My Beauty Best Teacher

A case study (PDF) from JETHRO states that:

SMEs are the main source of employment in developed and developing countries alike,comprising over 90% of African business operations and contributing to over 50% of African employment and GDP. Many SMEs remain outside the formal and banking sectors yet harnessing the talent in the informal sector and bringing it into the formal sector generates increased revenue through taxation; SMEs benefit from protection under legislation and homogenised standards and supply. Ultimately, some SMEs may become sufficiently integrated into the legal and banking frameworks that they can work towards listing on arms of the national Stock Exchanges

Lauren Gelfand of Oxfam stated that "...Infrastructure here(Sub-Saharan Africa) needs very, very basic aid, such as help with agricultural irrigation techniques," She described the kind of aid that would make a profound and lasting impact as "very low-tech, small-scale projects..."

Senait Mehari author of Heart of Fire states that "...Africans must help Africans...Africa is a forgotten continent,” she says. “When you beg for democracy or peace ,people laugh in your face...“Don’t cry for these people. Don’t cry for me. It doesn’t count. I want to see positive action. It’s not enough to say, ‘How sad, we hope something will change’. Hope is good, but it’s not enough..."
via TimesOnline

photo courtesy of droemer

The Mail & Guardian reports on the promise of retail development bonds:

Daniel Bradlow...is developing an investment product, in consultation with international and domestic financial institutions and development financing experts, that aims to create access to funding for smaller projects...Bradlow has mooted a retail bond along the lines of the government retail bond, which the public can invest in for a minimum of R500 for 10 years.
It provides a semi-annual return equal to the government’s retail bond, the underlying funds being used to develop small and micro- enterprise business and low-income housing in South Africa. So investors will be doing their bit to develop the country while making money themselves.

The focus on the rising profile of Southern Multinationals continues, Businessweek reports:

"...A new breed of ambitious multinational is rising on the world scene, presenting both challenges and opportunities for established global players.
These new contenders hail from seemingly unlikely places, developing nations such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and even Egypt and South Africa. They are shaking up entire industries, from farm equipment and refrigerators to aircraft and telecom services, and changing the rules of global competition..."

George Ayittey wrote "...We need TECHNOCRATS to fix our broken, dysfunctional institutions. REPAIRMEN or plumbers who will unclog the gutters or the system. CUTLASSES to chop down all the dead woods Rawlings packed into the civil service. PINCERS to de-worm the judiciary, and so on...You do NOT need an Nkrumah (a visionary and Pan-Africanist) or a Mandela (a heroic campaigner against white injustice) because they are NOT technocrats..."

Leadership imbued in the personality of Lee Kuan Yew was critical to the transformation of the then island backwater state of Singapore to a regional powerhouse."From Third World To First" is his account of this journey. "...Few gave tiny Singapore much chance of survival when it was granted independence in 1965. How is it, then, that today the former British colonial trading post is a thriving Asian metropolis with not only the world's number one airline, best airport, and busiest port of trade, but also the world's fourth-highest per capita real income?...",HarperCollins.
What lessons does this hold for the Liberia's, Malawi's and Senegal's of this world? Countries comparatively with much more than Singapore ever had in terms of raw material and human resources.

Alex Steffen reports on "leapfrogging through local wisdom"

what really captivates my imagination here is the way in which I see a marriage of approaches emerging here: a very sensible, community-based approach, which starts by finding and supporting the capacities of the poor, and focusing on the capital the community already has in its relationships, skills and local knowledge, and a redistribute-the-future approach, which recognizes that the tools poor people most need are the ones which help make them as independent as possible from the exploitative systems around them. It's a form of leapfrogging, certainly, but it transcends the technologies involved to look at the relationships and ways of thinking those technologies enable.

Eddie Cross writes:

There is a great deal wrong in Africa. The continent has the highest ratio of internally displaced people in the world, we generate more refugees than any other continent, and we are poorer now than we were before independence.
We are the Aids capital of the globe and our life expectancies are retreating on a scale seldom seen in history.

Why?

It’s not for lack of resources – we have those in abundance and if we rated Africa on the basis of population to its natural resource base we would find ourselves at the top of the log. It’s not for a lack of energy – we are now a major producer and exporter of oil, we have vast reserves of coal and hydroelectric potential to light the continent for decades to come. It’s not for a lack of aid from richer countries – many States in Africa draw up to half their annual budgets from donors in the West. Per capita we are one of the largest recipients of aid in the history of the world

The reason for all these problems lies not in our history nor in the predation of industrial economies, it lies in our leadership.

The IDEA outlines a number of reasons for decentralizing democracy:

• Decentralized governance is critical for initiating and sustaining participatory decision making and accountable management systems that permit communities to meet their own goals for development at the local level within the framework of nationally articulated economic and social programmes.

• It helps to deepen the commitment of countries to democratic governance and increase the legitimacy of national governments, including those just emerging from conflict. In addition, the role of regional and local governments have become important as the basic training ground for the citizenry in democratic problem solving as well as developing local politicians for the national arena.

Andrew Mwenda makes a case for turning off the Aid spigot:

“The best thing the West can do is nothing,” he says...“White society is being blackmailed. The white world looks at Africa from a position of guilt,” he told a seminar at IPN, the London think tank. The beneficiaries of aid are governments, politicians, the staff of aid agencies and charities, he says. Head in hands in mock despair, he reels off a list of “charities” that sprang into being when the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria began to disburse its millions. “There was Children of Hope, there was Hope for Children, there was Help the Children.”

Aid is the problem, not the solution, he says. Debt relief is a Moral Hazard. What is the incentive for country “A” to continue paying interest on its borrowings if country “B” steals the money, defaults and then gets debt relief.

“Countries that are deserving don’t get aid,” says Mr Mwenda. Aid creates the wrong incentives, he argues. It makes objects of the poor, passive recipients of charity rather than active participants in their own economic betterment. Africans don’t need handouts, they need better institutions, land reform and access to cheap mortgages.

CodeZed questions Zambia's wrongheaded software development policy:

The industry requirements seem to support ready made packages or proprietary software. Some of these colleges have no PCs and software and heavily depends on theory. For those that have, the curriculum is developed by academicians without involvement of industry and tailored towards a particular manufacturer- Microsoft. Entrepreneurship to start up your own Software house seem not to be viable as the market demands proprietary Software and always seem to be in hurry for ready made applications whether they work for or against them they do not mind!!!!

The donors are giving funds for ICT and specifications are for proprietary software. Donated computers have a price tag of free Microsoft Software. Most PCs have Microsoft Windows operating Systems pre loaded. Multi national and International organisations decide on behalf of their Zambian branches which version of Microsoft Products and other proprietary software should be in the installed base!!!