My Beauty Best Teacher

"...Football Made in Africa demonstrates all the creativity and dynamism of the peoples obliged to deploy a fair amount of cleverness and resourcefulness on a daily basis to be able to indulge in their passion: football...Every episode offers an original angle on a story, a slice of everyday life, where football is present everywhere. From the production of goals in the outskirts of Maputo to the atmosphere in bars where matches are aired on tiny TV screens, the harvesting of rubber tree waste to make balls or the beaches of Cameroon where fishermen use their nets to play. The films are funny and poetic snapshots that reflect the unique imagination and energy of the African continent..."-website

Photo courtesy of TakeFive
via African Digital Art

One more example of resourcefulness amongst the informal, the BBC reports:

Courtesy of the BBC

Mucina, Boniface and Kama are among the motorbike boys of Dirt Island in Nairobi, Kenya - young men who have discovered a new way to improve slum life - a two-wheeled taxi service..."I bought a bike, an old motorbike," he says, "and set up at the (taxi) stage. At first people weren't comfortable with riding the motorcycles but after we became many, people got used to it."

More here

From Africa Rising:

When a Western charity makes an appeal for funds with the photo of a seemingly helpless African child, the Western donor is cast in the role of the strong, generous, and righteous person helping the lowly and needy. Strength, generosity, and righteousness are all good things, but I fear that an unrighteous pattern has developed. The West and Africa have become type-cast into strong and weak, resourceful and helpless, giver and receiver, parent and child.
To cast whole continents and cultures in such starkly contrasting and fixed roles is an untruth and an injustice. There is strength in Africa, and there is resourcefulness, generosity, and righteousness...[continue reading]

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• "Don't listen to CNN" (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

Dayo Olopade's

The Bright Continent will report a phenomenon that is not new but has been overlooked: that people are Africa’s most abundant natural resource, and that a long tradition of individual resourcefulness, creativity, and straight hustling is the best hope for the continent’s social and economic development.The book takes inspiration from the massive failures of the traditional aid industry—and from the promise of the guys selling Christmas trees in Lagos traffic.

"...Football Made in Africa demonstrates all the creativity and dynamism of the peoples obliged to deploy a fair amount of cleverness and resourcefulness on a daily basis to be able to indulge in their passion: football...Every episode offers an original angle on a story, a slice of everyday life, where football is present everywhere. From the production of goals in the outskirts of Maputo to the atmosphere in bars where matches are aired on tiny TV screens, the harvesting of rubber tree waste to make balls or the beaches of Cameroon where fishermen use their nets to play. The films are funny and poetic snapshots that reflect the unique imagination and energy of the African continent..."-website

Photo courtesy of TakeFive
via African Digital Art

Dibussi Tande writes in African Path about the impact of educational systems that do not foster ingenuity,resourcefulness and invention amongst other things.Quoting the World Bank:

The ability of a society to produce, select, adapt, commercialize, and use knowledge is critical for sustained economic growth and improved living standards. Knowledge has become the most important factor in economic development.

And comparing Cameroon to India

Today Cameroon is where India was some two decades ago – and it has the potential to become what India (or even Mauritius) is today. However, unlike India, Cameroon is crippled by the “civil service mentality”, and it lacks a crop of creative economic and political visionaries similar to those who transformed Bangalore from a sleepy backwater Indian town into an IT outsourcing and software Mecca.
Nowhere has that absence of vision been most manifested than in the country’s higher education system which was established primarily to train administrators for the post colonial government. Time has not changed the focus of Cameroon’s higher education system even as the world has moved on.

He alludes to a point made in the The Entrepreneur

The deficit of knowledge and learning is killing Cameroon and Africa softly. Despite a proliferation of schools and colleges, the lack of true learning and creativity has held the African captive to underdevelopment. In Cameroon we have graduates who are just producing what they were taught in school, instead of producing new things…This has left Cameroon with millions of qualified illiterates and graduates who are failures as far as life and service is concerned. A Master's degree holder moves with little or no creativity. Thousands of poorly educated Cameroonians only wait for opportunities to work where others have worked. Few are involved in the creation of new things. The outdated education they received then gives birth to confusion.

And brings to our attention a critical piece of analysis by Jeremy Weate on his observations about Nigeria.

The longer I live here, the more I realize that technological interventions or money pumped in by donors will do little to transform, unless there is a primary focus on business processes (whether in the commercial or the public sector)… Nigerians enjoy the benefits of cars, laptops, mobile phones and other modern technology, but live in a society which does not understand the discipline and rigour it takes to produce such technology. This creates an alienated culture where technology and modern industrial processes are seen as a mystery. No one seems to be able to solve the aviation crisis. No one seems to be able to create value-added manufacturing processes; no one seems to stem the tide of an import-economy, turning into an export-economy. So few technological interventions (in any sector) meet with any kind of success.

Truly intellectually curious,technologically innovative and self sustaining societies cannot be built off a bedrock of reactive thinking coupled with disinterest and indolence .The challenge is to disrupt these ossified ways of thought and catalyze the forces of creativity.