My Beauty Best Teacher

Founded by Sindika Dokolo, The Sindika Dokolo Foundation's goal is to open the first Centre for Contemporary art in Luanda by 2012,it success has underlined the value of exposing the African public to its contemporary production.Its collection was chosen to represent the Africa Pavilion at the 2007 Venice biennale

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes:

So, here we are again. Two years on from the July 2005 gathering at Gleneagles, Scotland, the acceptable face of African leadership is preparing to assemble on the steps of the Group of Eight (G8) summit at Heiligendamm, Germany for a photo-opportunity amid more heartfelt pleas to increase aid to Africa...Africans themselves - from the grassroots to the more enlightened governments - have similarly argued that their principal route out of poverty lies in the creation of more jobs, something the aid industry is largely silent about. Gordon Brown has been conducting his own, lower-level but evidently affecting, love-affair with Africa. We can only hope that, as Tony Blair strides off-stage to leave him the limelight, he will lay aside the temptations of celebrity to apply some of the medicine that has been good enough for Britain in the last decade.

Robert Neuwirth author of Shadow Cities recently back from Lagos,Nigeria discusses self-regulated informal economies:

Paul Collier writes:

The debate on what the G8 should do has been entirely dominated by aid. More aid for parts of Africa would probably be helpful, but it would not be decisive in reversing divergence. It is, in fact, a sideshow relative to the other policy instruments that G8 governments control. It is the failure to use these instruments that is the tragic missed opportunity. Because aid has dominated the airwaves people are simply unaware of our true potential for action. Africa faces three distinctive economic problems, each amenable to a distinct policy.

A research team led by Robert H. Bates of the Africa Research Program found that:

African governments were instrumental in inhibiting the growth of their own economies in the late 20th century, according to a decade-long project conducted by African scholars and economists. Robert Bates, professor of government in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has been immersed in this economic survey, helping the economists to understand that governmental role....whatever the material situations of various African states — whether resource-scare or resource-rich, land-locked or coastal — each economy grew more slowly in Africa than it did in counterpart economies elsewhere in the world. In fact, without the “Africa effect,” they found that no natural obstacle would have prevented coastal African countries from growing at the same rate as Asian countries such as Mauritius or Thailand

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong reports on Courage Quashigah's campaign for a return to traditional foods:
He argues for,

Balanced nutrition by consuming healthy traditional Ghanaian food, as a bulwark against “preventing ill health,” is as vital as curative measures in the face of severe inadequate health infrastructure. Such observation comes in the face of similar admonitions in Japan, a country admired by Ghanaians for their ability to mix their traditional values with the dominant Western neo-liberal ones in their development process...The lessons here are that Ghanaian indigenous foods, with its heavy emphasis on green vegetables, like the famed healthy Arab/Mediterranean foods, are among some of the healthiest in the world.

The WSJ reports:

The richest nations recognized that the poorest continent can best help itself by unleashing investment and opening up to the private sector. The final aid numbers from Heiligendamm aren't as headline-grabbing as from the G-8 Gleneagles summit in 2005, but the strategy is far better suited to helping Africa out of poverty...The new aid is conditional on improved governance, i.e. less corruption, more respect for human rights, freer trade and openness to capital. The G-8's vision is spelled out in a communiqué on "Growth and Responsibility in Africa(pdf)," focused on spurring investment and business.
Take, for example, the Making Finance Work for Africa program, initiated by the World Bank and endorsed by the G-8. Under this initiative, G-8 countries will help national governments and regional organizations such as the African Union and the New Partnership for African Development to fund small loans, provide training for central bankers, reduce transaction costs for workers abroad who send remittances to families at home, and guarantee home-mortgage loans. None of this is big-ticket development assistance, but that's the point. Financial services help people help themselves to start businesses, buy homes and develop their economies.