My Beauty Best Teacher

From OludaScribe:

WAITING LINES by Lagos Based Daniel Oriahi Follow @Filmic25

Shorts have been the means by which upcoming film makers show the world and more specifically the industry what they are capable of doing. Many of the legends of today made short films which enabled them to be recognized and get the opportunity to make feature films. Directors like Speilberg, Scorcese, Chris Nolan ,George Lucas and other went through this path at some point.

As a cinephile and director, i get excited when i discover other film makers that know their craft , so I want to dedicate this post to the young film makers from Nigeria.

I won’t write much but i’ll let their work speak for them. Some of them are based in Nigeria others are outside the country, But they are all Naija Bred .

They vary in genre and tone. Some are socially relevant, some are art house and indie, and others are just entertainment,your opinions on their execution may vary. but they all show something different about their craft and the capabilties and potential of their directors. So ladies and gentlemen, say hello to The Future

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For context read an early Timbuktu Chronicles post on Nollywood and its promise of helping spawn Auteurs

Reuben Abraham writing in CNN:

image courtesy of Business Edge

Entrepreneurship and business are rarely accorded a serious place in discussions around drivers of economic development. A cursory look at the numbers makes this seem very surprising. China has pulled approximately 600 million people out of absolute poverty since Deng Xiaoping unleashed market reforms in the late 1970s. Never in human history have so many people been pulled out of grinding poverty is such a short span of time.

Similarly, South Korea has gone from a per-capita income of $291 in 1970 to $20,000 today. Even reform laggards like India have managed to pull a couple of hundred million people out of grinding poverty since economic reforms were initiated. Across the world, we find countries that created an entrepreneurship and business friendly environment were successful in reducing poverty drastically.

Despite the evidence, there are strong lobbies in emerging markets that make the claim that business friendly policies are anti-poor. Personally, I am in favor of redistribution, like these lobbies claim to be. However, what do you redistribute? One cannot, after all, redistribute poverty. One can only redistribute wealth, and to redistribute it, you have to create the wealth first...[continue reading]

At Poptech Rob Neuwirth author of Stealth of Nations:

...tells us about life in the informal economy, what French culture classifies as System D. 1.8 billion people on the planet subsist through economic transactions that happen outside legal spheres and, by 2020, two thirds of our planet will be doing business in this domain. The future is the free market vs. the flea market.

The Economist profiles Sao Tome and Principe:

Image courtesy of Paxgaea

Across São Tomé dense cocoa plantations cling to the sides of monolithic pillars. A third of the archipelago is covered in the crop which makes up 80% of its exports. In the late 1990s, dips in production and prices left the island state heavily reliant on foreign aid and farmers on the poverty line. But since 2004 farmers have set up collectives, eliminating the middlemen who had been eating into their profits. With facilities to ferment the product and dry the cocoa to export they are benefitting from prices five times higher than those for cocoa seeds still in their treacly translucent liquid. São Tomé and Príncipe does not produce huge quantities of cocoa but what it does grow is organic and Fairtrade which goes down well with wealthy Western consumers.

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A WSJ review of Robert Neuwirth's book,Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy:

In "Stealth of Nations," Robert Neuwirth offers a fascinating tour of System D, a world largely ignored by academics and government officials but a world familiar to anyone who has visited developing countries. Step outside your beachfront resort in Cancun and you can't miss it. Usually foreign visitors treat the participants in this unofficial economy with either pity or distrust: pity because they assume that System D workers are on the verge of starvation, distrust because familiar guideposts—regulations, licenses, credentials—are lacking.

Often neither prejudice is correct. Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo's early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children's fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth's sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it's a matter of costs and benefits: "If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building." These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy...[continue reading]

Over at Bloomberg Robert Neuwirth himself on the 'Offbeat Economy':

Here, in the squatter community of Makoko, one of the waterside shantytowns of Lagos, Nigeria, Ogun Dairo smokes fish. Without a license, on land that she doesn’t own, she has created her economic future. The fish is imported from afar, caught in the North Sea, frozen and shipped to the cacophonous port city on the Nigerian coast.

After several hours in the concentrated smoke of her scorched sawdust --- the strong fumes have stained her wax-print dress, dulling the extravagant colors -- she packs the fish in boxes, readying them to be retailed for a tiny profit on the roadsides of this West African megacity.Economic development in Africa can be found all over, hidden in plain sight. It evades our gaze because our notions of growth and development are conditioned by Western rules. We expect development to be highly organized and regulated, to involve government, and to be anchored by big corporations. In Makoko, as in most of the developing world, the great engine of economic progress is different. It is unstructured, unofficial and, to most people, unfathomable.Academics call this sub-rosa sphere the informal economy, an attempt at objectivity that unfortunately links unlicensed markets with drug dealers and gun runners. But Ogun Dairo and the billions of other unlicensed businesspeople around the world are not criminals. So I propose a new name.Sculpted From French

In French, people who are particularly effective and self- motivated are known as “debrouillards.” Former French colonies have sculpted this word to their economic reality. People doing business on their own, without registering or paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la debrouillardise” -- or, sweetened for street use, System D.

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via Stealth of Nations

A recent World Bank report 'Industrial Clusters and Micro and Small Enterprises in Africa: From Survival to Growth' states that:

Existing studies on natural industrial clusters in Africa have found that the lack of managerial skills among entrepreneurs running micro and small enterprises is a major constraint for innovation and growth in the clusters. As a part of this study, pilot managerial skills training programs were conducted in two industrial clusters on an experimental basis, where a group of randomly selected entrepreneurs within the clusters were given three-week long crash course of based management such as bookkeeping, marketing, business planning, and production management. The impact evaluation of the experiments showed significant positive impacts of the training programs on value added and gross profits of enterprises.

Continuing:

Raising the current survival-type industrial clusters, which have been formed as a coping mechanism to weak investment climate, into more dynamic innovating clusters will be an important avenue for fostering growth of micro and small enterprises in Africa. While national efforts to improve investment climate and investments in human capital are undoubtedly important, there could be more targeted policies to be formulated, in complementing general policies, to support growth of micro and small domestic enterprises using existing industrial clusters as a natural springboard for their growth. In that context, the study discusses the merit of cluster-based managerial human capital development to build steps toward more innovation-oriented clusters, the importance of sound spatial planning policy, particularly at the local level in the context of urban planning, the need to expand market access and economic linkages for industrial clusters including regional integration and linkages with large enterprises

via TCI

Barry D Wood writing in Moneyweb:

“Among the non-western economic blocs, East Asia has the highest intraregional trade, comprising largely intermediate goods, underpinning the region’s global trade and competitiveness agenda, and attracting ample FDI. In other words, Factory Asia has worked well. Factory Southern Africa has not. Southern Africa remains the least integrated region in the world despite the presence of a customs union and a free trade area.”Report co-author Sandeep Mahajan says a successful Factory Southern Africa requires dynamic trade based on nimble networks of multi-national firms. Formal and informal trade barriers have to be removed. “South Africa,” he says, “needs to open up, as well as integrate its own rural and advanced regions.” Current policy, he says, “tends towards mercantilism, at the cost of much larger gains from trade based on the principles of comparative advantage."

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via Trade Africa

Ndidi Nwuneli founder of AACE Foods writes:

Image courtesy of Alhaji's Groove

In my current status as a local food content activist and food processor, I have become a keen observer of the activities of restaurants, caterers and food processing companies. Sadly, my observations reinforce the Minister’s assertions – at least 60% and in some cases, up to 90% of the food on our shelves and in our tummies is imported. For example, I visited a local restaurant outside Lagos early in the month and decided to run the same test. I asked the chef for the sources of the different food being offered to the clients. What surprised me was that in a relatively “local” joint, owned by Nigerians and focused on catering to our local taste buds, the menu was tilted in the favor of imported products or products that were imported and repackaged in Nigeria. Interestingly, the chef did not seem to give much thought to the issue of the source of food. In her mind, she was looking for the most convenient and cost effective options. When I asked her why the restaurant used imported instead of local chicken, she simply said that “they purchased it in the local market.”

An illuminating historical exhibition at the NYPL:

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.

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Cairo's Makers, in Bombastic Elements:

Oliver Wilkins documentary looks at Al-Darb-al-Ahmar, a district in Cairo where in the past highly skilled artisans plied their trade creating some of the world's most beautiful Islamic architecture...[continue reading]

In the New Agriculturist:

courtesy of Story Workshop

"Knowledge is like fire; you get it from your neighbour," explains Malawian radio producer Gladson Makowa, based in Blantyre. He should know; his radio programme, Mwana Alirenji, is the only media programme in the country to provide a national forum for dialogue amongst ordinary smallscale farmers, encouraging thousands to become food secure by listening to each other.

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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

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Dilip Ratha writing in NYTimes:

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.

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Frank Brandmaier at Global Policy Forum:

Trade between developing nations is booming, which potentially marks the beginning of a new era of "rapid growth." The developed world during the 1950s and 1960s experienced a similar growth trajectory. The trade flows, termed South-South trade, has grown dramatically over the past two decades. Nearly half of all the goods and services produced in developing countries are exported to other developing countries. Stronger trade ties among developing countries may yield positive outcomes, but fears are growing that some emerging powers are exploiting these relationships merely to extract raw materials...[continue reading]

How We Made It Africa spotlights expatriate farmers from Zimbabwe in an interview:

courtesy of how we made it in Africa

Give us an overview of the current situation at your farm?

At present we have 400 hectares of cassava in the land, growing well due to recent rains. We now also have six boreholes in place, plus a holding dam.
Irrigation is key to our project but there have been many delays in this area.
The promise of a constant electricity supply has not yet materialised, although there are many electrical poles and wires on our farm.
Finance is also still a problem. We battle to get the financial institutions to understand the concept of short-, medium- and long-term loans and the real need to have finance before the rainy season starts. We are geared up to plant another 300 hectares in 2010 and just need the finance to do it.

Read the rest of the interview here