Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) is shrinking. The global poor are not getting poorer. The world population grew from 4.5 billion people in 1981, to 6.9 billion in 2010, - a 60% increase. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty in developing nations dropped from over 50% to 21%. (From about 1.95 bil to 1.2 bil - and estimates are now well below 1 bil in 2015.)
That doesn't mean life just above the extreme poverty line is desirable. That doesn't mean there isn't a great deal more to do. But let's be honest about the trajectory. And let's also be honest that central to the decline in extreme poverty has been inclusion of the poor in networks of productivity and exchange - that is to say, they embraced some form of market capitalism. Unqualified dismal of "capitalism" (almost never defined by critics), as some religious leaders are prone to do, should be challenged.
When I lecture on global Christianity, I am sometimes asked whether, in retrospect, I would revise what I wrote many years ago in books like The Next Christendom. Usually my answer is no.
But in one critical area conditions are changing so quickly as to demand rethinking. Whereas I (and others) once presented Africa as a region of extreme poverty and deprivation, we now have to take account of economic development that in some regions is so rapid as to amount to a boom. We can only begin to outline the religious consequences. ...
... The main impact on Christian churches will likely fall into the category of “more of the same.” For some years now, older independent churches have faded in the face of competition from new denominations rooted in global Pentecostalism that emphasize the blessings of material prosperity. Some tailor their message to aspiring professional and entrepreneurial groups, which will become much more numerous in the coming decade. Charismatic megachurches should boom.
Prosperity teachings never lack for critics. Nevertheless, such teachings usually include important practical lessons for coping with the new globalized world—lessons, for example, in the responsible use of debt and credit. Latin American precedents suggest that these churches also provide a vital organizational focus for campaigns for social and political reform and civic improvement. Expect more, rather than less, religious politics.
Other likely effects lie in the longer term. Increasingly, the demand for labor should draw more women into full-time paid employment, particularly in emerging service sectors. Expect to see more Western-style debates over issues of gender and sexuality, although framed strictly in terms of African traditions. What a pleasure it would be to see Africa’s churches enduring some of the familiar discontents of prosperity.
When you think about Nelson Mandela, you probably think about freedom — free people, free country, free speech. What may be overshadowed by Mr. Mandela’s extraordinary legacy was his complicated journey to support free markets and a free economy.
When Mr. Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he told his followers in the African National Congress that he believed in the nationalization of South Africa’s main businesses. “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the A.N.C., and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable,” he said at the time.
Two years later, however, Mr. Mandela changed his mind, embracing capitalism, and charted a new economic course for his country.
The story of Mr. Mandela’s evolving economic view is eye-opening: It happened in January 1992 during a trip to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Mr. Mandela was persuaded to support an economic framework for South Africa based on capitalism and globalization after a series of conversations with other world leaders.
“They changed my views altogether,” Mr. Mandela told Anthony Sampson, his friend and the author of “Mandela: The Authorized Biography.” “I came home to say: ‘Chaps, we have to choose. We either keep nationalization and get no investment, or we modify our own attitude and get investment.”
Inside South Africa, Mr. Mandela’s quick reversal was viewed with skepticism, and questions have long persisted about whether he was somehow pressured by the West to open up the country’s economy.
However, according to Tito Mboweni, a former governor of the South African Reserve Bank, who accompanied Mr. Mandela to Davos, Mr. Mandela’s change of heart was genuine. ...
... Armed with these justifications for both the heart and the head, for the past six months FORBES has engaged in an experiment: Can focusing some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurial and philanthropic minds on the problems of one specific country [Liberia] make a tangible difference? With that in mind, we made Liberia the centerpiece of the second annual Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, attended in June by more than 150 billionaires and near-billionaires. President Sirleaf and several of the country’s top social entrepreneurs addressed the participants, who then broke into groups to see how they could help them. In October FORBES followed up, leading a delegation of a dozen top philanthropists and private sector altruists to Liberia on a three-day mission to see their how their ideas worked in action. ...
Property rights for aid: this could be the most effective anti-poverty
strategy in history
... But the Arab Spring was a demand for freedom, not necessarily democracy – and
the distinction between the two is crucial. Take, for example, the case of
Mohammed Bouazizi, who started this chain of events by burning himself alive
on a Tunisian street market two years ago. As his family attest, he had no
interest in politics. The freedom he wanted was the right to buy and sell,
and to build his business without having to pay bribes to the police or fear
having his goods confiscated at random. If he was a martyr to anything, it
was to capitalism.
All this has been established by Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist who
travelled to Egypt to investigate the causes of the Arab Spring. His team of
researchers found that Bouazizi had inspired 60 similar cases of
self-immolation, including five in Egypt, almost all of which had been
overlooked by the press. The narrative of a 1989-style revolution in hope of
regime change seemed so compelling to foreigners that there was little
appetite for further explanation. But de Soto’s team tracked down those who
survived their suicide attempts, and the bereaved families. Time and again,
they found the same story: this was a protest for the basic freedom to own
and acquire ras el mel, or capital.
Ten reasons why Africa can feed itself—and help feed the rest of the world too. ...
1. More Africans now live in cities
Africa is the most rapidly urbanizing region on the planet. And while it may seem counterintuitive, that’s great news for farmers.
“The single biggest stimulus to most farmers is a thriving local city,”
says Wiggins, who leads the agriculture program at the United Kingdom’s
Overseas Development Institute. ...
2. Farming is now cool
Farming in Africa is not only profitable, it’s become popular. Even the
educated and well-off, who long shunned getting their hands dirty, now
extol farming as a path to prosperity. ...
3. International demand for Africa’s crops is soaring
Global prices for African cocoa, cotton, and even green beans are at or
near historic highs. Cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, commands
double what it did in the 1990s, which means the farmers in Ghana who
grow it are together collecting $2 billion annually. Europe’s surging
demand for fresh vegetables and cut flowers has been a windfall for
African farmers. Even ordinary staples, such as maize, have risen
markedly in price. ...
4. The “lost crops” of Africa have been rediscovered
Long ignored, Africa’s “forgotten” crops, including cassava, sunflower
seeds, and cowpeas, have in the last two decades rapidly expanded in
production, bringing unexpected benefits. ...
5. Information technology is boosting farmers’ profits
Go to any African market in even the tiniest village and you’ll see
farmers busily text-messaging on their cellphones. By linking buyers and
sellers, and making it easier to disseminate important information like
market prices and better planting and harvesting techniques,
information technology is greatly enhancing farmer productivity and
allowing coordination at an unprecedented scale. ...
6. African farms use the least amount of modern technology in the world, so any uptick in usage could lead to enormous gains
Two of the most important technologies in farming are irrigation and
fertilizers, and yet both are largely absent in Africa. Cost is the
major reason. In much of the sub-Sahara, fertilizer costs two to three
times more than it does anywhere else in the world, largely because of
the shipping costs of imported ingredients. Irrigation schemes,
meanwhile, require government support, which has until now been
virtually absent. Once these two proven techniques become more
widespread, as they have nearly everywhere else, African farm
productivity will soar. ...
7. Government support for food producers is getting better
Everyone agrees that African farmers remain heavily inhibited by poor governance. ... But government aid to farmers is improving. ...
8. Women are getting better educated, and that will lead to better farm outcomes
Harsher environments will force African farmers (and their counterparts
around the world) to work smarter and make long-term investments that
they should be making anyway. In staving off doom, they will actually be
building a more sustainable future. ...
10. Africa has done it before and can do it again
After World War II, a starving Europe, its farms ruined by the most
destructive conflict in human history, leaned heavily on growers south
of the Sahara. Wheat from Kenya, maize from Zimbabwe, and fruits and
vegetables from western and southern Africa adorned European tables.
African farmers prospered, and by the early 1960s, they supplied 8
percent of the world’s tradable food. ...
... Six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies of the past decade are
in sub-Saharan Africa. A clutch of countries have enjoyed growth in
income per person of more than 5% a year since 2007. ...
... GDP is not a perfect measure of living standards. A new study from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative
takes a broader look at well-being in Africa. As well as income per
person, BCG’s gauge of living standards includes jobs, governance,
health, and inequality. Measured in this way, well-being in much of
sub-Saharan Africa is lower than it ought to be, given rising average
incomes per person. Levels of well-being in South Africa are out of
whack with its GDP per head. Kenya and Ghana do a much better job of
reaping the benefits of a growing economy.
Yet many of the
countries whose well-being has improved most in the past five years are
in Africa. This list is headed by Angola and includes Congo, Ethiopia,
Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda and Tanzania. All have enjoyed rapid
growth in GDP per person. But they have also done well at translating
that strong growth into improved well-being: in technical terms, the
correlation between GDP per person and well-being above one in these
countries (see chart). ...
... By almost every measure – of health, wealth and education – and for most of its people, life in Africa is getting better.
All of these developments are perhaps best
encapsulated by the UN’s Human Development Index. Over decades, that
organisation has measured health, education and poverty indicators
across the world to assess people’s quality of life. Since the turn of
the century, human development has not only improved in every one of
sub-Saharan Africa’s 45 countries but gains were bigger in the 2000s
than in any previous decade.
In many ways, Africa remains the world’s most
miserable place. None of its longstanding problems can be declared
solved and it faces some new ones, including rising global food prices
and climate change, issues discussed this week in Dublin.
The scale of challenges cannot be
underestimated. But Africa’s prospects are improving. The dashed hopes
of the post-independence decades now stand a better chance than ever of
being fulfilled.
Africans are helping themselves more than aid workers are, according to new research.
Analysis of cash flows by Hong Kong-based Ghanaian academic
Adams Bodomo shows that Africans living outside the continent send more
money home to their families than is sent by traditional Western aid
donors in what is called Official Development Assistance (ODA).
In 2010 - the most recent year for which meaningful
comparisons can be made, according to Mr Bodomo - the African diaspora
remitted $51.8bn (£34bn) to the continent.
In the same year, according to World Bank figures, ODA to Africa was $43bn (£28bn).
"I started the research to see if I could support a hunch I
had that money remitted by African families was more efficient aid than
ODA money," the Ghanaian professor told the BBC.
"I found it was clearly more efficient and better targeted but to my surprise I found it was also a much bigger sum." ...
... Much of the promising economic news coming out of Africa reflects the
benefit of rising commodity prices. The continent can also expect to
capitalize on having a comparatively young demographic structure, as the
growth 16 to 30 age bracket provides the potential for an expanded
workforce. This is also the demographic that will rapidly adopt mobile
technology, which is likely to increase both markets and productivity on
the continent.
With sharp and rapid growth, however, there is greater economic
disparity. While global demand for Africa’s natural resources will
continue to attract investors, the growing gap between the rich and the
poor could trigger social and political instability in the future if
countries do not take measures to reduce economic disparity so that more
people will benefit from the growth of national and regional economies.
African nations should also be careful to direct a sizable portion of
the surplus from this growth into infrastructure and economic
diversity, so that nations will not be dependent on high commodity
prices to sustain a higher standard of living over the long-term.
Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.
"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are
thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new
survey shows.
Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance
surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said
they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years.
Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat
negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."
... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...
... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...
... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...
... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...
5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea
"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.
This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."
8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.
Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the
nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011
American Community Survey.
With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are
multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the
U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to
execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a
Latino market perceived to be homogenous?
11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”
"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an
enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about
the scarcity of resources. (If you belong to both of those groups,
there is little advice that I can offer.) However, in between those
poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."
... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.
Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...
... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs,
however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political
party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In
comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party
correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents'
political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the
researchers wrote. ...
STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.
He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...
... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...
Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new
meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed
not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the
building blocks for cutting-edge materials.
Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the
director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for
Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...
1. Too often Westerners perceive African economy as a monolithic basket case. There are actually many regions of that are very hopeful. Ozwald Boateng explains Why entrepreneurs are back in Africa
3. Lots of recent talk about whether or not e-books will ever actually totally supplant hard copy books. This week Mashable explores Why Are People Still Buying CDs? (And people are still buying them.)
7. I almost didn't link this article because I could swear I've linked it before. Why Does Deja Vu Happen?
8. Several months ago I saw a speech expert interviewed has offered voice training to a number of famous figures. One was Margaret Thatcher. They showed her speaking in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, after receiving voice training. A big piece of the change was lessening the modulation in tone and pitch, which tends to vary more widely with female voices. The changes were intended to make her sound more authoritative, which both men and women, unjustified as it may be, more often associate with male vocal traits. But apparently, the thing that really triggers gender detection in our language is the way we use S's. Change Your Perceived Gender by Pronouncing S's Differently
... So, yes, let us acknowledge these problems in Africa, and let us not
be romantic about the opportunities that exist in Africa. Instead, let
us be realistic about the opportunities, and the reality is that the
opportunities for investment, trade, and economic development are almost
limitless on the continent of 54 different nations. There are
challenges in some places but extraordinary opportunity in other
places.
Many parts of Africa are booming and they present the greatest
growth opportunities in the world at this time. Accra is a boom town,
emerging into a global city. Ghana itself is growing almost as fast. In
the Sahel, next to a Mali is a Burkina Faso, which is becoming a
regional hub of development and a trading center between Europe and
Africa.
Southern Africa is full of promise and has a far more receptive
business climate than in many parts of the world, and the work of the
East Africa Community is beginning to open the nations of East Africa as
important business destinations for the world.
The promise of Africa is recognized internationally by many nations.
While we talk much about the Chinese in Africa, so too are the
Indians, Malaysians, Japanese, the Arab nations, Turkey, Israel, the
Russians, the South Koreans, the Brazilians, and of course the
Europeans. Let us also not forget that when energy investment is taken
out of the equation, South Africa is a larger investor in the rest of
Africa than is the United States. ...
"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism
but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of
anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity
offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the
“specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in
discipleship” (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and
baptizes that as the content of Christianity.
Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says
Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism
in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any
particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go
to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people
into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals
right-wing authoritarianism.
I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of
the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of
the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."
"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support,
and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an
important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive.
Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners
that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture.
That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never
truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about
immigrant groups in the United States
show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not
wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in
individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a
life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the
basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans
frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their
family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a
family."
"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the
percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from
16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books
dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of
any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called
statistically insignificant."
Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.
The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).
North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.
West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.
Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.
Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.
On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.
The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.
Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.
15. When we think of transportation in the United States, few of us think about river and costal water transportation. Yet a great many goods and commodities are shipped on our rivers. The Midwest drought is having an impact on a major artery of that transportation network. The Mississippi River's Water Levels Are Dropping, And Could Shut Down Trade Next Week
"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase
and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn
out. That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."
"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there’s a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It’s even detectable in babies. ...
... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...
... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."
"... Is this a catastrophe of the sort that took place a generation ago,
when mass famines in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s killed hundreds of
thousands of people at a time? No. This time around, the cause is much
simpler, and the solution much more readily at hand. We’re experiencing a
basic crisis of undersupply: After three decades of worldwide food
surpluses, starting in 2008, the world’s farms have not produced enough
food to meet demand.
People no longer doubt, as they did 40 years
ago, that the world is capable of producing enough food for all of
humanity, even if our numbers grow to nine billion. We know it can, and
we know how to make it happen. Farms in Africa and the Indian
subcontinent – where the land is fertile and the growing season long –
should be producing much more food than their European counterparts.
Instead, India produces half as much per hectare, and Africa hardly
anything. They could easily feed the world.
This isn’t hard to
solve, and farmers know what’s needed: better transport and market
infrastructure, new seeds engineered for their climates and needs, an
end to subsidies and trade barriers, a shift from survival-based to
commercial farming practices. And these things are being done (in part
because farming is suddenly profitable), albeit too slowly. This decade
may well be remembered as the unfortunate gap between the first Green
Revolution (which ended mass famines and widespread Asian starvation in
the 1970s) and the second (which is poised to make even bigger changes
in Africa and Asia). Until supply catches up to demand, we have a
crisis.
What stands in the way, this time as last time, is
misunderstanding. Aid organizations in the West and governments in the
developing world, motivated by myths of village tranquillity, pay people
to stay rural rather than to consolidate their holdings and modernize
their farming. Too many people believe, falsely, that a shift to
commercial agriculture means a shift to big or exploitative farms,
rather than more income for small farmers. We allow superstitions about
engineered crops to become progress-blocking policies. We let
meaningless middle-class fetishes for “organic” or “local” foods pollute
the debate, when what’s needed is more protein, now. ..."
There has been a substantial reduction in both the extreme poverty rate
and the number of people living in extreme poverty since the early
1980s, according to information from the World Bank poverty database.
The World Bank maintains data on developing world nations, which
include both low income and middle income nations. The analysis below
summarizes developing world (low and middle income nations) poverty
trends from 1981 to the latest available year, 2008 (Table and Figure
1).
The article also includes this graph:
Go to the article for a number of interesting nuances in how poverty has changed.
(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)
1. Pray for Egypt Today!
More than 50 million Egyptians are voting today on a constitution that would be a giant step backward for Egypt and much of the Middle East, marginalizing women and religious minorities. A nation that has historically been a voice of moderation, the largest Muslim nation in the region, will likely move toward becoming an Islamist state. Remember to pray for Egypt. (See the Economist'sThe Founding Brothers)
2. Our prayers are with families of the victims at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Grace and peace to the entire community.
Traffic deaths in the USA continued their historic decline last year,
falling to the lowest level since 1949, the government announced
Monday.
A total of 32,367 motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians died in 2011,
a 1.9% decrease from 2010. Last year’s toll represents a 26% decline
from 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
said. ...
... The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as
well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The
state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white
students.
“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have
any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health
commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in
the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011....
....The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells. ...
... The research is still in its early stages, and many questions remain.
The researchers are not entirely sure why the treatment works, or why it
sometimes fails. One patient had a remission after being treated only
twice, and even then the reaction was so delayed that it took the
researchers by surprise. For the patients who had no response
whatsoever, the team suspects a flawed batch of T-cells. The child who
had a temporary remission apparently relapsed because not all of her
leukemic cells had the marker that was targeted by the altered T-cells. ...
....In 2011, 1.4 million chlamydia infections were reported to the CDC.
The rate of cases per 100,000 people increased 8%, to 457.6 in 2011 from
423.6 in 2010.
The CDC reported 321,849 gonorrhea infections. The
rate increased 4% to 104.2 cases per 100,000 in 2011 from 100.2 in
2010. Like chlamydia, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease,
a major cause of infertility in women.
Last year, 13,970 primary and secondary syphilis cases were reported. The rate of 4.5 cases per 100,000 was unchanged from 2010. ...
7. You may be bilingual but can you write in two languages, one with each hand, at the same time?!
10. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones speculates on why liberals have more exaggerated perceptions of political differences. We Are More Alike Than We Think
11. A surprising "right to work" bill was signed into law in Michigan, of all places. That has spurred a lot of debate about unions and the right to work. Michael Kinsley wrote a thoughtful piece opposing RTW, The Liberal Case Against Right-to-Work Laws. David Henderson has piece in support of RTW, The Economics of "Right to Work".
12. Slate has a piece about The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement.
Keith Kloor opines on the division between mondernist environmentalists
(or eco-pragmatists) and conservation traditionalists.
...
Modernist greens don't dispute the ecological tumult associated with the
Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as
well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this
end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft "a new vision of a planet
in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient
ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."
This
shift in thinking is already under way. For example, ecologists
increasingly appreciate (and study) the diversity of species and
importance of ecosystem services in cities, giving rise to the
discipline of urban ecology. That was unthinkable at the dawn of the
modern environmental movement 50 years ago, when greens loathed cities
as the antithesis of wilderness. ...
13. One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes I remember from my
childhood was when this woman ends up trapped in a department store at
night. The mannequins begin calling to her. She discovers she is actually a mannequin who
has over stayed her time out in the world and it is time for the next
mannequin to spend some time outside the store. This story confirms my worst nightmares: In Some Stores, the Mannequins Are Watching You
15. One of the biggest concerns about fracking technology is the enormous amount of water it uses. A company has figured out how to recycle water so that far less water is used in the fracking process. Solving fracking's biggest problem
... 3D printing represents the latest version of what industry experts call
"additive manufacturing" — a way to turn practically any computer
designs into real objects by building them up layer-by-layer using
plastics, metals or other materials. The technology could end up
affecting every major industry — aerospace, defense, medicine, transportation, food, fashion — and have an even bigger impact on U.S. manufacturing than the robot revolution. ...
20. Michael Cheshire has a great piece in Leadership Journal on "What I learned about grace and redemption through my friendship with a Christian pariah." Going To Hell with Ted Haggard
".... A while back I was having a business lunch at a sports bar in the
Denver area with a close atheist friend. He's a great guy and a very
deep thinker. During lunch, he pointed at the large TV screen on the
wall. It was set to a channel recapping Ted's fall. He pointed his
finger at the HD and said, "That is the reason I will not become a
Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that's what
keeps me away."
It was well after the story had died down, so I had to study the screen
to see what my friend was talking about. I assumed he was referring to
Ted's hypocrisy. "Hey man, not all of us do things like that," I
responded. He laughed and said, "Michael, you just proved my point. See,
that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and
forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys
can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you
talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say
he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I
stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy
failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to
him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat
your own. Always have. Always will."
He was running late for a meeting and had to take off. I, however, could
barely move. I studied the TV and read the caption as a well-known
religious leader kept shoveling dirt on a man who had admitted he was
unclean. And at that moment, my heart started to change. I began to
distance myself from my previously harsh statements and tried to
understand what Ted and his family must have been through. When I
brought up the topic to other men and women I love and respect, the very
mention of Haggard's name made our conversations toxic. Their reactions
were visceral."
21. Leonardo Bonucci got a yellow card for faking collision during a
soccer game. It should have been a red card. No one deserves to be a professional soccer player with acting skills
this bad!
AP has a story summarizing Global Trends 2030, a report put out by the U.S. Intelligence community.
... The study said that in
a best-case scenario, Americans, together with nearly two-thirds of the
world's population, will be middle class, mostly living in cities,
connected by advanced technology, protected by advanced health care and
linked by countries that work together, perhaps with the United States
and China cooperating to lead the way.
Violent
acts of terrorism will also be less frequent as the U.S. drawdown in
troops from Iraq and Afghanistan robs extremist ideologies of a rallying
cry to spur attacks. But that will likely be replaced by acts like
cyber-terrorism, wreaking havoc on an economy with a keystroke, the
study's authors say.
In countries where there are declining birth rates and an aging population like the U.S., economic growth may slow.
"Aging
countries will face an uphill battle in maintaining living standards,"
Kojm said. "So too will China, because its median age will be higher
than the U.S. by 2030."
The rising populations
of disenfranchised youth in places like Nigeria and Pakistan may lead
to conflict over water and food, with "nearly half of the world's
population ... experiencing severe water stress," the report said.
Africa and the Middle East will be most at risk, but China and India are
also vulnerable.
That instability could lead
to conflict and contribute to global economic collapse, especially if
combined with rapid climate change that could make it harder for
governments to feed global populations, the authors warn.
That's
the grimmest among the "Potential Worlds" the report sketches for 2030.
Under the heading "Stalled Engines," in the "most plausible worst-case
scenario, the risks of interstate conflict increase," the report said.
"The U.S. draws inward and globalization stalls." ...
Here is the overview from the report:
Over the next two decades, the relative power of major international
actors will shift markedly. Around 2030, after nearly a century as the
preeminent global economic power, the United States will be surpassed
by China as the world’s largest economy. With its trade in goods
expected to nearly double that of the U.S. and Europe, China’s
international economic clout will reach new heights. By 2030, India
will become the world’s most populous country and third-largest economy,
while Brazil’s economy will rank fourth in size. India and Brazil will
join China at the high table of 21st century international
politics alongside the United States, even as the relative weight of
Russia and Japan diminishes. The European economy will remain in the
top tier, but it is not clear whether Europe will be able to act with
common purpose to leverage this source of strength.
With its enhanced economic base, Beijing could rival Washington in
overall military spending, even as a slowing Chinese economy and
internal political conflict complicate China’s ability to lead
internationally. The United States will remain primus inter pares
in light of its continued advantages across the full spectrum of
national power and the legacy benefits of its leadership. It will,
however, be operating in a post-Western world in which the bulk of
global economic power is held by countries whose per capita incomes are
far below those of the traditional great powers. This reality will
leave China, India, Brazil, and other players focused on internal
development and domestic challenges, torn between their desire to be
global powers and their interest in free-riding on Western management of
the international system.
How will the rise of the rest impact the international system? The National Intelligence Council’s draft Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds maps out three broad scenarios:
Reverse Engines. Under this scenario, the
international system would consist of several powerful countries — but
no single state or bloc of states would have the political or economic
leverage to drive the international community toward collective action.
Such a world, characterized by a global vacuum of power, assumes that
the United States will no longer be willing or capable of sustaining the
predominant leadership role it has assumed since 1945. With no other
country able to step in to replace the U.S. as a global leader, the
resulting divergence of interests would lead to fragmentation and the
inability of great powers to work cooperatively to solve global issues.
Mercantilism and protectionism could lead economic globalization to go
into reverse, constraining technological breakthroughs required to
manage scarce global resources. Conflict and disorder would follow.
Great Power Convergence. An alternative scenario is
what the NIC calls a “fusion” world, in which major powers work
together to adopt and enforce a set of globally accepted rules and
norms. As U.S. predominance over the international system recedes, other
emerging powers would step in to assume greater responsibility for the
management of international affairs commensurate with their swelling
economic might. Emerging powers emerge as full stakeholders in a global
order that is transformed by power shifts but remains liberal and
pluralistic. Great power concert (perhaps enabled by democratization in
China) to meet global challenges increases the stability of the
international system even as power is diffused within it. U.S.
resilience enables it to create enduring partnerships with rising powers
to sustain the basis of liberal order. Technological advances create
new possibilities for joint management of key global challenges,
rewarding positive-sum behavior by the great powers.
Multipolar Divergence—U.S. Primacy. A third
scenario, one the NIC calls “fragmentation,” involves a multipolar
system characterized by a divergence of views among great powers that
challenges global governance. The United States would continue to
maintain disproportionate global influence and leverage that influence
to address global challenges by working through coalitions of
like-minded states. A multispeed global economy accelerates the
diffusion of power but an alternative coalition to the West does not
form, with developing giants consumed by their domestic challenges –
even as the global middle class explodes in ways that transform politics
within the rising powers. With inclusive global institutions
effectively stalemated, the United States instead turns to its old and
new allies in Europe and Asia, who would continue to see Washington as
their partner of choice in advancing the norms and rules of a liberal
order. The risk of conflict increases with the continued rise of new
powers like China and the rapid pace of technological change.
One key conclusion of the NIC study is that the future role of the
United States in the international system is a decisive variable in
determining what kind of “alternative world” will exist in 2030. The
choices U.S. leaders make – about how to marshal (and preserve) domestic
resources, how vigorously to assert U.S. military and economic
leadership overseas, and how much to invest in alliances old and new –
will be central to determining which of the above pathways the
international system will follow over the coming 20 years. To a certain
extent, the answer to the question of how the “rise of the rest”
impacts the U.S.-led international system is that it is not up to them…
so much as it is up to us.
Last year, I had the privilege of visiting the leaders of
the Synod of Syria and Lebanon and the Synod of the Nile (Egypt) a year ago,
partner denominations to the Presbyterian Church USA. I heard firsthand about
the struggles of Christians in these countries. It was made apparent to me that
a central component to any lasting peace in the region is for moderate Muslims,
Christians, and religious minorities to form a healthy civil society. Dedicated
Christians from our partner denominations in these regions have worked diligently toward that end.
We are hearing a great deal about the violence in Syria, and
with good reason. The immediacy of the suffering is tragic. But I sense that
Egypt may be the bigger story in the long run. There are more than eighty million
Egyptians, dwarfing the size of other nations in the region. There is also a
history of stronger, more tolerant, societal institutions. If Egypt is transformed
into an Islamist state, then I think the implications well be tragic and far
reaching for much of the rest of the region.
As I recall, about 90% of Egyptians are Muslim. About 9% are
Coptic Orthodox Christians. About 1% are Protestant. Moderate Muslims
and Christians alike were part of the protests that ousted Mubarak. Moderate Muslims
and Christians are leading the protests against Morsi’s power grab and against
the troubling new constitution that is being proposed.
While in Egypt, I had the privilege of dining in the home of
a young family who also acted as our tour guides for a day. The wife and mother of this family has been posting
articles and pictures relating to the protests on Facebook, like this picture
of brave women taking the front row of a march towards
the presidential palace carrying their own shrouds (coffin cloth) in their
arms.
And this picture of a Christian
doctor treating an injured member of the Muslim Brotherhood on the grounds of a
church in Cairo.
Three hours ago my friend posted that the
referendum on the constitution has now been delayed until the 12th. The
pressure has been to get this constitution passed as quickly as possible and
there is some hope this delay may lead good things.
Let us all remember to keep Egypt in our prayers. Let us
pray that moderate Muslims and Christians will be able to influence events
toward the creation of a healthy civil society, delivering Egypt from the
bondage of extremist elements, even was we continue to pray for an end to the horrific suffering in Syria.
AFRICA’S “mobile decade”, when telephones at last reached most corners
of the continent, has meant a huge improvement in the lives of the poor.
But quantifying it is hard. How useful can a mobile phone be to someone
living on less than $2.50 a day, the World Bank’s standard benchmark of
poverty? Researchers in Kenya have given a partial answer. They find
that people will skip a meal or choose to walk instead of paying for a
bus fare so that they can keep their phone in credit. ...
... Still, only 16% of respondents said they were using their phones to
browse the internet. The real breakthrough in the Kenyan market has been
in people’s ability to send and receive money, with more than
two-thirds doing so by phone. East Africa’s biggest success has been
M-Pesa, a mobile-based money-transfer system pioneered by Safaricom, a
leading Kenyan operator. Its simple interface, which works on any phone,
has brought financial services to Kenya’s poor majority, enabling the
movement of some $8.6 billion in the first half of this year. ...
There has been a big interest in microfinance in recent
years. The aim of many organizations was to make loans available to the poor so
they could start businesses and foster economic growth. But Daryl Collins, et
al., in Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day, show
that business formation is not the highest priority for the poor. They had
hundreds of poor families in India, Bangledesh, and South Africa fill out
diaries recording their financial transactions for one year. What they learned
is that the biggest financial challenge the poor have is cash flow management.
Money does not come in in a steady stream across the year. Yet if you save up
money is very difficult to keep it safe. Having the money readily at hand also
makes it harder not to spend. Banking by phone is proving to be a major impact
on financial management for the poor. With increased ability to manage finances
will also come a greater capacity for entrepreneurial activity.
4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world’s first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm is able to produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."
5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:
"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism;
they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in
moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their
monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean
striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to
correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America
was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be
hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the
post–Reagan Republican Party."
"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."
I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten
minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had
gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided
nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been
raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be
fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say
anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys
around the table nodded in agreement."
7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history
8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online
"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."
Bono has learned much about music over more than three decades with U2.
But alongside that has been a lifelong lesson in campaigning — the
activist for poverty reduction in Africa spoke frankly on Friday about
how his views about philanthropy had now stretched to include an
appreciation for capitalism.
The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE,
a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it
had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of
capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as
someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the
cliches.”
“Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a
bridge,” he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and
investors at the F.ounders tech
conference in Dublin. “We see it as startup money, investment in new
countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce.” ...
Poverty is not first and foremost an absence wealth. Poverty is
exclusion from networks of productivity and exchange. Inclusion into
those networks is the solution.
Economic development has three stages, much like triage. Stage 1 is
relief. The bleeding has to be stopped and the patient has to be
stabilized. Stage 2 is rehabilitation. Wounds need to be healed and the
person needs to be nurtured to health. Stage 3 is development. Assisting
a relatively healthy patient toward greater health and flourishing.
In the face of a natural disaster like a tsunami or a hurricane, we
must do relief. Water, food, clothing, shelter, and medical care are
paramount. Once the situation is stabilized comes a time of rebuilding
basic infrastructure. But if we want to help beyond relief and
rehabilitation, the focus must be upon expanding inclusion in networks
of productivity and exchange. All three stages are necessary but all
three have a different focus.
The propensity of Western advocates for the poor is to see most
instances of poverty as problems needing relief, with maybe some cases
needing rehabilitation. Economic development isn't even on the radar.
(And in fact, words like "markets" and "development" are voiced with
derision in some quarters.) But at any given moment, very few poor
nations are in need of significant relief, some could use rehabilitative
work, and most need economic development. We treat countries needing
economic development as victims needing relief. The consequences can be
devastating.
Here is a graph from the Hope International website. (It comes from Bill Easterly's The White Man's Burden, page 47. I have unsuccessfully looked for an updated chart with this data.)
When
aid grows to be about 7% of nation's economy a transformation begins to
take place. National leaders turn their attention away from their
domestic business sector. They feel less and less accountabile to making
their domestic economy work or to being responsive to their
constituents. Their energies turn toward the aid giver. The mission
becomes retention and expansion of aid.
Yet Western advocates talk in terms of the West has X% of the world's
wealth while sub-Saharan African countries have only Y%. Solution? Give
wealth to equalize the difference and "relieve" the poverty. As Bono
has learned, this "relief" orientation is not only not the answer, it is
a contributor to sustained impoverishment. Development and expansion of
networks of productivity and exchange are the answer.
A report by the World Bank found that easing fees, rules, and border restrictions could help Africa's food crisis, and could also lead to economic growth.
Africa could avoid food shortages if it reduces the tangled web of
rules, fees and high costs strangling regional food trade and by putting
large swathes of uncultivated land to productive use, a World Bank
report said on Wednesday.
Just 5 percent of Africa's cereal imports are now provided by African
farmers, according to the report released on the eve of an African
Union summit on agriculture and trade in Ethiopia.
"Too often
borders get in the way of getting food to homes and communities which
are struggling with too little to eat," said Makhtar Diop, World Bank
vice president for Africa.
The bank estimated that 19 million people are in danger of hunger and
malnutrition in West Africa's Sahel region. Yet, removing cross-border
restrictions could help avoid food crises if farmers were allowed to
trade more easily with each other and get food to communities facing
shortages.
In addition, the World Bank estimated that fewer
restrictions on food trade could generate an estimated $20 billion in
annual earnings for African governments.
Food trade barriers also
increase the cost to the consumer and the farmer, the World Bank said.
For example, farmers on holdings in Africa who sell surplus harvest
typically receive less than 20 percent of the consumer price of their
produce, with the rest being eaten up by various transaction costs and
post harvest losses.
"This clearly limits the incentive to produce for the market," the World Bank said. ...
The New Rice for Africa variety has become part of the debate over
whether a Green Revolution is the best approach to ensure food security
in Africa. ...
JAMBUR, The Gambia—The dissemination of the high-yielding New Rice
for Africa (NERICA) seeds has sparked contention that is a microcosm for
a central debate in global agricultural development: does Africa need
its own Green Revolution, an effort that 50 years ago saw dramatic
productivity increases through the use of new crop technologies in Asia
and Latin America?
NERICA, developed by 2004 World Food Prize winner Dr. Monty Jones,
is being promoted by the Africa Rice Center mainly in West African
countries where rice is a staple food. It is a cross between an Asian
variety, responsible for the high yield, and an African variety, which
ensures its local adaptability.
West African governments have touted NERICA as a hallmark of a new
Green Revolution and as a path to boosting rice self-sufficiency,
especially after the 2008 food price spike exposed the dangers of import
dependence. On the other side, advocates of “food sovereignty”—centered
on farmers’ control over food systems—have voiced strong opposition.
The advocacy organization GRAIN has labeled NERICA a “trap for small farmers”
who will become vulnerable to expensive chemical fertilizers and seeds,
a situation widely cited by critics of the 1960s Green Revolution.
What I’ve found in Jambur, which in 2002 became the first Gambian
village to access the new crop, is a much more nuanced picture, one that
in fact incorporates elements of each side of the debate. This suggests
what a tactical misstep it would be for food sovereignty loyalists to
completely remove themselves from engaging with a new variety just
because it has become embedded in the discourse of a new Green
Revolution. ...
... Deborah Potts, a demographer from Kings College London who studies
urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, says that more people are moving
from urban areas to rural ones in countries like Ivory Coast, Mali,
Zambia and Central African Republic. She says these "counter-movements"
are the result of the severe shortage of jobs in many of Africa's
teeming cities. This out-migration has slowed the expected growth rate
even of cities like Lagos, Nigeria, currently the most populous urban
area in Africa.
Cities in Africa are still growing, Potts says, just not necessarily
from the rural-to-urban migration patterns seen in other developing
countries like China and India in recent decades.
Better education for women, reductions in child mortality and higher
incomes have driven falling birth rates in many parts of the world,
particularly in towns and cities. But urban Africa, with its shortage of
jobs and persistently high rates of child and maternal mortality, has
not seen the declines expected.
Today in Africa, "most urban population growth comes from natural
increase in the cities and not from migration. This comes as a surprise
to most people," Potts said.
Asia - not Africa - remains the world's fastest urbanising region, she
said, noting that Africa "may remain primarily rural for decades", in
part because of a lack of employment opportunities in cities.
So while natural increase may be what's driving urban growth in these
African cities, it will also be driving growth in Africa's rural areas.
The masses may not be the same in the rural areas as they are in the
urban areas, but if Potts is correct, there could be a strong
urban-rural dichotomy in Africa for a long time coming.
Over the coming months, A Matter of Life and Tech will feature a range
of voices from people building Africa’s tech future. This week, United
Nation’s mobile learning specialist Steve Vosloo argues phones could be
the future of education on the continent.
... If mobile learning is to have a real impact, we need to also rethink
what we mean by education, schooling and what skills it delivers.
Recently, a United Nations task team led by UNESCO produced a think piece on education and skills
beyond 2015. The piece predicts there will be a shift away from
teaching in a classroom-centred paradigm of education to an increased
focus on learning, which happens informally throughout the day. A core
feature of mobiles is that they support ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning.
Because they are personal and always at hand, they are perfectly suited
to support informal and contextual learning.
The report also
predicts that there will be an increased blurring of the boundaries
between learning, working and living. Mobiles already support skills
development in a range of fields including agriculture and healthcare,
and provide paying job opportunities for mobile-based ‘microwork’.
In
addition to education basics such as literacy and numeracy, the reports
says, there will be a need for digital and information literacy, as
well as critical thinking and online communication skills. With the
guidance of teachers, mobiles provide a medium for developing these
skills for millions of Africans who go online ‘mobile first’ or even
‘mobile-only’.
On a continent where education change – what should
be taught, how it should be delivered and assessed, and where learning
happens – is inevitable, and mobiles are more affordably and effectively
networking people to each other and information than ever before, the
combined promise is bigger than the sum of the parts. Mobile learning is
here to stay and will only influence and enable learning more and more.
Africa’s fast-growing middle class has money to spend
... Africa already has a $1.8 trillion economy and is forecast to have a population of 1.3 billion by 2020. “Lion” economies such as Ghana and Rwanda have grown faster than South Korea, Taiwan and other East Asian “tiger” economies in five of the past seven years, albeit from a low base.
Unilever is not the only consumer-goods giant moving in. Africa accounts for only 3% of group sales of Nestlé, the world’s biggest food firm, but the Swiss behemoth is betting big there too: its African investments will total SFr1 billion ($1 billion) in 2011 and 2012 against a total capital expenditure of SFr4.8 billion last year. It has 29 factories on the continent and wants to build more. SABMiller, the world’s second-largest beermaker, is planning to invest up to $2.5 billion in Africa over the next five years to build and revamp breweries. In the year to March 2012, the continent (excluding South Africa) was SABMiller’s fastest-growing region, with volumes up by 13%.
Africa’s attractions stem from its new middle class, loosely defined by the African Development Bank as anyone who spends between $2 and $20 a day in purchasing-power parity terms. The bank estimates that more than 34% of Africans (326m people) fit this description, up from 27% in 2000 (see chart). ...
Washington — Economists say Africa will grow by 5.5 percent in 2012, with seven African countries expected to rank among the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world during the next five years, projections that are making the continent an increasingly popular destination for foreign investors. ...
... Foreign direct investment projects across the continent grew 27 percent in 2011 from 2010, a "stellar performance" that continued a longer-term trend of FDI growth by 153 percent in absolute terms since 2003.
But despite this growth, the survey of more than 500 investors and business leaders highlights a so-called perception gap of Africa's attractiveness.
"Those already doing business on the continent were overwhelmingly positive, ranking Africa's relative attractiveness above every other region except Asia, and even then, only marginally so," the report said.
"In stark contrast," it said, "respondents with no business presence in Africa were overwhelmingly negative." It said these respondents view Africa as "by far the least attractive investment destination in the world," citing risk factors such as political instability, corruption and security as major obstacles.
"This represents not so much a gap as a chasm between perception and reality," the report said, adding that "the facts tell a different story -- one of reform, progress and growth."
In addition to more than tripling its economic output during the past decade, Africa is rapidly democratizing, combating corruption and working to improve the climate and ease of doing business for foreign investors, the report states. ...
... The decline in African child mortality is speeding up. In most countries it now falling about twice as fast as during the early 2000s and 1990s. More striking, the average fall is faster than it was in China in the early 1980s, when child mortality was declining around 3% a year, admittedly from a lower base.
The only recent fall comparable to the largest of those in Africa occurred in Vietnam between 1985-90 and 1990-95, when child mortality fell by 37%—and even that was slower than in Senegal and Rwanda. Rwanda’s child-mortality rate more than halved between 2005-06 and 2010-11. Senegal cut its rate from 121 to 72 in five years (2005-10). It took India a quarter of century to make that reduction. The top rates of decline in African child mortality are the fastest seen in the world for at least 30 years.
The striking thing about the falls is how widespread they have been. They have happened in countries large and small, Muslim and Christian, and in every corner of the continent. The three biggest successes are in east, west and central Africa. The success stories come from Africa’s two most populous countries, Nigeria and Ethiopia, and from tiddlers such as Benin (population: 9m). ...
As African lions outpace Asian tigers, one of the world's poorest states is moving from civil war bust to boom – but who will gain?
... A construction boom is under way here, concrete proof of the economic revolution in Mozambique. Growth hit 7.1% last year, accelerating to 8.1% in the final quarter. The country, riven by civil war for 15 years, is poised to become the world's biggest coal exporter within the next decade, while the recent discovery of two massive gas fields in its waters has turned the region into an energy hotspot, promising a £250bn bonanza.
The national currency was the best performing in the world against the dollar. Investment is pouring in on an unprecedented scale; as if to prove that history has a sense of irony, Portuguese feeling Europe's economic pain are flocking back to the former colony, scenting better prospects than at home. Increasingly this is the rule, not the exception in Africa, which has boasted six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies in the past decade. The first oil discovery in Kenya was confirmed on Monday, while the British firm BG Group announced that one of its gas fields off the Tanzanian coast was bigger than expected and could lead to billions of pounds of investment. Bankers, analysts and politicians have never been so bullish about the continent, which barely 10 years ago was regarded as a basket case.
From Cape Town to Cairo, there are signs of a continent on the move: giant infrastructure projects, an expanding middle class, foreign equity scrambling for opportunities in telecoms, financial services and products aimed at a billion consumers. Growth is no magic bullet for reducing inequality or fostering democracy, but the stubborn truth that it is still the world's poorest continent has done little to dull the confidence and hype about the African renaissance. ...
Could any real country have an economy like Panem’s? Actually, yes.
At first glance, the economic landscape depicted in Suzanne Collins’ best-selling Hunger Games trilogy doesn’t make much sense. Despite its post-apocalyptic condition, the fictional nation of Panem is quite technologically advanced. It has high-speed trains, hovercrafts, extraordinary genetic engineering capabilities, and the ability to create extremely advanced weapons. And yet Panem is also a society of tremendous economic inequality, with clear examples of absolute economic deprivation and even famine.
Economic theory teaches us that over the long term, prosperity is driven by two factors—capital accumulation and the “Solow residual” of technology—and that of the two elements the technology is more important. Perhaps the best example comes to us from the experience of Germany and Japan around World War II. These were, before the war began, prosperous, technologically advanced societies rich in industrial capital. They had the capacity, in other words, to build the tanks and bombs and aircraft carriers one would need to mount a successful effort at global conquest. But during the course of the war, the capital stock of both countries was run down to almost nothing by massive Allied bombing. In the very short-term, this impoverished both countries, but they bounced back remarkably quickly. Knowing how to build a prosperous society, in other words, was more important than actually having the physical stuff.
So how can Panem, more than 70 years after the conclusion of its last major battle, be so poor and yet so rich in knowledge?...
... District 12 is a quintessential extractive economy. It’s oriented around a coal mine, the kind of facility where unskilled labor can be highly productive in light of the value of the underlying commodity. In a free society, market competition for labor and union organizing would drive wages up. But instead the Capitol imposes a single purchaser of mine labor and offers subsistence wages. Emigration to other districts in search of better opportunities is banned, as is exploitation of the apparently bountiful resources of the surrounding forest. With the mass of Seam workers unable to earn a decent wage, even relatively privileged townsfolk have modest living standards. If mineworkers earned more money, the Mellark family bakery would have more customers and more incentive to invest in expanded operations. A growing service economy would grow up around the mine. But the extractive institutions keep the entire District in a state of poverty, despite the availability of advanced technology in the Capitol.
Similar conditions would apply to the plantation agriculture we briefly see portrayed in District 8, and presumably other commodity-oriented Districts such as 7 (lumber), 10 (livestock), and 9 (grain). On the other hand, Collins wisely avoids going into detail about what life is supposed to be like in Districts specializing in luxury goods or electronics. It’s difficult to have a thriving economy in electronics production without a competitive market featuring multiple buyers and multiple sellers.
Absent market competition, personal computers never would have disrupted the mainframe market and the iPhone and Android never would have revolutionized telecommunications. Entrenched monopolists have no interest in developing new technologies that shake things up. It’s difficult to get real innovation-oriented competitive markets without secure property rights, and exceedingly difficult to have secure property rights without some diffusion of political power. That needn’t mean real democratic equality—a standard the United States and Europe didn’t meet until relatively recently—but it does mean fairly broad power-sharing, as the U.S. has had from the beginning.
But Collins is right in line with the most depressing conclusion offered by Acemoglu and Robinson, namely that once extractive institutions are established they’re hard to get rid of. Africa’s modern states, they note, were created by European colonialists who set out to create extractive institutions to exploit the local population. The injustice of the situation led eventually to African mass resistance and the overthrow of colonial rule. But in almost every case, the new elite simply started running the same extractive institutions for their own benefit. The real battle turned out to have been over who ran the machinery of extraction, not its existence. And this, precisely, is the moral of Collins’ trilogy. [Spoiler alert: Ignore rest of this story if you haven’t finished the trilogy.] To defeat the Capitol’s authoritarian power requires the construction of a tightly regimented, extremely disciplined society in District 13. That District’s leaders are able to mobilize mass discontent with the Capitol into a rebellion, but this leads not to the destruction of the system but its decapitation. Despite the sincere best efforts of ordinary people to better their circumstances, the deep logic of extractive institutions is difficult to overcome, whether in contemporary Nigeria or in Panem.
COULD smartphones help reduce electoral fraud in Africa and in other regions? At a recent forum hosted by the Brookings Institution on the ways that wireless technologies are affecting politics in various countries, Clark Gibson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego (USCD), presented findings from experiments in Afghanistan and Uganda which suggest that they can. Local researchers were deployed to polling stations armed with digital cameras and smartphones to take photographs of the publicly posted election tallies. The research found that this alone can cut electoral fraud by up to 60%.
The experiment was first developed during the 2010 Afghan elections by James Long and Michael Callen, then UCSD graduate students, with funding from the Development Innovation Ventures section at the United States Agency for International Development. To test the idea that photographic "quick-counts" of election results can reduce ballot rigging the team split a sample of 471 polling stations in Afghanistan into a "treatment" group and a "control" group. The polling stations in the treatment group were sent letters announcing that a researcher would visit shortly after the election to take a digital photograph of the tallies; the polling stations in the control group received no such prior warning. The research concluded that as a result electoral rigging was cut by 25% in the polling stations in the treatment group and the theft of ballot boxes and other election materials was reduced by 60%. ...
THE past four years have seen an economic crisis coincide with a food-price spike. That must surely have boosted the number of the world’s poor (especially since food inflation hits the poor hardest)—right? Wrong. New estimates of the numbers of the world’s poor by the World Bank’s Development Research Group show that for the first time ever, poverty—defined as the number and share of people living below $1.25 a day (at 2005 prices)—fell in every region of the world in 2005-08. Half the long-term decline is attributable to China, which has taken 660m people out of poverty since the early 1980s. But the main contribution to the recent turnaround is Africa. Its poverty headcount rose at every three-year interval between 1981 and 2005, the only continent where this happened. But in 2008, it fell by 12m, or five percentage points to 47%—the first time less than half of Africans have been below the poverty line. The bank also has partial estimates for 2010. These show global poverty that year was half its 1990 level, implying the long-term rate of poverty reduction—slightly over one percentage point a year—continued unabated in 2008-10, despite the dual crisis.
Concern for the poor is a fundamental pillar of Christian identity and calling, a constant theme throughout the Old and New Testaments (Deut. 15:4; Prov. 14:31; Gal. 2:10; James 2:2-6). A definitive mark of the church throughout history is its members caring for the poor in their midst.
Today, thanks to economic globalization and the Internet, those who want to care for the poor overseas enjoy a plethora of attractive options: sponsoring a child, donating a farm animal, making a small loan to a budding entrepreneur, installing a well in a village, getting a morning caffeine jolt with fair-trade (instead of free-trade) coffee—among others.
But what are the best ways to help those living in developing countries By "best," I mean most effective: things that actually help people rise out of poverty, and that carry with them a sizable "bang for your buck"—programs in which the impact on the poor is significant per donated dollar.
Answering this question proves more difficult than you'd expect. ...
... The Middle East has strikingly few private companies, less than one-third of the number per person in eastern Europe. Everywhere the state dominates the economy. In Egypt the public sector accounts for 40% of value-added outside agriculture—an unusually large share for a middle-income country. Such private firms as do exist tend to be large and closely connected to the state. The average Middle Eastern company is ten years older than in East Asia or eastern Europe because new entrants are kept out by pervasive red tape. The authors reckon it costs roughly 20 times the average annual income to start a firm in Syria and Yemen (assuming anyone would want to), just over twice the average globally. In a few Arab countries, like Tunisia, some notorious personifications of crony capitalism have fallen foul of political change but the practice has by no means ended. ...
... Obstacles to regional trade are legion. Costly “trade logistics”—non-tariff barriers, red tape and poor infrastructure—add 15% to the value of Egyptian clothes and 10% to the total value of all goods shipped in the region. It costs companies an average of 95 man-days a year just to deal with trade bureaucracies. It takes longer and is more expensive to ship goods between two Middle Eastern ports than to send them from the Middle East to America. Such market fragmentation, the authors argue, is the consequence of the region’s centralised, state-led economic policies.
More trade would have familiar benefits: larger markets should enable firms to reap greater economies of scale, increase returns to investment and adopt more new technology. Just as important in the Middle Eastern context, more open trade would begin the process of dismantling over-centralised states and create a constituency for further economic change.
Of course, trade liberalisation is no substitute for privatisation, financial reform and other domestic measures. But it has a political advantage over those reforms. Because the steps required are relatively small ones (reductions in red tape, for instance) they should provoke less resistance from insiders; and because regional trade can be presented as a pan-Arab goal, it does not have the same taint of “Westernisation” that discredited earlier reform efforts. Regional trade would be only a start. But the main thing is to start somewhere.
African governments are seeking higher rents and bigger ownership stakes from foreign miners.
THE true extent of Africa’s vast wealth of resources is hard to guess. Geologists have picked over most of the rest of the globe in search of minerals, yet huge swathes of Africa remain largely unprobed. But the immense ore deposits so far discovered and soaring commodity prices on the back of rip-roaring Chinese demand have convinced the world’s miners that the continent is the next big frontier. Bumper profits have also spurred mineral-rich countries to seek a bigger share of the spoils.
The list of African governments that have miners in their sights is a long one. South Africa, home to the greatest mineral wealth in the world, estimated to be worth $2.5 trillion, is considering imposing a swingeing 50% windfall tax on mining “super profits” and a 50% capital-gains tax on the sale of prospecting rights. Those are among the proposals put forward by an independent panel of experts, set up by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to study the possibility of greater state intervention in the mining sector. ...
I just finished reading Paul Collier's The Plundered Planet, which spends chapters unravelling issues involved with the natural resource trap that many emerging nations find themselves in. There is need for greater transperancy in how mining contracts are negotiated. There need to be civic institutions that justly investment proceeds in the long-term development of the economy and society, and insure that funds are not squandered or appropriated by strongmen. Collier gives some good insights on how to navigate this minefield (if you'll pardon the pun) and it is well worth the read.
This is a fascinating piece about bringing endangered speicies back from extinction through the use of property rights ... in Texas. Some background ...
By Mid-Twentieth Century, elephants were endangered in Africa. Hunters hunted them vigorously. Locals viewed them as oversized rodents that frequently destoryed their crops. In 1977, with more than 160,ooo elephants in existence, Kenya placed a complete ban on hunting elephants. Barely more than a decade later, there were 16,000 elephants left.
Also with diminshing herds, Zimbabwe took another apporach. Hunting areas were established with proceeds going to compensate locals for damages caused by elephants and to elepehant preservation. Experts calculate a sustainable number of elephants that can me hunted each year and hunters bid pay for the privilege of hunting them. From 1989 through 2005, the elephant population grew from 37,000 to 85,000, and is believed to top 100,000 today. Meanwhile, hunters get to hunt and the locals have an incentive to preserve the wildlife. (See my earlier post: Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community)
The story below is about conservation of three other species in Texase using Zimbabwean methods. Yet environtmentalists are successfully winning legal battles to stop this approach in favor of the Kenyan model, effectively protecting species to extinction.
(CBS News)
The scimitar horned oryx . . . the addax . . . the dama gazelle - three elegant desert antelope that you'd hope to see on a journey through Africa, except that their numbers are dwindling there. Which is why Lara Logan went to Texas -- yes, Texas. There, on large grassland ranches, some exotic species that are endangered in the wild have been brought back in large numbers. But there's a catch: a percentage of the herd is hunted every year by hunters who pay big money for a big catch. The ranchers say this limited "culling" gives them the money they need to care for the animals and conserve the species. But animal rights activists don't buy that argument, claiming the hunts are "canned" and that hunting is wholly inconsistent with conservancy.
We have now reached the heart of what is distinctive about the role of government in societies that are rich in nonrenewable natural, assets. The exploitation of the natural asset is intrinsically unsustainable. At some stage the oil well is going to run dry, the vein copper ore will be exhausted, and the revenue stream will cease.
That word "unsustainable" sends shivers down the spine every environmentalist. But just because the exploitation of a natural asset is unsustainable does not mean that it should be avoided. The only sustainable rate of use of a nonrenewable natural asset zero. But were we never to use any nonrenewable assets they might as well not be there in the first place: the baby has disappeared with the bathwater. So, literal sustainability sets the bar absurdly high. Here economics is helpful in imagining a more meaningful conception: sustainability does not imply preservation. The world has sustained overall economic growth, albeit with hiccups, for two centuries yet virtually no Single economic activity has been sustained. Growth has not been a matter of everything getting bigger. Rather, it has been like running across ice flows: if you stand still you fall in and drown; if you keep going - even if each individual step is unsustainable - you survive. In the nineteenth century the British government was worried that it was going to run out of tall trees for the masts of ships. What happened, of course, is that at a certain point ships no longer needed trees.
The decision to deplete a nonrenewable natural asset is therefore not intrinsically an economic sin. The ethics of depletion depend upon how the money generated gets used. I have suggested that it is ethically incumbent on us to respect the rights of future generations. We may not be the curators of natural assets, but we are the custodians of their value. We are not obliged to turn the earth into a gigantic museum, with nature neatly preserved in its display case. Nonetheless, we have a responsibility not to plunder natural resources because we do not own them in the way that we own created assets. We can fulfill our ethical obligations by bequeathing to the future other kinds of assets of an equivalent value. This boils down to whether to consume the revenues or save them. We have a responsibility to save.
This represents the golden rule for the ethical use of revenue from nonrenewable natural assets. It implies that the use of this revenue should be quite unlike that of normal tax revenue. Normally, tax revenue can be presumed to rise as the economy grows: it is sustainable and thus can be spent on consumption. A good test of whether the government of a resource-rich country is being ethically responsible is whether it has a higher savings rate of its revenues from natural-asset depletion than from other tax revenues. As it depletes the natural asset is it accumulating man-made assets in its place?
Do you have a higher savings rate of unsustainable income than income you expect to continue? Perhaps you have not consciously thought about it; you just have an overall savings rate out of your total income. It might equally be difficult for a government to identify which part of its overall savings is attached to which part of its income. However, we might reasonably expect that those governments whose revenues are largely generated by the depletion of natural assets should have higher savings rates than those whose revenues are fully sustainable. For example, Africa, where so much revenue comes from resource extraction, should tend to have a higher savings rate than "Developing Asia," where revenues are linked to industry. In fact, the opposite is the case. Africa's savings rate averages around 20 percent of national income, whereas that of Developing Asia has been approximately double. (98-99)
Here is just one example of the positive impact a large "evil" multi-national corporation has on economic development among the poor. There are many other stories similar to these that are rarely seen in the press.
... Seventy percent of the world's cocoa grows in West Africa, and most of that in one country, Ivory Coast. Since 1999, Ivory Coast has been through a bloody succession of military coups, rigged elections, and civil wars. "We were concerned about running into a ceiling on production there," says Harold Poelma, managing director of Cargill Cocoa. So Cargill began looking for other options. The solution that it came up with perfectly illustrates the company's global reach and long view.
Cocoa trees look like something Dr. Seuss would draw, with clusters of hard-shelled pods, as big and colorful as Halloween gourds, sprouting directly from the trunk and limbs. They don't grow just anyplace. They need shade, warmth, and humidity, as well as deep, rich soil -- conditions generally found within a band 20 degrees north and south of the equator. That band passes through Vietnam.
Cargill was one of the first U.S. multinationals to return to Vietnam when President Bill Clinton normalized relations with the government in Hanoi in 1995. Today it is the country's largest domestic producer of livestock feed and a central player in Vietnam's fast-moving shift from a state-controlled agricultural economy to one where small farmers are encouraged to work private plots for private gain. The effect of that shift has been transformative. Not long ago, Vietnam was importing a million tons of rice a year. Last year it became the world's second leading rice exporter. "Same people, same land," Vietnam's director of crop production, Dr. Nguyen Tri Ngoc, told me in his Hanoi office, speaking through a translator. "Before, farmers were not really farmers. They were workers in the fields, and they worked under the supervision of the government." And the difference now? "Free markets!" he says in English.
In 2004, Cargill launched a public-private partnership with one of its biggest customers, chocolate giant Mars, and the governments of Vietnam and the Netherlands. The aim: to create something that had never before existed in Vietnam, a cocoa-export economy.
First, Cargill had to convince a front line of growers to switch to cocoa from well-established crops like coffee, black pepper, and cashews. Two years before the first harvest (it takes at least that long for cocoa seedlings to produce fruit), before there was anything to buy, Cargill opened two fully staffed cocoa buying stations on major roads, in Ben Tre and Dak Lak provinces. It made an early commitment to transparency, posting on the Cargill website and offering by text message both the daily international price on the London market and what Cargill is paying locally; growers can lock their price for three weeks, the time it takes to ferment and dry the beans after harvest. Cargill also built a network of more than 100 demonstration farms, where curious growers can learn from their neighbors. And in February 2011 the company took delivery of the first Vietnamese cocoa beans to carry UTZ certification -- an independent sustainability program through which growers can earn an extra $100 per ton.
This year Vietnamese farmers will produce about 2,500 metric tons of cocoa, 70% of which will go to Cargill. That's a tiny sliver of the 3.4 million-ton global market, but the growth trend is impressive: 40,000 acres under cultivation in 2010, compared with 1,200 in 2003, and already 32,000 active growers in 12 provinces. Poelma sees the potential for 100,000 tons by 2020. Instead of shipping all of that to Cargill's North Sea Canal processing plant in Wormer, the Netherlands -- a voyage that takes 24 days -- Cargill hopes to have a Cargill factory in Vietnam by then, processing cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, and cocoa powder for export to growing markets in China and India.
None of that happens without the eager participation of thousands of small growers. One I met last summer was Trinh Van Thanh, a smooth-cheeked 43-year-old with a wife, three daughters, and roughly four acres of land in Baria-Vungtau province, a two-hour drive southeast from Ho Chi Minh City. Five years ago Thanh was growing pepper and coffee and raising pigs, and he was struggling. His pepper trees were afflicted by blight. The yield from his mature coffee trees was declining year by year. He says he was $5,000 in debt.
Thanh planted his first cocoa saplings, as Vietnamese farmers often do, in the shade of his coffee trees. He enrolled in an agricultural extension program in Ho Chi Minh City, where he learned how to build a specialized slow-drip irrigation system based on technology invented on an Israeli kibbutz. When the first crop came in, Thanh made the ambitious choice to ferment and dry the cocoa beans himself. Ultimately, he built more fermentation boxes and drying tables than he needed for his own crop, which meant he could perform those value-adding services for other growers. Soon he wasn't just farming, he was running a collection station. Next he planted a cocoa-tree nursery. Then he launched an irrigation consulting business. (The man gets the concept of a virtuous cycle.) Thanh still sells all his beans to Cargill but maybe not for long. What he really wants to learn how to do next, he told me, is make and sell chocolate.
Thanh's success so far almost defies belief. He says his mini cocoa conglomerate will gross more than $850,000 this year. And if his daughter, who's about to graduate from high school, wants to go to college in America -- and he hopes that she will -- he can easily afford it.
Later in Hanoi, I tell Ngoc all about my visit to Baria-Vungtau province. When does a farmer like Thanh, I ask him, become too much of a capitalist for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam? Ngoc beams. "No limit!" he says. Again in English. ...
... The advent of the mobile society may have brought convenience and a cultural sea change to the U.S. and Europe, but in the poorest regions of the world, affordable mobile phone access has caused a quantum leap in services -- like calling for medical help, sending a quick letter to loved ones or starting a savings account -- that Americans and Europeans have taken for granted for generations, analysts say.
"The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development," said Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of the 2005 book "The End of Poverty."
"Poverty is almost equated with isolation in many places of the world. Poverty results from the lack of access to markets, to emergency health services, access to education, the ability to take advantage of government services and so on," Sachs said. "What the mobile phone -- and more generally IT technology -- is ending is that kind of isolation in all its different varieties."
Moreover, the profusion of payment services via cell phones puts places like Kenya and Uganda in the vanguard of mobile financial services. "You can walk in the middle of rural village in Rwanda and use a mobile phone to pay at a recharging station to recharge LED lights," says Amanda Gardiner, acting program manager of Business Call to Action, a New York-based non-profit organization that is helping to bring more mobile phones to Africa's rural poor.
"I'm always flabbergasted I don't walk into Home Depot and see these services here, just swipe your cell phone and go," Gardiner said. "In some ways, they're really leaping ahead of us and going right to the future."
I came to Kenya partly to help make a PBS documentary about empowering women as a way to lift families and communities — men included — out of poverty. And I promptly met a prostitute-turned-businesswoman who epitomizes that theme. ...
... In Jamii Bora, Jane was pushed to save for the future, to lean forward. There is growing evidence that the most powerful element of microfinance is not microlending, but microsavings, and that’s how Jamii Bora starts: it encourages members to save small amounts, perhaps just 50 cents a week. Then members are coached to use those savings, coupled with loans and training, to start tiny businesses. ...
What Africa's booming middle class really wants is a roller coaster.
... At least eight theme parks have opened or are scheduled to open in West Africa alone since 2000. The region’s roller coaster tycoons — some foreign, many local — brave one of the world’s least friendly business environments.
Power outages in Dakar last half the day; Nigeria’s last longer. Most citizens of either country can’t earn enough in 24 hours to ride Magic Land’s bumper cars for even 15 minutes.
And yet, triumphing over power outages, corrupt governments and widespread poverty, Africa's middle class is flourishing. And that middle class, theme park operators say, craves roller coasters.
“More and more, Senegalese parents bring their children here to ride the attractions and play,” said Abdoulaye Ndiaye, security guard at Magic Land. “It’s super. We have given them a place to relax in a city where we don’t have a lot of space to play.”
However discouraging West Africa’s economics are, its demographics make it ripe for a theme park bonanza. Half the continent is under 20. By 2050, one in every fifth person on the planet will be a sub-Saharan African, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of millions of those will be teenagers with no place to go on a date. ...
... Like many environmental groups, PETA is all about the "anti." In this case, it is anti-hunting. Its supporters rally against causes with easily identifiable "bad guys" such as corporations and hunters like Bob Parsons. While such good-versus-evil narratives are useful for garnering financial support, they ignore the complexity of human-wildlife conflicts in Africa and the role of property rights and local management in resource conservation.
Seldom does PETA advocate for more practical but less emotive "pro" causes such as wildlife habitat, community resource management, or higher incomes. As a result, it neglects solutions such as devolving wildlife management to the local level, where the people living with the costs of wildlife can find ways to profit from sustaining the habitat and the animals. Where property rights to wildlife have been assigned to local communities—either through explicit institutional reforms or innovative entrepreneurship—Africans have proven that private ownership means resources stewardship. ...
... Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country’s elephant population declined from 167,000 in 1973 to just 16,000 in 1989. Poaching took its toll on elephants because of their damage to both cropland and people. Today Kenya wildlife officials boast a doubling of the country’s elephant population to 32,000, but nearly all are in protected national parks where poaching can be controlled. With only 8 percent of its land set aside as protected areas, it is no wonder that wildlife in general and elephants in particular have trouble finding hospitable habitat.
For the landowners who bear the costs of wildlife, the decision of whether to protect wildlife is a simple one: if it pays, it stays. The ban on hunting gives wildlife little or no economic value, causing rural Africans to view wildlife as a liability to be avoided rather than an asset to be protected. As a result, landowners have increasingly turned to agriculture instead of habitat protection, which decreases available habitat and increases the potential for human-wildlife conflicts.
In sharp contrast to Kenya, consider what has happened in Zimbabwe. In 1989, results-oriented groups such as the World Wildlife Fund helped implement a program known as the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources or CAMPFIRE. This approach devolves the rights to benefit from, dispose of, and manage natural resources to the local level, including the right to allow safari hunting. Community leaders with local knowledge about wildlife and its interface with humans help establish sustainable hunting quotas. Hunting then provides jobs for community members, compensation for crop and property damage, revenue to build schools, clinics, and water wells, and meat for villagers—just as Parsons’ elephant did.
By granting local people control over wildlife resources, their incentive to protect it has strengthened. As a result, poaching has been contained and human-wildlife conflicts have been reduced. While challenges remain, especially from the current political climate in Zimbabwe, CAMPFIRE has quietly produced results with strikingly little activist rhetoric.
The numbers attest to the program’s success. Ten years after the program began, wildlife populations had increased by 50 percent. By 2003, elephant numbers had doubled from 4,000 to 8,000. The gains have not just been for wildlife, however. Between 1989 and 2001, CAMPFIRE generated more than $20 million in direct income, the vast majority of which came from hunting. During that period, the program benefitted an estimated 90,000 households and had a total economic impact of $100 million.
The results go beyond the CAMPFIRE areas. Between 1989 and 2005, Zimbabwe’s total elephant population more than doubled from 37,000 to 85,000, with half living outside of national parks. Today, some put the number as high as 100,000, even with trophy hunters such as Parsons around. All of this has occurred with an economy in shambles, regime uncertainty, and mounting socio-political challenges. ...
I wouldn't say that regulation is never needed but what is too frequently missing is an appreciation of how markets can help achieve better outcomes than moralistic campaigns.
Images from a satellite perched hundreds of kilometres above Earth have fused modern technology and ancient wonder, leading to discoveries that experts are hailing as some of the great archeological finds in a century.
“Seventeen lost pyramids!” exclaimed Kathlyn Cooney, an assistant professor of Egyptology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “That would be one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years. That's amazing.”
Cooney was referring to a series of infrared images and high-resolution photographs taken from a satellite suspended 700 kilometres above Egypt, in a project directed by University of Alabama archeologist Sarah Parcak.
What those images have revealed nearly boggles the mind — 17 previously undiscovered pyramids, more than 1,000 antique tombs and at least 3,000 ancient settlements.
All of them are invisible to the human eye, all buried beneath the countless layers of sediment that have been deposited over the millennia by the annual flooding of the Nile River. But they are real — or they certainly seem to be. ...
... The toilet they threw open is Sanergy, a year-old for-profit social enterprise that manufactures high-quality, yet low-cost and compact toilets for urban slums in the developing world and then uses human waste to produce energy and fertilizer. It is an “affordable, accessible and hygienic sanitation” solution for millions that live in places without sewage or electricity. They are places where the street is the bathroom. And that’s precisely the problem.
According to the World Toilet Organization, (yes, there really is one) 2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to a toilet. Relieving themselves in rivers, roadsides and impromptu and poorly built latrines, this results in high levels of disease, notably diarrhea and cholera. The recent cholera scourge in Haiti that killed thousands is sobering evidence. It is estimated that 1.6 million children die as a result of these diseases. Statistics show that hundreds of millions lose approximately 60 days of work.
David Auerbach and Ani Vallabhaneni, two of Sanergy’s young entrepreneurs, didn’t need stats to know how the absence of toilets affected the poor. The two graduating MIT-Sloan of Management school students experienced first hand the challenges of no sewage or sanitation when they lived and worked in rural China and India respectively. “Going to the bathroom isn’t a popular topic that comes up at the dinner table in the West,” Auerbach, a former policy hand at the Clinton Global Initiative (and my former colleague at Endeavor), says. “It’s flush and forget for us. That’s not the case in much of the developing world.” ...
... What they found was that Kenya’s poor were interested in having compact stalls that could fit into the tight spaces of their usually one-room homes, rather than large community outhouses. They wanted a “permanent” feel to the stalls rather than the flimsy feel of a porta-potty. As a result, Auerbach, Vallabhaneni and their Sanergy team that includes engineers, architects and designers drew up plans for a 3×5 toilet made out of thin shell cement that is locally produced for $200 per unit. Each toilet is designed for a 100 uses per day. They are units, which also collect waste in double-sealed 30L containers, rather than pits, or septic tanks “that are then drained into waterways.” It is this waste collection that is key.
More than where to go to the bathroom, how to dispose of human waste is, as Auerbach points out, a primary reason that no one touches the issue of toilets. That was Sanergy’s opportunity. Recognizing that, though “messy,” human waste can be converted through anaerobic digestion to produce fertilizer or electricity. It is also where the Sanergy team recognized that it could generate revenue.
Sanergy produces toilets that are franchised to local operators who charge around $0.06 per use. Currently the company has two toilets serving approximately 150 each day. One is at Bridge International school (a for-profit school supported by the Omidyar Network), the other in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum. These local operators keep all revenues. That, Auerbach says, is an incentive for them to clean, maintain and “market” the toilets. The operators then work with groups who collect the waste daily and bring it to facilities where it is converted to energy. “The waste from each toilet generates Sanergy revenues of $1250 per year.” The waste from 10 million creates a potential market of $178 million per year. Brown gold. ...
