My Beauty Best Teacher

Bombastic Element covers MIT student presentations on African Architecture:

MIT student, Nancy Demerdash's "Before the scramble for Africa: tracing African architecture through trade" goes back to 1200 to understand the historical development of various architectural forms as a function of natural resources in the complex changing societies and trading economies that depended on these resources. Also, how different architectural typologies evolved and were impacted by environmental and climatic changes.

Africa's Middle Class-A Photographic essay, Maggie Koerth-Baker reporting in Boing Boing

Do the middle classes really exist in Abidjan? With between 1 and 7€ per person [about $1.30 to $9.75] per day, their income could seem pathetic to the occidental standards. However, they live far better than the poor (1€ or less a day) and can not be compared to the rich minority. Often coming from numerous and rural families, their education brought them in town and allowed them to emerge. For most of them, they have a steady job allowing them to build up their future, live in a flat with electricity, TV, fridge .... and invest in their children's education, sending them to private school if they feel it is necessary. Upon this definition, they represent 30% of the country's population and hold 40% of its wealth.
[Pictured] Charles Kapié with his partner in the street close to their office. At 30 years old he has created and runs a consulting firm in agronomy and a cyber café. He used to be a civil servant and he invested his "rappel" (first year of salary paid at once) in his activity and resigned after one year. He was paid $400/month. He situates himself in the middle of the Middle Classes.

From a recent Lancet–LIDC Commission report on the MDGs:

The MDGs are fragmented not only in their implementation but also in their underlying conceptualisations of development and overlapping of means and ends...While this approach captures a range of development perspectives, it generates a poorly aligned mixture of means, ends, and sometimes competing ideas about normative aspiration (eg, economic growth vs sustainability), which has made the MDG project less useful than it could have been, since opportunities to link the goals together coherently have been missed and a rigorous approach to assessment has been overlooked.
The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015

Bombastic Element on art ecosystems and markets in China and South Africa:

It is apparent South Africa, in terms of the push-pull tensions of its post-Apartheid society and emerging middle class, occupies a unique nexus of culture and politics that's boon for artists and art consumption...while in China It is very simple. You have a society [exemplified by] rapid consumerism and a system that's authoritarian. The 2 co-habit, mingle, co-exist in each other...

A Bombastic Element points us to Dilip Ratha's ponderings on the subject of remittances:

A standard remittance is a simple financial transaction that -- if lightly regulated and processed using modern technology -- can cost as little as one percent. If funds were transferred through banks and other financial intermediaries, migrants and their beneficiaries would be encouraged to save and invest. Intermediary banks could also use remittance inflows as collateral to borrow larger sums in international credit markets for local investments.

To best leverage these flows for development, it is time to create an international body -- an "International Remittances Institute" -- that would monitor the flows of labor and remittances and oversee policies to make them easier, cheaper, safer, and more productive. The proposed African Remittances Institute, supported by the African Union and the European Union, is a small but important step in this direction.

In Bombastic Element:

Sola Odunfa's elaboration on Economic and Financial Crimes Commission czar Farida Waziri's comments that the "extent of aggrandisement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth" has led her to believe some Nigerians might be "psychologically unsuitable for public office," is even more danming when read out loud:

Nuhu Ribadu and others at a 'Symposium on Investigative Reporting on bribery and corruption',  in Bombastic Element:

A high profile panel aptly titled "Corruption Hunters," answered questions about international corruption and the role of the media during the 3rd Annual Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting back in April.