My Beauty Best Teacher

CNN reports:

Residents of Kano in Nigeria are struggling to keep alive their centuries-old tradition of hand-dying delicate cloth a deep indigo blue, with their trade under threat from the realities of modern commerce.Kano's pits are said to date back 500 years and were once the center of a bustling Saharan trade in dyed cloth.There are still over 120 pits in Kano but only 30 of them are functioning. Many of them have been filled in, often because families have moved on to other businesses, but sometimes because they're waiting for their children to grown up, dig out the pit and reclaim their tradition.

From Africa Industrialization Day where Thomas Mattig of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in conjunction with the Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria stated:

Nigeria is experiencing solid economic growth for several years now. However, employment remains low and can hardly catch up with population growth. The sectors of the economy that are booming such as the banking, telecommunications and insurance industries, do not create many jobs.

 continuing:

...even a large bank branch will only employ a handful of people, while a factory can give employment to a whole town.

regarding the oil industry:

The prosperous petroleum sector is built virtually on extraction and not value addition as Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt refineries remain comatose.

and the critical informal sector:

It is also widely acknowledged that the informal sector provides over 70 percent of employment in the country, yet many workers daily face harassment and intimidation from Government officials at all level whilethere is no systematic programme of training and re-training in the face ofchanging technologies and market dynamics, credible programmes ofaccess to credits as well as decent workspaces.. This must change, workersin the informal economy need state support in capacity building, finance and patronage and social protection.

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via All Africa

Reason profiles Wenzhou China, a commercial powerhouse propelled by informal entrepreneurs:

Private citizens were the first to connect Wenzhou to neighboring regions by building roads, bridges, and highways, as well as the city’s airports and substantial portions of the dock. Even today the city is scattered with infrastructure investment firms through which groups of businessmen pool money to build the transport routes they all need to get their goods from factory to the point of sale. The result is not pretty. Aside from the confusion faced even by residents driving into the city, it is not uncommon to see sidewalks torn up to insert piping, with seemingly no intention of replacing the concrete. Nevertheless, the system is crudely efficient, merchants can all easily access factories, and the factories in this geographically isolated city now have sales networks that span the globe. ...

Images courtesy of Reason

The streets around the railway station are covered in stalls selling $3 blue jeans and $5 boots. There’s a city block dedicated to baby clothes next to a street that sells plastic signs for bathroom doors. In one run-down alleyway you’ll see people repairing televisions, making blankets, and selling fruits, vegetables, and poultry (live or dead). Further outside the center, you can find small shops dedicated to aluminum rods, sheet metal, tire rims, and tires. ... Pool halls are set up wherever there’s open space that you can set a tarp over. Gambling dens are openly advertised. Taxi drivers often drive off the meter. The karaoke parlors are numerous, and almost all of them double as brothels. The poorest residents take part in one of the largest citizen recycling programs anywhere in the world. In an alley one family collects scraps of fabric to sell to the local textile mills, another hoards scraps of paper and cardboard to send to the paper mills, and in front of a lot that looks like it is being used for a garbage dump, a man has set up a secondhand goods shop.

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via Stealth of Nations

Bus Rapid transit Lagos:

BRT is a transport option, which relies on the use of dedicated ‘interference’ free segregated lanes to guarantee fast and reliable bus travel. The BRT buses run on physically segregated lanes and thus make them run faster in a situation where there is traffic congestion.It is one of the several options available for tackling the huge public transport predicaments of Lagos.

In the spirit of various initiatives that focus on indigenous self-sustaining DIY philosophy's.We spotlight The Appropriate Technology Centre (‘the Centre’) a brainchild of Kofi Sam covered earlier. The centre's recently proclaimed manifesto makes a number of observations and contentions:

Uncle Joe's roofing sheet fabrication facility

At first glance,there’s nothing extraordinary about the shed sitting next to Uncle Joe’s mud brick home in the coastal Ghanaian village of Atabadze.Inside there’s a certain familiarity about the clutter – tools propped up against stacks of roofing sheets and machinery – the kind of organized chaos you’d find in tool sheds and workshops anywhere in the world. But the sheer ordinariness of it of all belies the fact that this is the birthplace of a remarkable and important technology.Those roofing sheets – Uncle Joe made them,out of local river sand,using only his own ingenuity and the electric vibrating table in the corner – he made that too.
Uncle Joe is an innovator.He has brought his community something they never had before:a roofing material that is both sturdy and affordable.Before his intervention,his neighbours had a hugely unsatisfactory choice between using expensive,often imported, manufactured materials, or local unprocessed thatch, at a fraction of the price,but at the cost of durability;there was no middle ground.But Uncle Joe was not so sure this was necessarily a matter of ‘either or’; why couldn’t there be an alternative that was both manufactured and local, he wondered.
So he set about answering his own question,experimenting with local environmental inputs and different manufacturing processes.And through his efforts he developed a process to produce roofing sheets from river sand – a sturdy,high quality product The poor need opportunities to generate income and work themselves out of poverty manufactured from a sustainable local resource. To produce these sheets,Uncle Joe even had to build his own electric vibrating table,a vital piece of machinery that blends the sand with a small quantity of cement (added as fixative),enabling the mixture to set.All in all,an unlikely triumph of innovation considering the poor infrastructure and extremely limited availability of capital and manufacturing know-­‐how in his rural locality.
Uncle Joe is a prime example of the creativity and dynamism that are blossoming in Africa; one of the manyindividuals and communities championing innovative technologies that,by mobilising local resources to provide essential goods and services,and create income generation opportunities for the poor,can deliver sustainable and equitable ‘grassroots’development across the continent.And yet his story also illustrates the uphill task they face.
For all the originality of his idea and his dedication to implementing it,Uncle Joe cannot currently make ends meet manufacturing tiles – he simply cannot afford to hire the labour he needs to produce viable volumes.Without capital,his operation will not reach a level at which the technology can really impact the livesof the poor.

In conclusion

For the global development community (donors,NGOs,etc) Uncle Joe’s story is one of opportunity: it highlights an opportunity forthem to create the opportunities the rural poor need to work their way out of poverty.To date the governmental and multilateral institutions with the resources and clout to change the lives of those living in poverty have favoured...To make meaningful inroads into poverty reduction in Africa,the development community must foster the growth of robust local industries that mobilise the continent’s substantial environmental resources to meet local needs and create opportunities.Technologies like Uncle Joe’s manufacturing process are the foundation on which such industries are built,and donors should support their development,whether by investing in the entrepreneurs pushing innovative local solutionsor by providing the tools and training rural communities can use to unlock the developmental potential in their local environment.

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Jon Gosier in Appfrica:

The environment is rich in phenomena that has been observed, analyzed, commoditized and, in many cases, exploited. But much like the precious mineral and natural gas resources of the continent, for local societies, the tools for extraction are sparse or absent. In this context we aren’t talking about refineries, we’re talking about the capacity to collect, understand, and manipulate statistics and quantitative research to build narratives that change behavior or encourage action.

Shanta Devarajan recently pointed out this ‘statistical tragedy’ of Africa:

To show that this is not an arcane point, consider the case of Ghana, which decided to update its GDP last year to the 1993 system. When they did so, they found that their GDP was 62 percent higher than previously thought. Ghana’s per capita GDP is now over $1,000, making it a middle-income country. The “tragedy” is that we were happily publishing GDP statistics and growth figures for Ghana over the last decades, when in fact the national accounts were understating GDP by 62 percent…. The tragedy is that donors, including the World Bank, undertake statistical activities without ensuring that they are consistent with the NSDS. Why? Because they need data for their own purpose—to publish reports—and this means getting it faster, with little time to strengthen the countries’ statistical capacity. But just as Africans turned around their growth tragedy, they can turn around their statistical tragedy.

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The Africa Prisons Project founded by Alexander McLean aims to:

To bring dignity and hope to men, women and children in prison through healthcare, education, access to justice and community reintegration.

their vision:

...is that prisons in Africa are places of positive transformation and that entering prison does not mean losing hope. We believe depravation of freedom need not mean deprivation of humanity.The African Prisons Project (APP) is a group of people passionately committed to improving access to healthcare, education, justice and community reintegration for prisoners in Africa. We aim to restore the dignity of those we serve by providing humane conditions and services which help them to regain their humanity.

From the P2P Foundation:

WHEN the Egyptian authorities realised protesters were using the internet to organise themselves in January, they came up with a simple solution: in an instant they disconnected the nation, cutting off anti-government dissidents from an invaluable resource.The outage inspired James Burke and Chris Pinchen – both members of the P2P Foundation - to begin work on the ChokePoint Project. The idea is to compile a real-time interactive map of the entire internet and identify potential choke points – the physical and virtual locations where internet access could be easily compromised – and who has the power to strangle them.

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In REculture:

courtesy of REculture

The informal construction sector has been the only industry capable of providing affordable housing solutions for the urban poor in developing countries. While South African housing policies rely on the formal construction sector for attaining the ambitious targets of subsidized housing delivery, township keep growing with the support of informal process.The strategies and outputs of both sectors are dramatically different; while the formal industry relies on standardization , repetition, and the use of new materials and a single technology, the informal sector takes full advantage of variety, multiplicity, recycling and combination of technologies.Surprisingly, this does not prevent the informal sector from looking for specialization and innovation...[continue reading]

Sarah Mukasa in Pambazuka:

Image of Sarah Mukasa

Philanthropy in Africa has become an area of increasing interest in the past 10 or more years. A key focus for interrogation is the manifestation of philanthropy in the African context - its areas of strength and weakness. Another is how to build on the traditions of philanthropy in Africa to attain stronger institutional processes that scale up localized forms of giving and ground these in principles of social justice, equality, peace and sustainable development. Africans are challenging the notion that Africa is purely a ‘donor recipient’ continent and instead are pointing to the rich traditions of giving and philanthropic practice in Africa – which in many instances have been the mainstay of entire communities.
Whilst it is known that philanthropy is an age-old practice in Africa, there is little recognition of the contributions it has made in developing and sustaining communities. In Africa today, much of the giving takes place in familial and informal community networks responding often to immediate/ welfare concerns. Burial societies, individual support to the payment of school fees and, building of community facilities are examples of philanthropy that can be found in many variations on the continent. Religious organizing has also formed a critical avenue for much of the more formal and institutionalised mechanisms for philanthropy, with programmes driven by local actors providing a range of services including education, health services and feeding programmes...[continue reading]

In Think Africa, Lucky Idedia on the unintended consequences of Nigeria's new minimum wage:

To pay the new wage, some states like Lagos will increase taxes or devise new taxes to increase their internally generated revenue. The ripple will hit the informal sector—the biggest employment sector in Nigeria. A market woman in Lagos, struggling to meet her tax responsibility in addition to other inflated costs, has no choice but to increase the price of tomato, fish, or garri. The same goes for commercial bus operators, and landlords. The load eventually falls on consumers, and that includes labour.

Organized Labour should focus on meaningful solutions:

Living conditions cannot be improved simply by increasing wages. Using the national union, workers should fight the cankerworm that chews holes in the pockets where that wage – however small – ends up. Organized labour has a lot of leverage, and is selling it cheap on the minimum wage issue.But they could really exert effective pressure for far-reaching change. This is not to say that Nigerian workers do not need a living wage. But there would be bigger and better rewards to be had if labour campaigned on a much broader range of governance issue. That way, they can ensure the government implements policies capable of improving the economy and sustaining a genuine living wage.

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Jamie Doran writing in Al Jazeera:

Ethiopia is a poor country, with most of its population living in what is termed 'extreme poverty' (accepted definition: less than $1 per day). But Ethiopia should not be a poor country; large areas are lush green with plenty of opportunity for cultivation. The key is to direct aid in such a way that it avoids sporadic development and, instead, achieves long-term success through integrating all of the requirements a community needs to thrive. In other words, what's the point of building a school when the kids are too hungry, or sick with malaria, to attend? You need to provide them with food, health care and education at the same time. This is only part of it, but you get the idea.The fancy phrase is 'holistic development' and it's not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking; I saw it with my own eyes during my visit: large swathes of land being irrigated to produce cash crops which, in turn, could be sold at market (the tradition had been to grow maize, more maize and more still); schools being built, new health centres, savings and lending schemes allowing investment in rudimentary tools which revolutionise production and, crucially, food storage to ensure that if the rains do not arrive one year there's enough food to feed their families. In short, a major success story run entirely by Ethiopians themselves.A group called Self Help Africa runs the project in the Sodo region I visited, along with others in various parts of the country. To see such immense pride on the faces of the farmers planting their new crops, on the children walking to their new schools and, particularly, on the women who run the savings and lending schemes is a memory which simply doesn't fade. Whole communities coming together, hundreds of men, women and children digging ditches, building dams: millions of gallons of rainwater which had previously crashed off the mountainside, dragging topsoil from the land below until eventually pouring uselessly into the river and being lost forever, now being stopped in its tracks. That rainwater now seeps into the ground, raising the water table.

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Time reports on efforts to turn around the bustling metropolis of Lagos:

Image of Lagos via Wikipedia

For Babatunde Fashola (Governor of Lagos state), the law is key. The changes he is overseeing improve infrastructure, create jobs, make money, even build him a soaring political career. But ultimately, the aim is to end the anarchy, he says. A city that does not function "creates desperate conditions for people and reduces their ability to resist temptation." Lapses can be minor, like driving on sidewalks or into oncoming traffic, or major, like violent crime. Fashola sees both as symptoms of Lagos' dysfunction, and he is tackling them by, in one approach, setting up a series of driver-improvement schools as well as, in another tack, employing area boys as cleaners and gardeners to beautify their neighborhoods. It's working. Orderly lanes are becoming the norm on the roads. And crime is down. From 2007 to 2008, armed robberies in Lagos fell 89%. From 2008 to 2009, car theft fell 54%. And murder more than halved, from 221 cases in 2007 to 94 in 2010. This rising sense of citizenship is revealing itself in another surprising way. Astonished then delighted by the transformation their new governor was effecting, Lagosians were happy to pay for it. By 2010 the governor was raising 70% of the state's income locally from taxes. By diminishing the importance of oil money handed out by the federal government and raising the role of local tax, Fashola has reconnected the state to its people. He takes that as a stamp of approval for his efforts to reverse lawlessness in government as well as across the city. "The capacity of a government to attract taxes is a very strong measure of its legitimacy,"

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G. Pascal Zachary writing in Reason:

Lagos Bus Transit System  courtesy of Wikipedia

Once overwhelmingly rural, Africa is urbanizing at a faster rate than any other region on the planet. With the world’s lowest rates of automobile ownership, urban Africans also have the world’s greatest demand for mass transit. And they are meeting their own needs with enterprise and creativity, largely fueled by private resources. The successes of the continent’s ad hoc urban transit systems are partly due to government neglect. Unable to keep pace with growth, governments are simply staying out of the way and letting private operators assemble inexpensive networks of buses and taxis that can adapt quickly to shifting consumer needs.

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In The FT:

“The question for executives at consumer packaged goods companies is no longer whether their firms should enter the region, but where and how,” A.T. Kearney, the management consultancy, wrote in recent research that found west African subsidiaries achieving nearly twice the profit margins of their parent groups. Other research amassing at investment banks and international financial institutions highlights the potential for Africa – or at least parts of it – to become a significant driver of global economic expansion in coming years.
No one sensible believes that the road will be smooth for all of sub-Saharan Africa. But in almost every sector demand outstrips supply. “The reality is Africa is probably 30 years behind China and 20 years behind India on the developmental curve in that regard, so I think the Chinese and Indians will start to look at parts of Africa as potential sites for low-cost manufacturing and outsourcing and things like that,” says Michael Lalor of Ernst & Young.

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SOS Malabo intends to, effectively, mobilise people all over the world in favor of the oppressed people of Equatorial Guinea.
Unrest in Algeria: The window is closing fast
'Guangzhou's Great Multi-Modal Transit System' a model for Lagos,Cairo,Nairobi?
Temperatures rise around the Nile Waters
Wonda Wendy a Gabonese hip-hop artist
Nigeria's Mad Men

In Lagos:

The first of it’s kind in Lagos, “I See Lagos”, is a call to all Lagosians, wherever you are in the world, to join in a collective visioning of Lagos. Lagos is more than a geographical space but a place for our hopes, dreams, and our plans to make our reality what it can be. “I see Lagos” is a challenge to all those who truly believe in the future of this great city to envision the continuing work that the Fashola administration has been acknowledged for worldwide. But this is more than political posturing, it’s a chance for all outspoken Nigerians, Lagosians especially, to take up the call for change and make your dreams a reality through expression and networking.

Listen to an Economist podcast on innovation in emerging markets. Related article
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The South continues to link its infrastructure, this time with undersea cables
Messay Kebede asks are Ethiopians angry enough to revolt?
Religion as politics in Africa.

From Daily Dispatches: Nairobi

Image courtesy of Brendon Bannon

The face of this young city is undergoing radical plastic surgery. In what the media here never fail to call “the leafy suburbs”, 1930s stone-built bungalows behind manicured hedges are being torn down and multistory apartment blocks rising high in their place.
Out on the upgraded highways snaking into the city, red tiled roofs stretch across acres of what was once empty grassland tended only by Masai cattle.Malls are morphing from charming clusters of family-owned grocers and butchers, where everyone knows your name, into many-outlet monoliths to Mammon.At well-to-do dinner parties, this is a constant topic of slightly disapproving conversation. Think of all the traffic. Have they upgraded the sewer pipes and the water supply? How will the electricity grid cope with all this extra demand?

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