My Beauty Best Teacher

"...James Tooley argues that private education is cheaper and more effective than public education.For instance, in Lagos State, the mean maths score advantage over government schools was about 15 and 19 percentage points more respectively in private registered and unregistered schools, while in English it was 23 and 30 percentage points more.More striking: enrollment at private schools in Africa is hugely under-reported, and efforts to provide free primary education may have encouraged parents to move children from the private to the public sector, saving money but making no impact on educational standards.

In Ga District, Ghana, 64 percent of school children attend private unaided schools and in Lagos State we estimate that 75 percent of school children are in private schools - with a larger proportion in unregistered private schools (33 percent of the total) than in government schools (25 percent)..."

The PSD Blog reports on a Bill Easterly paper (pdf) that questions those who set the MDG goals in the first place,he concludes that.

It seems undesirable to exaggerate the “Africa as failure” image, which in turn exaggerates the role of “the West as Savior” for Africa (as the MDG campaign has often played out in practice). It is demoralizing to have goals for Africa that only be attained with progress that is nearly without historical precedent from other regions or in Africa itself. Africa has enough problems without international organizations and campaigners downplaying African progress when it happens.

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.

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.

PSD Blog reports on the trailblazing work of Beatrice Ayuru:

A few years ago, with no business training and no money, Beatrice decided that she would build her own school. "No girl should endure what I had to go through myself," says Beatrice. "Education is the best way to help reduce poverty in my region […] and giving girl children education empowers them. In my village, women are over-dependent on men."

Lira Integrated School, today has 1500 students, a school bus and an income-generating brass band. With the savings from the school, Beatrice has built a small-scale yoghurt factory and employs in total 104 people. Beatrice is far from being done. She is planning to open a university.

C.K. Prahalad walks though Bombay’s streets (it could just as well be the streets of Lagos or Nairobi) with Business Week and believes that the:
"…entrepreneurial ingenuity at work amid such poverty, where success depends on squeezing the most out of minimal resources to furnish quality products at rock-bottom prices, has cosmic implications for executives and consumers everywhere. Some of the most interesting companies of the future won't emerge from Silicon Valley or other places of abundant means, he says. They will come from places many executives don't even think about because they have been considered too marginal. They won't have that excuse for much longer, though.
In the world according to C.K. -- short for Coimbatore Krishnarao -- poor nations are incubating new business models and innovative uses of technology that in the coming decade will begin to transform the competitive landscape of entire global industries, from financial and telecom services to health care and carmaking..."
via PSD Blog

PSD Blog reports on the WSJ's coverage of Africa's Bull markets:

The continent's so-called frontier markets, such as Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Mauritius and Botswana, are up an average of 26% so far this year in dollar terms, according to Liquid Africa. By comparison, the MSCI Emerging Market Index, which includes just three African countries -- South Africa, Egypt and Morocco -- has risen 9.5% during the same period.

If you haven't heard this story, it's because the numbers are still small. The London Stock Exchange is five times as big as all African stock markets combined. And South Africa's exchange is 2/3 of the African total.

Energy Biz Insider reports on the uphill task of reforming AES Corp, a privatized state owned utility company in Cameroon.
Jean-David Bile:

is rooting out corruption at the electricity company, cracking down on customer theft, improving the flow of electricity -- and ending the practice of hiring people to satisfy the demands of politicians and traditional chiefs. His achievements don't always endear him to his fellow Cameroonians

"To implement dramatic reforms you have to be tough on your own people, or you'll never make it,"

Where does Microfinance go from here Raghuram Rajah asks "...How can microfinance be made more viable? Asking this question relegates financial services for the poor to a separate and unequal existence. Instead, we should ask how we can make financial services available to all. If we focus just on finance for the very poor, the thinking immediately shifts to subsidies and charity, which hurts the quality of service. Not only do the poor lack the collective voice to demand better services, but government money can spoil the credit culture. As one participant in a women's credit cooperative said, 'We don't default now because we would be defaulting on our sisters' money. If we took money from the government, default rates would go up because we would all feel we were defaulting only on the government...What needs to be done? For one, the government should encourage the creation of infrastructure that can allow technology to bring down transaction costs...Perhaps most important, the government should encourage competition in the financial sector. As private sector banks find their traditional businesses coming under fierce competition, they will seek out nontraditional businesses, including providing services to the very poor..."
via PSD Blog

Raghuram Rajan writes:

While no one has the "magic bullet" for growth, there are some things that do seem important. These include sensible macroeconomic management, with fiscal discipline, moderate inflation, and a reasonably competitive exchange rate; laws and policies that create an environment conducive to private sector activity with low transaction costs; and an economy open for international trade. In addition, investments in health and education—which create a population that not only lives a better life but also sees opportunities in growth and competition—ought to be encouraged.

In PSD Blog:

Recent work suggests another explanation of the resource curse – the Nigerian Disease. That is, an abundance of natural resources leads to poorer governance and conflicts. It gives rise to governments that are less accountable to the people, have little incentive for institution-building, and fail to implement growth enhancing reforms. Higher corruption, more rent-seeking activity, greater civil conflict, and erosion of social capital are some of the outcomes associated with the Nigerian Disease (see, for example, Rosser 2006). While it too early to draw any definitive conclusion on the relevance of the Nigerian Disease, the early results do suggest a possible way out of the resource curse - greater emphasis on institution-building and government accountability...[continue reading]

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.

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

A report(pdf) on post-conflict financing states:

Private investment in infrastructure in postconflict countries follows a clear sequence of sectors, with mobile telephony the only one likely to attract significant investment immediately after conflict. All the postconflict countries analyzed had at least one private mobile operator investing in the country after it emerged from war. The willingness of mobile operators to invest in high-risk environments reflects the rapid cost recovery allowed by the sector’s economics.Beyond telecommunications, the attractiveness of infrastructure investments in postconflict countries drops precipitously. Power projects remain somewhat attractive, particularly in generation, where projects start to emerge three years after conflict and increase in frequency after five years.

PSD Blog reports on a debate regarding Latin America's problem with the free market or moreso crony capitalism:

One legitimate reason for the opposition to capitalism in Latin America is that it frequently has been "crony capitalism" as opposed to the competitive capitalism that produces desirable social outcomes. Crony capitalism is a system where companies with close connections to the government gain economic power not by competing better, but by using the government to get favored and protected positions. These favors include monopolies over telecommunications, exclusive licenses to import different goods, and other sizeable economic advantages. Some cronyism is found in all countries, but Mexico and other Latin countries have often taken the influence of political connections to extremes.