My Beauty Best Teacher

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza states:

The value of a liberal arts education in general is too well known for a lengthy recounting. Suffice it to say, a liberal education gives every generation of students, as it gave mine, skills that are essential not only for the job market but for leading more fulfilling lives. At the very least it provides six sets of capacities or competencies: cognitive, communicative, computational, cultural, civic, and concrete.

THDBlog reports on 'Development Pornography':

“Upwards of 90% of the images of the majority world that are seen in the western media are produced by white photographers from the USA or Europe. This results in a one dimensional view often driven by a negative news agenda or the need to raise money.”

“Recognizing everybody’s communication rights in the information society is not mere slogan or campaign; it’s an integral part of social justice.”...Part of the reason for this kind of post-colonial choreography by INGOs is because they are still required to be the visual mediators of the poor world to the rich world. In Western society, our INGOs are inter-cultural gatekeepers. And you would often have for example, the young white INGO nurse talking passionately on television beside starving children…” Full story.

Edward B. Rackley writes in 3quarksdaily:

The nature of governance in these ex-colonies attests to the abiding power of the self-serving instinct and immediate gain, over and against the long-term goal of national progress. Such is the confounding irony of Africa’s entire post-colonial era in nations previously occupied by France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium alike: why is the colonial, predatory model of governance so faithfully re-enacted by ruling African elites? It’s as if all that negative conditioning only succeeded in instilling a predatory instinct in the new ruling class. Why are Mandela-style visions for collective prosperity not more common, given the shared experience of subjugation and occupation across the continent?

Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing opens the door to Vintage African TV ads:

You can find some great classic 1960s TV commercials from Africa on sites like YouTube and Africahit.com, but all of that stuff appears to originate from one source: the amazing Africa archives at Adeater.com. About a dozen MPEG files there, and products include everything from perfume to cool old cars to booze to cigarettes (add it up, you got a recipe for the good life).

FinancialNigeria reports:

Interfaced with the capacities and growth aspirations of Diaspora African businesses, some of the challenges faced by local entrepreneurs on the continent become opportunities for mutual benefits. A good number of Diaspora African entrepreneurs have distinguished themselves in their profession and industry. They have access to capital and are able to mobilize investible funds within and outside their community. They have integrated well with the international system, while they seek opportunities to further expand their businesses outside of their country of residence. In this connection, African is a vast market for them...While African governments continue to press for more favourable trade conditions perhaps when the Doha Round of negotiations resumes, a clear outcome of the process of engagements between African entrepreneurs at home and abroad can conduce to Africa moving out of the aid fixation. Leveraging on Diaspora network and capital, Africa economies can leapfrog on the crest of private sector-led growth.

Joanna Chung reports in the FT:

Investment bankers are grappling with a novel challenge: explaining to potential investors that exotic places such as Abuja and Accra, the capitals of Nigeria and Ghana, are among the new frontiers in the inter­national capital markets.

“We have a super-conviction about Africa,” he says. “We are very optimistic that the corner has been turned economically. You have to imagine where it will be in two or three years’ time, and it is going to change in ways that people don’t expect.
“I fully expect the capital markets in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop as rapidly as they have done in Russia over the past 10 years.”

Jerome Booth writes in Yahoo finance:

Africa's lack of globalization is evident in its unbalanced financing structure. State-controlled aid money dominates public finance in Africa in spite of improvements in macroeconomic policies, spreading democracy, and supportive commodity prices. Recent growth in local currency debt issuance is welcome, but foreign demand is rapidly exhausting local capacity to absorb selling, with potential destabilizing macro­economic implications if issuance continues unabated. Meanwhile, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the last great region of the world not to issue external sovereign bonds at all...Potential corporate bond issuance in Africa is maybe 10 times the sovereign (government) financing needs, but – and here is the rub – without a sovereign bond curve, the potential corporate issuers cannot issue as they cannot price sovereign risk. The bond market has far more capacity to finance Africa's development needs than aid, but bond markets need to lend to governments first. A balanced financing structure would replace aid-financed central government budget support with global bonds to sit alongside moderate local currency issuance and conventional aid flows.

Sebri Omer founder of the Yemage Medical Center asserted that:

I vowed to become active and support a medical renaissance in the country. My vision graduated into the establishment of a new hospital, with the latest technological medical facilities and treatments. This is a significant move in the right direction. It will also encourage others to take similar steps to assist the people of this region. In this way, Ethiopians can help themselves and improve their health conditions.

Kavaljit Singh writes:

To a large extent, the expansion of South-South and South-North investment flows reflects the increasing integration of developing countries into the world economy. A number of important factors including regional integration through trade and investment agreements, trade and financial liberalisation, increasing wealth as well as limited market size and resource base at home have encouraged Southern TNCs to invest abroad.

The award winning Bernard Lédéa Ouedraogo stated:

The danger for many Africans is that the erosion of our ways by the aggressive ways of others, our own values by foreign values, will destroy our sense of responsibility for solving our communities' problems.

African Signals interviews Ken Banks, founder of the FrontlineSMS system.He discusses its adaptation to the role of election monitoring.Background on Ken:

Ken isn’t just a talker, he actually is doing things with technology to make the world a better place. He has a distinct focus on Africa, as can be seen through the various projects he has worked on over the years.

David Gauthier-Villars writes in the WSJ:

For the past half-century, the secretive and powerful "African Cell" has overseen France's strategic interests in Africa, holding sway over a wide swath of former French colonies. Acting as a general command, the Cell uses France's military as a hammer to install leaders it deems friendly to French interests. In return, these countries give French industries first crack at their oil and other natural resources. Sidestepping traditional diplomatic channels, the Cell reports only to one person: the president...Critics say the Cell's support of nondemocratic African regimes, an artifact of France's colonial past, is preventing these nations from making progress to modernity. And Africa, once evidence of imperial grandeur, is now viewed by many French as the source of a continuing flood of poor immigrants.

Patrick Gathara of Africa Path writes:

Our continent's penury has been proclaimed far and wide. Governments, NGOs, the media and celebrities alike have taken to the rooftops to weave their sorry tale of Africa's woe...Let us disabuse ourselves of this notion that Africa is poor. Africa is not poor. We lack because what we have is freely given away to the developed world. I do not blame the West for this state of affairs. Hey, who says no to free lunch, even in Africa? The truth is that the blame lies squarely with us Africans because we tolerate the situation and accept the rationalisations that support it. We agree to sell our raw materials on the cheap and cough up to buy back the processed stuff.

Cities Feeding People: a book published by IDRC highlights:

The importance of urban food production as a source of both income and food. It stresses the wide socioeconomic spectrum of urban farmers and the critical importance of self-grown food for the poorest urban dwellers, particularly those living in households headed by women. The studies also emphasize the growing commercial importance of certain foods such as vegetables, poultry, and eggs.

Government response to urban food production has generally been one of neglect if not harassment. Land-use regulations for both public and private land are needed for urban food production to flourish. Improved information about crops and fertilizers, water, and pesticides could greatly increase crop production while immunization and advice on feeding would improve livestock and reduce the wastage by premature death. To encourage such governmental reconsideration of policies toward urban and peri-urban farming, however, careful quantitative comparative studies must be completed to understand current practices.

Lawrence W. Reed writes:

Market advocates throughout Africa have come to a conclusion once famously expressed by the comic strip character Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." They understand that foreign subsidies may salve the consciences of naïve foreigners, but they perpetuate the poverty-creating cultural and political pathologies that Africans must shed. They have stepped forward and devoted their careers to filling a longstanding void in discussions about Africa.

Kenneth Okoth writing in Migration Information Source stated that:

The challenges facing Kenya are not unique. Countries like China, India, and South Africa have developed different approaches for tapping into the expertise and other resources of their diasporas to meet their development goals and achieve global competitiveness. These countries are leading the way in turning the despair of brain drain into brain exchange and brain gain in different ways. Hopefully, a robust private-public framework that can facilitate productive linkages between Kenyan academics, researchers, artists, and investors at home and in the diaspora will emerge to consolidate the political and economic changes taking place in Kenya, as has been the case elsewhere.

In a report(pdf) on corruption within low income countries Rohini Pande states:

That investment in specific mechanisms which alter individual incentives to engage in corrupt practices may succeed in reducing levels of corruption...This would suggest that the policy emphasis should be on identifying features of the economic environment which increase the incidence of corruption, not simply identifying individuals who are corrupt.

George Ayittey writes in the WSJ about waste and lack of accountability at the World Bank:

In its 40-year involvement in Africa, the Bank scandalously wasted tens of billions in failed programs to spur economic growth, promote democracy and good governance. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bank lending was project specific: roads, dams for generating electrical power, telecommunications, and other public goods with large externalities in agriculture, health care, education and industry. By the mid-1990s, more than 2,200 projects had been undertaken but nearly all were seriously undermined by poor Bank supervision, lack of domestic maintenance or neglect. In 1989, the Bank itself admitted to numerous examples of badly chosen and poorly designed public investments it had funded. Half of its development projects in Africa failed, according to its own evaluation report.

To help carry out its wasteful and ineffective programs, the Bank employs a huge staff of 7,000 bureaucrats, plus a fleet of some 7,000 more consultants.In a feeble attempt at reform the Bank quietly eliminated 600 positions at its Washington, D.C., headquarters in July 1997, to save $96 million over two years. But even this miniscule "adjustment" was fiercely resisted by Bank staff. In 1998, the staff howled when an internal investigation uncovered "alarming information" about kickbacks and embezzlement.

An UNCTAD report on Asian FDI in Africa states(PDF):

The Asian experience demonstrates that governments’ strategic investment in education and infrastructure is crucial for promoting economic development in general and attracting efficiency seeking FDI in particular. To become attractive locations for FDI, African countries have to improve their overall investment climate in addition
to offering profitable investment opportunities.

Robert Guest writing in the WSJ states:

Simply put, since politics is the quickest route to riches in Nigeria, a lot of crooks go into politics. That makes life tough for those who are trying to clean up the system. Before the elections put everything on hold, Mr. Obasanjo's economic reform team had done a good job of making the central government’s finances more transparent; so much so that Nigeria won debt relief in 2005.
But the reforms did not go far enough, and barely began to drain the swamp of state and local politics. The chief obstacle to any anticorruption drive is that most rich and powerful people in Nigeria have a vested interest in its failure

Founded by Oyeronke Atilade Half Tribe states that "...Culture & Civilization are rooted in your Soul through years and decades and centuries of tradition, beliefs, experiences, practices, including war & toil, and secrets. In your Soul lies the Foundation of all that you know, believe, experience, and practice..."

Lucia Akosua Quachey writes(doc):

The fundamental importance of women entrepreneurs in promoting made in Africa goods is enormous. However, African governments and the private sector under estimate the crucial and important role women entrepreneurs play in production of goods and services and development of enterprises and the benefit to promoting made in Africa.
Entrepreneurship in all its diversity in Africa provides a dynamic and potentially efficient means of meeting the many of the emerging challenges of development and low productivity in Africa. The relationship between economic development and promoting the growth of the informal sector is in many ways symbolic. Entrepreneurial activity of the informal sector breeds innovation, injects competitive pressures and develops opportunities in economies. It is the foundation in many respects for broader economic development. African women entrepreneurs have a matured long standing tradition of entrepreneurship for centuries. In the context of promoting made in Africa goods, on-going reforms and rethinking of development will put women entrepreneurs in a pivotal position in relation to expectation

Founded by Agatha Nnaji the DewDrop foundation's goals include supporting and upgrading the standard of the service delivery in the hospitality and tourism industry within Nigeria.Its objectives include:
-Job opportunities for the unemployed

-Empowerment and Poverty eradication within the Nation

-Certificates and Diplomas equivalent to any comparable Institute worldwide.

- Grant to establish small to medium scale self-owned business

G. Pascal Zachary writes:

The emphasis on large dams reinforces centralized power and invites corruption, because large dams bring big money into the hands of a few government officials and technocrats. By contrast, small dams capable of generating up to 15 MW are relatively inexpensive and require the hands-on involvement of villages and communities, thus potentially serving as a tool for local empowerment. Perhaps because small dams spread political and economic power, rather than concentrate it, African governments and the foreign donors who fund so much of Africa's infrastructure have generally ignored them.