Monetary Fund reform programs, they have yet to see their growing wealth trickle down very far. For ordinary citizens, daily hardships are intense: few jobs, few schools, few hospitals, poor diets, rising prices, no money. For the majorities of these populations that are ill fed, ill clothed, illiterate and just plain ill, what Mozambicans dubbed the "years of cabbage" are not over.

Let us also acknowledge that for every optimistic tale we tell, even these countries can tell 10 times as many despairing ones. Nevertheless, each of these countries is moving ahead, and what we discovered was the reasons--some unique, some replicable--they are doing so.

MOZAMBIQUE

What are the eyes of a child soldier supposed to look like? Felfiel Manhica's are downcast and blank in a face that rarely smiles. He is 22 now, still undersize and boyish, but he was just 13 when rebel Renamo soldiers crept into the hamlet of Taninga before dawn in 1988 to steal food and took him too. They threatened to execute him, armed him with an AK-47 assault rifle and turned him into a pitiless killing machine aimed at his family, friends and neighbors on the government side of Mozambique's civil war. "They told me I must fight in order to eat," he stutters, loath to recall those years. "I killed people. I saw their faces when I hurt them." He cannot look a questioner in the eyes. "Now," says this boy-man who subsists by cutting bamboo, "life is good, because I don't have the heavy heart of a fighter."

Not long before the ruling Frelimo government signed a peace accord with Renamo in October 1992, Felfiel escaped and walked for three days back to Taninga. The village allowed him to undergo the forgiving rites of traditional cleansing. Felfiel's mother went to the spiritual guardian for a muti, a physical and psychological purgative. It took three days for Felfiel to vomit up the "bad things" he had done and earn atonement. After the cleansing, Felfiel stopped having nightmares, and his neighbors embraced him once again.

Call it witchcraft if you like, but such rural healing is a major reason that nearly 95,000 demobilized soldiers and 5 million refugees have been absorbed back into society. In less than five years, Mozambique (pop. 18 million) has forged cohesion out of the animosities that tore it apart. The revered practices of communal tradition have succeeded, better than any modern forms of psychotherapy, in restoring a sense of unity to Mozambique's deeply riven clans. "National reconciliation started in the communities themselves," says Roberto Chavez, the World Bank director in Mozambique. "They were the main factor in bringing the country back together."

The Frelimo government was smart enough to help too. Anxious about the potential for trouble from 90,000 unemployed guys with guns, it contracted with the United Nations to develop a plan that would rapidly resettle soldiers and refugees in their home villages. In 1994 the government and donor countries scraped together $20 million to pay all demobbed soldiers a minimum salary for two years to help them rebuild their shambas (farms) and restock their corrals. "We wanted to get them out of the military and make them civilians right away," explains Sam Barnes, a program administrator. "We wanted the soldiers to be part of rebuilding the country from the ground up."

Recovery from the ravages of war is the baseline against which Mozambique's progress must be measured. Almost from the day the former Portuguese colony won independence in 1975, it was dragged into a vicious struggle between its new rulers, the Marxist Mozambique Liberation Front, known as Frelimo, and a rebel movement called Renamo that was trained, armed and supplied mostly from sources in South Africa. Sixteen years of guerrilla warfare devastated the country. A million men, women and children died. Two million people fled across the borders; 3 million more moved off their farms into safer urban enclaves. When hostilities ceased, some 2 million unmapped mines laid waste the nation's arable lands.

That is where more rural magic comes into play. The newest local healer lumbers into the countryside on 17 tons of armor plate and giant steel wheels. The Frelimo government has invested its scarce cash to bring in a fleet of Casspir demining vehicles, operated by a private subsidiary of the South African army, to get rid of the mines that keep farmers and herders off the country's lush lands.

As fast as the vehicles roll over the acres around Sabie, west of the capital of Maputo, destroying the mines, the farmers stream in behind, planting corn and squash, grazing goats and cows. Francisco Mucavele is one of them. For 10 years he was confined within the perimeter of the little settlement of Chavane, bounded by fear of the minefields. "We felt like prisoners in the village," he says. "Now I can go anywhere I want."

Standing among corn shoots already knee high, Francisco waves toward other fields where the telltale puffs of black smoke show mines detonating beneath the Casspir's wheels and talks of planting there too. Then he can not only feed his family of seven children but also sell for a profit. "As we get our land back, we can cultivate more and graze more cows. Then maybe we can get roads, and trucks will come to take our food to market. And then the stores and clinics will come back," he says. Already his younger children can go to school again, and a midwife has moved into the village.

The essential first step for African nations is the step back from the edge of famine. The Mozambicans are doing other things right too. Theirs is a people's peace, driven by popular refusal to continue the conflict and a fierce determination to live a normal life. Today political stability--though not much democracy--has been achieved through the government's policy of "no victor, no vanquished." Four years ago, Renamo elected impressive numbers to the national assembly; now it has a stake in running the country, and hostilities find voice mainly as parliamentary debate. Frelimo jettisoned its socialist economic credo by 1989 and decided not only to adopt market-based capitalism but to take the bitter IMF-ordered medicine required for international investment.

What really fuels Mozambique's climb, though, is the energy of individuals tackling problems from the bottom up. Take the "Italian roads." Instead of paying foreign companies for expensive foreign-built, high-maintenance asphalt roads, local authorities are copying a cheap labor-intensive, low-tech alternative pioneered in Italy: roads constructed of small, handmade stone or concrete pavers that can be laid directly on the sandy soil and individually replaced when rains wash them out.

Or take the little restaurant on the beach at Xia Xia, a great sweep of sand running for miles north of Maputo. Nuno Fonseca and his second wife Paola spent the war years in Maputo but came back to her largely destroyed hometown in early 1994. Once there were swank hotels along the strand for tourists. "When we got here there was nothing, nothing," says Nuno.

He "saw opportunity in abundance" and told the government he wanted to set up a campground on the beach, maybe a little restaurant. He brought in water and electric lines, put up a concrete toilet-shower building, then opened for business. Now he owns a caravan park, 12 rental bungalows and the restaurant, and he has plans for more. "I'm very confident about the future," says Nuno. "No one is interested in war ever again." As he sips a coffee, he muses, "You know, a lot of people here are trying to do things just like me. Sure, the government can help, but we've got to start taking care of ourselves."

ERITREA

By logic, the nation of Eritrea (pop. 3 million) should not exist. The secessionist province's independence fighters ought never to have defeated Ethiopia in their 30-year-long struggle. They were outmanned, outgunned, abandoned or betrayed by every ally; their cause was hopeless. They won by force of character, a unity and determination so steely not all the modern armaments, superpower support or economic superiority of Ethiopia could withstand it. The spirit that saw the Eritreans through 10 years in the trenches of their mountain redoubt at Nakfa has built them a nation from scratch, since independence was finally consummated in 1993.

The emergence of Eritrea as a working state in so short a time is a remarkable testament to self-reliance. "We learned the hard way," says President Issaias Afewerki, the rebel leader turned chief executive, "that our own sense of purpose, our own unity, our own organized capabilities were the only things that we could count on to succeed." Alone in Africa, Eritrea carries little debt and accepts virtually no foreign assistance. Over the past four years, it has asked all but six aid providers to leave, including Oxfam and every religious organization. "It's not that we don't need the money," says Issaias, "but we don't want the dependence." Aid, he says, subsidizes but corrupts the government, blocks innovative solutions to problems, so that people do not seek out and use their own resources.

Just the physical improvements are impressive. All the rusted metal detritus of battle has been swept up into neat piles waiting to be recycled into rail lines, girders and tools. Men and women break rock by hand to repave the highway that spirals down 7,000 ft. from the capital of Asmara to the seaport of Massawa. Workers trained by the grandfathers who built the railroad in the '30s lay reforged rails back toward Asmara; they have completed 26 miles in two years and cunningly restored the country's two 1938 Italian steam engines.

What sets Eritrea apart is the self-sacrificing character of its people, the thousands like Olga Haptemariam who rely solely on their own gumption. We meet her behind the counter of the building-supply shop she has opened in Massawa, striving to capitalize on the construction boom resuscitating this shattered equatorial port. "It's my own business," she says, pointing to the stacked cans of paint and tools lining the shelves. "It is doing very well, very nice." She can't wait to expand. "When I get more money, I want to get more materials from Italy, China. If I can bring them in, I can improve this business fast."

Olga is a self-made woman. While her brother went to university, she was married off at 16, already pregnant. Two years ago, she sought a divorce and demanded 30,000 birr as alimony. Out of that she paid the 2,000 birr for a business license and 18,000 birr for the shop. She earns 3,000 or 4,000 birr a month, occasionally as much as 7,500. She can afford to send her daughter to a private school, preparing her to study abroad and become a "doctor for women." Olga vows never to remarry. "I think of business only," she says. "I want to make this business very big, and I can do that best myself."

Nothing symbolizes this nation's true grit better than the mountain retreat of Nakfa. There the near defeated rebel troops hewed out miles of rock trenches with bayonets and survived for 10 years beneath the shelling of the Ethiopian army. It still takes 10 hours in a four-wheel to drive the 137 miles from the capital over rugged mountain tracks. But Nakfa is a place of veneration akin to Valley Forge. "It reminds us forever of our resistance," says Zacharias, a teacher at the new technical school. The national emblem is the camel that carried supplies to Nakfa; the country's new currency, introduced in November to replace the Ethiopian birr, is called the nakfa. Despite Nakfa's 9,000-ft.-high chill and barren soil, the government is determined to turn this inhospitable locale into a regional magnet.

Many of the 10,000 current residents moved into their first concrete buildings just this year. Helping replace the city's tin huts are young people doing their national service. Every Eritrean male is required to spend six months in the army and 12 more working on rehabilitation projects. Up here, some are also planting trees to revive the blighted landscape. "I like doing it," says 24-year-old Daniel. "I teach people how to do things, and that is a way to develop our country fast."

In his blacksmith shop in the busy market town of Keren, Fikad Ghoitom explains the national attitude: show me, don't tell me; ingenuity applied to example; homegrown know-how. Fikad's brother saw a wood-cutting machine in an English magazine and forged one out of scrap metal. Down in the artisans' suq in Asmara, men in blue overalls don masks cut from cardboard to weld new pots from old oil tins and cooking braziers from rusted rods. The clang, hammer, sizzle of makeshift industry are everywhere as boys flatten old iron bars for their brothers to beat into new shovels.

Eritreans are extraordinarily dedicated to the public welfare. Doctors living abroad came back during the war as volunteer medics and still visit for six-month stints. Former fighters who went into the civil service took no pay for three years.

This is not Africa, people will tell you in Eritrea. What they mean is that the country is astonishingly free of the social plagues that taint much of the continent. There is no tribalism or sectarian division here. National pride supersedes loyalties to nine main ethnic groups, at least 10 languages, Islam and Christianity, in part the consequence of the rebels' insistence on mixing everyone together in its army units and now in national-service teams.

Egalitarianism is ingrained, reinforced in the days when army officers wore no insignia of their rank on their shoulders.

There is no begging, no corruption, virtually no crime. "We would not be so dishonorable," says Russon, an Asmara taxi driver. However poor they are, families share with the truly destitute. A fierce sense of personal rectitude makes thievery unthinkable. "It is not the police who prevent crime but the honor inside us," insists Fikad, the blacksmith. "The corruption is the lowest of any government I've ever worked for, including in Santa Rosa, Calif.," says Michael O'Neill, an American adviser to the Commercial Bank of Eritrea. "They will not tolerate it in any way, shape or form." During the war, the fighters were too desperate for money to put any into people's pockets, and that scrupulous use of every precious resource carries over into the government today.

What also sets Eritrea apart is the dedication to national purpose of its leader. President Issaias is one of Africa's new men, hammered into leadership by the rigors of long war. Though soft-spoken, he is stern, almost paternalistic in his confidence that he knows best. His government is firmly controlled, even secretive, yet people seem to admire him. He is sharp and decisive, says what is on his mind, accepts diplomatic criticism when he considers it right and rejects it when he doesn't. "What you hear is what you get," says O'Neill. "He doesn't dicker or pussyfoot."

The President has few doubts about his methods, even if they differ from those practiced in the rest of Africa. "We learned from the bad experiences of others," he says, "what is bad governance." He and his countrymen are determined to do better, on their own. "We are not rich; we do not have many resources; we are affected by things we cannot control. But we prefer to face our problems ourselves. If you teach someone to fish, instead of giving him fish, then he has a sustainable future." He turns his nearly impassive face toward the reporter. "This is difficult for people; it takes a long time," he says. "But in the long term, success can only come from inside us."

MALI

The story of Mali's ascent out of poverty begins at 6 a.m. on March 26, 1991. Then Lieut. Colonel Amadou Toumani Toure--called A.T.T. by everyone--went on the radio to announce that he had just arrested his commanding general, the nation's President, and taken control. "I said that as soon as minimum security was established we would organize elections," recalls Toure. "And as soon as the elections were held, we would go back to our barracks."

On April 26, 1992, after two rounds of voting widely judged to have been free and fair, civilian Alpha Oumar Konare was elected President, and A.T.T., now an immensely powerful and popular general, stepped down. Instead of returning to the barracks, he took on the job of fighting Guinea worm disease and now also mediates regional disputes.

In the 14th century Mali (pop. 11 million) was the biggest, richest empire in West Africa, encompassing all or part of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Mauritania, the legendary land of gold and learning, grower of cotton, source of salt, trader across the Sahara to all the countries of Europe. Almost 700 years later, the Republic of Mali found itself the fourth poorest country in the world, destroyed by tribal and religious wars, colonialism, crashing commodity prices, soaring fuel prices, bad weather, bad governments.

The dictatorial President Moussa Traore had run the country dismally for 23 years. "I made a coup," says Toure, "but sometimes you have to give a quick kick to democracy." Rare among Africa's military bosses, A.T.T. had the courage to return his country to civilian control. "I watched officers my age in other countries take over," he says. "These men came in to save their countries, then stayed 20 years. But when a country is well managed, the constitution is respected, no captain can come out of his barracks. The vaccination against a coup is good government."

Mali seems to have that under the guiding hand of Konare, its first ever popularly elected President. The 52-year-old former teacher and history Ph.D. once taught A.T.T. and served in the regime A.T.T. ousted, resigning in 1980 to join a clandestine democracy movement. "He understands human capital," says Tore Rose, head of the U.N. Development Program in Mali. "It's not the people themselves, but how they work with one another, and with groups and institutions."

The history of Mali is marked by the trust people have in these dealings, institutionalized in the traditional "palaver tree" approach to decision making, where village elders consult under a tree until a consensus is reached. Since its creation in 1993, Mali's Decentralization Mission has been educating the public about a modern democratic version of such local control. The country is divided into eight regions, 50 districts, 701 communes and thousands of villages. District chiefs are no longer appointed from the capital of Bamako but elected locally. Later this year, the communes will hold elections. "Reinforcing democracy," says President Konare, "means devolution of power to the communities."

Although CMDT, the Malian Company for the Development of Textiles, which monopolizes the country's cotton production, is state owned, it is decentralizing, transforming a money-losing dinosaur into an engine for local development. Putting cotton plants into rotation with cereal crops, CMDT not only grows higher-quality cotton but also keeps farmers producing less pricey but essential maize, millet, sorghum and rice. Says Chaka Berte, a CMDT management director: "The farmers are taking their cotton money and diversifying. Good for them. Good for Mali."

The profits have helped transform N'Tjinina, a hamlet of 49 families, 1,263 people, deep in the countryside southeast of Bamako. There are still no paved roads, no electricity, no running water anywhere in the district. But with help from its CMDT-sponsored village association, which bought insecticides, oxen and a weighing machine, the families regularly harvest bumper crops. Mali's Producers' Union, a rarity in Africa, negotiates with CMDT to set prices for the farmer, and the village association receives block earnings. Extra profits are pooled, and so far N'Tjinina has bought two water pumps and built three primary schools, paying the three teachers' salaries too. "Before, our children left the village," says N'Tjikoua Sangare. "Now they are staying."

Women have always labored twice as hard as men in Africa, tending house, raising children, harvesting their husbands' fields. When we met Awa Kone, she was watering, bucketful by bucketful, young banana and mango trees and small plots of onions, tomatoes and eggplants. This garden in the tiny 10-family settlement of Tenemakana is a cooperative moneymaker for the village wives. The women pool the profits and then loan out the money to each other at 9% interest. No woman has ever defaulted. When they have earned enough, Kone and her friends plan to build a clinic.

These credit schemes are giving village women their first independent source of cash. That is changing the societies they live in, turning tiny profits into wells, protective fences and, most important, schools. Since 1992, villagers have built and staffed 128 primary schools; with U.S. grants, an additional 447 local schools were opened. Today 46.5% of Mali's children attend primary school, and the literacy rate, 19% seven years ago, is now 32%. "I've never seen such effective community systems," says the U.S. Agency for International Development's Timm Harris.

Awa Kone is not surprised. "If you are educated," she says, "you can solve problems." For the first time in her life, such ideas are shared by the nation's leaders. A.T.T. has started a private foundation dedicated to the education and health of Mali's children. "Here in this country," he says, "everyone works for the community."

GHANA

The rise and slump and rise again of Ashanti Goldfields, the only black-African-operated mining company on the New York and London stock exchanges, mimics the fortunes of Ghana itself. The British outpost in French-dominated West Africa lived well on its gold and cocoa exports until the production of both plummeted during the first two decades after Ghana's independence in 1957, under Kwame Nkrumah, one of the founding fathers of modern Africa. As Ashanti's output tumbled, the first sub-Saharan colony liberated from colonialism never did live up to Nkrumah's promise that "all else" would follow the act of uhuru, freedom.

The junior air-force flight lieutenant named Jerry Rawlings who seized power firmly in 1981 spouting Marxist rhetoric hardly seemed the man to turn things around. Yet within two years of his coup, Rawlings pirouetted to the right and embraced Adam Smith capitalism. It was the practical move of a military man wise to who had the money to help dig Ghana (pop. 18 million) out of its sinkhole. For the sake of foreign investment and IMF loans, he swallowed one of Africa's harshest doses of free-market medicine. The result: one of the most diversified economies in Africa and a more than embryonic middle class.

Rawlings also brought Sam Jonah into the boardroom. Jonah was the seventh child of 10; he grew up in Obuasi, site of Ashanti's richest gold mine. Jonah went down into the mine while awaiting a promised scholarship from Ashanti. "It was character forging," he says. "I know about teamwork, and I can still speak the mining slang." After study at University of Exeter's Camborne School of Mines, he returned to Obuasi, starting as a shift boss deep in the pits and working his way up--and out--the first black man to climb the ranks.

Rawlings chose Jonah in 1982 as deputy managing director of Ashanti, then owned 55% by the government and 45% by London's Lonrho Corp. "I didn't know him," says Jonah. "He just reached out for the highest-ranking Ghanaian." In 1986 Jonah rose to the top job, becoming, according to him, the only black African ceo of a multinational company. "The obstacle to there being more like me on this continent relates to one thing," says Jonah. "Ownership. If Rawlings had not taken a personal interest in the mining sector, the level of prejudice would have kept me underground forever. I still tell my Ghanaians," he adds, "'Don't accept no!'"

Under Jonah, Ghana has learned the art, rare in Africa, of managing its natural resources effectively. Ashanti has led the country's gold production to record highs. Floating public shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994, the government sold off 30% of its interest. Then Jonah went shopping, acquiring mining interests and prospecting rights in 15 other African states. Instead of confirming that any multinational company involving foreign owners will only exploit African labor and steal Africa's natural resources for the benefit of shareholders overseas, Rawlings and Jonah have turned Ashanti into a model for made-in-Africa industrialization.

Modernization is also the byword of Nat Nii Amar Nuno-Amarteifio, the mayor of Accra, a sprawling port city that in 20 years will be home to 50% of Ghana's population. Rawlings has just launched an ambitious plan known as Vision 2020, aimed at making Ghana a middle-income country by then. Part of that is spinning off responsibility for local governance to district assemblies, shifting the jobs of housing, feeding, educating and picking up the garbage of Ghana's population to trained technocrats like Nuno-Amarteifio. Local government was career exile before decentralization; now, says the mayor with gusto, "it is where reality catches up with even the best politicians. If we don't make things work here, then we become Liberia."

Nii Quaynor saw what modernization can do when he went to study computer science in the U.S. But when he returned home in 1969 to spread the technology gospel, "I was too advanced. Computer science was too new." Twenty-four years later, Quaynor finally hooked his country into the Web. In 1993 his company brought the Internet to West Africa, and in 1995 Ghana became the second sub-Saharan nation to have full connectivity. "We're sharing the same information as everyone else in the world," says Quaynor. His most prized client: President Rawlings, an avid Web surfer. Soon, Quaynor hopes, wireless technology will let the phone-short country leap straight into airborne access

Farsighted enterprise is also the business of women in Ghana, and the prospect of making money brought Sarah Galloway Hage-Ali back from a comfortable life in England. In 1994 Hage-Ali bought Accra-based Sapad Manufacturing Co., Ghana's only maker of sanitary napkins. Changing the company's name to Fay International, she revamped its marketing philosophy into an ambitious campaign to teach Ghana's often infected women to use her hygienic product. Only 15% to 20% of Ghanaian women use sanitary towels; genital ailments are among the most prevalent problems of women patients. In the past two years, the company has conducted more than 30 workshops, bringing its message to secondary schools, village associations, market traders.

Lucia Quachey, president of the Ghana Association of Women Entrepreneurs, is proud that Hage-Ali is showing the world the other side of the African woman. "Not just the woman with the child on her back, pregnant, wood on her head," she explains, "but the African women who operate computers, who employ people, who generate resources to help in the growth of the national economy." Those are the women Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings, Ghana's First Lady, has drawn into the biggest and best-organized women's association in Ghana, the 31st December Women's Movement, named after the day her husband took over the country. Before, she says, "we did not ask for our due; we were not politicized."

Five-year-old Fridous Abu Tofic is learning simple arithmetic along with 295 other preschoolers because the movement opened a day-care center in Nima, a Muslim enclave in one of Accra's poorest and most neglected neighborhoods. 31st December runs tree-planting programs, immunizes children, offers family-planning services and initiates rural-development projects. Once funded by foreign donors, it now gets 95% of its operating funds from income-generating programs, one of which provides the army with bread and a local staple called kenkey. The movement, claiming some 1.5 million members, even produces a children's television program. "We have changed the face of Ghanaian women," says Mrs. Rawlings.

You might call it a second-chance African revolution. What every country striding forward shows is that progress comes first to those who adopt the principles and practices of capitalist democracy. There are some common lessons here that any African nation can learn: free-market economics works, including privatization, entrepreneurship and often the stern measures of wholesale reform to jump-start failed economies. So does agricultural self-sufficiency, starting from the bottom up. And decentralization, spreading development outside urban capitals to the vast rural majority. And women's empowerment.

Other elements may be harder to acquire but are no less essential: Good governance, caring for the welfare of the people, not the potentates. New leaders, pragmatic and progressive, honest and efficient in their exercise of power. Eritrea's President Issaias is but one of them, along with South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Botswana's Quett Ketumile Masire. National reconciliation where necessary, national cohesion everywhere, the sublimation of narrow loyalties to a larger good.

You will note that there is not yet much stable democracy. Mali is still struggling to institutionalize democratic practices, and Rawlings still runs Ghana after two questionable elections. Neither of these countries--along with Eritrea and Mozambique--qualifies as anything other than a one-party state, despite token oppositions. Many African leaders, good and bad, share Museveni's belief that real multiparty elections are a luxury these fragile states cannot afford until they have the education, the middle class, the rule of law and the firm economic base on which American-style democracy rests.

But it's easy to see only the Africa that's broken. While many of these countries cannot quite stand on their own, what they want from the West is no longer just a benefactor but a partner. Although the U.S. trade-liberalization bill passed two weeks ago by the House of Representatives is mostly symbolic in easing the terms for America's minuscule trade with Africa, it moves in the right direction of shifting aid from handouts to the development of sustainable economies.

There is a word we heard over and over in Africa: ubuntu. It's different in every dialect, but the meaning is always roughly the same: a complex, highly nuanced precept governing the way individuals relate to the community. Ubuntu is the organizing principle of the African mind, defining the pre-eminence of the interests of the community over the individual, the duties and responsibilities the individual owes the community, the obligation of the individual to share what he has with the community. It is both blessing and curse, the root of Africa's strong families and social customs and the root cause of its debilitating corruption and crime. Yet as the continent embraces Western ways, its people do not want to lose everything African. What we need to encourage--what Africa needs to make for itself--is lives and systems that mesh modernization with an African way of doing things. That's what works.
__________________

Last edited by Vakai; November 25th, 2012 at 08:24 PM.


Time Magazine: Africa Rising Dec 3 2012 (part I)
Boniface Mwangi's first camera was an old Japanese film model, bought with $220 borrowed from a friend. He'd been selling books at his mother's roadside stall in Nairobi since he was 15. Then one day in 2003 he came across a biography of Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin, whose pictures of the 1984 Ethiopian famine, the book implied, led to Band Aid, Live Aid and a new era of global humanitarianism. "That book opened a new world for me," says Mwangi. "Here was another high school dropout who went on to conquer the world using his camera." Mwangi set out to do the same. Within months his photographs were being published in Kenya, and within a year he had won a national award for Best New Photographer. His inches-close pictures of the tribal bloodletting that followed a disputed 2007 general-election result in Kenya earned him a slew of awards and a grant from the New York City--based Magnum Foundation.

For many, the story of the street hawker who became a world-class photographer seemed to epitomize the notion of an emerging Africa: a giant continent awakening from poverty and disaster, now bursting with hope and opportunity.

Then Mwangi quit. He was haunted by the idea that his success was built on his country's turmoil. He wouldn't, couldn't go on photographing the politicians he heard promise Kenyans a new dawn, only to rob them, ignore them and then, come an election, allow violence to break out. Whatever the cost to his career, the price his country was paying for that kind of execrable leadership--which led to more than 1,000 murders during the 2007--08 election crisis, along with the theft of billions of dollars from the state--was far greater. "We didn't vote for these guys for them to screw us," he says.

So in 2011, Mwangi formed a group of street artists, with whom he began staging guerrilla art attacks across Nairobi. Aerosol stencils of vultures began to appear on sidewalks and road crossings. Then more-elaborate murals appeared--of vultures urinating and wiping their backsides on the Kenyan flag. One February night, Mwangi's group painted a 40-ft. tableau on a downtown wall, depicting a smirking, suited vulture sitting next to a list of what the artists saw as Kenyan politicians' crimes since independence. "MPs--screwing Kenyans since 1963," read the caption. "Africa is rising," says Mwangi, now 29. "But there's also a lot of anger. There's trouble ahead."

As Africa marks half a century since it began to free itself from colonialism, its future lies in the hands of hundreds of millions of young Africans who, like Mwangi, must choose between Africa rising and Africa uprising. It is not, as the cynics have it, that Africa will never move beyond dictators and disasters, that it cannot and will not develop. Africa's progress is real, dramatic and, by now, well established. The International Monetary Fund says that since 2003, GDP across sub-Saharan Africa's 48 countries has risen an average of 5% to 7% per year. In the past decade, six of the 10 fastest-growing countries in the world were African, and this year five African countries will outgrow China and 21 will beat India. The result of all this growth? Africa is in the midst of a historic transition, and during the next few decades hundreds of millions of Africans will likely be lifted out of poverty, just as hundreds of millions of Asians were in the past few decades.

Bob Geldof's evolution from Live Aid organizer to, this February, the founder of a $200 million Africa-focused private-equity fund is emblematic of the transformation. "This could be the African century," he says.

Old Habits

But if Afro-pessimism is outdated, undiluted Afro-optimism is premature. Historically the continent labored under predatory inequality and clownish tyranny. President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zare (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) would charter a Concorde airplane for European shopping trips while his people starved. Today, while Africa's economies are modernizing, its rulers too often are still not. "With a very few notable exceptions, our leaders are not part of accountable governments," says Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, chairman of the international mediation body and rights watchdog the Elders. "It's still, If they perform abominably, so what?" The continent's leaders are, by one important measure, less accountable than they were in the past. Since it was set up in 2007 by a Sudanese telecom billionaire, the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance has recorded a striking divergence: material improvement along with political deterioration. This year, for the third time, Mo Ibrahim's foundation declined to award its $5 million prize for African leaders who leave office peacefully and democratically. "We are not completely out of the past and into the future," says Ibrahim.

More than anyone else, it will be young Africans who shape that future. The Arab Spring showed what can happen when corrupt regimes that oversee strong overall growth fail to share the gains or greater political freedom with a connected and well-educated youth. All those ingredients exist in potentially even more explosive proportions in Africa. The average African is 19, while the average Middle Easterner is in his or her 20s. Thanks to foreign aid, hundreds of millions of Africans are better educated than ever--and they expect more-rewarding jobs. And by 2016, there will be over a billion cell phones in use on the continent, according to industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media, giving nearly every African access to that most essential tool of 21st century rebellion. It is a recipe for, simultaneously, entrepreneurialism and revolution.

To be continued....
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Last edited by Vakai; November 25th, 2012 at 09:04 PM.


[QUOTE=greenandgold;97664139]When was the first article written? It seems a bit old.[/QUOTE]


Time Magazine - Africa Rising Dec 3. 2012 (part II)
As Kenya's capital and east Africa's business hub, Nairobi encapsulates Africa's transformation. Steel-and-glass skyscrapers dominate colonial bungalows. From vendors at traffic lights selling iPad chargers to millions of neatly suited commuters, signs of change are everywhere. Average incomes have close to doubled in a decade, and if the economy continues to expand 5% annually as expected, a nation of mud huts will become a middle-income country by 2016.

Africa owes its takeoff to a variety of accelerators, nearly all of them external and occurring in the past 10 years: billions of dollars in aid, especially to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria; tens of billions of dollars in foreign-debt cancellations; a concurrent interest in Africa's natural resources, led by China; and the rapid spread of mobile phones, from a few million in 2000 to more than 750 million today. Business increasingly dominates foreign interest in Africa. Investment first outpaced aid in 2006 and now doubles it.

While these phenomena combine in a tsunami of change at a continental level, their local impact can be uneven, and Nairobi is a prime example. Pass through the city center at noon and you'll find daily protests by striking doctors, teachers and university lecturers, all demanding increases in what are, in some cases, risible wages. Return at night and downtown is deserted save for a small army of private security guards protecting steel-shuttered businesses against thieves who journey in from outlying squatter camps. A short minibus, or matatu, ride takes you to the giant clapboard slum of Kibera, home to 250,000, where most evidence of either development or the state--streetlights, schools, paved roads, businesses--ends abruptly at the township's edge.

Sipping a latte at a coffee shop in one of Nairobi's new malls, Dennis Karema, 28, is one of hundreds of young Nairobi technology entrepreneurs whose advances in mobile banking and data plotting have earned the city the nickname Silicon Savanna and attracted global investor interest. In January, his 13-month-old start-up, Usalama, will unveil a technology that Karema claims cuts ATM and mobile money fraud by 90% and which Karema will market globally. "This is the time for Africa to change the world," he declares.

But Karema readily admits to being one of the lucky few. In his home village of Murang'a, in the Mount Kenya foothills north of Nairobi, there is almost no outlet for a young man with ambition. "Most of my friends survive by picking up occasional manual work," he says. "Some are brilliant, but without opportunity they lose hope. You find them drunk, sleeping by the side of the road." Worse, the government makes little effort to improve their prospects. So every weekend, Karema returns to Murang'a to teach basic computer skills like typing, e-mailing and Googling.

The wasted lives of Murang'a's young men reflect a pattern: across Africa, governments are failing to convert growth into jobs. According to an August report by analysts McKinsey & Co., 275 million out of a total African workforce of 382 million are either unemployed or in informal day-hire work. By 2020 a youth surge propelled by the world's highest birthrates, which will raise Africa's population from 1 billion in 2009 to 2 billion in 2050, will add a further 122 million Africans of working age. That would be a boon if they had work. But McKinsey calculates that in the same period, Africa will create just 54 million to 72 million more jobs. "If current trends continue, it's going to take Africa until 2066 before employment levels reach those of East Asia," says David Fine, one of the report's authors.

"The next part [of Africa's development] is jobs," agrees Geldof. "What will it take to fill that void?" McKinsey argues that the answer lies less in Africa's traditional extractive industries--which tend to be capital-intensive--and more in sectors such as tourism and retail, which employ more labor. But what happens if, as McKinsey predicts, the void cannot be filled? South Africa provides an example of a government's paying the price for failing to share the gains of growth. Since the end of apartheid rule in 1994, South Africa, the continent's biggest economy, has expanded by up to 5% a year. But 18 years in power has changed the African National Congress (ANC) from the party of Nelson Mandela's righteous revolution into just another rapacious developing-world elite. Unemployment runs anywhere from 25% to 40%, state-run education can be among the worst in the world, and inequality--stretched wider by a fabulously wealthy ANC-connected cabal--has increased.

The ANC is reaping the reward for this sorry record. In mid-August, 3,000 miners at platinum producer Lonmin's Marikana mine in northern South Africa walked off the job, demanding a tripling of basic pay, from about $500 per month. On Aug. 16, after days of violence in which 10 people died, police shot dead 34 miners. The killings evoked the brutality of apartheid. Meanwhile, the militant antibusiness, antigovernment strikes that erupted at other mines, then in other industries, continue today. These have exposed as nothing more than a hollow fraud the claims by the ANC's ruling alliance that it represents the poor. With such a disconnect between government and people, Tutu says, the potential for upheaval in South Africa is "very great ... When the big eruption happens," he says, "it's going to be very, very disturbing."

Just as worrying is another type of unrest emerging in East and West Africa. Marginalization divides rich from poor, but it also aggravates existing tribal, racial and religious fault lines. A series of religious insurgencies is taking place below the Sahara. From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, young Muslims are taking up arms against governments they see as Westernized, corrupt and shutting them out of economic opportunity.
__________________

Last edited by Vakai; November 25th, 2012 at 08:17 PM.


Time Magazine - Africa Rising Dec 3 2012 (part III)
A continent of Entrepreneurs

Amid such instability, it can be hard to imagine progress. Perhaps that's why Africa's successes can sound almost like fantasy. Take Ecobank, a global retail bank with assets of $18.5 billion, deposits of $13.1 billion and 23,500 employees in 32 countries--all managed from the small nation of Togo. Or the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange: a generation after a famine killed a million people, Ethiopia's first yuppies are food traders at Africa's first agricultural-commodities exchange.

Non-Africans can find it hard to grasp the coexistence of such great promise with such great problems. The $130 billion-a-year aid industry retains a singular focus on crisis. Western bankers, meanwhile, seem to see only Africa's prospects. But sub-Saharan Africa, with its 48 countries and 3,000 languages, is inevitably a place of adversity and opportunity. Geldof suggests the former might even lead to the latter. Where does Africa get its spirit of enterprise? he asks. "If you're constantly scratching for a living, you're an entrepreneur."

The world's emerging economic powerhouses, with their own experience of major transition, find it easier to digest Africa's simultaneous potential and pitfalls. China has taken the lead. Two-way trade with Africa--often in infrastructure-for-resource swaps that have given the continent an infrastructure makeover that runs from roads and railways to airports and dams--hit $166 billion in 2011. (The U.S., long Africa's biggest trading partner, recorded $126 billion.) Also in pursuit of Africa's oil and gas, coal, timber, minerals and farmland are India, Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey and the Gulf states. "There is a new Great Game being played out in Africa," says Geldof. "Yet much of the West ignores this geostrategic giant."

That will inevitably change. Mozambique's offshore Rovuma-1 block has bigger natural gas reserves than all of Libya, while initial estimates are that Somalia has as much oil as Kuwait. The continent has 60% of the world's unused arable land. As Geldof says, "In the end, we all have to go to Africa. They have what we need." And it is in that second scramble for Africa that the continent's best hopes lie, because if the first scramble for Africa--as historians dubbed the period from the 1870s to 1900--was a European imperialist carve-up, the second should leave Africa as the big winner. The more needed Africa is, the less needy--and the more powerful--it can be. With the right governments, "we have the capacity to do wonderfully well," Tutu says.

So tantalizing is the new hope across Africa, it infects even the most skeptical. Asked to imagine the future, Mwangi predicts one day returning to photography to capture a very different Kenya. "There are tough days ahead," he says. "There will be violence. But eventually you'll see an evolution. We'll be a new country, stable and with a government with standards. We'll be reborn. Out of the old will come the new." With a bit of luck, that's a story he'll be shooting across all of Africa.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...#ixzz2DDULSJms
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Last edited by Vakai; November 25th, 2012 at 09:05 PM.


[QUOTE=Vakai;97664197]I agree. I'm not aware of when it was written but it's featured in the December 3 2012 issue.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=tigalion;97664419]  -

So, there is a trend in the Western media going
on... Not complaining though.[/QUOTE]


Quote:
Originally Posted by silence us View Post
africa rising? lol, should have rose after independence


greenandgold -
Well its rising now.
__________________

[QUOTE=tigalion;97664594]It did actually. The 60s and 70s were economically fine for most African states.

 - [/QUOTE]

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[QUOTE=HerachioBlo;99299734]Dangote Cement, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lD8HzLiwBQg


Zinox Computers, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6VSdIyo8cuU
supplied 80,000 computers for our voter's registration

Star Breweries, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncSkBNjES6w&feature=player_embedded

Though a significant bulk of manufacturing is in Lagos, there are very impressive states that hold their own, namely Ogun, Anambra, Kaduna, Kano, and Rivers[/QUOTE]


Omatek Technologies, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S12X7Ruczpg


British American Tobacco, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jgVOgRxVXOw


Gypsum, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2ymsZrQ15c4


Scitygate Group Ltd, Nigeria (Cement blocks and products)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t15uo_5f1mk

HerachioBlo-
Nigerian manfacturing is primarily dominated by small cottage industrialists, especially in the east, that used a collection of simple materials to build small factories

There's a large nigerian population in China that's specifically there to get a hold of such machines and send them back to Nigeria

Below is an example from Lagos, the cities of Lagos, Onitcha, Nnewi, and Aba manufacture everything under the sun this way, they just need government patronage or access to capital which they seldom have.


Cottage Industries:
:
SIEL ENGINEERING, Nigeria

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DqfS9Nw6j3w


Sokoto State man manufactures pots from waste
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vXjiHZvz1Mw


Ebonyi State Village manufactures Palm Oil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_i7SiIjKZ8&feature=player_embedded


Gari Plant in Southwest Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDkxk64dRHA&feature=player_embedded


PSC Solar Industries Limited, Nigeria (solar panels)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OeqkgTJP4C8


Innoson Motors, Nigeria
 -

 -


 -


http://vimeo.com/49501397


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wlDXdrEEw7A


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ks41mWMt8fw


DMT Mobile Toilets, Nigeria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5rLZfjy2Pg&feature=player_embedded


dakhla
Africa is not only growing in manufacturing but is putting new standard for new plant in the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QGejw7S3Qm4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5eNJnYKuc0&feature=player_embedded


Morocco
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqIcVW3Kz98&feature=player_embedded


Nemotek Debuts First Wafer-Level 720p HD Camera Module
High-definition, high-performance camera module features compact form factor - ideal for front-facing camera applications


RABAT, Morocco, Jan 08, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Nemotek Technologie, a manufacturer of customized wafer-level cameras, today announced the debut of the world's first wafer-level high-definition camera module, the Exiguus A15-B1. The new 720p HD, high-performance solution features an ultra-compact form factor. It incorporates two-element HD and reflowable wafer-level lenses and provides lower distortion, better resolution and higher image quality while utilizing replicated lenses on glass wafers instead of traditional plastic. This makes the Exiguus A15-B1 ideal for front-facing camera applications in smartphones, tablets, notebooks, gaming systems and other portable devices.

According to recent reports from InfoTrends, the percentage of all digital camera owners reporting the importance of HD capabilities almost doubled, from 7.9% in 2009 to 15.1% in 2011. The Exiguus A15-B1 responds to this trend and offers a 1/6-inch 1.26 megapixel, reflowable wafer-level camera solution with an active-pixel array of 1296H x 976V. It incorporates a CMOS image sensor and embedded image processor as well as sophisticated functions such as auto exposure control, auto white balance, flicker avoidance, and defect correction.

"We are proud to introduce the first high-definition, wafer-level camera module as it supports our position in the industry as a leader in innovation and state-of-the-art solutions," said Hatim Limati, vice president of sales and marketing for Nemotek Technologie. "Consumers are increasingly relying on cameras within their portable devices, such as phones and tablets. With the Exiguus A15-B1, we are meeting the growing expectations of users by offering the most advanced module in the industry."

The Exiguus A15-B1 also features 720p HD video capture at 30 frames per second and offers low light sensitivity in video mode. Additional features of the Exiguus A15-B1 include automatic image enhancement, parallel and MIPI data outputs and multi-camera synchronization. The Exiguus A15-B1 can also be directly reflowed onto the printed circuit board (PCB), making system design and manufacturing easier and cost effective.

By leveraging the benefits of wafer-level technology, the Exiguus A15-B1 can withstand the harshest environmental conditions, making it the perfect solution for existing and new applications requiring cutting-edge camera technology.

Nemotek is currently sampling the Exiguus A15-B1.

The company will also be showcasing its high-performance wafer-level solutions at this year's CES in booth number 47013.

About Nemotek Technologie

Nemotek Technologie designs, develops and manufactures customized Wafer-Level Cameras for portable applications. The company provides customers with innovative design and manufacturing services for Wafer-Level Packaging, Wafer-Level Optics and Wafer-Level Cameras. Established in May 2008, Nemotek Technologie is funded by Caisse de Depotet de Gestion (CDG). The company features a world-class manufacturing and clean room facility located in the Rabat Technology Park, a hub for technology development based in Morocco. For more information, visit: http://www.nemotektechnologies.com/

SOURCE: Nemotek Technologie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_a_Vs0C3yPs

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Angola is definitely going to become Africa's next star...Angola unlike many African nations is a TRULY independent nation.

Portuguese people are even moving to Angola in waves due to Portugals bad economy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-kSt-5ip94&feature=player_embedded

^^^That will most likely happen more in the future.

Also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0UMb4F8tSE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N0K6J20Tuo

I see Angola probably surpassing Nigeria and even possibly South Africa.

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Originally Posted by TshabalalaGH View Post
Well I'm sad for you that you have such a dim view about your country but there's a lot of progress going on in many African countries. Incredible progress! You gotta be living under a rock to not see these changes.

[QUOTE=silence us;99298573]i've been to over 15 countries in africa mostly ssA, i don't see it, i see people living in poor conditions trying to survive in near impossible conditions, poor health care, poor educational system, generally poor public service where money can even get you out of jail if you steal from the poor depending how powerful you are locally or nationally, there are changes but most of Africa is 100 years behind the rest of the World, change was imminent but the pace is walking, some of you are happy with any little change but africa has wealth, most countries should invest in all their people and not just on friends, specific ethnic groups and relatives, i'm talking about things i see, the pace is unacceptable, i don't know if it's the mentality it can't be post colonialism[/QUOTE]


Originally Posted by DSP View Post
yeah my parents and uncles and older relatives said Cote Ivoire(and Liberia) were land of milk and
honey
back then

[QUOTE=Paperyostrich;99308949]They were definatly. But after their fall they are now rising again, so I can see a very bright future ahead for these countries[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=Kangaroo MZ;99309434]Saying that Africa's growth is a myth is almost ridiculous.
While most people still remain in poverty, there's also a considerable growth in wealth, health, education and an improvement in quality of life in many places. It's slow however.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=Paperyostrich;99309542]It's more visable in some countries than others. Whilst some countries have exceled in these areas, some have stagnated or are even declining. It's true though it's not a myth. The growth is there and it's right in front of us, you don't have to look hard to see it.

To get to the level of development seen by some other countries in the world will take a very very long time, but needless to say the continent is developing at a steady pace[/QUOTE]


Quote:
old school

Accra, the capital of Ghana, has welcomed business travelers for years. Now tourists are streaming in, a byproduct of the fact that the country has Africa’s fastest-growing economy and is also one of its safest destinations. The Mövenpick Ambassador Hotel (with poolside bar and waiters on roller skates) opened in 2011, and the Marriott Accra — the chain’s first sub-Saharan offering — will feature a casino and upscale shopping when it opens in the spring. On Accra’s packed beaches, you’ll see everything from snake handlers to plantain peddlers. Head to the upscale neighborhood of Osu and hit the treehouse-inspired terrace at Buka for fine West African food. The best Ghanaian adventures start with a giant plate of tomato-smothered tilapia and banku — a fermented yeast paste that’s tastier than it sounds — washed down with local Star beer.
__________________


[QUOTE=African Lion;99647421]Africas rise is real but it takes time to see it on land rather then just paper.[/QUOTE]


Originally Posted by Malaika254 View Post
Spending time in subforums will not change their mentality. We have
hospitals
offering free contraceptives to women for example, free antenatal clinics, graduates creating innovative stuff....., they will still bitch. They will forever miss the silver lining in the clouds.


[QUOTE=RODDAS;99274742]^^ [SIZE="6"]Sorry, But [COLOR="Red"]Africa’s Rise is Real[/COLOR][/SIZE]

 -


[SIZE="3"]AFRICA GROWTH SKEPTICS HAVE GOT IT WRONG. THE CONTINENT'S RISE IS VERY REAL.[/SIZE]
BY CHARLES ROBERTSON, MICHAEL MORAN | JANUARY 11, 2013

The counter-attack, when it came, failed to live up to our expectations.
As the authors of a book that challenges so much of what passes for conventional wisdom about Africa in financial, academic, and NGO circles, we thought long and hard about the vulnerabilities of our argument.

In The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa's Economic Revolution, we and our co-authors endeavor to show that sub-Saharan Africa -- or at least a great many of its 48 countries -- will make impressive advances in living standards, economic performance, health, education, and governance over the next thirty years.

Like a growing number of economists, development specialists, health, and agricultural scientists, we have watched as the gap between popular depictions and reality on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa has widened. We set out, with detailed sectoral, geopolitical and econometric analysis, to lay out what we feel is a more accurate picture of sub-Saharan Africa today -- and the dramatic changes we expect to see in the coming decades.

[SIZE="4"]The Myth of Africa's Rise[/SIZE]

For years, whenever economic or financial news from Africa managed to wangle its way through the tales of genocide, famine, and catastrophe spun by western correspondents, the response of pessimists has been to write off all growth on the continent as a crude commodity play.

In a piece that makes this point aggressively, JNU doctoral candidate Rick Rowden returns to this narrative, [SIZE="3"]one which, we believe, reflects an outdated mentality and rests on several misconceptions about sub-Saharan Africa and economic development generally.[/SIZE] Indeed, to write off, as Rowden does, a decade and a half of GDP growth at rates of 7 percent or more -- performance a dozen sub-Saharan African countries have achieved -- is as [SIZE="3"]outdated as the Cold War mentality that views China's massive investment as a threat or dismisses the startling improvements in health, education, per capita income, and retail activity as just some kind of anomaly. [/SIZE]

Rowden, we believe, makes three critical miscalculations in discounting sub-Saharan Africa's prospects as "a myth," as the headline put it.

First, he makes the common mistake of comparing Africa today with East Asia today. It's like comparing Germany in 1840 with Victorian England at its height and saying Germany will never amount to anything. In our analysis, we choose instead to compare Africa today with East Asia in the 1970s, when South Korea, to name just one subsequent "tiger," was still a poor, largely agricultural cub. Our confidence in forecasting robust future growth -- growth that lifts not only GDP but also the well-being and prosperity of these societies generally -- is based on the similarly of policy shifts, growth patterns and improvements in health, welfare and governance measurements that echo the events that preceded East Asia's takeoff.

Second, [SIZE="3"]Rowden ignores the experience of India, which has pulled millions out of poverty and vaulted up international league tables without engaging in a massive push for industrialization.[/SIZE] In contrast to the East Asian model, India has boomed for 30 years without industrialization. The pace of India's GDP growth is exactly the same pace as Developing Asia for the last 20 years -- but with a 10-year lag. Manufacturing accounted for 11 percent of India employment in 1995 and 11 percent in 2011. [SIZE="3"]It is services that are driving Indian growth.[/SIZE] We argue that India is 20 years ahead of sub-Saharan Africa on this, and that growth in the region can accelerate for the next generation without industrialization leading the charge.

Rowden states that, absent such an emphasis on manufacturing and other value-added activities, a sub-Saharan country will be saddled with "still largely a primary agricultural economy with little movement towards the increased manufacturing or labor-intensive job creation that are needed for Africa to "rise."
In fact, if there is a myth in Rowden's piece, this is it.
Justin Yifu Lin, the Taiwan-born chief economist of the World Bank, recently emphasized in his own book, The Quest for Prosperity, that every economic miracle -- including that of his Taiwanese homeland -- starts with the primary sectors doing well first.

[SIZE="3"]Even Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, had to achieve an 18th-century agricultural revolution first. [/SIZE]Russia's development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries followed a similar pattern.

[SIZE="3"]Indeed, the mistake of too many African countries in the 1960s was in believing western and Soviet economic propaganda that promised post-independence leaders they could leap-frog straight to industrialization.[/SIZE] This flew in the face of both western and Soviet history as even Stalin only industrialized on the back of what had been a very successful agricultural, mining, and resource sector.

The consequence was that African governments built up debt during the last commodity boom of the 1970s to pay for industrialization that was premature given infrastructure constraints (human and physical capital was lacking). Mining and resources in general today are helping Africa pay for the infrastructure improvements (from human to physical capital) that will enable the continent to expand industry.

[SIZE="4"]Three key things have changed that suggest sub-Saharan Africa will start to industrialize at a faster pace. [/SIZE]

First, labor costs are rising in China, thanks to its shrinking young labor force (the number of 15-24 year olds will fall 20-30 percent this decade). Per capita GDP was similar to sub-Saharan Africa in 2000, but is now three to five times higher.

Second, education levels in sub-Saharan Africa are now (2005 data) on par with Turkey and Mexico in 1975, suggesting that sub-Saharan Africa in the coming decades can emulate the industrialization of Turkey and Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. This began with textiles and light manufacturing, and got heavier and more value-added as time progressed.

Third, African governments are prioritizing business-friendly policies. The World Bank Ease of Doing Business reforms show steady progress among sub-Saharan African countries, as they do in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.

[SIZE="3"]This is not to say that Rowden is all wrong.[/SIZE] The focus on industrialization may not be necessary for the next 20 years. But it would be useful. Justin Lin's book emphasizes that governments should adopt industrial policies. We richly agree, and we have counseled officials in Africa whenever we have an opportunity to do just that.

In [COLOR="Red"]Kenya[/COLOR], which will soon be the largest of Africa's economies, officials have such a plan. Called, Vision 2030, it spells out an industrial policy that will take effect after a major infrastructure investment and construction program is completed.

Kenya is not unique -- many governments now have 10-20 year development plans -- and we agree that nothing in them guarantees they will be effectively implemented, or implemented at all. [SIZE="3"]We'd like to see more targeted policies, which aim to capture the textile and light manufacturing business which China is losing as its wages rise.[/SIZE] We argue that education and demographics both suggest Africa is well placed to capture this over the next 10-20 years.

But the fact is, [SIZE="3"]sub-Saharan Africa's leaders are conscious of the precedents and acutely aware they are walking two to three decades behind in the same footsteps as emerging market powers like Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South Korea and Brazil. [/SIZE]

[SIZE="3"][COLOR="red"]Discounting the chances of an entire continent under such circumstances strikes us as foolish, at best.[/COLOR][/SIZE] We, after all, are an investment bank, and we approach this topic not only in the hope that a continent so ill-served by recent history will finally break through, but as an opportunity to share in its growing prosperity. If we're right, and we believe the case we make is very convincing, then we have indentified an important inflection point in global economic history as [SIZE="3"]sub-Saharan Africa finally begins to shake off the problems that led The Economist, only a decade ago, to label it "The Hopeless Continent." That august magazine's recent proclamation that Africa was rising should not, as Rowden suggests, be seen as a misguided and shallow provocation aimed at selling magazines.[/SIZE] [Eek!] Indeed, it is a corrective -- one long overdue, in our minds -- and one only the hidebound can now abide.
And when push comes to shove, [SIZE="3"]who among you would not be willing to risk a few dollars to own a bit of Hyundai or Kia at 1978 prices? That's precisely where sub-Saharan Africa is today. [/SIZE]

Photo by TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images

Charles Robertson is Chief Economist of Renaissance Capital and Michael Moran Editor-in-Chief of Renaissance Insights, the bank's thought leadership division.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=Paperyostrich;99280421]I can agree with that one, the Ivory Coast was really to be envied, but after the mid 80's, and especially after 1993 the country went to the dogs. In 1985 less that 10% of the population was living on less than $1.25 per day. Brilliant for a developing country.

I think the problem is many in Africa, especially the presidents and governments want to develop, which is great. But, they seem to think that they can develop over night, which is not true. Many of the countries in the modern world such as Botswana, Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam are only alot more developed today because they have been developing for years at growth rates of 10% or more. You need long term growth strategies to make it both sustanible and long lasting, not just policies that aim for short busrts of growth. These countries also have a diversified economy. Many countries in Africa (Angola, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gabon etc) rely too much on one resource. You need to not just dig things up to grow, but also make them into something else, otherwise when demand for that resource falls, then you're in trouble.

Mnay of these countries are also starting out from nothing. When some countries on the continent such as Chad, Botswana, CAR gained independance from 1960-1966 they were nothing, and apart from one or two resources had no economy, add the stagnation and you have the poverty and lack of basic development there is today. Some of the so called "Asian Tigers" for example were already quite well developed when they gained independence, and they managed to keep developing, this was not always the case for Africa, so in a sense the economies are still starting out, and those who had a strong industrial base like the DRC, Mozambique and Angola, all went down the plughole in the 1970's.

In my view Africa is developing, but it needs to develop more than it is, which is an obvious statment, and it also needs to diversify. I myself am optimistic about Africa, and I have high hopes for it in the future.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=HerachioBlo;99267741]Is it possible that many of you are assuming there's no manufacturing happening, growing or being looked into simple because you don't know?
I think is article is wildly ignorant of the situation at hand on the continenet and bases it's understanding of africa on western articles with a China obsession/phobia

I know that anambra, a state near my own has made incredible manufacturing strides in the past 4 years. from breweries to mechanized parts, to indigenous car manufacturing, but it's not making international news, so it doesn't exist

I'm not going to foolishly assume that manufacturing isn't happening or growing in africa until i personally tour africa. AFrica has seen more manufacturing growth than anywhere in the world with the exception of asia, in the past few years.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=TshabalalaGH;99268408]Well I'm sad for you that you have such a dim view about your country but there's a lot of progress going on in many African countries. Incredible progress! You gotta be living under a rock to not see these changes.[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE=xJamaax;99267928]Some people won't be satisfied until they see some recognizable results. [Wink]

Many African countries are doing well if you analyse and compare how they were doing years before.[/QUOTE]


Spending time in subforums will not change their mentality. We have hospitals offering free contraceptives to women for example, free antenatal clinics, graduates creating innovative stuff....., they will still bitch. They will forever miss the silver lining in the clouds.


Quote:
Originally Posted by TshabalalaGH View Post
It's just sad. Maybe ppl need to spend more time in the sub-forums.
I see some of them do but they still ignore the info.

I HAD ALOT OF INFO ABOUT PROGRESS IN AFRICA A FEW MONTHS AGO BUT IT
WAS
IGNORED AND STILL IS.
With certain folks it's just a waste of time giving or showing the info.

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quote-
Angola is definitely going to become Africa's next star...Angola unlike many African nations is a TRULY independent nation.


Some african nations are more independent then others just like anywhere else but when some of these guys say that no countries in africa is free,then you can't take them seriously.

I Would say it's best to ignore them but sometimes the facts have to said.someone once in awhile has to do it.


Of course africa is free,of course in my view the northern african nations like egypt,libya etc..are not,but that's another story.

I Would say it's best to ignore them but sometimes the facts have to said.someone once in awhile has to do it.

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intra-african trade increasing/Africa’s hopeful economies/Africa's Blossoming Middle Class


Friends and neighbours
Even if many of the world’s most inept states can still be found
between the Sahara and Kalahari deserts, governance has improved
markedly in many places. Regulatory reforms have partially unshackled
markets. A string of privatisations (more than 100 in Nigeria alone)
has reduced the role of the state in many countries. In Nigeria,
Africa’s biggest resource economy, the much-expanded service sector,
if taken together with agriculture, now almost matches oil output.

Trade barriers have been reduced, at least a bit, and despite the
dearth of good roads, regional trade—long an African weakness—is
picking up. By some measures, intra-African trade has gone from 6% to
13% of the total volume. Some economists think the post-apartheid
reintegration of South Africa on its own has provided an extra 1% in
annual GDP growth for the continent, and will continue to do so for
some time. It is now the biggest source of foreign investment for
other countries south of the Sahara.

Somewhat belatedly, Africans are taking an interest in each other.
Flight connections are improving, even if an Arab city, Dubai, is
still the best hub for African travellers. Blocks of African economies
have taken steps towards integration. The East African Community,
which launched a common market in 2010, is doing well; the Economic
Community of West African States less so. The Southern African
Development Community has made the movement of goods and people across
borders much easier. That said, barriers remain, and the economy
suffers as a result. Africans pay twice as much for washing powder as
consumers in Asia, where trade and transport are easier and cheaper.

Africa is still not entirely peaceful and democratic. But it has made
huge strides. The dead hand of the Soviet Union is gone; countries
such as Mozambique and Ethiopia have given up on Marxism. The
dictators, such as Congo’s leopard-skin-fez-wearing Mobutu Sese Seko,
that superpowers once propped up have fallen. Civil wars like the one
which crippled Angola have mostly ended. Two out of three African
countries now hold elections, though they are not always free and
fair. Congo held one on November 28th.
_____________

he sun shines bright
The continent’s impressive growth looks likely to continue
Dec 3rd 2011 | LAGOS | from the print edition


Enlarge
HER $3 billion fortune makes Oprah Winfrey the wealthiest black person
in America, a position she has held for years. But she is no longer
the richest black person in the world. That honour now goes to Aliko
Dangote, the Nigerian cement king. Critics grumble that he is too
close to the country’s soiled political class. Nonetheless his $10
billion fortune is money earned, not expropriated. The Dangote Group
started as a small trading outfit in 1977. It has become a pan-African
conglomerate with interests in sugar and logistics, as well as
construction, and it is a real business, not a kleptocratic sham.

Legitimately self-made African billionaires are harbingers of hope.
Though few in number, they are growing more common. They exemplify how
far Africa has come and give reason to believe that its recent high
growth rates may continue. The politics of the continent’s
Mediterranean shore may have dominated headlines this year, but the
new boom south of the Sahara will affect more lives.

From Ghana in the west to Mozambique in the south, Africa’s economies
are consistently growing faster than those of almost any other region
of the world. At least a dozen have expanded by more than 6% a year
for six or more years. Ethiopia will grow by 7.5% this year, without a
drop of oil to export. Once a byword for famine, it is now the world’s
tenth-largest producer of livestock. Nor is its wealth monopolised by
a well-connected clique. Embezzlement is still common but income
distribution has improved in the past decade.

Severe income disparities persist through much of the continent; but a
genuine middle class is emerging. According to Standard Bank, which
operates throughout Africa, 60m African households have annual incomes
greater than $3,000 at market exchange rates. By 2015, that number is
expected to reach 100m—almost the same as in India now. These
households belong to what might be called the consumer class. In
total, 300m Africans earn more than $700 a year. That’s not much, and
many of those people could be pushed back into penury by a small
change in circumstance. But it can cover a phone and even some school
fees. “They are not all middle class by Western standards, but
nonetheless represent a vast market,” says Edward George, an economist
at Ecobank, another African banking group.

As for Africans below the poverty line—the majority of the continent’s
billion people—disease and hunger are still a big problem. Out of
1,000 children 118 will die before their fifth birthday. Two decades
ago the figure was 165. Such progress towards the Millennium
Development Goals, a series of poverty-reduction milestones set by the
UN, is slow and uneven. But it is not negligible. And the mood among
have-nots is better than at any time since the independence era two
generations ago. True, Africans have a remarkable capacity for being
upbeat. But it is seems that this time they really do have something
to smile about.

Lions and tigers (and bears)

Since The Economist regrettably labelled Africa “the hopeless
continent” a decade ago, a profound change has taken hold. Labour
productivity has been rising. It is now growing by, on average, 2.7% a
year. Trade between Africa and the rest of the world has increased by
200% since 2000. Inflation dropped from 22% in the 1990s to 8% in the
past decade. Foreign debts declined by a quarter, budget deficits by
two-thirds. In eight of the past ten years, according to the World
Bank, sub-Saharan growth has been faster than East Asia’s (though that
does include Japan).

Even after revising downward its 2012 forecast because of a slowdown
in the northern hemisphere, the IMF still expects sub-Saharan Africa’s
economies to expand by 5.75% next year. Several big countries are
likely to hit growth rates of 10%. The World Bank—not known for
boosterism—said in a report this year that “Africa could be on the
brink of an economic take-off, much like China was 30 years ago and
India 20 years ago,” though its officials think major poverty
reduction will require higher growth than today’s—a long-term average
of 7% or more.

There is another point of comparison with Asia: demography. Africa’s
population is set to double, from 1 billion to 2 billion, over the
next 40 years. As Africa’s population grows in size, it will also
alter in shape. The median age is now 20, compared with 30 in Asia and
40 in Europe. With fertility rates dropping, that median will rise as
today’s mass of young people moves into its most productive years. The
ratio of people of working age to those younger and older—the
dependency ratio—will improve. This “demographic dividend” was crucial
to the growth of East Asian economies a generation ago. It offers a
huge opportunity to Africa today.

Seen through a bullish eye, this reinforces exuberant talk of “lion
economies” analogous to the Asian tigers. But there are caveats. For
one thing, in Africa, perhaps even more so than in Asia, wildly
different realities can exist side by side. Averaging out failed
states and phenomenal success stories is of limited value. The
experience of the leaders is an unreliable guide to what will become
of the laggards. For another, these are early days, and there have
been false dawns before. Those of bearish mind will ask whether the
lions can match the tigers for stamina. Will Africa continue to rise?
Or is this merely a strong upswing in a boom-bust cycle that will
inevitably come tumbling back down?

More than diamond geezers


Previous African growth spurts undoubtedly owed a lot to commodity
prices (see chart 1). After all, Africa has about half the world’s
gold reserves and a third of its diamonds, not to mention copper,
coltan and all sorts of other minerals and metals. In the 1960s
revenues from mining paid for roads, palaces and skyscrapers. When
markets slumped in the 1980s the money dried up. The skylines of
Johannesburg, Nairobi and Lagos are still littered with high-rise
flotsam from the high-water marks of previous booms.

Recently revenues from selling oil and metals have helped to fill
treasuries, create jobs and feed an appetite for luxury. In gem-rich
Angola, high-grade diamonds are reimported after being cut in Europe
to adorn the fingers of local minerals magnates and their molls.

Overall, though, only about a third of Africa’s recent growth is due
to commodities. West and southern Africa are the chief beneficiaries.
Equatorial Guinea gets most of its revenues from oil; Zambia gets half
its GDP from copper. When commodity prices soften or tumble such
countries will undoubtedly suffer. But it is east Africa, with little
oil and only a sprinkling of minerals, that boasts the
fastest-expanding regional economy on the continent, and there are
outposts of similar non-resource-based growth elsewhere, such as
Burkina Faso. “Everything is growing, not just commodities,” says Mo
Ibrahim, a Sudanese mobile-phone mogul who is arguably Africa’s most
successful entrepreneur.

When the world economy—and with it commodity prices—tanked in 2008,
African growth rates barely budged. “Africa has great resilience,”
says Mthuli Ncube, chief economist of the African Development Bank. “A
structural change has taken place.”

A long-term decline in commodity prices would undoubtedly hurt. But
commodity-led growth on the continent is not as reversible as it used
to be. For one thing, African governments have invested more wisely
this time round, notably in infrastructure. In much of the continent
roads are still dire. But there are more decent ones than there used
to be, and each new length of tarmac will boost the productivity of
the people it serves long after the cashflow that paid for it dries
up. For another, Africa’s commodities now have a wider range of
buyers. A generation ago Brazil, Russia, India and China accounted for
just 1% of African trade. Today they make up 20%, and by 2030 the rate
is expected to be 50%. If China and India continue to grow Africa
probably will too.

More jaw-jaw, less war-war

What’s more, many foreign participants in the African commodity trade
have become less short-termist. They are likely to stick around after
they finish mining; Chinese workers, of whom there are tens of
thousands in Africa, have shown a propensity to morph into local
entrepreneurs. A Cantonese construction company in Angola recently set
up its own manufacturing arm to produce equipment that is difficult to
import. Few Western competitors would do the same (though many of
their colonial forebears did).

Commodity growth may be more assured than it used to be. But two big
drivers of Africa’s growth would still be there even if the continent
held not a barrel of oil nor an ounce of gold. One is the application
of technology. Mobile phones have penetrated deep into the bush. More
than 600m Africans have one; perhaps 10% of those have access to
mobile-internet services. The phones make boons like savings accounts
and information on crop prices ever more available.

Technology is also aiding health care. The World Bank says malaria
takes $12 billion out of Africa’s GDP every year. But thanks to more
and better bed nets, death rates have fallen by 20%. Foreign investors
in countries with high HIV-infection rates complain about expensively
trained workers dying in their 30s and 40s, but the incidence of new
infection is dropping in much of the continent, and many more people
are receiving effective treatment.

The second big non-commodity driver is political stability. The Africa
of a generation ago was a sad place. The blight of apartheid isolated
its largest economy, South Africa. Only seven out of more than 50
countries held frequent elections. America and the Soviet Union
conducted proxy wars. Capital was scarce and macroeconomic management
erratic. Lives were cut short by bullets and machetes.

Africa is still not entirely peaceful and democratic. But it has made
huge strides. The dead hand of the Soviet Union is gone; countries
such as Mozambique and Ethiopia have given up on Marxism. The
dictators, such as Congo’s leopard-skin-fez-wearing Mobutu Sese Seko,
that superpowers once propped up have fallen. Civil wars like the one
which crippled Angola have mostly ended. Two out of three African
countries now hold elections, though they are not always free and
fair. Congo held one on November 28th.

Friends and neighbours

Even if many of the world’s most inept states can still be found
between the Sahara and Kalahari deserts, governance has improved
markedly in many places. Regulatory reforms have partially unshackled
markets. A string of privatisations (more than 100 in Nigeria alone)
has reduced the role of the state in many countries. In Nigeria,
Africa’s biggest resource economy, the much-expanded service sector,
if taken together with agriculture, now almost matches oil output.

Trade barriers have been reduced, at least a bit, and despite the
dearth of good roads, regional trade—long an African weakness—is
picking up. By some measures, intra-African trade has gone from 6% to
13% of the total volume. Some economists think the post-apartheid
reintegration of South Africa on its own has provided an extra 1% in
annual GDP growth for the continent, and will continue to do so for
some time. It is now the biggest source of foreign investment for
other countries south of the Sahara.

Somewhat belatedly, Africans are taking an interest in each other.
Flight connections are improving, even if an Arab city, Dubai, is
still the best hub for African travellers. Blocks of African economies
have taken steps towards integration. The East African Community,
which launched a common market in 2010, is doing well; the Economic
Community of West African States less so. The Southern African
Development Community has made the movement of goods and people across
borders much easier. That said, barriers remain, and the economy
suffers as a result. Africans pay twice as much for washing powder as
consumers in Asia, where trade and transport are easier and cheaper.


As in Asia a generation ago, relatively small increases in capital can
produce large productivity gains. When, after decades of capital
starvation, outside investors started to take that disproportionate
return seriously, they helped Asia blossom. Now some of those
investors are eyeing Africa. In financial centres such as London
barely a week goes by without an Africa investor conference.
Private-equity firms that a decade ago barely knew sub-Saharan Africa
existed raised $1.5 billion for projects on the continent last year.
In 2010 total foreign direct investment was more than $55 billion—five
times what it was a decade earlier, and much more than Africa receives
in aid (see chart 2).

Foreign investors are no longer just interested in oil wells and
mines. They are moving on to medium-sized bets on consumer goods. The
number of projects—for example by retail chains such as Britain’s
Marks & Spencer—has doubled in the past three years. Despite the boom
in mining, the share of total investment going into extractive
activities has shrunk by 13%. That said, the riches are far from
evenly spread: three-quarters of all investments are in just ten big
countries.

The increased interest from outsiders that has been triggered by
Africa’s political and technological changes is not, though, the heart
of the story. Economic change has made life more rewarding for
Africans themselves. They have more opportunities to start businesses
and get ahead than they have enjoyed in living memory, and governments
are showing some willingness to get out of their way. According to the
World Bank’s annual ranking of commercial practices, 36 out of 46
African governments made things easier for business in the past year.

Talking to the future
No end to worries

That said, most African countries are still clustered near the bottom
of the table. In all sorts of ways African governments need to run
their countries more efficiently, more accountably and less
intrusively. They also need to offer much better schooling, an area in
which Africa woefully lags behind Asia. African businessmen constantly
complain about the shortage of skills. Hiring qualified staff can be
prohibitively expensive. The return of skilled exiles has helped in
some newly peaceful countries, but often foreigners are needed,
usually other Africans. Without better education, Africa cannot hope
to emulate the Asian miracle.

Africa’s demographic dividend, too, is far from guaranteed. A growing
population and a bulge of working-age citizens proved a blessing in
Asia. But population growth always has its costs. All those extra
people must be fed, educated and given opportunities. If illiberal
policies obstruct growth and discourage firms from hiring, Africa’s
extra millions may soon be jobless and disgruntled. Some may even take
up arms—a sure recipe for disaster, both human and economic.

An abundance of young people is like gearing on a balance sheet: it
makes good situations better and bad ones worse. It is worrying that
some of Africa’s fastest-growing populations are in economies not
performing well at the moment; and fertility rates are not declining
as uniformly, or as swiftly, as they did in Asia.

Africa’s extra people are flocking to cities. Some 40% of Africans are
city dwellers now, up from 30% a generation ago. By 2025 the number is
likely to be 50%. In Asia the rate is currently 52%. This is usually a
good thing. Productivity is higher in cities. Transport costs are
lower and markets are busier when people live close to each other. In
bad times, the tight ethnic jumble of the city can be a powder keg.
That said, Africa’s worst wars, such as those in Congo, Rwanda, Sudan
and Somalia, have been fought in countries where most people are
peasants or livestock herders.

Extra mouths will need to be fed. There is scope for this. Though
Africa is now a net food importer, it has 60% of the world’s
uncultivated arable land. It produces less per person now than in
1960. Africa’s land is often hard to farm, with large year on year
variations in climate (a problem likely to get worse as the Earth
heats up). Farmers lack access to capital for fertiliser and
irrigation. More roads and storage depots are also needed; much of the
harvest rots before it gets to market. And land ownership often raises
thorny issues about who belongs to a place and who does not.

Agriculture is a long-term worry. A shorter term concern is how to
deal with a coming slowdown and recession in the north. Investors
fleeing risky assets in Europe are unlikely to put their cash into
Africa. More likely they will pull back some of the money they have
already invested there. The signs are that this is already happening.
Bankers say the deal flow is slowing. But many remain generally
bullish on Africa, convinced that its growth potential will reward
patient investors and eventually lure back fickle ones.

Africa’s growth is now underpinned by a permanent shift in
expectations. In many African countries people have at last started to
see themselves as citizens, with the rights that citizenship brings.
Greater political awareness makes it harder for incompetent despots to
hold on to power, as north Africa has discovered. Bastions of the
continent’s past—destitute, violent and isolated—are becoming
exceptions.

Africa is not the next China. It provides only a tiny fraction of
world output—2.5% at purchasing-power parity. It is as yet not even a
good bet for retail investors, given the dearth of stockmarkets. Mr
Dangote’s $10 billion undeniably makes him a big fish, but the Dangote
Group accounts for a quarter of Nigeria’s stockmarket by value: it is
a small and rather illiquid pond. Nonetheless, Africa’s boom will
continue to benefit Africans, serving the billion as well as the
billionaires. That is no small feat.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541008
______________________________________


Africa's Blossoming Middle Class

Published on Tuesday, 05 July 2011


Africa is often painted as a continent of misery, despair, and
hopelessness. On a daily basis, news and pictures are presented by the
media which perpetuate this image. Although media like newspapers
cannot be faulted for presenting the public newsworthy events, they
often paint a partial, biased picture of the continent. The result is
distorted perceptions of African countries and circumstances, fuelled
by stereotypes.


This CAI paper highlights Africa's burgeoning middle class as key to
the African Renaissance. Earlier this year, the African Development
Bank (AfDB) released a report entitled "The Middle of the Pyramid:
Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa." The report shows that
Africa's middle class has tripled over the last three decades to 313
million, or approximately 34% of Africa's population. It states that
the rapid increase in the number of middle class citizens can be
attributed to strong economic growth and a shift towards a stable,
salaried job culture as well as entrepreneurial activity, as opposed
to traditional agricultural activities. The continent is clearly
developing itself and this paper serves to promote the fact.

The AfDB report emphasizes the rapid increase in middle class
citizens, which has occurred since 2000. In 1980, there were
approximately 111 million middle class citizens: 26% of Africa's
population. In 1990, the number had risen to 151.4 million (27%), and
in 2000, to 196 million (27.2%). By 2010, the number stood at 313
million (34%).(5) The North African countries of Tunisia (90%),
Morocco (85%) and Egypt (80%) had the highest percentage of middle
class citizens. It is therefore not surprising that both Tunisia and
Egypt toppled their oppressive governments.Botswana, Cape Verde,
Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa also have a high
percentage of middle class citizens.


Vijay Mahajan, author of Africa Rising, terms Africa's middle class
"Africa 2s" and notes that Africa's middle class collectively is
approximately the same size of the middle class of India or
China.Vijay uses different criteria than the AfDB to measure Africa's
middle class and estimates that between 300 and 500 million of
Africa's population of 1 billion can be defined as middle class.


The general media has highlighted the AfDB's report. It is generally
held in democratic theory that a burgeoning middle class indicates a
blossoming society, and that a powerful middle class which is
collectively wealthier than the elite and more numerous than the poor
invariably leads to a healthy, functional, and truly democratic
society which is both accountable and responsive to the needs of its
citizens and centered upon ensuring the welfare of all of its
citizens, which often results in greater economic growth. For example,
BBC News recently highlighted the technology revolution occurring in
Africa by drawing attention to Kenya's increasingly sophisticated
mobile phone market, ShopAfrica53 in Ghana, and the SKA (Square
Kilometre Array) in South Africa - a deep space telescope project.
Africa's burgeoning middle class is a promising sign of a more
prosperous Africa in the future. A burgeoning middle class is, most
importantly, a sign of strong economic growth, which implies that (at
least parts of) Africa have been creating the conditions that
facilitate the rise of a powerful middle class.

"Africa's middle class is not only crucial for economic growth but it
is essential for the growth of democracy… The middle class in Africa,
like everywhere else, supports democratic governments that function
well and that are accountable... Africa's middle class support states
that provide public services like education, health, electricity and
water… Africa's middle class is strongest in countries that have
robust and growing private sectors,"Vijaya Ramachandran, author of
Africa's Private Sector.


Although the AfDB noted that Africa's burgeoning middle class is far
from becoming a powerful, established middle class and still faces the
danger of slipping into poverty again, we must focus on the fact that
development in Africa is occurring all the time. Africans are taking
the initiative and taking important steps towards a brighter future,
despite what is often portrayed by the media. The next century might
just be Africa's.

http://www.africagoodnews.com/africa...dle-class.html

AND
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/a...elop-continent


Africa’s middle class: striving to develop a continent




Some of the info below is repeat and i do not have time to remove but kept reading until you see new info below.
THANKYOU.

Subject: POSTIVE NEWS ABOUT MODERN AFRICA


Friends and neighbours
Even if many of the world’s most inept states can still be found
between the Sahara and Kalahari deserts, governance has improved
markedly in many places. Regulatory reforms have partially unshackled
markets. A string of privatisations (more than 100 in Nigeria alone)
has reduced the role of the state in many countries. In Nigeria,
Africa’s biggest resource economy, the much-expanded service sector,
if taken together with agriculture, now almost matches oil output.

Trade barriers have been reduced, at least a bit, and despite the
dearth of good roads, regional trade—long an African weakness—is
picking up. By some measures, intra-African trade has gone from 6% to
13% of the total volume. Some economists think the post-apartheid
reintegration of South Africa on its own has provided an extra 1% in
annual GDP growth for the continent, and will continue to do so for
some time. It is now the biggest source of foreign investment for
other countries south of the Sahara.

Somewhat belatedly, Africans are taking an interest in each other.
Flight connections are improving, even if an Arab city, Dubai, is
still the best hub for African travellers. Blocks of African economies
have taken steps towards integration. The East African Community,
which launched a common market in 2010, is doing well; the Economic
Community of West African States less so. The Southern African
Development Community has made the movement of goods and people across
borders much easier. That said, barriers remain, and the economy
suffers as a result. Africans pay twice as much for washing powder as
consumers in Asia, where trade and transport are easier and cheaper.

Africa is still not entirely peaceful and democratic. But it has made
huge strides. The dead hand of the Soviet Union is gone; countries
such as Mozambique and Ethiopia have given up on Marxism. The
dictators, such as Congo’s leopard-skin-fez-wearing Mobutu Sese Seko,
that superpowers once propped up have fallen. Civil wars like the one
which crippled Angola have mostly ended. Two out of three African
countries now hold elections, though they are not always free and
fair. Congo held one on November 28th.
_____________

he sun shines bright
The continent’s impressive growth looks likely to continue
Dec 3rd 2011 | LAGOS | from the print edition


Enlarge
HER $3 billion fortune makes Oprah Winfrey the wealthiest black person
in America, a position she has held for years. But she is no longer
the richest black person in the world. That honour now goes to Aliko
Dangote, the Nigerian cement king. Critics grumble that he is too
close to the country’s soiled political class. Nonetheless his $10
billion fortune is money earned, not expropriated. The Dangote Group
started as a small trading outfit in 1977. It has become a pan-African
conglomerate with interests in sugar and logistics, as well as
construction, and it is a real business, not a kleptocratic sham.

Legitimately self-made African billionaires are harbingers of hope.
Though few in number, they are growing more common. They exemplify how
far Africa has come and give reason to believe that its recent high
growth rates may continue. The politics of the continent’s
Mediterranean shore may have dominated headlines this year, but the
new boom south of the Sahara will affect more lives.

From Ghana in the west to Mozambique in the south, Africa’s economies
are consistently growing faster than those of almost any other region
of the world. At least a dozen have expanded by more than 6% a year
for six or more years. Ethiopia will grow by 7.5% this year, without a
drop of oil to export. Once a byword for famine, it is now the world’s
tenth-largest producer of livestock. Nor is its wealth monopolised by
a well-connected clique. Embezzlement is still common but income
distribution has improved in the past decade.

Severe income disparities persist through much of the continent; but a
genuine middle class is emerging. According to Standard Bank, which
operates throughout Africa, 60m African households have annual incomes
greater than $3,000 at market exchange rates. By 2015, that number is
expected to reach 100m—almost the same as in India now. These
households belong to what might be called the consumer class. In
total, 300m Africans earn more than $700 a year. That’s not much, and
many of those people could be pushed back into penury by a small
change in circumstance. But it can cover a phone and even some school
fees. “They are not all middle class by Western standards, but
nonetheless represent a vast market,” says Edward George, an economist
at Ecobank, another African banking group.

As for Africans below the poverty line—the majority of the continent’s
billion people—disease and hunger are still a big problem. Out of
1,000 children 118 will die before their fifth birthday. Two decades
ago the figure was 165. Such progress towards the Millennium
Development Goals, a series of poverty-reduction milestones set by the
UN, is slow and uneven. But it is not negligible. And the mood among
have-nots is better than at any time since the independence era two
generations ago. True, Africans have a remarkable capacity for being
upbeat. But it is seems that this time they really do have something
to smile about.

Lions and tigers (and bears)

Since The Economist regrettably labelled Africa “the hopeless
continent” a decade ago, a profound change has taken hold. Labour
productivity has been rising. It is now growing by, on average, 2.7% a
year. Trade between Africa and the rest of the world has increased by
200% since 2000. Inflation dropped from 22% in the 1990s to 8% in the
past decade. Foreign debts declined by a quarter, budget deficits by
two-thirds. In eight of the past ten years, according to the World
Bank, sub-Saharan growth has been faster than East Asia’s (though that
does include Japan).

Even after revising downward its 2012 forecast because of a slowdown
in the northern hemisphere, the IMF still expects sub-Saharan Africa’s
economies to expand by 5.75% next year. Several big countries are
likely to hit growth rates of 10%. The World Bank—not known for
boosterism—said in a report this year that “Africa could be on the
brink of an economic take-off, much like China was 30 years ago and
India 20 years ago,” though its officials think major poverty
reduction will require higher growth than today’s—a long-term average
of 7% or more.

There is another point of comparison with Asia: demography. Africa’s
population is set to double, from 1 billion to 2 billion, over the
next 40 years. As Africa’s population grows in size, it will also
alter in shape. The median age is now 20, compared with 30 in Asia and
40 in Europe. With fertility rates dropping, that median will rise as
today’s mass of young people moves into its most productive years. The
ratio of people of working age to those younger and older—the
dependency ratio—will improve. This “demographic dividend” was crucial
to the growth of East Asian economies a generation ago. It offers a
huge opportunity to Africa today.

Seen through a bullish eye, this reinforces exuberant talk of “lion
economies” analogous to the Asian tigers. But there are caveats. For
one thing, in Africa, perhaps even more so than in Asia, wildly
different realities can exist side by side. Averaging out failed
states and phenomenal success stories is of limited value. The
experience of the leaders is an unreliable guide to what will become
of the laggards. For another, these are early days, and there have
been false dawns before. Those of bearish mind will ask whether the
lions can match the tigers for stamina. Will Africa continue to rise?
Or is this merely a strong upswing in a boom-bust cycle that will
inevitably come tumbling back down?

More than diamond geezers


Previous African growth spurts undoubtedly owed a lot to commodity
prices (see chart 1). After all, Africa has about half the world’s
gold reserves and a third of its diamonds, not to mention copper,
coltan and all sorts of other minerals and metals. In the 1960s
revenues from mining paid for roads, palaces and skyscrapers. When
markets slumped in the 1980s the money dried up. The skylines of
Johannesburg, Nairobi and Lagos are still littered with high-rise
flotsam from the high-water marks of previous booms.

Recently revenues from selling oil and metals have helped to fill
treasuries, create jobs and feed an appetite for luxury. In gem-rich
Angola, high-grade diamonds are reimported after being cut in Europe
to adorn the fingers of local minerals magnates and their molls.

Overall, though, only about a third of Africa’s recent growth is due
to commodities. West and southern Africa are the chief beneficiaries.
Equatorial Guinea gets most of its revenues from oil; Zambia gets half
its GDP from copper. When commodity prices soften or tumble such
countries will undoubtedly suffer. But it is east Africa, with little
oil and only a sprinkling of minerals, that boasts the
fastest-expanding regional economy on the continent, and there are
outposts of similar non-resource-based growth elsewhere, such as
Burkina Faso. “Everything is growing, not just commodities,” says Mo
Ibrahim, a Sudanese mobile-phone mogul who is arguably Africa’s most
successful entrepreneur.

When the world economy—and with it commodity prices—tanked in 2008,
African growth rates barely budged. “Africa has great resilience,”
says Mthuli Ncube, chief economist of the African Development Bank. “A
structural change has taken place.”

A long-term decline in commodity prices would undoubtedly hurt. But
commodity-led growth on the continent is not as reversible as it used
to be. For one thing, African governments have invested more wisely
this time round, notably in infrastructure. In much of the continent
roads are still dire. But there are more decent ones than there used
to be, and each new length of tarmac will boost the productivity of
the people it serves long after the cashflow that paid for it dries
up. For another, Africa’s commodities now have a wider range of
buyers. A generation ago Brazil, Russia, India and China accounted for
just 1% of African trade. Today they make up 20%, and by 2030 the rate
is expected to be 50%. If China and India continue to grow Africa
probably will too.

More jaw-jaw, less war-war

What’s more, many foreign participants in the African commodity trade
have become less short-termist. They are likely to stick around after
they finish mining; Chinese workers, of whom there are tens of
thousands in Africa, have shown a propensity to morph into local
entrepreneurs. A Cantonese construction company in Angola recently set
up its own manufacturing arm to produce equipment that is difficult to
import. Few Western competitors would do the same (though many of
their colonial forebears did).

Commodity growth may be more assured than it used to be. But two big
drivers of Africa’s growth would still be there even if the continent
held not a barrel of oil nor an ounce of gold. One is the application
of technology. Mobile phones have penetrated deep into the bush. More
than 600m Africans have one; perhaps 10% of those have access to
mobile-internet services. The phones make boons like savings accounts
and information on crop prices ever more available.

Technology is also aiding health care. The World Bank says malaria
takes $12 billion out of Africa’s GDP every year. But thanks to more
and better bed nets, death rates have fallen by 20%. Foreign investors
in countries with high HIV-infection rates complain about expensively
trained workers dying in their 30s and 40s, but the incidence of new
infection is dropping in much of the continent, and many more people
are receiving effective treatment.

The second big non-commodity driver is political stability. The Africa
of a generation ago was a sad place. The blight of apartheid isolated
its largest economy, South Africa. Only seven out of more than 50
countries held frequent elections. America and the Soviet Union
conducted proxy wars. Capital was scarce and macroeconomic management
erratic. Lives were cut short by bullets and machetes.

Africa is still not entirely peaceful and democratic. But it has made
huge strides. The dead hand of the Soviet Union is gone; countries
such as Mozambique and Ethiopia have given up on Marxism. The
dictators, such as Congo’s leopard-skin-fez-wearing Mobutu Sese Seko,
that superpowers once propped up have fallen. Civil wars like the one
which crippled Angola have mostly ended. Two out of three African
countries now hold elections, though they are not always free and
fair. Congo held one on November 28th.

Friends and neighbours

Even if many of the world’s most inept states can still be found
between the Sahara and Kalahari deserts, governance has improved
markedly in many places. Regulatory reforms have partially unshackled
markets. A string of privatisations (more than 100 in Nigeria alone)
has reduced the role of the state in many countries. In Nigeria,
Africa’s biggest resource economy, the much-expanded service sector,
if taken together with agriculture, now almost matches oil output.

Trade barriers have been reduced, at least a bit, and despite the
dearth of good roads, regional trade—long an African weakness—is
picking up. By some measures, intra-African trade has gone from 6% to
13% of the total volume. Some economists think the post-apartheid
reintegration of South Africa on its own has provided an extra 1% in
annual GDP growth for the continent, and will continue to do so for
some time. It is now the biggest source of foreign investment for
other countries south of the Sahara.

Somewhat belatedly, Africans are taking an interest in each other.
Flight connections are improving, even if an Arab city, Dubai, is
still the best hub for African travellers. Blocks of African economies
have taken steps towards integration. The East African Community,
which launched a common market in 2010, is doing well; the Economic
Community of West African States less so. The Southern African
Development Community has made the movement of goods and people across
borders much easier. That said, barriers remain, and the economy
suffers as a result. Africans pay twice as much for washing powder as
consumers in Asia, where trade and transport are easier and cheaper.


As in Asia a generation ago, relatively small increases in capital can
produce large productivity gains. When, after decades of capital
starvation, outside investors started to take that disproportionate
return seriously, they helped Asia blossom. Now some of those
investors are eyeing Africa. In financial centres such as London
barely a week goes by without an Africa investor conference.
Private-equity firms that a decade ago barely knew sub-Saharan Africa
existed raised $1.5 billion for projects on the continent last year.
In 2010 total foreign direct investment was more than $55 billion—five
times what it was a decade earlier, and much more than Africa receives
in aid (see chart 2).

Foreign investors are no longer just interested in oil wells and
mines. They are moving on to medium-sized bets on consumer goods. The
number of projects—for example by retail chains such as Britain’s
Marks & Spencer—has doubled in the past three years. Despite the boom
in mining, the share of total investment going into extractive
activities has shrunk by 13%. That said, the riches are far from
evenly spread: three-quarters of all investments are in just ten big
countries.

The increased interest from outsiders that has been triggered by
Africa’s political and technological changes is not, though, the heart
of the story. Economic change has made life more rewarding for
Africans themselves. They have more opportunities to start businesses
and get ahead than they have enjoyed in living memory, and governments
are showing some willingness to get out of their way. According to the
World Bank’s annual ranking of commercial practices, 36 out of 46
African governments made things easier for business in the past year.

Talking to the future
No end to worries

That said, most African countries are still clustered near the bottom
of the table. In all sorts of ways African governments need to run
their countries more efficiently, more accountably and less
intrusively. They also need to offer much better schooling, an area in
which Africa woefully lags behind Asia. African businessmen constantly
complain about the shortage of skills. Hiring qualified staff can be
prohibitively expensive. The return of skilled exiles has helped in
some newly peaceful countries, but often foreigners are needed,
usually other Africans. Without better education, Africa cannot hope
to emulate the Asian miracle.

Africa’s demographic dividend, too, is far from guaranteed. A growing
population and a bulge of working-age citizens proved a blessing in
Asia. But population growth always has its costs. All those extra
people must be fed, educated and given opportunities. If illiberal
policies obstruct growth and discourage firms from hiring, Africa’s
extra millions may soon be jobless and disgruntled. Some may even take
up arms—a sure recipe for disaster, both human and economic.

An abundance of young people is like gearing on a balance sheet: it
makes good situations better and bad ones worse. It is worrying that
some of Africa’s fastest-growing populations are in economies not
performing well at the moment; and fertility rates are not declining
as uniformly, or as swiftly, as they did in Asia.

Africa’s extra people are flocking to cities. Some 40% of Africans are
city dwellers now, up from 30% a generation ago. By 2025 the number is
likely to be 50%. In Asia the rate is currently 52%. This is usually a
good thing. Productivity is higher in cities. Transport costs are
lower and markets are busier when people live close to each other. In
bad times, the tight ethnic jumble of the city can be a powder keg.
That said, Africa’s worst wars, such as those in Congo, Rwanda, Sudan
and Somalia, have been fought in countries where most people are
peasants or livestock herders.

Extra mouths will need to be fed. There is scope for this. Though
Africa is now a net food importer, it has 60% of the world’s
uncultivated arable land. It produces less per person now than in
1960. Africa’s land is often hard to farm, with large year on year
variations in climate (a problem likely to get worse as the Earth
heats up). Farmers lack access to capital for fertiliser and
irrigation. More roads and storage depots are also needed; much of the
harvest rots before it gets to market. And land ownership often raises
thorny issues about who belongs to a place and who does not.

Agriculture is a long-term worry. A shorter term concern is how to
deal with a coming slowdown and recession in the north. Investors
fleeing risky assets in Europe are unlikely to put their cash into
Africa. More likely they will pull back some of the money they have
already invested there. The signs are that this is already happening.
Bankers say the deal flow is slowing. But many remain generally
bullish on Africa, convinced that its growth potential will reward
patient investors and eventually lure back fickle ones.

Africa’s growth is now underpinned by a permanent shift in
expectations. In many African countries people have at last started to
see themselves as citizens, with the rights that citizenship brings.
Greater political awareness makes it harder for incompetent despots to
hold on to power, as north Africa has discovered. Bastions of the
continent’s past—destitute, violent and isolated—are becoming
exceptions.

Africa is not the next China. It provides only a tiny fraction of
world output—2.5% at purchasing-power parity. It is as yet not even a
good bet for retail investors, given the dearth of stockmarkets. Mr
Dangote’s $10 billion undeniably makes him a big fish, but the Dangote
Group accounts for a quarter of Nigeria’s stockmarket by value: it is
a small and rather illiquid pond. Nonetheless, Africa’s boom will
continue to benefit Africans, serving the billion as well as the
billionaires. That is no small feat.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541008
______________________________________


Africa's Blossoming Middle Class

Published on Tuesday, 05 July 2011


Africa is often painted as a continent of misery, despair, and
hopelessness. On a daily basis, news and pictures are presented by the
media which perpetuate this image. Although media like newspapers
cannot be faulted for presenting the public newsworthy events, they
often paint a partial, biased picture of the continent. The result is
distorted perceptions of African countries and circumstances, fuelled
by stereotypes.


This CAI paper highlights Africa's burgeoning middle class as key to
the African Renaissance. Earlier this year, the African Development
Bank (AfDB) released a report entitled "The Middle of the Pyramid:
Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa." The report shows that
Africa's middle class has tripled over the last three decades to 313
million, or approximately 34% of Africa's population. It states that
the rapid increase in the number of middle class citizens can be
attributed to strong economic growth and a shift towards a stable,
salaried job culture as well as entrepreneurial activity, as opposed
to traditional agricultural activities. The continent is clearly
developing itself and this paper serves to promote the fact.

The AfDB report emphasizes the rapid increase in middle class
citizens, which has occurred since 2000. In 1980, there were
approximately 111 million middle class citizens: 26% of Africa's
population. In 1990, the number had risen to 151.4 million (27%), and
in 2000, to 196 million (27.2%). By 2010, the number stood at 313
million (34%).(5) The North African countries of Tunisia (90%),
Morocco (85%) and Egypt (80%) had the highest percentage of middle
class citizens. It is therefore not surprising that both Tunisia and
Egypt toppled their oppressive governments.Botswana, Cape Verde,
Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa also have a high
percentage of middle class citizens.


Vijay Mahajan, author of Africa Rising, terms Africa's middle class
"Africa 2s" and notes that Africa's middle class collectively is
approximately the same size of the middle class of India or
China.Vijay uses different criteria than the AfDB to measure Africa's
middle class and estimates that between 300 and 500 million of
Africa's population of 1 billion can be defined as middle class.


The general media has highlighted the AfDB's report. It is generally
held in democratic theory that a burgeoning middle class indicates a
blossoming society, and that a powerful middle class which is
collectively wealthier than the elite and more numerous than the poor
invariably leads to a healthy, functional, and truly democratic
society which is both accountable and responsive to the needs of its
citizens and centered upon ensuring the welfare of all of its
citizens, which often results in greater economic growth. For example,
BBC News recently highlighted the technology revolution occurring in
Africa by drawing attention to Kenya's increasingly sophisticated
mobile phone market, ShopAfrica53 in Ghana, and the SKA (Square
Kilometre Array) in South Africa - a deep space telescope project.
Africa's burgeoning middle class is a promising sign of a more
prosperous Africa in the future. A burgeoning middle class is, most
importantly, a sign of strong economic growth, which implies that (at
least parts of) Africa have been creating the conditions that
facilitate the rise of a powerful middle class.

"Africa's middle class is not only crucial for economic growth but it
is essential for the growth of democracy… The middle class in Africa,
like everywhere else, supports democratic governments that function
well and that are accountable... Africa's middle class support states
that provide public services like education, health, electricity and
water… Africa's middle class is strongest in countries that have
robust and growing private sectors,"Vijaya Ramachandran, author of
Africa's Private Sector.


Although the AfDB noted that Africa's burgeoning middle class is far
from becoming a powerful, established middle class and still faces the
danger of slipping into poverty again, we must focus on the fact that
development in Africa is occurring all the time. Africans are taking
the initiative and taking important steps towards a brighter future,
despite what is often portrayed by the media. The next century might
just be Africa's.

http://www.africagoodnews.com/africa...dle-class.html

AND
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/a...elop-continent


Africa’s middle class: striving to develop a continent
____________

quote:Originally posted by Whatbox:
The Brain Gain I've heard is already under-way, but in what regions?


Brain gain: Skilled diaspora return to Africa
Written by Phephelaphi Dube
Thursday, 02 September 2010 08:31

After Tomi Adegoke completed a Master’s degree in Public Health from a
university in the United States of America (USA), she decided to move
to Nigeria, the country from which her parents had emigrated one
generation earlier. She accepted a position as a program management
officer for the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Abuja,
Nigeria. Tomi’s story echoes Michael Akindele’s, who left his
financially rewarding position as a consultant within a Fortune Five
Hundred company in the USA to set up his own business in media and
entertainment in Nigeria. He cited the readily available investment
opportunities created by Nigeria’s growing economy as the main
incentive for the return to the continent.


These stories highlight a growing trend on the African continent which
suggests that skilled African citizens, who have been living as
expats, are returning to the continent in what can be termed Africa’s
brain gain. This can be viewed as a reversal of the brain drain
phenomenon which beset many African countries in the latter half of
the twentieth century. This brief focuses on the African brain drain
and the return of skilled Africans to the continent.

Brain drain trends

Brain drain typically results in African countries experiencing skills
shortage when citizens with necessary expertise opt to, or are forced
to emigrate. According to the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP), the African brain drain is particularly noticeable in the
health sector. For example, in the 1980’s, Kenya reportedly had 20
medical doctors leaving each month, whilst Ghana reportedly lost 60%
of its medical doctors. In 1993, the UNDP’s Human Development Report
stated that close to 21,000 Nigerian doctors were practicing in the
United States alone, despite the fact that Nigeria suffers from a
chronic shortage of doctors.


Ethiopia similarly lost a third of its medical doctors to the West.
Between 1978 and 1990, Zambian statistics showed that only 50 of the
600 doctors who received training remained in Zambia, whilst the rest
emigrated to the West. Numerous factors drive the movement of
professionals from the African continent, including socio-economic and
political matters. A regularly cited reason is that 22 African nations
were ruled by military juntas in 1982 and that by 1985, post
independent Africa had witnessed at least 60 military coups. This
period was characterised by regimes that severely repressed human
rights such as academic freedom and free speech. Attempts to garner
better working conditions were often met with harsh reprisals,
including imprisonment and sometimes death. The Africa described here
appears to be undergoing transformation, however, in which good
governance, respect for human rights and growing economies are
becoming more respected, sought-after principles.

Changing times

In 2001, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the
Organisation of African Unity (OAU) adopted the Constitutive Act of
the African Union (AU) which replaced the Charter of the Organisation
of African Unity. Barely a year after its adoption, 40 member states
had ratified the treaty and their actions were heralded “an expression
of the political commitment of our leaders to regional integration,
and beyond this, to a united Africa.”

A new era started for Africa, far removed from what had typified the
continent in its recent past. Importantly, the AU treaty acknowledges
aspects such as the continents’ political economy, socio-cultural
issues as well as human rights. The AU has fourteen objectives
ultimately aimed at boosting political cooperation and economic
integration and including the protection of human rights. The AU
treaty represents a departure from the OAU Charter because it
prioritises human rights and democracy. The central theme of the AU
treaty is a continent with a unified approach to important issues like
politics, human rights and economics. Arguably, the adoption of the
treaty has resulted in increased respect for human rights in Africa.
The AU’s objectives imply that African states see the value of
improved living standards for its citizens alongside the importance of
promoting investment in science and technology research.

Today, the African continent is witnessing a significant drop in the
number of armed conflicts. The AU and other regional actors have been
active in peacekeeping missions and pacifying tense political crises.
On the economic front, Africa appears to be gaining some ground,
mostly due to well performing agro-industries. The overall Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) of the continent has risen steadily from 3.5%
in 1997 to a 5.5% projection in 2010 by the International Monetary
Fund (IMF). These changing circumstances are the reason why many
professionals, thought to be long lost to the West in successive waves
of emigration, are returning to the continent.

Kayode Akindele returned to Nigeria in order to work as an investment
banker with the United Bank for Africa (UBA). Akindele is Oxford
educated and lived in Britain for more than 16 years. Prior to his
departure, he held an investment banking position with Lloyds TSB in
London. He stated that “There was a sense of patriotism. I have always
regarded myself as Nigerian and planned to return to Nigeria
eventually.” Kofi Ansah, a fashion designer from Ghana, studied
fashion at the Chelsea School of Art in England. He lived and worked
in Europe for 20 years before returning to Ghana. Ansah has since
established a growing fashion empire, based in Accra. He is also
creating jobs in the local fashion industry for designers, tailors and
models. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) recently
released a report which indicated that Ghana’s relative peace and
political stability had a positive impact on return migration.
Emigrants now return sooner, usually after acquiring a skill or trade.

South Africa has seen its fair share of professionals leaving during
the post apartheid era. Most cited factors like the high levels of
crime and unfair employment equity policies in the labour market.
Alana Bailey of the ‘Kom Huis Toe Veldtog’ (Come Home Campaign)
founded an organisation that promotes the return of migrated
professionals to South Africa. As many as 6,000 people moved back to
South Africa within 6 years after the campaign started.

Skilled and patriotic Africans

It seems most expats return to the continent once they regard their
homelands as politically and economically stable. In order to find a
lasting solution to the African brain drain, the factors that force
African professionals to leave for the West need to be addressed. The
development of Africa’s human resources, as well as the reversal of
the brain drain, are significant concerns of the New Partnership for
African Development (NEPAD). It is vital that NEPAD recognises the
importance of luring African professionals back home. Although Africa
still has some way to go with regard to providing a lasting fix to the
brain drain phenomenon, the introduction of human rights based
regimes, improved economies and relative stability are key catalysts
in the brain drain reversal.


http://www.consultancyafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=532:brain-gain-skilled-diaspora-return-to-africa&catid=90:optimistic-africa&Itemid=295

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Good News From The Congo. Really.
this is really about progress

Quote:
Good News From The Congo. Really.

* By: Jenee Desmond-Harris | Posted: June 21, 2011

According to Foreign Policy's Charles Kenny, citizens of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo believe there's hope for their
war-torn country. And, despite the fact that it's struggling
economically and has been declared the second worst place in the world
to be a woman, their optimism is starting to be reflected in health
and education outcomes:

Read an excerpt here:

. . . But over the same 1990 to 2007 period in which poverty was
spreading, according to the World Bank, infant mortality rates dropped
from 15 percent to 9 percent. That's still horribly high, but it means
that a child in present-day Congo has a better chance of surviving
than a child in South Korea or Mexico in 1960. Maniema, the province
of the country that performed worst in the survey, has an infant
mortality rate of 13 percent -- below the overall country average in
1990 and below the levels in Peru and Morocco in 1960. The proportion
of underweight children has declined. Maternal mortality has also
fallen. Even HIV prevalence has dropped, from 4.2 to 3.4 percent of
the population.

. . . And it isn't just health. Education rates are climbing by leaps
and bounds. Thirteen million Congolese students were enrolled in
school in 2007, and the percentage of primary-age kids in school went
from 64 to 84 percent between 2006 and 2008 alone. There is now a
considerably higher percentage of children in school in the Congo than
there was two decades ago -- or, for that matter, in Kuwait and
Honduras as recently as 1980.

. . . In short, the signs of hope in the Congo are the result of the
country's citizens' own belief that things should be better than they
are -- and that they can be. Source:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...killing_fields.
________________________________________________


Africa is rising.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by NihonKitty

______________________

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Africa is rising,like it or not.


If there was one thing Finbarr O’Reilly sought to emphasize when he began reporting on white poverty in South Africa, it was that color shouldn’t have a voice in the conversation.

“It doesn’t really matter what color it is,” said Mr. O’Reilly, a 39-year-old Canadian photographer for Reuters whose touching 2005 photo of a Niger mother and child was named World Press Photo of the Year. “It’s an issue that really is quite urgent right now in South Africa.”


The story has rarely been told. But it has been on his radar since a 1994 backpacking trip through Africa, when he noticed a number of poor white South Africans begging for change at traffic lights.

“I started asking around and saying, ‘What’s going on here?’” Mr. O’Reilly said over the phone from Dakar, Senegal, where he’s based. “It’s not a new phenomenon, but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past.”


Many people react with surprise when they hear the numbers associated with the poor white population. Mr. O’Reilly said there are nearly half a million white South Africans living below the poverty line, and at least 80 squatter settlements near the capital city, Pretoria.

“The common perception is that white South Africans enjoy lives of privilege and relative wealth,” Mr. O’Reilly said. He spent a week in March photographing the mostly-Afrikaner population in Coronation Park, a squatter community of about 400 in Krugersdorp, northwest of Johannesburg.

On the surface, Coronation Park is quaint, with the aura of a verdant holiday resort. On weekends, wealthy Afrikaners picnic there. But a closer look, like the one evoked through Mr. O’Reilly’s reportage, reveals scattered garbage, stray animals and children in bare feet. Small generators and open fires stand in for electricity. Alcoholism and violence abound.

Mr. O’Reilly’s goal is to refute the kinds of stereotypes typically associated with African imagery; to show not only another side of poverty, but the resilience of those who live it.

The residents of Coronation Park were at first skeptical when Mr. O’Reilly approached them. In the past, he said, the local press had depicted them very negatively.

“I was less interested in what they were saying than why they were saying it,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “All of it was aimed at not coming into a place like that with any preconceived judgment, and to try and portray the people for how they are in a dignified way.”
He spent a week in the community and ultimately gained the residents’ trust. Inside their homes — many of which are one-room shanties — Mr. O’Reilly found poignant vestiges of formerly-middle-class lives: religious icons, wall hangings, wooden spoons and Afrikaner lace doilies.“It was little bits and pieces of former lives that no longer were,” he said. “All these individual items added up to trying to recreate in this new environment the comfortable existence that they would have had before.”The series from Coronation Park is being shown in an Italian exhibition called “After A.” In his wider look at poverty among white South Africans, Mr. O’Reilly said, it is just the beginning.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/behind-45/

The real privilege group in south africa now are the blacks not whites,black africans are in power there,so folks must face these facts.The wealth by the way will get in black hands,and it'slowly happening anyway and more land has well.
TIME IS ALL IS NEEDED,TIME.
BLACK POVERTY HAS GONE DOWN BY THE WAY THERE,AND WHITE POVERTY HAS GONE UP,BUT IN THE END IT'S BEST THAT POVERTY GOES DOWN FOR EVERYONE.

THAT WILL SHOW THAT SOUTH AFRICA IS MAKING EVEN GREATER PROGRESS,OF COURSE I PREFER THE WHITES TO LEAVE OR MOST OF THEM.

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Late Venezuelan president's letter to the participants of the Third Africa-South America Summit, Equatorial Guinea, February 2013

'I won't tire of repeating that we are one people. We are obliged to find one another, going beyond formality and discourse, in the same feeling of our unity.'

Caracas, February 22, 2013.

Brothers and Sisters,
Please receive my most fervent Bolivarian greeting of unity and solidarity, filled with all my joy and hope for the progression of this long-awaited Third Summit of Heads of State and Government of South America and Africa.
From the bottom of my heart, I truly regret that I cannot be physically present to reiterate my irrevocable commitment to the unity of our nations once more, in a sincere and everlasting embrace.

I am there with you, however, represented by the Chancellor of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, comrade Elías Jaua Milano, whom I have asked to convey the deepest expression of my love for these continents, which are more than brethren, united by inseparable historic ties, and destined to move forward together towards their full and absolute redemption.

I say this from the depths of my consciousness; South America and Africa are one single people. The depth of the social and political reality of our continent can only be understood, within the womb of the vast African territory, from which I am sure that humanity originates.

And from Africa, originate the components and codes that make up the cultural, musical and religious syncretism of our America, creating a unity between our peoples that is not only racial, but also spiritual.

Similarly, the empires of the past, guilty of kidnapping and murdering millions of daughters and sons of Mother Africa, as a means of feeding an exploitative slave system in their colonies, implanted the seeds of African warrior blood and fighting spirit in our America, which produced the burning desire for freedom.

Those seeds germinated and our land engendered men as grand as Toussaint Louverture, Alexandre Pétion, José Leonardo Chirino and Pedro Camejo, among many others, resulting in the initiation of an independentist, unionist, anti-imperialist and restorative process in Latin America and the Caribbean, over 200 years ago.

Then in the twentieth century, came Africa's libertarian struggles. Her independences, her new neocolonial menaces, her heroes and martyrs: Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral and Nelson Mandela just to mention a few.

Those that conquered us in the past, blinded by their hunger for power, did not realise that the barbaric colonialism they imposed on us would become the catalyst of our first independences.

Thus, whilst Latin America and the Caribbean share a past history of oppression and slavery, today more than ever, we are the children of our liberators and their heroic deeds. We can and must say with conviction and resolve, that this unites us in the present, in a vital struggle for the freedom and definitive independence of our nations.

I won't tire of repeating that we are one people.

We are obliged to find one another, going beyond formality and discourse, in the same feeling of our unity. Together we must dedicate ourselves to creating conditions that allow us to rescue our peoples from the maze they were thrown into, first by colonialism and then by the neoliberal capitalism of the twentieth century.

For this reason, I wish to now recall two great fighters for South-South cooperation, the former Presidents of Brazil and Tanzania, Luiz Inácio 'Lula' da Silva and Julius Nyerere respectively, whose contributions and efforts over time enabled the formation of this great forum for solidarity and complementary cooperation, such as ASA [1].

However, the times that we are currently living in oblige us to give our deepest, most urgent consideration to the effort needed in order to transform ASA into a truly productive apparatus for sovereignty and development in social, economic, political, productive and environmental spheres.

It is in our continents that sufficient natural, political and historical resources can be found, which are necessary to save the planet from chaos that has been brought about.

We must not miss today's opportunity provided by the independentist sacrifice of our forefathers, to unify our capabilities to turn our nations into authentic centres of power which, to quote our father Simon Bolívar the Liberator, would be greater for their freedom and glory than for their extent and riches.

Always resonant in my soul and conscience are the words of the incommensurable Uruguayan General José Gervasio Artigas; 'We cannot expect anything, if not from ourselves.' I believe that this deeply profound thought contains a great truth that we must accept, with absolute certainty.

Our South-South partnership must be an authentic and permanent joint effort that must thwart their plans for sustainable development of the Global South, of our nations.

While in no way denying our sovereign relations with the Western powers, we must remember that these are not the source of comprehensive and definitive solutions to the problems that our countries share.
Far from it, some of them have neocolonial designs on us that threaten the stability we have begun to strengthen our continents.

Sisters and brothers, for this Third Summit of Heads of State and Government of ASA, I want to evoke the spirit of fraternity, unionism and willpower that drove the development of that wonderful Second Summit on Margarita Island in Venezuela, which allowed us to unanimously take on the commitments of the Declaration of Nueva Esparta.

With much faith, I sincerely hope that here in Malabo we might achieve the same momentum and performance of that extraordinary moment for our unity process, the Summit of 2009, as demonstrated as much by massive appeal as by the quantity and substance of the agreements reached.

Today from Venezuela, we renew our firmest commitment to strengthening the Permanent Secretariat of the Strategic Presidential Table of ASA and its main tasks and functions, so as to accelerate the pace of consolidation in our institutional framework, and thus achieve greater efficiency in our collaborative work.

With much pain and regret, I am sorry that our work, formally initiated in 2006, has been interrupted by the imperial forces that still seek to dominate the world.

It's neither by luck nor by chance, and I say it with full responsibility, that since the Summit on Margarita, the African continent has been the victim of multiple interventions and attacks by Western powers.
Among the main objectives of the various imperial invasions and bombings, dismissing any chance for peaceful political solutions to internal conflicts that began in some African nations, were impeding the process of consolidating unity among African peoples, and consequently, undermining the progress of their union with Latin American and Caribbean peoples.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, neocolonial strategy has been to divide the world's most vulnerable nations, so as to subject them to an enslaving relationship of dependency. For that reason Venezuela was radically opposed to the foreign military intervention in Libya from the outset. For that very same reason today, Venezuela reaffirms her absolute rejection of all NATO interventionist activity.

Facing the extra-regional threat to the advancement and deepening of our South-South cooperation, I quote the words of Bolívar in his letter from Jamaica in 1815; 'union, union, union, must be our ultimate slogan'.

In this Third ASA Summit held in our sister Republic of Equatorial Guinea, our Government renews its absolute willingness to progress in the work required to strengthen our partnership in areas that I personally suggested during our last summit, on beautiful Margarita Island.

Energy, education, agriculture, finance and communication remain our priorities, for which we reiterate our approach to making progress in concrete initiatives such as PetroSur, the University of the People's of the South, or the Bank of the South, just to mention a few.

In the area of communications, from Venezuela we propose that TeleSUR, the effort we have succeeded in developing in conjunction with other South American countries, be coordinated with Africa from these latitudes, in order to enable it to meet its main function: to connect the peoples of the world to one another and to bring them the truth and reality of our countries.

Finally, I want to reaffirm my wish that the results obtained in this Third ASA Summit will allow us to gain our definitive independence, living up to modern demands and as the Liberator would say, bringing the greatest amount of happiness for our peoples.

I am thoroughly and absolutely convinced that we will succeed in this cause of centuries, entrusted to us by our liberators and martyrs, the millions of our women and men given up in sacrifice for their total and absolute liberty.

I quote the words of the infinite Father once again, our Liberator Simón Bolívar: 'We must expect a lot from time; its vast womb contains more hopes than past events, and future events must surpass those gone by'.

Let us march then towards our togetherness and definitive independence. Paraphrasing Bolívar once more, I say; let us form one homeland, one continent, one people at all costs, and everything else will be tolerable.

Long live the South American and African union!

Long live ASA!

Ever onwards to victory!

We will live on and we will succeed!

Commandant Hugo Chávez Frías

____________________________________________


Djehuti i wish you did not start a thread to start some of these guys off.
They never miss a opportunity to miss a opportunity to bash modern africa.

One thing i think i agree on and that is global warming may be a scam.

Now my disagreements.

No one is stealing africa.

That's scare talk.
AFRICA HAS MADE MORE PROGRESS in reducing poverty in the last 10 years,AND ARE BUILDING UP THIER NATIONS and no one is stealing thier resources.
African nations are mostly control of most of thier wealth.


They are slowly turning from the west and the west is in panic mode,and the west is in the decline,don't you guys get.

Doug and lamin and some others you guys get it wrong AND WRONG ON ISSUES dealing with modern africa but I AM GETTING INTO THAT.

The world is global now and what some of you guys are seeking is for africa to disengage from it,and from that point of view that's when africa to some of you guys is really free,but it's not going to work that way now,so face it.

You have deal with the world the way it is,not how you like it to be.Complaining about it gets you no where.

The worse thing is your complains are outdated or incorrect or both.
African armies -some are better trained then others just like any place else,so i disagree with the comments about them,of course many of them to need to be much better trained,but that another story.


If THE WORLD IS GLOBAL,LIKE IT OR NOT NATIONS OUTSIDE OF AFRICA WILL STILL HAVE SOME MAJOR INFLUENCE IN IT,but the thing is some of you guys are ignoring THE FACT THAT africa is investing in nations outside of africa.


African leaders don't need to sound or have big mouths and act like they must threaten the west to prove they are anti-western like hugo chavez to get things done,just get things done,and that is what is happening.

It DOES NOT MATTER HOW MATTER POSTIVE THREADS or post about africa these guys just ignored and jump on bad news and outdated and incorrect news all time about africa.
All i post above is what is really happening.


For good news and update stuff incorrect stuff
folks should open links here.

Projects and Construction Developments in Africa
Developments in Africa
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=955


Business, Economy and Infrastructure
Our architecture, infrastructure, transport, economy and other related discussions
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=956

Photo Galleries
Cityscapes, skylines and landscapes
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=957


Anyway,i am done with thread and it's not really for those with close minds like you know who since they have thier minds mind up no matter what info is posted.
Of course like i said they wrong but who cares really,africa and it's folks will go on and make more progress has long has peace continues.
Africa is rising like the posts i posted above and progress will go on.


Bye.

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Firewall I agree many countries in Africa are rising.Firewall you have the data to prove it. Country like Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, Botswana, Cameroun, Senegal, South Africa etc are industrialisings and growing their economies.Africa is a great place for investor with knowledge and connection to make money.

--------------------
mena

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When the Western media parrot the same nonsense about African economic growth when most of Africa is Tier 4 of the Human Development Index only the naive will be dazzled. Time magazine? For proper news about Africa? LOL.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/16/fbi-arrest-bribery-10bn-mountain


This is the corrupt state of affairs these days.

Always handing over things for free or for cheap Western trinkets and baubles.

Mo Ibrahim has it right. Corrupt idiots--all of them,

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Firewall,
A lot of posts on Africa but are you in now in Africa or have you actually lived there?

Stealing land, stealing resources and being afforded room for Western business to make profit killings. Just as Shell does in Nigeria and De Beers and Anglo-American do in South Africa.

As longs as those tiny, weak unprotected states are run by idiots the Western media will be full of dazzling stories.

I say go back to the Human Development Index of 2012 and 2013. The HDL formula was formulated by an Indian and a Pakistani--not neoliberal Western economists.

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quote:
Originally posted by Djehuti:
While lyinass trolls talk about country music songs, I have a far more pressing and interesting issue to address.

I recently saw an episode of the documentary series Global Voices, entitled 'Stealing Africa' which talks about the modern day colonialism on the African continent by corporations exploiting Africa's resources while leaving the natives in poverty. This fiendish system was only made possible by a government programs such as global banks and tax systems. In other words, it isn't the corporations alone but the governments that back them through their political cronies.

As one person put it, "Africa receives several billions of dollars in aid every year to alleviate poverty, yet Africa relinquishes ten times the amount in money every year in terms of resources to foreign corporations!"

It is this horrible paradox that continues to debilitate the economies of many African countries not including the political corruption or turmoils.

You can see the trailer here:

Global Voices | Stealing Africa | Trailer | WORLD

SMH.

 -

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lamin what African nation looks most promising to you for the future?
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To Firewall, I am not at all impressed. 'Africa is becoming Asia' alright because they are now allowing Asian countries (actually just one-- China) to now economically colonize them. These were the same Chinese who sold weapons to various corrupt dicatorships and militias including machetes to the murderous Hutus!! Even now as I speak many of Africa's traditional markets are being threatened by encroaching Chinese marketeers!

As for the 'late Venezuelan president', Hugo Chavez was a murderous dictator himself that oppressed his own people. Instead of forging alliances with other dictatorships and communist regimes, the ONLY way Africa can truly rise up is not through socialism or communism but CAPITALISM though in its original and true form where the people take control of their own resources and manufacture and sell them at fair and reasonable prices!!

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quote:
As for the 'late Venezuelan president', Hugo Chavez was a murderous dictator himself that oppressed his own people.
Whoa there! Just stay factual and you will win lots of fans. Chavez was more popular than any U.S President ever was in recent times. Fair elections and the people kept voting for him. "Murderous dictator"? That sounds like FOX(faux) news!

Ckeck out the IMF reluctant news on Venezuela: during Chavez's tenure education was free for the masses, poverty levels were halved, etc. That's why the U.S. hated him. Venezuela was not a ditzy whore that opened up for vile U.S. penetration as in the cases of Colombia,Chile, Panama, etc

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quote:
lamin what African nation looks most promising to you for the future?
You always ask these kindergarten questions. OK, I will humour you.

1) A lot of rearrangement of the furniture must take place first.

2) African nations should form regional economic and political units. West Africa, for example, has ECOWAS, but it's just a BS piece of paper. France still runs those piddling Bantustan-like nations. When Mali was invaded by Islamists the Malian interim President Dioncounda Traore called on France to rescue Mali, he didn't call on ECOWAS. That's my point about the neocolonial weakness if these states.

3)A proper ECOWAS would have a strong convertible currency--after jettisoning the play-monopoly money the ECOWAS states now use. Maximum exchange rate should be 1 ECOWAS currency to 3 U.S. dollars. It's on this basis that resource-poor places like Iceland and New Zealand can show high per-capita GDP, etc. They just boost their currencies and the IMF just says "fine".

4) Tiny statelets like Togo, Cape Verde, Gambia, Gabon, etc. would no longer exist as tiny fish in a big pond but would be part of a big fish in a big pond.

5) Economic policies would include autarkic measures a la Friedrich List, the German economist, who closed off Germany from foreign industrial competition for its infant industries. In time, Germany became the industrial powerhouse of Europe. After a while try import substitution for vital commodities in manufacturing and industrial production.

6) In short, regional economic and political units, each with at least 150 million people, free movement of peoples, strong currencies, collective security along NATO lines, heavy investment in education, infrastructure, etc. A created lingua franca like Esperanto should be constructed for intragrouping usage. After all, all natural languages are artificial creations.

7) But all this requires serious-minded and mature politicians who have no compromised attitudes towards the West and are fully committed to African development. Like Nkrumah or Thomas Sankara were.


Short answer to your kindergarten question. Now run off to your playpen and meet your little friends.

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Djehuti
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^ Are you kidding me?! Chavez was only 'popular' through his system of government run propaganda machine media. Even then, the so-called "elections" he won were a total fraud as there was no true candidates who were able to challenge him let alone 'win' any elections. Venezuela is not a real democracy but a socialist dictatorship. As for free education, I don't know what that had to do with Chavez since that guaranteed by the Venezuelan constitution since 1961 well before Chavez and his PSUV party ruled. As for poverty being cut, I don't know where you heard that. Poverty has always been high in Venezuela due to socialist policies that prevent the masses from acquiring wealth. Sure there are programs that provide some sort of sustenance but government cannot provide prosperity. And the crime rate is always high. Now that the dictator is gone there is a power vacuum with increased corruption and violence on the rise.
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mena7
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Djehuti you are so right wing .Chavez wasnt a dictator he was elected freely three times.Before Hugo Chavez 70% of the Venezuelian governement money was spent on the rich class.After Chavez was elected 70% of Venezuela governement money was spent on the poor and middle class.Chavez maked cheap housing, cheap food, free healthcare and free education available to them.The Western oil corporation that was getting Venezuela oil at super low price were force to pay a fair price under Chavez.Land was nationalise from absante Western land speculator and given to landless farmer to cultivate.Chavez is not communist there are billionaire Venezuelian businessman in Venezuela.Chavez just beleive it is the job of the state to take care of the middle class and poor not the Wealthy.Unlike Kaddafi(another socialist humanitarian) Chavez knew how to use Western democratic aka plutocratic/oligarchic electoral system.

Lamin your plan to empower Africa are magnifique, I hope you have a rich backer to help you.The ex West African French colonies are stupid they are letting France create, print and control their currency call the Franc CFA.They are financial colony of France.Nigeria and Ghana are truly independant state in West Africa.Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Angola are other truly independant African state.Lamin you can write a book on African developement to help future African politician you have some great idea like the ECOWAS currency and a lingua Franca like Haoussa in West Africa and Swahili in Bantu Africa.

I hope some country in Africa get two great powerful competent and tough leader like Mao Tse Tong and Deng Xiaoping.They were cruel but China is a world superpower today respected by the West(unlike Japan) because of them.

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Doug M
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quote:
Originally posted by Firewall:
UNEP has developed a loan programme to stimulate renewable energy
market forces with attractive return rates, buffer initial deployment
costs and entice consumers to consider and purchase renewable
technology. After a successful solar loan program sponsored by UNEP
that helped 100,000 people finance solar power systems in developing
countries like India,] UNEP started similar schemes in other parts of
developing world like Africa - Tunisia, Morocco, Kenya projects are
already functional and many projects in other African nations are in
the pipeline. In Africa, UNEP assistance to Ghana, Kenya and Namibia
has resulted in the adoption of draft National Climate Awareness
Plans, publications in local languages, radio programmes and
seminars.The Rural Energy Enterprise Development (REED) initiative is
another flagship UNEP effort focused on enterprise development and
seed financing for clean energy entrepreneurs in developing countries
of West and Southern Africa.

“I pay 30,000 kwacha [about $6.25] as a rental charge every month to
NESCO,” Mr. Lungu told the Integrated Regional Information Networks
(IRIN), a humanitarian news agency. “For me, it works out cheaper to
use solar because paraffin is more expensive, and even if electricity
comes to Nyimba, not all the people will get connected.”

No major marketing is needed to convince African citizens to turn to
solar. The demand is high. NESCO says it has about 360 people on its
waiting list. “We are struggling to satisfy demand,” confesses Mr.
Stanislas Sankhani, the company’s project manager.
With a concerted NEPAD effort Africans will, hopefully, not languish
in line for much longer. Solar electricity, states the World Bank, is
as good as an electricity grid for rural households since they do not
consume much power. In a modest Nyimba office, 320 kilometres away
from the Zambian capital’s grid, a sign confidently announces that the
office is up to date: “Solar is good ... even in thatched houses; it
will reach you wherever you are.”

__________________________________________________________________-

some more news

The River Estate near Shamva, 70 kilometres from Zimbabwe’s capital,
Harare, boasts one of the best solar-village models in the country.
Fifty-two commercial farming families share systems; there is one
system for every two houses. Each family has two lamps and a
connection for a radio or small television set. The new lighting
systems have improved the quality of life for the community. They have
extended study hours for schoolchildren, reduced rural-to-urban
migration in the area and upgraded health standards by electrifying a
local health center.

Innovative financing

“With all their advantages, solar systems are not cheap to install,”
says Mr. Jem Porcaro, an analyst for the Energy and Environment Group
at UNDP. “A typical home system in sub-Saharan Africa costs anywhere
between $500 and $1,000 and such systems typically provide enough
power to light three to six rooms and power a black-and-white TV each
night. But the cost is well beyond the means of most African
households.”

The use of innovative financing schemes, like fee-for-service
arrangements, is one way to overcome these high up-front costs, notes
Mr. Porcaro. Installing solar panels to power multiple houses at once
can also cut down on costs. More households could afford solar power,
argues the World Bank, if governments were to remove barriers, such as
high import duties, that increase the cost of the panels. Regional
cooperation to facilitate trade is another major NEPAD goal.
African leaders are demonstrating commitment to bring solar power to
rural homes. For example, a UNDP-GEF report on solar financing and
delivery models notes that private sales, through dealers, initially
dominated the market in South Africa, but that the government, a
leading NEPAD proponent, later initiated a massive off-grid effort
that is now fully active. Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and
most countries in the region have developed solar markets, in many
cases with special funds to support consumer credit.

Boost to businesses

Besides domestic use, people are harnessing solar power to run small
businesses. Entrepreneur Abina Lungu operates a maize-grinding mill in
Nyimba, eastern Zambia. With reliable solar energy, he can work well
into the night to meet all his customers’ orders. His house, close to
the mill, is also lit by solar power. Mr. Lungu is one of the many
villagers serviced by the Nyimba Energy Service Company (NESCO), an
enterprise funded by the Swedish International Development Agency. To
get power into a home or shop, NESCO installs a system that includes a
panel, battery, charge controller and power points. The cost is
$33.33, including the contract fee. Thereafter, consumers pay a
monthly rental fee.
__________________________________________________________________________________


Renewable energy use
Solar power

Several large-scale solar power facilities are under development in
Africa including projects in South Africa and Algeria. Although solar
power technology has the potential to supply energy to large numbers
of people, and has been used to generate power on a large scale in the
U.S. and other developed nations, its greatest potential in Africa may
be to provide power on a smaller scale and to use this energy to help
with day to day needs such as small-scale electrification,
desalination, water pumping, and water purification.


The only example of a grid-linked solar power station in Africa is the
photovoltaic 250 kW Kigali Solaire station in Rwanda. The Desertec
project, backed by several European energy companies and banks, plans
to generate renewable electricity in the Sahara desert and distribute
it through a high-voltage grid for export to Europe and local
consumption in North-Africa. Ambitions seek to provide continental
Europe with up to 15% of its electricity.

Power Up Gambia, a non-profit operating in The Gambia, uses solar
power technology to provide power to Gambian health care facilities,
providing a reliable source of electricity for lighting, diagnostic
testing, treatments, and water pumping.


Solar water pumping
Kenya may be a good candidate for testing out these systems because of
its progressive and relatively well-funded department of agriculture,
including the Kenya Agricultural Research Center , which provides
funding and oversight to many projects investigating experimental
methods and technologies.

Even though this solar technology may have a higher starting cost than
that of conventional fossil fuel, the low maintenance and operation
cost and the ability to operate without fuel makes the solar powered
systems cheaper to keep running. A small rural community could use a
system like this indefinitely, and it would provide clean drinking
water at a negligible cost after the initial equipment purchase and
setup. In a larger community, it could at least contribute to the
water supply and reduce pressures of daily survival. This technology
is capable of pumping hundreds of gallons of water per day, and is
limited only by the amount of water available in the water table.

With a minimum of training in operation and maintenance, solar powered
water pumping and purification systems have the potential to help
rural Africans fulfill one of their most basic needs for survival.
Further field test are in progress by organizations like KARI and the
many corporations that manufacture the products needed, and these
small-scale applications of solar technology are promising. Combined
with sustainable agricultural practices and conservation of natural
resources, solar power is a prime candidate to bring the benefits of
technology to the parched lands of Africa.

Supplementing the well water would be collection of runoff rainwater
during the rainy season for later use in drought. Southern Africa has
its own network of information sharing called SEARNET [4] which
informs farmers of techniques to catch and store rainwater, with some
seeing increased yields and additional harvests. This new network of
farmers sharing their ideas with each other has led to a spread of
both new and old ideas, and this has led to greater sustainability of
water resources in the countries of Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi,
Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This water could be
used for agriculture or livestock, or could be fed through a purifier
to yield water suitable for human consumption.


Examples
A solar powered water pump and holding system was installed in
Kayrati, Chad, in 2004 as compensation for land lost to oil
development.[37] This system utilizes a standard well pump powered by
a photovoltaic panel array. The pumped water is stored in a water
tower, providing the pressure needed to deliver water to homes in the
area. This use of oil revenue to build infrastructure is an example of
using profits to advance the standard of living in rural areas.


Hundreds of solar water pumping stations in Sudan fulfil a similar
role, involving various applications of different systems for pumping
and storage. Over the past 10 years approximately. 250 photovoltaic
water pumps have been installed in Sudan. Considerable progress has
been made and the present generation of systems appear to be reliable
and cost–effective under certain conditions. A photovoltaic pumping
system to pump 25 cubic metres per day requires a solar array of
approx. 800 Wp. Such a pump would cost US$6000, since the total system
comprises the cost of modules, pump, motor, pipework, wiring, control
system and array support structure. PV water pumping has been promoted
successfully in Kordofan state in Sudan. It shows favorable economics
as compared to diesel pumps, and is free from the need to maintain a
regular supply of fuel. The only maintenance problems with PV pumping
[are] due to the breakdown of pumps and not the failure of the PV
devices.


The Solar Water Purifier, developed and manufactured by an Australian
company, is a low-maintenance, low operational cost solution that is
able to purify large amounts of water, even seawater, to levels better
than human consumption standards set by the World Health
Organization.[39] This device works through the processes of
evaporation and UV radiation. Light passes through the top layer of
glass to the black plastic layer underneath. Heat from the solar
radiation is trapped by the water and by the black plastic. This
plastic layer is a series of connected troughs that separate the water
as it evaporates and trickles down through the levels. The water is
also subjected to UV radiation for an extended period of time as it
moves through the device, which kills many bacteria, viruses, and
other pathogens. In a sunny, equatorial area like much of Africa, this
device is capable of purifying up to 45 litres per day from a single
array. Additional arrays may be chained together for more capacity.

The Water School uses SODIS Solar disinfection currently in target
areas of Kenya and Uganda to help people drink water free of pathogens
and disease causing bacteria. SODIS is a UV process that kills
microorganisms in the water to prevent water borne disease. The
science of the SODIS system is proven with over 20 years of research.


Wind power
The Koudia Al Baida Farm in Morocco, is the largest wind farm in the
continent, currently two others big wind farms are under construction
in Tangier and Tarfaya. There are also projects being planned in South
Africa to implement the use of a wind farm, or large, commercial scale
operations, the construction of these wind farms is being planned for
west coast, north of Cape Town.

In January 2009, the first wind turbine in West Africa was erected in
Batokunku, a village in The Gambia. The 150 kilowatt turbine provides
electrical power for the 2,000-person village.


Geothermal power
So far, only Kenya has exploited the geothermal potential of the Great
Rift Valley.[14] Kenya has been estimated to contain 2000 MWe of
potential geothermal energy[41] and has twenty potential drilling
sites marked for survey in addition to three operational geothermal
plants.[42] Kenya was the first country in Africa to adopt geothermal
energy, in 1956, and houses the largest geothermal power plant on the
continent, Olkaria II, operated by Kengen, who also operate Olkaria I.
A further plant, Olkaria III, is privately owned and operated.


Ethiopia is home to a single binary-cycle plant but does not utilize
its full potential energy output for lack of experience in its
operation. Zambia has several sites planned for construction but their
projects have stalled due to lack of funds. Eritrea, Djibouti and
Uganda have undertaken preliminary exploration for potential
geothermal sources but have not constructed any type of power plant.

Geothermal power has been used in agricultural projects in Africa. The
Oserian flower farm in Kenya utilizes several steam wells abandoned by
Kengen to power its greenhouse. In addition, the heat involved in the
geothermal process is used to maintain stable greenhouse temperatures.
The heat can also be utilized in cooking which would help eliminate
the dependence on wood burning.

_________________________________________________


other info-
In Djabula – 50 miles south of Maputo – Mozambique’s National
Electricity Fund established a photovoltaic standalone station
providing electricity for 45 residencies, a primary school and a heath
outpost. Legislators and politicians visited the project to see how
projects like this could provide answers to many of the energy and
climate change problems facing communities across Africa.

“Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” Mr. Groening said, “and
politicians are working on integrating schemes like this into their
own national energy plans.”

Small-scale projects like this are becoming more common in Africa.

“The demand for our solar kits is huge,” said Katie Bliss of Solar
Aid, a British organization that aims to bring clean, renewable power.


“In Tanzania the price of kerosene, the main energy alternative, is
rapidly increasing,” added Ms. Bliss, whose organization also has
projects in the works in Zambia, Kenya and Malawi. “Our studies found
that 20 percent of household income was being spent on fuel.”


As with other solar products targeting communities, SolarAid does not
give away its micro-solar kits. “It’s not a handout,” Ms. Bliss said.
“We want to encourage a viable trade. Solar has a huge future here,
and anyone we have trained with solar skills has a good chance of
finding employment. We also encourage distributors to take solar
products to rural villages.”


Groups like Solar Aid provide solar power kits — which typically
consist of locally sourced parts and simple construction — starting at
about $20.
But when scaled up, some community projects can challenge grid power.
In an award-winning project in Remu, Ethiopia, the Swedish Solar
Energy foundation supplied electricity to 10,000 people with an
off-grid solar photovoltaic system charging less than $2 per person.


other info
Sierra Leone
Forget the Grid. Can Solar Power Light Africa?

http://blogs.forbes.com/helencoster/...-light-africa/

_____________________

solar-panels-turning-dirty-water-clean-in-angola
http://www.africagoodnews.com/develo...in-angola.html


namibia-boosts-power-supply-capacity
http://www.africagoodnews.com/infras...-capacity.html
______________


working on sustainable cities in africa-

http://africa.siemens.com/en/siemens...ble_cities.htm


and

_________________________________________________________
uganda

http://sca21.wikia.com/wiki/Sseesamirembe_Eco-City


_______________________________________


Hacienda Kenya- Africa's First Eco City, Low Cost Housing

http://www.haciendakenya.com/


_____________________________________________________

MOMBASA | Hacienda Eco City | Under Construction

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=915968


___________________________________________________________________-

The Age of the Eco-City | We Blog The World
Jan 4, 2011 ... Midrand in South Africa's Gauteng Province, has been
working hard to turn the area into an EcoCity, which would incorporate
state-of-the-art ...

http://www.weblogtheworld.com/countr...-the-eco-city/

_____________________________________________________________

South Africa - Eco-City, an ecologically sustainable village in Johannesburg

http://www.lafarge.com/wps/portal/2_...610621438/CSEN


sustainable city in africa-
or eco cities of africa

http://sustainablecities.dk/en/city-...g-for-everyone

_____________________________________________________


http://sustainablecities.net/project...rojects/durban

___________________________________________________________

Eco-city, Johannesburg

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...U2PW15WS0SVqOQ

________________________________________________________________________________________

and

EcoCity: Johannesburg, South Africa


http://www.article13.com/A13_Content...tion&PNID=1120


________________________________________-

Ecocity 3: Yoff/Dakar, Senegal, 1996
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/ecoci...dakar-senegal/


reforestation in the sahara
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...sahara-forest/


____________________________________________________________________________-
nigeria-
Tianjin Eco-city Vs Eco Atlantic City

http://nidf.blogspot.com/2009/06/tia...ntic-city.html


_____________________________________________


Reforestation in Sub-Sahara

http://www.infospring.org/questions/...-in-sub-sahara
_______________


Africa-leads-solar-powered-laptop-revolution

http://www.africagoodnews.com/busine...evolution.html
_____________

Largest Solar Park Being Built in South Africa

http://www.africagoodnews.com/infras...th-africa.html

These solar power projects are a perfect example of the gimmicks I am talking about. Sudan has the biggest hydroelectric power plant on earth and you mean to tell me that they need solar power?

The problem is that the world bank and other globalist organizations create big power plants but NOT for providing electricity to Africans. Where do you think all these multinational mining companies with their huge mines and Oil operations get their power from? These power projects are explicitly designed ONLY to provide power to the foreign owned companies, mines, oil rigs and farming operations and NOT NOT NOT for Africans. What they will say if you read ANY of the large power plant projects is that they DONT HAVE FUNDING to expand the electrical grid. Or in other words, we don't have the money to provide electricity to the African people where the power plant is being built. But of course that power is going somewhere and that is to the foreigners businesses. And that is by design. Just like the fact that the BIGGEST consumer of power in South Africa is what? The mines. There is more than enough electricity to provide power to all the people in South Africa, but the mines get most of the power and of course the Africans don't own the mines and therefore don't get any benefit from the wealth that gets generated from those mines just like they don't get any benefit from the infrastructure, including the power industry.

So stop kidding yourself if you believe these drop in the bucket projects represent "progress". They are simply the SAME people who built the power plants NOT to provide energy to the Africans, making themselves LOOK GOOD by creating these small scale projects to provide energy for ONE LIGHT and ONE CELL PHONE charger per house as if that is REALLY doing something....

quote:

Mining sector to help grow southern Africa T&D market
transmission_lines

22 March 2013 - The expansion of mines in southern African countries such as Namibia, Botswana and Zambia is set to trigger an increased need for electricity generation capacity. This, in turn, will fuel the development of the transmission and distribution (T&D) market in the region.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan finds that this T&D market in southern Africa covering Namibia, Botswana and Zambia including high voltage switchgear, high voltage cables and high voltage transformers earned revenues of US$327.4 million in 2012 and estimates this to reach US$393.4 million in 2016. 'The mining sector, the largest consumer of electricity in southern Africa, will catalyse the high voltage T&D market in the region,' Frost & Sullivan’s energy and environmental research analyst Muneera Salie, says. 'Mining is the most prominent driver of electricity demand and economic growth. Therefore, reliable power supply to this sector is crucial.'

While the need for increased electricity generation is evident, the region is still unable to meet the current load demand. Plans to enhance power generation will therefore, necessarily, involve significant investments in generation and transmission infrastructure as well.

'The region has to focus on developing the interconnectivity between countries in the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). This will alleviate the struggle to meet an individual country’s load demand. The cost of imports is high, and countries need to ensure greater independence in terms of their power needs.'

African countries have a reputation of resisting the integration of independent power producers (IPPs). This perception is changing. 'The entry of IPPs into the market will help governments meet technical and financial challenges, assisting in the development of southern Africa,' Salie says. 'It has been proven that IPPs easily attract the funding required for projects and could support the region in the delivery of a more developed T&D network.'

http://www.esi-africa.com/node/16114

Of course IPPs are independent because they don't HAVE to produce energy for African people to consume.

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Djehuti
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quote:
Originally posted by mena7:

Djehuti you are so right wing.

Really? So I'm 'right wing' for calling out the fact that Chavez was a dictator. I take it calling Castro, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao dictators as well is a 'right-wing' thing. And if denying that these men are dictators is left wing, then I'd rather be 'right'. Since I guess YOU are so left wing.

quote:
Chavez wasn't a dictator he was elected freely three times.Before Hugo Chavez 70% of the Venezuelan government money was spent on the rich class.After Chavez was elected 70% of Venezuela government money was spent on the poor and middle class.Chavez made cheap housing, cheap food, free healthcare and free education available to them.The Western oil corporation that was getting Venezuela oil at super low price were force to pay a fair price under Chavez.Land was nationalize from absent Western land speculator and given to landless farmer to cultivate.Chavez is not communist there are billionaire Venezuelan businessman in Venezuela. Chavez just believe it is the job of the state to take care of the middle class and poor not the Wealthy.Unlike Kaddafi(another socialist humanitarian) Chavez knew how to use Western democratic aka plutocratic/oligarchic electoral system.
Really? So apparently you don't know that socialism doesn't work as it NEVER works not even in Venezuela. Because of Chavez's government controls poverty is worse in Venezuela because their currency devalued. People have to spend more money on necessities than ever before. Sure the rich got poorer but the poor stayed poor. That's what always happens in a socialist nation. Because of his socialist programs despite the 'free' education and healthcare, most of the countries best educators and doctors either fled the country or stopped practicing because it wasn't worth it anymore. And back in 2002 when Chavez cut down on oil production he drove oil prices even higher and ended up importing oil from his ally (fellow dictatorship nation) Iran. And all the while the ONLY people in his country who were prosperous were himself and his government cronies oligarchies in the truest sense. Yeah many politicians here in the U.S. are rich as most folks who choose get into politics are rich idiots that does not mean the U.S. has no democracy. At least in the U.S. the poor have the opportunities to not be poor anymore. Unlike in socialist countries. [Embarrassed]

quote:
Lamin your plan to empower Africa are magnifique, I hope you have a rich backer to help you.The ex West African French colonies are stupid they are letting France create, print and control their currency call the Franc CFA.They are financial colony of France.Nigeria and Ghana are truly independent state in West Africa.Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Angola are other truly independent African state.Lamin you can write a book on African development to help future African politician you have some great idea like the ECOWAS currency and a lingua Franca like Haoussa in West Africa and Swahili in Bantu Africa.
That's the problem with Africa-- they rely too much on their former colonizers whose corporations still continue to colonize them.

quote:
I hope some country in Africa get two great powerful competent and tough leader like Mao Tse Tong and Deng Xiaoping. They were cruel but China is a world superpower today respected by the West(unlike Japan) because of them.
Now I KNOW you're a crazed communist! "Cruel" Mao Tse Dong killed over 400 million people either through murder or mass starvation and tortured and maimed others! The only reason China is a superpower today is because the broke away from communism and turned to capitalism!! LOL That's why they are opening up markets and launching corporations around the world!

Mena, you are obviously one confused and ignorant individual. [Embarrassed]

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Son of Ra
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China is not colonizing Africa. And I wouldn't even have Castro in the same sentence as Hitler and Stalin.
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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by lamin:
[QB]
quote:
lamin what African nation looks most promising to you for the future?
You always ask these kindergarten questions. OK, I will humour you.


it's a good question. You call it kindergarten because you are so cynical of all the African countries you can't point to one which might have a hopeful future
you must be turning into a grumpy old man

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zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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The article sez:
As one person put it, "Africa receives several billions of dollars in aid every year to alleviate poverty, yet Africa relinquishes ten times the amount in money every year in terms of resources to foreign corporations!"

"Relinquishing" is a relative term. A company that invests say 20 million in a mine
deserves to make its money back with some profit, or it should not be in business.
This is economics 101. Companies are not charities. They survive by covering
their costs and making profits. That's how its employees stay employed. The
Chinese are not making massive investments in Africa because they like black
people. They expect to cover their costs and profit, and there is nothing wrong
with that.

By contrast, natl governments do not have to worry about staying in business.
They can keep pouring money into losing investments decade after decade
without bearing the real world consequences and accountability busniess have to deal with.

And the "10 times the amount" is dubious. 10 times what? and what
credible source has the data that demonstrates this sinister "10 times" figure?

And the comparison misses an important question. If Africa receives several
billions in aid every year, why haven't these billions made more measurable impact
among the masses in increasing incomes and wealth? Notice how the "bad guy" is
"the foreign corporations" but never the grasping bureaucrats that handle those
billions in aid. Why are they supposed to be more virtuous that a corporation?
Simplistic "corporations bad", "Bureaucrats good" formulas have yielded dubious
results for the African masses. Indeed, the primary enemy of the masses in many
cases is not evil "foreign corporations" but smiling, corrupt, parasitical "soul brotha bureaucrats"

--------------------
Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began..

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Doug M
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quote:
Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
The article sez:
As one person put it, "Africa receives several billions of dollars in aid every year to alleviate poverty, yet Africa relinquishes ten times the amount in money every year in terms of resources to foreign corporations!"

"Relinquishing" is a relative term. A company that invests say 20 million in a mine
deserves to make its money back with some profit, or it should not be in business.
This is economics 101. Companies are not charities. They survive by covering
their costs and making profits. That's how its employees stay employed. The
Chinese are not making massive investments in Africa because they like black
people. They expect to cover their costs and profit, and there is nothing wrong
with that.

By contrast, natl governments do not have to worry about staying in business.
They can keep pouring money into losing investments decade after decade
without bearing the real world consequences and accountability busniess have to deal with.

And the "10 times the amount" is dubious. 10 times what? and what
credible source has the data that demonstrates this sinister "10 times" figure?

And the comparison misses an important question. If Africa receives several
billions in aid every year, why haven't these billions made more measurable impact
among the masses in increasing incomes and wealth? Notice how the "bad guy" is
"the foreign corporations" but never the grasping bureaucrats that handle those
billions in aid. Why are they supposed to be more virtuous that a corporation?
Simplistic "corporations bad", "Bureaucrats good" formulas have yielded dubious
results for the African masses. Indeed, the primary enemy of the masses in many
cases is not evil "foreign corporations" but smiling, corrupt, parasitical "soul brotha bureaucrats"

The point being made is that the foreign companies use their money to buy off the African governments in order to get favorable deals like thousands of acres of land at pennies on the dollar or power plants that only benefit foreign companies or infrastructure projects like train lines, ports and roads that ONLY benefit foreign companies. And yes if you go by ANY of the various natural resources in Africa, there are billions more going out than is coming in. Africa is a food exporter yet they have starvation? Why? Because their agricultural industry is owned and controlled by foreigners and many African countries are like massive plantations run by white folks. Still today in 2013. Black people don't want to believe it because I guess they think black folks would have risen up by now and put foot in somebody's butt. Right? Wrong. There are too many cowards and traitors within the African population for this to happen, making it very easy to divide and conquer.

Tea plantation TODAY in Kenya:
 -

http://abroad.iupui.edu/photos/2009/

Malawi tea plantation:
 -
http://www.africaimagelibrary.com/media/55074e20-895f-11e1-b1de-375353e4cdde-lujeri-tea-estate-mulanje-massif-malawi

Now with all this lush green land in Africa why are the people starving? Yet working sun up to sun down either directly on plantations or indirectly as share-croppers and at the end of the day are still poor and have no food to eat? What, all that just came about naturally huh? And I guess the foreigners who run these plantations are the good guys now huh? Investing in Africa. Sure. Whatever you say. Keep in mind that Slavery was an investment strategy..... And you are absolutely right, investment is not for the purpose of making slaves rich. The slaves are supposed to make the investors rich.

But seeing as Africans aren't the primary investors in their own economies with no industries or mines of their own to generate capital for themselves, then what else could they be..... poor peasants A.K.A. slaves.

And these investors aren't ashamed of it. You can go on a tour of the plantation and see the bright scenery while surrounded by slaves..... TODAY.


Mount Mulanje tea plantation:
 -
quote:
After spending almost two weeks on the massive mountain I descended to the valley and found myself in a large tea plantation. The surprised Dutch expatriate plantation manager adopted me for a week or so in my recovery from the rigors of my alpine adventures. Having a hot bath was the nearest thing to paradise that I had experienced in quite a while!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottholcomb/5328740021/

 -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malawiproject/5751647778/in/photostream
quote:

Lujeri Tea Estate

Maid services goes with the visit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/malawiproject/with/5751647778/#photo_5751647778

And these people are supposedly there to help the Malawians overcome poverty even as they sit there and observe the cause of the poverty which is the white exploitation. But they aren't going to stop that now are they?

And it is funny to hear black folks talk as if someway somehow all of this wealth is going to magically trickle down to them after everyone else and their grand mom gets their cut.

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JMT2
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quote:
Originally posted by Djehuti AKA lioness


Really? So I'm 'right wing' for calling out the fact that Chavez was a dictator. I take it calling Castro, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao dictators as well is a 'right-wing' thing. And if denying that these men are dictators is left wing, then I'd rather be 'right'. Since I guess YOU are so left wing.

Really? So apparently you don't know that socialism doesn't work as it NEVER works not even in Venezuela. Because of Chavez's government controls poverty is worse in Venezuela because their currency devalued. People have to spend more money on necessities than ever before. Sure the rich got poorer but the poor stayed poor. That's what always happens in a socialist nation. Because of his socialist programs despite the 'free' education and healthcare, most of the countries best educators and doctors either fled the country or stopped practicing because it wasn't worth it anymore. And back in 2002 when Chavez cut down on oil production he drove oil prices even higher and ended up importing oil from his ally (fellow dictatorship nation) Iran. And all the while the ONLY people in his country who were prosperous were himself and his government cronies oligarchies in the truest sense. Yeah many politicians here in the U.S. are rich as most folks who choose get into politics are rich idiots that does not mean the U.S. has no democracy. At least in the U.S. the poor have the opportunities to not be poor anymore. Unlike in socialist countries.

Here you are submitting to a forum on a daily basis using multiple aliases discussing topics related to Africa and it’s people knowing damn well the basic structure of ancient African civilizations and villages was COMMUNAL, and the logical extension of communalism towards a larger societal structure is SOCIALISM.

Chavez was democratically elected. Unless you sat on the International Election-Monitoring Committee in Venezuela, your opinion is bullshiit. If you can’t tell the truth, or ignorant of the truth, it’s better to be thought of as a fool then to open your mouth and remove all doubt. SMDH.

Chavez didn’t cut down oil production in 2002. You’re lying again, Lioness ... I meant Djehuti. The decline in oil production was caused by the opposition oil strike. Let’s discuss sustainability in Venezuela. I have debates with people like you all the time who have been predicting economic collapse -- and that the current the Socialist system is unsustainable. Well, my adversaries has been predicting collapse for the past fourteen years, nor do they dispute any of the real stats with factual numbers. An unsustainable debt is what the US had in 2006 with a eight trillion dollar housing bubble. Any forthright person with integrity who analyzed the economy knew it was going to burst like your premise and cause a major recession. Venezuela doesn’t have those types of imbalances. What Venezuela does have is inflation which is higher than their trading partners which appreciates the real exchange rates. And that’s why Venezuela has a devaluation, not for the reasons you stated.

Capitalism is nothing but a ponzi scheme. Ponzis are illegal in most states. And what you think is "capitalism" is really an evolution of Adam Smith's classical liberal pre-industrial commercial marketism -- which the dude never called “capitalism". What you bend over for today is corporate consumerism, or what we on the left would refer as monopoly post-industrial capitalism.

Socialism would prosper on it’s own if not for the constant disruption and deliberate undermining disposition of the neo-liberal cartels of the West, the IMF and the World Bank. You already know that there are no truly functioning Socialist countries other than Venezuela where the country itself isn't under full scale attack from capitalist assault or embargo. The most economically successful (in terms of wealth distribution and economic stability) countries in the world right now are market Socialist and Social Democrat countries such as Germany. So yeah, I’m against capitalism because I'm a strong believer in real democracy. Having worked in the private and public sector, I see private sector capitalism inherently undemocratic. I believe in black people taking back control of their communities, their lands and resources -- through direct democracy, federalism, and direct worker/consumer ownership of the economy and society. This will never be achieved under post-industrial capitalism.

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anguishofbeing
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LOL! Mary Mary. I knew that jackass was deranged.
Posts: 4254 | From: dasein | Registered: Jun 2009  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
lamin
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LOL
quote:
it's a good question. You call it kindergarten because you are so cynical of all the African countries you can't point to one which might have a hopeful future
you must be turning into a grumpy old man

.

I am not grumpy--I am full of LOL--and I am not old. I play football on the beach and in the park a lot. LOL.

I answered your question. Your question is a kindergarten question because no African country can progress with the present Bantustan system in place. That's why I said that "the furniture in the house[Africa] must be rearranged".

Anyone who thinks in a mature way about Africa will know this. That's why your question was just so basic--unless you are of pro-Western mindset when it comes to Africa.

Litmus test for you: was the West justified in murdering and chopping up Lumumba, justified in overthrowing Nkrumah, justified in murdering Sankara by proxy, justified in locking up Mandela, justified in murdering Steve Biko, justified in arranging the deaths of Mondlane and Garang, justified in arranging the Doe coup in Liberia, justified in poisoning Felix Moumie at a Swiss airport, justified in murdering Amilcar Cabral, justified in murdering Gaddafi, justified in arming thugs, brigands, and thieves like Museveni, etc?

You asked a question I answered. Let's see you answer the above question.

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lamin
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Djehuti,
So what would you call countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand? Socialist or not?

I take "socialism" to mean that the surpluses(gains, profits,etc) from investing in agriculture, industry, and services are maximally spent to benefit the whole society in areas like health(almost free), education, public and social welfare--such as in cheap public transport, parks, roads, housing[ as a human right], etc.

The opposite of that is neo-liberal capitalism where almost everything is privatised. The result: large wealth gap, crime, class conflicts, poor education for the masses, life is good for some but stressful and even dangerous for others.

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anguishofbeing
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Mary is a Zionist, a capitalist, an Africanist, a Filipino, a Christian, an Islamophobe, a lyinass etc etc LOL!
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Brada-Anansi
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Most of the Africans I have met are well to do or even riich!! and yes they do have their maids or cleanup ladies in some countries they do business but then again they do not represent most Africans but neither is that Dutch lady,not watering down the negative impact of some business practices of Euro/Asian investors in Africa, but from my limited view alot of Africans in Asia are getting theirs,more so than your average westerner of whatever stripe.
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Son of Ra
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African Education has been invested in heavily by the Chinese;
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-10/28/content_719147.htm

(COMESA) secretary-general Sindiso Ngwenya has asked China to invest in African Manufacturing which is extremely important if their business relationship is to run smoothly;
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-06/07/content_8256667.htm


China has Further opened it's markets to exports from African LDCs by increasing from 190 to 440 the number of products receiving zero-tariff treatment

...Train 15,000 African professionals, double the number of Chinese government scholarships given annually to Africans (to 4,000) and send 100 senior agricultural experts and 300 youth volunteers

Built over 30 new hospitals, 30 malaria treatment centres and 100 rural schools and many more.
http://www.un.org/africarenewal/fr/vol20no4/204-china-africa-ties.html

The difference between the Chinese and the west is that the west were not helping African people, they were only making backdoor deals with the corrupt leaders or Dictators that the west themselves put in power so they could get natural resources extremely cheap.

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mena7
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Hi Djehuti Im not a communist I like money.I play the lotto every week, Im middle class but I watch Blommberg news in the morning,I like reading the Forbes 400 and the Forbes world 400 of the world richest people.I fantaisize sometime about being an Ancient Egyptian priest or an International businessman .

Im an unselfish thinker.Capitalism is a great system to create wealth and enrich country.Capitalist also create great inequality, poverty and crime.Exemple Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria are rich capitalist country with big inequality and large poverty.The reason there is no great poverty in the USA and the EU despite great inequality is because the USA and EU are imperialist and ex colonialist countries.They created a rig international trade were the so call third world is selling them cheap raw material in exchange for expensive manufactured goods.The real reason there is no poverty in the West is because Western fiat currencies like the dollar and euro are used as an international trade currencies.All the country in the world have to buy dollar and euro to trade.The USA and EU can print their own world trade paper fiat currency and buy anything of real value in the world like gold, diamond, hotel, factories,businesses coffee, iron etc.Brazil doesnt have a world trade currency thats why there is poverty in capitalist Brazil.The point is the USA and Euro are rich not only because of capitalism but because of imperialism and the legacy of colonialism.(The Collapse of Civilization by Muata Ashby talk about fiat currency)

Communism is a capitalist/bankers and secret society fraud.Wall Street and London international bankers with their agent Adam Weishaupt, Karl Marx and Lenin created communism to rob the wealth of the royal family, the aristocratie and middle class of Russia.Economic equality in a country is unnatural and demagogic.Some people are way smarter then other, some people are super beautiful.They will always make more money.(David Icke exposed the International bankers financed of con munism).

I like money but I cant be against civilise and smart socialism that use governement money to improve the life of the poor and middle class.Socialism doesnt make a country super rich but it allow the creation of a large middle class by getting the poor out of poverty.Jesus Christ was socialist he taught people to take care of the poor and didnt favor rich people.I cant be anti Chavez and Kaddafi when they are using their oil revenue to take care of the middle class and poor instead of giving it to native and Western capitalist.

I think the best economic system will combine capitalism to enrich the state and socialisme to create fairness in society and maintain some kind of democracy, representation and participation.A country were 10% of the rich own 80% of the wealth is only a democracy in name.The best system is the balance of capitalism and socialism.

Some people say Mao Tse Tong was responsible for the death of 30 millions Chineses because of that he is not a great exemple.Deng Xiaoping reform is the reason China is very succesful today.

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Amun-Ra The Ultimate
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Africa would certainly be in better shape economically if we extracted the minerals and oil ourselves and would transform more of it locally into finished products. Providing more jobs and enterprises while increasing the money available for self-investments. Selling minerals at low cost and buying transformed products made out of them at higher cost is simply mathematically unsustainable.
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the lioness,
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quote:
Originally posted by lamin:
LOL
quote:
it's a good question. You call it kindergarten because you are so cynical of all the African countries you can't point to one which might have a hopeful future
you must be turning into a grumpy old man

.

I am not grumpy--I am full of LOL--and I am not old. I play football on the beach and in the park a lot. LOL.

I answered your question. Your question is a kindergarten question because no African country can progress with the present Bantustan system in place. That's why I said that "the furniture in the house[Africa] must be rearranged".

Anyone who thinks in a mature way about Africa will know this. That's why your question was just so basic--unless you are of pro-Western mindset when it comes to Africa.

Litmus test for you: was the West justified in murdering and chopping up Lumumba, justified in overthrowing Nkrumah, justified in murdering Sankara by proxy, justified in locking up Mandela, justified in murdering Steve Biko, justified in arranging the deaths of Mondlane and Garang, justified in arranging the Doe coup in Liberia, justified in poisoning Felix Moumie at a Swiss airport, justified in murdering Amilcar Cabral, justified in murdering Gaddafi, justified in arming thugs, brigands, and thieves like Museveni, etc?

You asked a question I answered. Let's see you answer the above question.

I am against these murders.
There was a good dramatized movie about Lumumba several years ago, might have been in French.

What about Leopold Senghor
and Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa ?

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africurious
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quote:
Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
The article sez:
As one person put it, "Africa receives several billions of dollars in aid every year to alleviate poverty, yet Africa relinquishes ten times the amount in money every year in terms of resources to foreign corporations!"

"Relinquishing" is a relative term. A company that invests say 20 million in a mine
deserves to make its money back with some profit, or it should not be in business.
This is economics 101. Companies are not charities. They survive by covering
their costs and making profits. That's how its employees stay employed. The
Chinese are not making massive investments in Africa because they like black
people. They expect to cover their costs and profit, and there is nothing wrong
with that.

By contrast, natl governments do not have to worry about staying in business.
They can keep pouring money into losing investments decade after decade
without bearing the real world consequences and accountability busniess have to deal with.

And the "10 times the amount" is dubious. 10 times what? and what
credible source has the data that demonstrates this sinister "10 times" figure?

And the comparison misses an important question. If Africa receives several
billions in aid every year, why haven't these billions made more measurable impact
among the masses in increasing incomes and wealth? Notice how the "bad guy" is
"the foreign corporations" but never the grasping bureaucrats that handle those
billions in aid. Why are they supposed to be more virtuous that a corporation?
Simplistic "corporations bad", "Bureaucrats good" formulas have yielded dubious
results for the African masses. Indeed, the primary enemy of the masses in many
cases is not evil "foreign corporations" but smiling, corrupt, parasitical "soul brotha bureaucrats"

Thank you, Zarahan!!! I now know that at least one other person on this forum has some sense when it comes to economics.
I'm tired of all the same laments about evil euros and foreign corporations destroying africa while those parasitical african bureaucrats get almost no blame. And the funny thing is ppl who are supposedly so pro-african are portraying african countries as helpless babies in the face of evil omnipotent euros. What nonsense!

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africurious
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Another thing I'd add is that it's so spurious to talk about africa relinquishing money by having foreign corporations extracting resources. The money africa gets from those foreign corps can be seen in the many fancy homes, vehicles, clothes of the ppl in gov't and their families and friends. Not to mention the foreign bank accounts where these gov't officials stash their loot.
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lamin
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quote:
The difference between the Chinese and the west is that the west were not helping African people, they were only making backdoor deals with the corrupt leaders or Dictators that the west themselves put in power so they could get natural resources extremely cheap.
China like any nation pursues its own interests. It is now in the process of exporting capital to Africa and exporting labour there too. You go to Dakar, Senegal and they are there selling from shops. The dumb governments just let them in and what the Chinese do is undercut the local struggling retailers. These people end up on the streets selling goods for the Chinese.

The problem is that the kinds of "assistance" offered by China is very basic and can be done by African governments themselves. Why can't African governments just get together and train themselves in what's needed.

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Son of Ra
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quote:
Originally posted by lamin:
quote:
The difference between the Chinese and the west is that the west were not helping African people, they were only making backdoor deals with the corrupt leaders or Dictators that the west themselves put in power so they could get natural resources extremely cheap.
China like any nation pursues its own interests. It is now in the process of exporting capital to Africa and exporting labour there too. You go to Dakar, Senegal and they are there selling from shops. The dumb governments just let them in and what the Chinese do is undercut the local struggling retailers. These people end up on the streets selling goods for the Chinese.

The problem is that the kinds of "assistance" offered by China is very basic and can be done by African governments themselves. Why can't African governments just get together and train themselves in what's needed.

Thats Africans problems. Chinese are just ruthless business minded people. At least unlike the west...The Chinese are offering African countries like Angola,Zambia, Kenya,etc...A 'win-win' deal.

Africa gives the Chinese their resources and return, the Chinese build up Africa's infrastructure.


I agree Africans should get together. But Africans and heck people of African descent are not known to work together.

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africurious
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Btw, kudos to Firewall for posting the excellent info he did. Africa indeed has been socioeconomically improving for a while now, despite the many thieves and incompetents in gov't. Poor defenseless africa being sucked dry by foreigners is like a religious belief for some ppl and they don't have much to support their claim, as is demonstrated by this thread.
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