My Beauty Best Teacher

WorldChanging reports on Afghanistan's National solidarity program:

Ashraf Ghani has worked to establish partnerships between communities, national and international NGOs, and government, most pointedly through the establishment of the National Solidarity Program, which promotes village-level, community-run development programs, and networks Afghanistan's many villages -- through community development councils -- with one another and with agencies and organizations that can grant them access to resources.

Alex Steffen reports on "leapfrogging through local wisdom"

what really captivates my imagination here is the way in which I see a marriage of approaches emerging here: a very sensible, community-based approach, which starts by finding and supporting the capacities of the poor, and focusing on the capital the community already has in its relationships, skills and local knowledge, and a redistribute-the-future approach, which recognizes that the tools poor people most need are the ones which help make them as independent as possible from the exploitative systems around them. It's a form of leapfrogging, certainly, but it transcends the technologies involved to look at the relationships and ways of thinking those technologies enable.

The Big picture photo-journal reports on unregulated mining in Madagascar.One wonders if there are local efforts to organize the participants into local cooperative mining bodies of a sort?
(photo courtesy of ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

Update: Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging profiles the "Mines of Ilakaka"

Ethan Zuckerman reports on Lindaba Ziyafika a sms news creation and dissemination project:

Harry Dugmore of Rhodes University is working on a pioneering project to provide news and information into urban neighborhoods in South Africa via mobile phones. The project – Lindaba Ziyafika (the news is coming) – is designed to create and distribute news in the context of the “techno-social flux” that South Africa is experiencing...The journalists behind the Lindaba Ziyafika project are largely unemployed adults in their early 20s. They’re producing content that’s ending up in the 140 year old newspaper that serves Grahamstown. The content is distributed first via online media – SMS, messages through systems like MXit (an incredibly clever hack that uses the cheaper data connectivity available on African cellphones to evade the huge expenses of SMS messages)

Ethan Zuckerman builds on his Incremental Infrastructure concept:

[T]he idea is to build essential facilities -- telephone networks, power grids, roads -- in small pieces using private investment, instead of relying on large, centrally planned, government-run projects.The rise of mobile phone networks linking more than 100 million Africans across the continent and the blossoming of cybercafes from Cape Town to Dakar are evidence that incremental infrastructure is already transforming the continent. But Africa needs go beyond telephones and computers. Many nations lack roads, electric power, schools, hospitals, clean water. If the lessons learned from building telephone and Internet systems can be applied to other types of African infrastructure, African entrepreneurs could find themselves wiring villages, paving roads, and perhaps even building airports -- building the new Africa while turning a profit in the process.

I’m wondering whether he’s too quick to extrapolate the mobile phone phenomenon to other areas. I’m especially thinking about big ticket items like roads and power generation/transmission that don’t have the same option of being subsidized by the consumer. Also the incremental and even moreso the “pico” approach does not address needs on a macro-level that most countries in Africa need to address, having power in the village is great but if factories / business can’t operate at an optimal level because of power shortages or costs there’s still a big conundrum that needs be address (and unfortunately the role of government can’t be wished away).

Paul Theroux in the NYTimes writes "...It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions...Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large...Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for..."
Analysed at Worldchanging

"...Fahamu uses information communication technologies to conduct pan-African campaigns for human rights and social justice.Fahamu (a word meaning 'consciousness' or 'comprehension' in Kiswahili) fields digital publishing and communications -- CD-ROMs, the web, e-newsletters, and now, mobile phone text messaging -- in diverse ways that let the group, "pack a punch larger than our weight" to support progressive social change in Africa, empower Africans to control their own economies and political systems -- and stave off a repeat of the tragedies that hang over the heads of African social justice activists..."
Via Worldchanging

Alex Steffen writes about Rwanda's Leapfrogging Vision 2020 project goals:

Transforming a nation's society and economy while building from scratch a new infrastructure is no mean feat. In some places, it may be that it simply can't be done in any short-term way, as Bono and the TED team learned in Ethiopia and some American entrepreneurs are finding in parts of Rwanda. Then, too, some of the kinds of problems that face many developing countries in adopting technology are particularly severe in Rwanda. The essential question is can basic improvements, from democracy-building to movement-building to transparent governance to the creation of a free press to the provision of essentials be better delivered in a nation with a focus on employing new technologies.

How Mauritius continues to get it right-Economist
Worldchanging provides an overview of Financial Innovators
Is Private Health Care the Answer to the Health Problems of the World's Poor?-Plos
Competing views on Informal Economies-Next Billion
A Cheery African future?
Alaskan Village Corporations, A model for rural Africa?
Poverty Reduction demands a 'bottom-up approach'.
Training Women Entrepreneurs-WSJ
While Rio Tinto and Israeli diamond trader Beny Steinmetz fight over Guinean Iron Ore...the question is where are the Africans?
Wealth creation in the developing world: Is Africa a lost cause? Listen here