My Beauty Best Teacher

Sam Rich critiques Jeffery Sachs millennium villages:

If Sauri(A millenium village) is to become a useful model for development on a bigger scale, and not just another development expert’s white elephant, Sachs and others working on the project must acknowledge that they are still learning about Africa. Sauri is not yet a ­success.
Lasting changes in Sauri will come about not through distribution of commodities, but through education for children and training for adults. To put it another way, give a man a mosquito net, and when it rips, he’ll come and ask for another one. But show him how using a mosquito net benefits his health and how it will save him money on medication in the long run, and he might just go out and buy one for himself.

William Easterly writes:

Like all ideologies, Development promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society’s problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent. It deduces this unique answer for everyone from a general theory that purports to apply to everyone, everywhere. There’s no need to involve local actors who reap its costs and benefits. Development even has its own intelligentsia, made up of experts at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United Nations.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes::

The heavy criticism of the African elite in relation to Africa’s progress is that they are the frontline directors of progress and, as intellectuals, are the main players of development ideas for progress. They should be questioned about Africa’s development troubles. Whether they are playing with ideas or directing development, the elites should be informed by African values first. Because of their education system or their own inability to think within their values first, especially in policy-making, African elites have projected “debilitating intellectual incoherence” in tackling the continent’s development. They are skewed, more or less, towards talking Western values or thinking of Western values when tackling Africa’s progress.

Annwen Bates writes:

You are a celebrity humanitarian and guest-editor of a well-circulated glossy. The territory is Africa. The topic is staving its demise. In the 1980s this would have been a famine. Today it is poverty and HIV/Aids. Readers will judge your cause by the cover, so select the visuals with care. What will you choose: an outline of an uninhibited continent, an abandoned toddler or a panic-eyed, skeletal mother clutching her dying baby? Do not feel limited by this empty outline of the place and its people, the abandoned children and wilting women. They are quite interchangeable, even mix'n matchable.

"...The goal of Congo Basin Forest Partnership is to improve communication between members and coordination between their projects, programmes and policies in order to enhance the sustainable management of the Congo Basin forests and improve on the standard of living of the inhabitants of the region..."

Afrol News reports:

Following complaints lodged by right groups, French authorities have instituted a preliminary inquiry against Presidents of Gabon and Congo Brazzavile who are accused of embezzling their public funds to acquire properties in France.

Yasmina Zaidman writes:

It might be possible that a government would cross-subsidize water, charging wealthier customers more and poorer customers less, but this is different from charging nothing at all. There are a few problems with any system, public or private, that provides water for free to a large segment of the population: First it eliminates the interest of entrepreneurs, distributors, innovators and investors to find cheaper and more reliable ways to make water available to those who need it most.

George Essegbey writes in SciDev:

To appreciate the crucial need for innovation and the imperatives of science and technology, Ghana(read Sub-Saharan Africa) needs to develop a scientific habit of mind throughout its society and economy.
One way to achieve this is through an expansive and effective programme recognising that innovation happens within a framework of people's worldview, their belief systems and other cultural aspects.
Ghanaian society needs to wage a war against poverty, but it must first battle the forces that militate against a science culture. And just as countries can be mobilised for war, Ghana could be oriented towards science.

Andrew Rugasira writes in the FT:

Has any nation ever developed by way of handouts? The British industrial revolution for example, was fuelled by home grown technological breakthroughs that defined Britain as a truly modern society.
Pro-aid campaigners argue that providing aid to accountable governments is a means of stimulating their economies. This is nonsense. Giving aid to poor countries and working exclusively through their government agencies makes accountability worse rather than better.
Africa's only viable and sustainable strategy for economic growth is one based on trade and not aid.

A friend of G. Paschal Zachary makes the following comments:

One can imagine drawing a continuum of investing in poverty stricken countries.On the extreme hard radical right, you have vulture investors who buy defaulted debt of deeply impoverished countries and then litigate in international courts for recovery against the limited cofers of these countries. Such has happened to many countries including congo and zambia. On the other side of the spectrum are “social entrepeneurs” who’s url end in “org”. Deeply subsidized microlenders who
distribute profits to back to the country might be an example. But an org is an org, and I don’t consider them investors, social or otherwise. What I’m looking to do is more “com” than “org”, but I want to be comfortable that my investments are helping the country (and not just a select few entreprenuers). Since [the government] has stated that private sector investing is a key foundation of development, I feel I can invest and still feel that my activity is springing from my charitable side and not my profit maximizing side. I’m doing good, even if I do well

Carina Ray writes:

We can't afford to turn a blind eye to the challenges facing Africans, and equally we can't continue to brand Africa, as The Economist infamously did in 2000, as "the hopeless continent." Rather, we need to begin highlighting the significant contributions Africans make everyday to shaping their own destinies for the better. Give serious airtime to the thousands of Sudanese human rights activists and aid workers in Darfur, rather than just the handful of foreigners among them. Instead of solely featuring Hollywood celebrities in the next (RED) advertising campaign, also include the heroes and heroines of Africa who work tirelessly and often at great cost to themselves to improve conditions in every corner of the continent.

Sociolingo reports on an ongoing debate regarding The Mande Charter described as a Magna Carter for Africa.It is a document that "is presented by its promoters as a “hidden treasury”; from the West African past. It is already the basis for claims of endogenous origins of modern concepts (decentralisation, local democracy, environment conservation, feminism, human rights, cultural diversity, welfare state)"

Bon Voyage "...is short three-minute film about a woman's reflections on her immigration to France..."

Founded by Sindika Dokolo, The Sindika Dokolo Foundation's goal is to open the first Centre for Contemporary art in Luanda by 2012,it success has underlined the value of exposing the African public to its contemporary production.Its collection was chosen to represent the Africa Pavilion at the 2007 Venice biennale

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes:

So, here we are again. Two years on from the July 2005 gathering at Gleneagles, Scotland, the acceptable face of African leadership is preparing to assemble on the steps of the Group of Eight (G8) summit at Heiligendamm, Germany for a photo-opportunity amid more heartfelt pleas to increase aid to Africa...Africans themselves - from the grassroots to the more enlightened governments - have similarly argued that their principal route out of poverty lies in the creation of more jobs, something the aid industry is largely silent about. Gordon Brown has been conducting his own, lower-level but evidently affecting, love-affair with Africa. We can only hope that, as Tony Blair strides off-stage to leave him the limelight, he will lay aside the temptations of celebrity to apply some of the medicine that has been good enough for Britain in the last decade.

Robert Neuwirth author of Shadow Cities recently back from Lagos,Nigeria discusses self-regulated informal economies:

Paul Collier writes:

The debate on what the G8 should do has been entirely dominated by aid. More aid for parts of Africa would probably be helpful, but it would not be decisive in reversing divergence. It is, in fact, a sideshow relative to the other policy instruments that G8 governments control. It is the failure to use these instruments that is the tragic missed opportunity. Because aid has dominated the airwaves people are simply unaware of our true potential for action. Africa faces three distinctive economic problems, each amenable to a distinct policy.

A research team led by Robert H. Bates of the Africa Research Program found that:

African governments were instrumental in inhibiting the growth of their own economies in the late 20th century, according to a decade-long project conducted by African scholars and economists. Robert Bates, professor of government in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has been immersed in this economic survey, helping the economists to understand that governmental role....whatever the material situations of various African states — whether resource-scare or resource-rich, land-locked or coastal — each economy grew more slowly in Africa than it did in counterpart economies elsewhere in the world. In fact, without the “Africa effect,” they found that no natural obstacle would have prevented coastal African countries from growing at the same rate as Asian countries such as Mauritius or Thailand

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong reports on Courage Quashigah's campaign for a return to traditional foods:
He argues for,

Balanced nutrition by consuming healthy traditional Ghanaian food, as a bulwark against “preventing ill health,” is as vital as curative measures in the face of severe inadequate health infrastructure. Such observation comes in the face of similar admonitions in Japan, a country admired by Ghanaians for their ability to mix their traditional values with the dominant Western neo-liberal ones in their development process...The lessons here are that Ghanaian indigenous foods, with its heavy emphasis on green vegetables, like the famed healthy Arab/Mediterranean foods, are among some of the healthiest in the world.

The WSJ reports:

The richest nations recognized that the poorest continent can best help itself by unleashing investment and opening up to the private sector. The final aid numbers from Heiligendamm aren't as headline-grabbing as from the G-8 Gleneagles summit in 2005, but the strategy is far better suited to helping Africa out of poverty...The new aid is conditional on improved governance, i.e. less corruption, more respect for human rights, freer trade and openness to capital. The G-8's vision is spelled out in a communiqué on "Growth and Responsibility in Africa(pdf)," focused on spurring investment and business.
Take, for example, the Making Finance Work for Africa program, initiated by the World Bank and endorsed by the G-8. Under this initiative, G-8 countries will help national governments and regional organizations such as the African Union and the New Partnership for African Development to fund small loans, provide training for central bankers, reduce transaction costs for workers abroad who send remittances to families at home, and guarantee home-mortgage loans. None of this is big-ticket development assistance, but that's the point. Financial services help people help themselves to start businesses, buy homes and develop their economies.