My Beauty Best Teacher

Ron Eglash covered earlier, discusses African Fractals at TED Global:

IPSNews reports:

The world's new economic powerhouses, including India, Brazil, South Africa and China, are largely responsible for a dramatic surge in trade and investments among the 132 developing nations in the global South."The South as a whole is not only richer in absolute terms but their combined economic weight relative to the global economy has also substantially increased," says Yiping Zhou, director of the U.N.'s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation...During the past two-three decades, Zhou pointed out, developing country economies have grown much faster than those of the developed and transition economies.New patterns of trade, investment and other economic linkages are emerging rapidly, eroding the structures inherited from a colonial past, he added."This reality is also changing the institutional and power structures of the South, presenting before us an entirely different landscape of South-South and, for that matter, also South-North relations politically, economically and culturally."

In NextBillion Manuel Bueno writes:

In the BOP, innovation often entails an unusual combination of technologies and other components that generates value for the consumer. It does not normally involve capital intensive research (like that which may be done in western pharmaceutical or technological corporations) or complex supply chains. BOP innovations are, for example, adding a torch light to mobile phones or developing wider washing machine pipes (for cleaning vegetables, you see). Rebecca Henderson of MIT and Kim Clark of Harvard have coined the phrase "architectural innovation" to describe these kind of innovations...Anywhere in the word, the best innovation will be the one that involves short development periods, less invested resources and brings additional benefits as fast as possible. However, at the BOP level, we are talking about probably more intuitive, more spontaneous and open innovations. They have a stronger anthropological bent, being dependent on customer observation and with more "obvious" innovations, rather than the more scientifically advanced research western markets are used to.

Al Hammond writing in NextBillion about the challenges of the OLPC states:

If there is any lesson that our studies here have shown, the essential starting point is a viable business model, grounded in a real understanding of needs, the value proposition as perceived by local people, and evidence of willingness to pay. Only then can technology opportunities really be evaluated. That is not to say that technology doesn’t have a critical role as an enabler for BOP communities—witness the still accelerating adoption of mobile phones (and their prepaid service business model). But engineers—especially those that don’t know developing market well—should take to heart the real moral of the laptop story: First, it’s the business model.

Darren Taylor of VOA reports on the work of Chinwe Uwandu:

A leading legal advisor to the Nigerian government says strong laws and effective implementation thereof must be the basis for Africa’s future progress. Chinwe Uwandu a former Yale fellow...represents Nigeria at various international forums, including the United Nations, and has helped secure Nigerian input into a number of continental and international treaties. In the third part of a series on African fellows at Yale, Darren Taylor reports on some of Uwandu’s achievements.

Founded by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, recently profiled in the FT, NOI Polls seeks to address a knowledge gap in opinion research within Nigeria.The company states that:

The lack of adequate information often hampers decision-making by both businesses and governments. Although there is a large domestic market and an emerging middle class in Nigeria, most businesses operating in the Nigerian environment know that it is difficult to assess market demand or even consumer preferences. Similarly, government policy-makers are often unable to ascertain genuine public opinion on important economic or social issues as well as important government policy changes, reforms or legislative actions.

Tristan McConnell writes in the Times:

Scores of British school children are being sent away to take their GCSEs in Ghana, exchanging truancy and gang culture for traditional teaching and strong discipline, including the cane...For the parents it is a chance to save their children from the thuggery that has seen 21 teenagers shot or stabbed to death in London alone this year. Abena and three other British pupils at her school now believe they are receiving a rigorous education that was lacking in Britain.

Henry Ekwuruke reports on a meeting titled "Deepening the Judiciary’s Effectiveness in Combating Corruption". Its attendees:

grappled with the dual complexity faced by the judiciary in curbing corruption and the need for the judiciary to purge itself of corruption within its own ranks. The discussions aimed at proposing practical modalities to enhance the role of the judiciary in combating corruption.

"Our anti-corruption efforts are compounded by the difficulty of managing the expectations of the public..."Most cases involve highly complex transactions, spanning many jurisdictions, which brings about a lot of frustrations due to the apparent lack of progress,"Zambian participant.

"In a country that at one point had the reputation of one of the worst countries to do business, we are fighting corruption on many fronts, including introducing anti money-laundering, and public procurement laws...“we must be incorruptible and must be ready to die in the course of duty.”,Nigerian representative.

Paul Collier author of 'The Bottom Billion'writes in OpenDemocracy:

Since the 1960s countries with around a billion people have been diverging from the rest of the world at an accelerating rate, a trend which will generate unmanageable social pressures. Most of these countries are in Africa, and so it is appropriate that the region should again have been on the Group of Eight (G8) agenda at the summit in Heiligendamm, Germany on 6-8 June 2007. Unfortunately, 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.

In a follow-up to a recent announcement about inflated Aids figures Christopher Caldwell of the FT writes:

A quarter-century into an epidemic that has killed millions, the organisation that leads the fight admits that it has been doing so with shaky data. Certain doctors have been saying this for a long time and the UN has ignored them. This week’s correction was a reminder that, while the UN can sidestep local political squabbles, questions of accountability inevitably crop up again at the international level, with the stakes often much higher.

While the US frets about Chinese investment in Africa, it underinvests.Meanwhile South-South investments in the continent continue to rise, one of the most recent being ArcelorMittal's steel industry plans for Mozambique.The FT reports:

As part of the project to build a plant capable of making 400,000 tonnes of steel a year, the Luxembourg-based company has also signed an agreement with the government of Mozambique under which it will look at the possibilities of operating new ventures in the country in mining iron ore and coal - important raw materials for steelmaking.

The FT reports:

Africa is the largest and most exciting group of the frontier markets and everyone wants to be part of it,” says Richard Segal, fixed income strategist at Renaissance Capital, the Russian investment bank.
Interest seems to have intensified in recent months – amid the credit turmoil in western finance – because African markets have exhibited low correlation to each other and other emerging and developed markets.

Donald Kaberuka of the AFDB stated that "...In order to maximise efforts in research, policy analysis and information dissemination, Africans need to make more use of the skills of African academics and researchers, both within and outside the continent...for a long time, analysis of African economic conditions has been the domain of external institutions, which are external to the continent, rather than bringing African intellectuals together to exercise their voice..."

Emerging Markets reports on SSA debt markets:

If domestic debt markets are to develop, it is also vital to improve local debt management, which has generally lagged behind efforts at debt relief. Countries need a clear debt management plan(pdf) and issuance strategy(pdf), which might include publishing a debt management report, lengthening the yield curve, building benchmark issues as conditions permit and widening the investor base

The limited size of local debt markets means that not all financing needs can be met domestically, and external commercial borrowing may also be cheaper than domestic debt, by removing the inflation and currency risk faced by international investors. Finally, it also fits in with the need to maintain a diversified funding mix. African governments now seem ready to test international investor appetite with sovereign issues, and Ghana’s milestone Eurobond issue in September points the way – the Ghanaian government could not have raised $750 million at a yield of 8.5% in the local market. African companies have also been active in the international market, especially telecoms and banks, and we believe international bond issues will be a significant feature of corporate Africa going forward.

An upcoming event titled "Mobile Government: The New Frontier in Transforming Public Services." states that:

Mobile services are quickly emerging as the new frontier in transforming government and making it even more accessible and citizen-centric by extending the benefits of remote delivery of government services and information to those who are unable or unwilling to access public services through the Internet or who simply prefer to use mobile devices. In theory, many government services can be now made available on a 24x7x365 basis at any place in the world covered by mobile networks, which today means almost everywhere.

Should anyone be surprised by this? The NY Times reports:

In the past, global health officials have treated the epidemic as a cyclone spiraling ever upward with no end to new infections in sight.But better surveys, particularly a household survey in India, have driven the figures down.Until recently, most national estimates were made by giving anonymous blood tests to some young women who came into public health clinics because they were pregnant or feared they had a sexually transmitted disease; those results were expanded with statistical models.But epidemiologists have realized that such a method — usually applied in big urban clinics because it was more efficient — oversampled prostitutes, drug abusers and people with multiple partners, and ignored rural women. Then the statistical extrapolations exaggerated those errors.

The Economist writes:

Africa is enjoying its best period of sustained economic expansion since independence. Real GDP growth is expected to rise from 5.7% in 2006 to 6.1% this year and 6.8% in 2008. This good performance is partly driven by high commodity and oil prices. Foreign aid has also helped. But it is also due to better economic management, more openness and more stable politics. Such policies mean banks have to work harder to make a profit, but also help them to grow. That is encouraging them to reach out to new customers—and so they should.

For all the progress, much remains to be done. In spite of innovations to bring in new customers, banks still have to build up necessary scale, cut costs and manage risks better. Sub-Saharan African economies are growing, but except for a handful, they remain very small: South Africa's GDP alone makes up almost 40% of the whole. Relative poverty is declining, but four out of ten Africans still have to survive on less than a dollar a day.

Robert Neuwirth writes(pdf) about the critical role of the informal economy in Lagos, Nigeria:

The informal sector is the most dynamic and fastest-growing part of the city.Eighty per cent of the people who live in Lagos work in the informal economy,which accounts for more than two-thirds of Nigeria’s gross domestic product. This gives informal workers unusual economic power: about US$125 billion worth. The unemployment and the massive social upheaval and misery that would exist if the thousands of people who immigrate to Lagos every day weren’t able to find work could quickly lead to social and political anarchy. The informal sector is what holds the country together and what determines its shape.

Goldman Sachs coined the term BRIC countries in 2003, in a 2005 follow-up paper they added eleven potential BRICers to that list, the Next Eleven. Two of which are in Africa, Egypt and Nigeria:

In thinking about other countries that might have BRICslike potential, we focused on demographic profiles, which drive much of the analysis. Without a substantial population, even a successful growth story is unlikely to have a global impact. Hong Kong will never be a global
power nor Luxembourg, despite the very high levels of income and living standards that they have achieved.We call this larger developing-country set the Next Eleven (N-11), though whether they will ‘emerge’ is still an open question for many. This group shows broad representation by region and includes Bangladesh, Egypt,
Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam.

A recent Businessweek article on India highlights the importance of manufacturing in a countries ascent to developed worlds status:

While the dynamic software-services sector has picked up some of the slack, it employs just 2 million people—a speck in a country where 14 million new job seekers enter the market every year. India generates fewer than 1 million new manufacturing jobs annually, but needs to create at least five times that. And to really lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, India, like China, must build up labor-intensive export industries such as textiles, toys, and electronics. Many of the new plants are intended to serve India's growing market, but they're also targeting sales overseas.

Jonathan Power writes in the IHT:

"We are focusing on merger and acquisition in emerging markets in Asia and Africa because these places enjoy high growth rates and have great potential.",Jiang Jianqing of ICBC...The fact that a top Chinese banker brackets Africa with Asia is one more sign that the Asians themselves see what is happening in Africa as a repeat of what happened to them 20 and 30 years ago.

Prize-winning author of "Half of a Yellow Sun" Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks at the Christopher Okigbo International Conference. She talks about subjects which include "...Ideas of authenticity and Afrofashion..."See parts 1 2 3 .

KenyanPoet writes about the need to develop intellectual property protections.

The Maasai Market Empowerment Trust (MMET)was formed due to the need for an organization that understands the intricacies of Intellectual Property as well as appreciate the cultural, economic and historical value art has in a country and its people.
It will not only seek to protect such products like Lesso(fabric) or Akala(sandals), it will also ensure that every one of its members is educated on Intellectual Property, its impact and need to protect their inventions, this will be through workshops, seminars, campaigns and other awareness programs. The Trust also hopes to provide Micro-finance facilities to its members to further expand their businesses.

"...The Global Bond Fund For Emerging Market Local Currencies Program -- is designed to move more institutional investment into local currency bond markets in developing countries. Making local currency bond markets deeper and stronger can lower the cost of borrowing, and a liquid corporate debt market can help firms better manage risk. Institutional investors, both domestic and international, could benefit from investing in a diversified portfolio of local emerging market bonds as they offer diversification with low correlations and potential returns from an improving credit environment and currency appreciation..."

Dibussi Tande analyses the sit-tight ineffectual Cameroon presidency.

Paul Biya failed to transform his nationalistic and progressive political vision into reality. By the end of the 1980s he had jettisoned all the key principles of his "New Deal" doctrine that had won him widespread national support and international acclaim early in his presidency...Unlike Ahmadou Ahidjo who was able "to frustrate somewhat the appetite of Northerners in order to stabilize his personal power" by carefully "cultivat[ing] ties with every ethnic group and [by] placat[ing] all the provincial elites with access to state resources," Biya "demonstrated less ability to control corruption and rent-seeking than Ahidjo had." He therefore allowed the "Beti barons" to increase "rent-seeking, corruption, and patronage beyond what Ahidjo ever allowed," and in the process, established a political system based on "ethnoclientelism".

African Loft highlights a BusinessDay article about Nigeria's kleptocratic governors:

As the second tier of government under Nigeria’s federal system, state governments comprise all arms - executive, legislative and judiciary. Just like at the federal level, each arm acts as a check on the other in the overall objective of providing good and equitable leadership to every state.
Every month, each state gets monetary allocations guaranteed by the constitution from the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC). Apart from meeting recurrent needs, the allocation is supposed to be used to fund development projects. It is regrettable that in spite of the huge resources given to the states, little or nothing is on the ground to justify the expenditure made by the governors. In effect, a greater portion of the allocations are suspected to be diverted or siphoned away to private accounts by some unscrupulous governors.
Taking advantage of the weak institutional structures of the judiciary and the legislative arms, state governors have through the application of the carrot and stick strategy turned them into adjuncts and appendages of the Government House. Having accomplished that and with the constitution granting them immunity, state governors had a free reign plundering the resources of their states.

The Economist writes about emerging markets being the flavor to the moment,are they?:

Back in 2002, emerging-market bonds offered a yield a full ten percentage points higher than American Treasury bonds. This year, although spreads have widened from the historic lows seen in May, they have settled at a modest two percentage points or so.
The performance of the equity markets has also been impressive. The MSCI emerging markets index has risen by nearly 40% so far this year, a remarkable achievement given the credit crunch and geopolitical worries. Although China's stockmarket has more than doubled, this is not all about the People's Republic; the Polish, Indian, Brazilian and Pakistani markets are all up by more than 40%.
Indeed, investor focus is now shifting towards what Michael Hartnett of Merrill Lynch dubs “the emerging emerging markets”, such as Botswana and Kazakhstan. MSCI is in the process of launching a benchmark for such exotica called the “frontier market” index.

SciDev reports:

Old-fashioned 'parachute science' — in which scientists from industrialised countries fly in to developing countries, obtain blood from a few patients and immediately return home with their samples — is no longer acceptable, say Frances Gotch and Jill Gilmour in Nature Immunology...Gotch and Gilmore have helped expand laboratories in Uganda to enable large-scale, international HIV vaccine trials to take place. They say trials must be carried out where the epidemic is worst and that their experience has shown high quality trials and good clinical practice, including sophisticated testing, can be done even in areas where resources are scarce.
Successful laboratory development requires a central 'supporting' laboratory as well as substantial investment in the training of laboratory and managerial staff, and sustained long-term support, they say.

China states what many in the developing world feel, but have been uncomfortable to voice publicly,this and the developing green protectionism gives food for thought:

Most developing countries are in the process of industrialization and urbanization, and they face the arduous task of poverty reduction," Zhang (Vice Foreign Minister) said. "So they need a large period of time for continuous energy demand growth with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Life Cycle Analysis reported that:

...gas flaring from Nigerian wells and refineries emits more greenhouse gases than any other single source in Africa south of the Sahara. Even more important for the Nigerian people are the chronic health effects and contamination of the air, water, and soil in the delta which result from the practice of flaring rather than capturing the natural gas. Approximately 24 billion m3 of natural gas are wasted by flaring in the Niger delta and offshore, and the flares are bright enough to be clearly detected in satellite images as shown above.
According to Nigerian economist Anthony Adegbulugbe, quoted on the TVE program Earth Report, Nigerian natural gas wasted by flaring would be enough to provide electricity to half of Africa for a year...

The Washington Post reports on the women-only village,Umoja.

Ten years ago, a group of women established the village of Umoja, which means unity in Swahili, on an unwanted field of dry grasslands. The women said they had been raped and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands, who claimed they had shamed their community...What started as a group of homeless women looking for a place of their own became a successful and happy village. About three dozen women live here and run a cultural center and camping site for tourists visiting the adjacent Samburu National Reserve. Umoja has flourished, eventually attracting so many women seeking help that they even hired men to haul firewood, traditionally women's work.

The WSJ asks "What Makes an Industrial Revolution?" Gregory Clark author of a 'A farewell to Alms' posits:

The lessons are that growth requires a combination of social culture, and half-decent institutions, but culture dominates. The right culture can compensate for poor institutions -- as in Sweden. Look at China now. Not a democracy, rife with corruption and nepotism, no respect for law -- yet spectacular growth.
Further foist the institutions of the West on countries with the wrong cultural background -- as the World Bank has attempted -- and the formal institutions of democracy, rule of law, public education, transparency, get corrupted into nepotism, looting, and faction. How can we transform the economic cultures of poor societies to be more like rich ones?

African countries suffer from terrible political and economic institutions. These are difficult to change because they reflect the underlying structure of political power in these societies. This means that simple-minded institutional advice will fail. The most important thing in solving the problem of underdevelopment, however, is to get the right diagnosis.

The dangers of an oligarchy covered earlier are highlighted in Martin Wolf's FT piece on plutocrats:

Are the vast fortunes being made in emerging economies the result of productive entrepreneurship or of rent-seeking? The answer to this question depends on where the economies are likely to go. The bigger the fortunes made by extracting rent from uncompetitive markets, the greater the resistance to the introduction of fiercer competition and so the weaker competition itself is likely to be. As I learnt in Mexico just over a week ago, knowledgeable observers partly ascribe the country’s weak growth to the lack of robust competition across the economy...Mr Winter(of USA Today) worries that “as the core of the global economy shifts to countries with weak rule of law and institutions, connections to government, rather than entrepreneurial skill, are becoming the quickest and most effective route to wealth.

The Economist writes:

Ethiopia likes to do things differently. In September it started celebrating the new millennium, more than seven years after everybody else. The country has been out of step in this respect since 1582: while the rest of the Christian world changed to the revised Gregorian calendar, Ethiopia stuck to the Julian. It also still keeps its own time, measured in 12-hour cycles rather than 24-hour ones.

The reasons for this economic crawl are not hard to find. Beyond the government-directed state, funded substantially by foreign aid, there is—almost uniquely in Africa—virtually no private-sector business at all. The IMF estimates that in 2005-06 the share of private investment in the country was just 11%, nearly unchanged since Mr Zenawi took over in the early 1990s. That is partly a reflection of the fact that, despite some privatisation since the centralised Marxist days of the Derg, large areas of the economy remain government monopolies, closed off to private business.

This is where Ethiopia misses out badly. Take telecoms. While the rest of Africa has been virtually transformed in just a few years by a revolution in mobile telephony, Ethiopia stumbles along with its inept and useless government-run services. Everywhere else, a plethora of South African, home-grown and European providers has leapt into the market to provide Africans with an extraordinary array of cheaper and more efficient services, now used even by the poorest of farmers, for instance, to check spot prices for agricultural goods in markets miles away. And the mobile-phone revolution has created thousands of new livelihoods; at times it seems as if every boy on a street corner is hawking a top-up card. Not in Ethiopia.
It is the same story in financial services, where, despite the growth of some smaller private banks, no foreign banks are allowed. Micro-finance schemes have expanded exponentially, but it remains almost impossible to find start-up loans for small or medium businesses.

The FT reports

When the military ruled Nigeria, it was the generals who boasted most of the fattest bank accounts. They were careful to keep these far offshore. By contrast, eight years of civilian rule has seen the emergence of a cabal of business tycoons whose net worth amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars and in some cases far more...Big business and some of the banks are heavily invested in the political system, just as politicians and government appointees are invested in the Nigerian banks and businesses making money, he says. There are significant changes, however, in the way Nigeria’s newly mega-rich are deploying their wealth. In the past, the wealth was hoarded in banks abroad. Today, it is mostly being poured into business enterprises within Nigeria...Among those Nigerians already in Africa’s big league, five names regularly crop up, led by the merchant-turned-industrialist Aliko Dangote. When complete, the many cement factories his Dangote group is building – or has bought from the state – will give him overwhelming dominance in domestic and potentially regional markets. Mr Dangote also dominates the distribution of sugar and salt and the manufacture of flour products. He was among the beneficiaries of the sale of the two dilapidated state-owned oil refineries in the days before Mr Obasanjo relinquished power.
Also in that deal was Femi Otedola. A licence to import and distribute diesel has given his company, Zenon, control over a commodity on which businesses depend to run generators in the absence of reliable power from the grid. Two bankers close to Mr Obasanjo, Jim Ovia of Zenith bank and Tony Elumelu of United Bank of Africa, also feature among the super-rich. Their banks have wrestled for the largest slice of government business and for ascendancy in the top industry tier.

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh writes about the Patricia Etteh imbroglio:

...competence cannot be sexualized. Competence is competence. Conviction is conviction. Integrity is integrity. If you did not cultivate it, you cannot flaunt it. It cannot be bought. It is earned. This explains why Dora Akunyili, in stark contrast to Etteh is a summary of probity, integrity and competence. Akunyili daily faces huge temptations from the fake drugs mafia and multinationals merchants of death, whose “businesses” she impedes; to betray her mission for a fee. But this woman of incorruptible principles has stood her grounds. She has challenged and taken the battle to the turf of these crooks...It is only in Nigeria, that an intellectual midget and a morally compromised woman like Mrs. Etteh would become a speaker of the lower house of laws. The horse and goat trading that brought about her emergence is an indictment on the Nigerian political culture. This woman may be a domestic bully, but to handle the complicated tasks of lawmaking in a nascent political environment is beyond the furthest limits of her competence.