My Beauty Best Teacher

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza states:

The value of a liberal arts education in general is too well known for a lengthy recounting. Suffice it to say, a liberal education gives every generation of students, as it gave mine, skills that are essential not only for the job market but for leading more fulfilling lives. At the very least it provides six sets of capacities or competencies: cognitive, communicative, computational, cultural, civic, and concrete.

THDBlog reports on 'Development Pornography':

“Upwards of 90% of the images of the majority world that are seen in the western media are produced by white photographers from the USA or Europe. This results in a one dimensional view often driven by a negative news agenda or the need to raise money.”

“Recognizing everybody’s communication rights in the information society is not mere slogan or campaign; it’s an integral part of social justice.”...Part of the reason for this kind of post-colonial choreography by INGOs is because they are still required to be the visual mediators of the poor world to the rich world. In Western society, our INGOs are inter-cultural gatekeepers. And you would often have for example, the young white INGO nurse talking passionately on television beside starving children…” Full story.

Edward B. Rackley writes in 3quarksdaily:

The nature of governance in these ex-colonies attests to the abiding power of the self-serving instinct and immediate gain, over and against the long-term goal of national progress. Such is the confounding irony of Africa’s entire post-colonial era in nations previously occupied by France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium alike: why is the colonial, predatory model of governance so faithfully re-enacted by ruling African elites? It’s as if all that negative conditioning only succeeded in instilling a predatory instinct in the new ruling class. Why are Mandela-style visions for collective prosperity not more common, given the shared experience of subjugation and occupation across the continent?

Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing opens the door to Vintage African TV ads:

You can find some great classic 1960s TV commercials from Africa on sites like YouTube and Africahit.com, but all of that stuff appears to originate from one source: the amazing Africa archives at Adeater.com. About a dozen MPEG files there, and products include everything from perfume to cool old cars to booze to cigarettes (add it up, you got a recipe for the good life).

FinancialNigeria reports:

Interfaced with the capacities and growth aspirations of Diaspora African businesses, some of the challenges faced by local entrepreneurs on the continent become opportunities for mutual benefits. A good number of Diaspora African entrepreneurs have distinguished themselves in their profession and industry. They have access to capital and are able to mobilize investible funds within and outside their community. They have integrated well with the international system, while they seek opportunities to further expand their businesses outside of their country of residence. In this connection, African is a vast market for them...While African governments continue to press for more favourable trade conditions perhaps when the Doha Round of negotiations resumes, a clear outcome of the process of engagements between African entrepreneurs at home and abroad can conduce to Africa moving out of the aid fixation. Leveraging on Diaspora network and capital, Africa economies can leapfrog on the crest of private sector-led growth.

Joanna Chung reports in the FT:

Investment bankers are grappling with a novel challenge: explaining to potential investors that exotic places such as Abuja and Accra, the capitals of Nigeria and Ghana, are among the new frontiers in the inter­national capital markets.

“We have a super-conviction about Africa,” he says. “We are very optimistic that the corner has been turned economically. You have to imagine where it will be in two or three years’ time, and it is going to change in ways that people don’t expect.
“I fully expect the capital markets in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop as rapidly as they have done in Russia over the past 10 years.”

Jerome Booth writes in Yahoo finance:

Africa's lack of globalization is evident in its unbalanced financing structure. State-controlled aid money dominates public finance in Africa in spite of improvements in macroeconomic policies, spreading democracy, and supportive commodity prices. Recent growth in local currency debt issuance is welcome, but foreign demand is rapidly exhausting local capacity to absorb selling, with potential destabilizing macro­economic implications if issuance continues unabated. Meanwhile, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the last great region of the world not to issue external sovereign bonds at all...Potential corporate bond issuance in Africa is maybe 10 times the sovereign (government) financing needs, but – and here is the rub – without a sovereign bond curve, the potential corporate issuers cannot issue as they cannot price sovereign risk. The bond market has far more capacity to finance Africa's development needs than aid, but bond markets need to lend to governments first. A balanced financing structure would replace aid-financed central government budget support with global bonds to sit alongside moderate local currency issuance and conventional aid flows.