My Beauty Best Teacher

Image courtesy of Nollywood Gossip

Nigerian D’Banj–a combination of outsize showman, confidence, flash, little politics and affecting personality–could be Africa’s first global pop star of the 21st century. He draws big crowds on the continent and regularly plays the diaspora circuit in cities like London. Perhaps the clearest sign of that he is about to be a bona fide pop star is that he was recently signed by Kanye West’s label and one of his hits, “Oliver,” is doing better than well on UK pop charts. Now it is getting the cover version treatment from artists as diverse as a British boy band (who changed some words in the song) and mainstream R&B singer, Estelle...[continue reading]

...September 2010, international organizations, heads of state, celebrities and specialists gathered to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).As you may know, the MDGs were set in 2000 to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. In the midst of the coverage of these grand events, high profile attendees wined, dined and debated the relative merits of each MDGs plan, while the actual “poor,” were not invited to these elite events.
Via 2010 from Project Diaspora on Vimeo.
Project Diaspora decided to change perceptions about the poor by building the Villages in Action platform whereby the voices of the poor can be heard. On November 27, 2010, the first conference was held in a village outside Masindi, Uganda. The goal of this one-day conference was to showcase the grassroots efforts driving economic development and improving the lives of the community – all with little or no assistance from international aid organizations...[continue reading]

These networks of kinship and language make it easier to do business across borders (see article). They speed the flow of information: a Chinese trader in Indonesia who spots a gap in the market for cheap umbrellas will alert his cousin in Shenzhen who knows someone who runs an umbrella factory. Kinship ties foster trust, so they can seal the deal and get the umbrellas to Jakarta before the rainy season ends. Trust matters, especially in emerging markets where the rule of law is weak. So does a knowledge of the local culture. That is why so much foreign direct investment in China still passes through the Chinese diaspora. And modern communications make these networks an even more powerful tool of business.
Diasporas also help spread ideas. Many of the emerging world’s brightest minds are educated at Western universities. An increasing number go home, taking with them both knowledge and contacts. Indian computer scientists in Bangalore bounce ideas constantly off their Indian friends in Silicon Valley. China’s technology industry is dominated by “sea turtles” (Chinese who have lived abroad and returned).

The Agro Mindset organisation was founded with a clear mission to advocate the youth in the diaspora to pursue agriculture and related sciences, its entrepreneurial excellence and rural development. One component of this work is to train new interdisciplinary generation of agriculturist who think innovatively about the challenges that lie ahead in this field…
The future of agriculture relies on the younger generation coming through to provide succession, add enthusiasm, bring fresh ideas and drive innovation. To us, as long as agricultural growth in Sub-Saharan Africa remains below 3% annually, Food Security is wishful thinking.
The vision of the Agro Mindset Organisation is to build the green revolution where the youth having attained academic skill and knowledge relating to agribusiness can develop the knowledge and skill towards career requirements and industry expectation, apply and transfer the knowledge, skill and technology in a variety of settings.

Photograph: Zed Nelson/Institute

Mabior Garang, son of Dr John Garang, a former SPLA rebel leader and Sudanese politician

'The people are edgy right now. They fought the war, contributed their children, their crops, their livestock. The moment they should be paid back, the ­movement is hijacked by the ­"cut-and-paste ­middle class" – the foreign diaspora returning. They can’t institute ­policies that speak to the people. And when ­people are hungry and perceive those in power are denying them food, they will rise up.'

Image courtesy of the NYPL

Over the course of nearly 20 centuries, millions of East Africans crossed the Indian Ocean and its several seas and adjoining bodies of water in their journey to distant lands, from Arabia and Iraq to India and Sri Lanka.
Called Kaffir, Siddi, Habshi, or Zanji, these men, women and children from Sudan in the north to Mozambique in the south Africanized the Indian Ocean world and helped shape the societies they entered and made their own.
Free or enslaved, soldiers, servants, sailors, merchants, mystics, musicians, commanders, nurses, or founders of dynasties, they contributed their cultures, talents, skills and labor to their new world, as millions of their descendants continue to do. Yet, their heroic odyssey remains little known.
The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World traces a truly unique and fascinating story of struggles and achievements across a variety of societies, cultures, religions, languages and times.

courtesy of ajayiandellen

it examines a development initiative spearheaded by the members of a transnational diaspora – the creation of a medical hospital in the holy city of Touba in central Senegal. Although the construction of the hospital is decidedly a philanthropic project, Hôpital Matlaboul Fawzaini is better understood as part of the larger place-making project of the Muridiyya and the pursuit of symbolic capital by a particular Mouride dahira. The dahira's project illuminates important processes of forging global connections and transnational localities, and underscores the importance of understanding the complex motivations behind diaspora development.

It is no surprise that the internet, which is the primary tool of communication among Cameroonian communities in the Diaspora and between Cameroonians in the Diaspora and Cameroonians at home, would become an area of focal concern for the government of Cameroon. Simply put, the Biya regime has never viewed Cameroonian cyberspace as a viable space for civic engagement and public discourse, instead, it sees it as a threat to the regime – a space that must be controlled, co-opted, contained, or simply coerced into submission.

Africa needs not only greater investment in agriculture, but also in roads, ports and other facilities that are vital to moving the land’s products to consumers. Fortunately, part of the solution could lie with the almost 23 million African migrants around the globe, who together have an annual savings of more than $30 billion. Tapping into this money with so-called diaspora bonds could help provide Africa with the equipment and services it needs for long-term growth and poverty reduction.
These diaspora bonds would be in essence structured like any bonds on the market, but would be sold by governments, private companies and public-private partnerships to Africans living abroad. The bonds would be sold in small denominations, from $100 to $10,000, to individual investors or, in larger denominations, to institutional and foreign investors.

"...Badilisha Poetry Radio uniquely focuses on podcasts by poets from the African continent and its Diaspora. This online platform creates a dynamic space in which to appreciate, celebrate and discover contemporary Pan-African poetry. The weekly podcasts feature a vast spectrum of voices across poetic genres..."-site Watch overview video after the jump

“An interdisciplinary web portal for reflection, critique and documenting contemporary Portuguese-speaking African cultures” is how Buala is introduced. In an interview with Global Voices, Buala’s creators Marta Lança and Francisca Bagulho discuss the grounds and justification for a space that grapples with culture, history, politics, the arts in general and the city – the space par excellence of “constant change,” the living stage for playing out contemporary culture..."

a “place for long, in-depth articles that focus on serious, complex works that do not dispense with irony and with the urban cultures of African youth in the Diaspora that has much to say, with people who study Africa without historic blind folly and fantasy, who wish to contribute to reflections on (and with) the continent.”