Is it Africa's Turn?

Edward Miguel discusses Nation Building in his Boston Review article about Africa's Prospects:

It should not be surprising that it is taking a full generation or more for real nationhood to take root in these infant countries. Everything started from scratch after independence. Politicians had to figure out how to forge political compromises across class, regional, gender, linguistic, tribal, and religious lines. History and civics textbooks needed to be written. Citizens had to come up with their own national narratives and heroes. Creating new identities and institutions is not something that foreign colonizers, aid donors, or the IMF and World Bank are willing or able to do. That kind of transformation demands visionary leaders, who have too often been lacking in Africa, or have themselves been victims of political violence. Further complicating matters, leaders and citizens trying to assemble structures of civic life must contend with the immediate economic imperatives of boosting agricultural productivity, educating the workforce, and building a modern transportation infrastructure.

via 3 Quarks Daily
Photo Courtesy of Christopher Herwig/herwigphoto.com

Investment Banks & Rising Indian Interest

Businessweek reports:

Banking powerhouses including Citigroup and JP Morgan operate in sub-Saharan Africa, but last week Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital (RenCap) showed signs of things to come as it bought stakes in brokerages in Ghana and Zambia...Mr Cornthwaite(of Rencap) said: "The situation is similar to our experience in Russia 15 years ago. There is a business opportunity here, and if you've seen the movie before, you're in a better position to capitalise," he said.

While India trys to play catch-up:

India and Africa have similar markets, value systems, levels of development," says Sunil Mittal, chairman of Bharti. "Emerging markets make sense for us."Especially markets in Africa, where connections to India run deep..."If we don't step in today, we will lose a huge market 15 years from now," says Malvinder Mohan Singh, CEO of drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories, which operates throughout Africa.

South-South Cooperation

Athar Osama writes about strengthening South-South scientific and technological research collaboration in SciDev:

Scientific collaboration between developed countries, such as members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and to a lesser extent between developed and developing countries (often referred to as North–North and North–South collaboration respectively) has become increasingly popular since the 1970s and ‘80s. But South–South collaboration between developing countries has only recently emerged.
Such collaboration is now growing in scientific and economic importance. South–South research collaboration can promote research on problems that have low priorities in the North, and can provide shared opportunities for capacity building. It also fosters social and economic links between countries, potentially helping them strengthen their position in the global economy.

An Opportunity for Africa?- China's Declining Export Economy

Egoli reports on the conclusions of a recent Credit Suisse analysis :

"We think the end of an era in terms of China's mighty export industry has just began," say the Credit Suisse economists.
The team has been visiting Guangdong province (China) regularly, and has found that its initial assessment of the new labor law's impact - already pessimistic - was understated. The economists predict that one third of export-oriented manufacturers in the province will be closed within three years. Guangdong produces 30% of China's exports.
What does this mean for the global economy?
The Chinese export economy had already peaked. Replacing its impact has been the growth of the domestic economy, fueled by higher wages and growing domestic consumption, and supported by a government flush with foreign reserves keen to bring Chinese infrastructure up to, or beyond, the standards of that enjoyed by the West. While rising wages and improved labour rights are generally bad for capitalists, as Credit Suisse notes, they are good for workers and domestic consumption. Hence the economists foresee a greater shift towards the growth of China's domestic economy, which would lower the pace of overall growth but improve the "quality" of that growth.

Transitioning to Emerging Market Status?

From the IMF's Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa,2008(PDF):

The term “emerging market” was coined in 1980 to refer to countries that had stock markets and were in transition toward having the features of the mature stock markets in industrial countries.This box suggests that some African countries fit within the emerging market group and supports this view by benchmarking these African economies of 2007 against the ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,and Thailand) of 1980, when the term “emerging market” entered the lexicon.
Selected African countries compare favorably with the ASEAN countries of 1980. The ASEAN countries were already experiencing strong economic growth. Yet, in many other respects, the ASEAN countries looked quite different from what we see today. Inflation rates were still high in some cases, the depth of their financial sectors was limited, foreign direct investment had yet to accelerate, and their financial
resources, reflected in international reserves, were adequate but not high. Many African countries have perhaps reached broader macroeconomic stability than the 1980 ASEAN benchmark. Growth is strong, inflation moderate, and international reserves relatively high. Like ASEAN, financial depth remains limited.Foreign direct investment is quite high, although this is in large part a reflection of the larger share of naturalresources such as oil in the case of African countries.2 Debt-to-GDP ratios are low.

Farmers Reap Rewards

The Ft reports:

Historically, there have been tenuous links between farmers and food producers, with many companies having scant knowledge of how and where their ingredients are grown.
But as the prices of raw materials soar – from the barley used to make beer or the cocoa used to make chocolate – leading brewers and food manufacturers from Cadbury Schweppes to Diageo are increasingly recognising their businesses will benefit from investment in agriculture.

Pandiaspora

"...Pandiaspora encourages Nigerians in the Diaspora to volunteer their skills to work on short term medical mission projects and to consider returning home to contribute to longer term sustainable development...their mission is the principle of direct intervention - helping people and communities to attain better health and well-being and to support better education for vulnerable school-aged children. To achieve our mission, we work in support of existing health and educational infrastructure in Nigeria and mobilise the skills of Nigerian professionals in the Diaspora to bridge the health and educational needs of the people we serve... "

Achieving Self-Sufficiency in Rice Production-Uganda

Uganda proves that food self-sufficiency can be realized with the right sets of policies.G. Pascal Zachary reports in Foreign Policy:

The country’s rice output has risen 2½ times since 2004, according to the Ministry of Trade. Rice production is expected to reach an astonishing 180,000 metric tons this year, up from 135,000 in 2006 and 102,000 in 2005. Consumption of imported rice, meanwhile, fell by half from 2004 to 2005 alone, and by half again from 2005 to 2007. Uganda’s importers, seeing the shift, have invested in new mills in the country, expanding employment and creating competition for farmer output, thereby improving prices. New mills, meanwhile, lowered the cost of bringing domestic rice to market. While people in developing countries across the globe are clamoring about the sharp rise in food prices, Ugandans are still paying about the same for rice as they always have. And Uganda is poised to start exporting rice within East Africa—and beyond.
The secret of Uganda’s homegrown success? Ignoring decades of bad Western advice.

Zimbabwe and Land Reform

Jeremy Cronin writes in Pambazuka News:

"We are told, for instance, that ‘land reform’(in Zimbabwe) did not succeed because the British failed to meet their financial obligations as agreed in the Lancaster House negotiations. But what kind of heroic anti-imperialist liberation movement is this? Can you imagine the Cubans arguing two decades after their revolutionary breakthrough that they had not implemented land reform because the US refused to subsidise it? President Mugabe’s demagogic ‘anti-imperialism’ is not an anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the interests of the peasantry, the workers (insofar as any remain employed) and the progressive professional and middle strata of Zimbabwe’s society (and indeed of our region). It is a pseudo anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the narrow interests of a rentier capitalist elite within Zanu-PF and the upper echelons of the state. It is a stratum that is entirely parasitic on state power. State power is used to pillage for the purposes of primitive accumulation. And remember, much of the recent socio-economic crisis in Zimbabwe dates back to the pillaging ‘peace mission’ to the DRC in the mid-1990s, which ended in bankruptcy and defeat for a once professional and proud Zimbabwean army."

Mwenda on Traditional Aid

Recently detained Andrew Mwenda, addresses the Progressive party of Norway on Traditional Aid

Gordon Brown Deemphasizes Aid

The British PM Gordon Brown, seems to have changed his position on Aid.In a speech on international development he stated that:

Some argue that it is the presence of big international corporations that is the cause of the problems in developing countries, but I disagree. Indeed, I believe it is the absence of business - and not the presence of business - that blights the lives of poor people, leaving them dependent on aid and denying them the opportunity to work, denying them the chance to support their families and denying them the means to ensure their children get the chance to succeed.
Economic growth alone has lifted more than 500 million people out of poverty over the last 25 years, accounting for over 80 per cent of poverty reduction.
And the countries whose economies are growing fastest, like Rwanda and Ghana represented here today, are those that are making progress on the Millennium Development Goals - with countries whose economies are growing more slowly falling behind.
So we need to fully acknowledge the critical importance of the private sector in driving development - focusing our attention not on an old one-dimensional welfarist approach but on enterprise, on free and fair trade and open markets, and on harnessing the power of innovation -- the building blocks of growth.
Developing countries - including Ghana and Rwanda - are already working hard to put in place the macroeconomic stability, supportive regulatory environment and measures to tackle corruption that are necessary for business and trade to thrive.

He expands on this and urges the strengthening of successful methodologies:

Today we need a new approach --- moving beyond minimum standards, beyond philanthropy and beyond traditional corporate social responsibility - important though they are - to develop long-term business initiatives that mobilise the resources and talents that are the central strengths of global business...From delivering financial services via mobile phones so that millions of people have access to basic bank accounts for the first time; to providing rural farmers with electronic price and weather information so they can decide when best to harvest and sell their crops; to sourcing ingredients from local supply chains to develop the base of the local economy --- each one of these initiatives is providing innovative solutions to the problems we face and spreading enterprise and opportunity across the developing world.

Tiwai African Health & Fitness Village

The award winning Tiwai African Health & Fitness Village is modern health and fitness center built around the principles and practices of West African ethnomedicine and located near the high biodiversity Tiwai Island Gola Forest. Their aim

...is to protect the high biodiversity environments of West Africa by making them relevant to sustainable livelihood activities of the people who live in or around them. West African life and customs emerged from the rich biodiversity of the Upper Guinea rainforest. Preserving the cultures that emerged from this forest could be an important unifying factor in conflict-prone West Africa, while applying traditional knowledge in a 21st Century context is potentially a rich source of revenue for rural development.

Africa's innovations systems cannot create wealth

Judi W. Wakhungu writes in Africa Science News about the shortcomings that are leading to a dearth of innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa:

Institutional inefficiency is historical and in SSA these have been broadly into three systemic categories-institutional inertia, organsational ineffectiveness and institutional gaps. Institutional inertia is multi-faceted and does not necessarily mean that an organization is not changing.
Rather, it means that an organization may not be responding fast enough to keep abreast of changes in the local, national and global contexts.
Functional incoherence was designed into the structure from the beginning and the institutional forms have not been refined and adapted to the changing context.

She asks the question:

What is the relevance of the existing R&D institutions if they are not connected to the productive sectors? The lack of strong market coordination means that funding or inadequate funding exacerbating ineffectiveness.

In this video she discusses the transformative power of investment in science and technology:

Makerere University Private Sector Forum

Continuing our focus on academia-industry linkages we take a look at the Makerere University Private Sector Forum. They describe themselves:

As a new vehicle for promoting value addition to the University products in addressing the Private Sector needs. It will serve as a central 'hub' for practical support and information dissemination, encourage and facilitate the University Departments by linking them up with the Private Sector in socio-economic development, initiate demand driven joint research and practice to influence development policy and curriculum review, technology innovations and projects at national and regional levels. Value for money based-practices to promote the Private Sector enterprise development is key in the partnership.

Ismail-Musa Ladu covering the initiative at Zibb states

The marriage between the University and the private sector will ensure that both participate in the creation and running of academic programmes like training and research and stand to benefit from technological innovations generated by the academia.
This will also ensure that the University produces graduates who will fit the needs of the jobs market by being employment-focused student training, problem-oriented and demand driven research that include policy at the national and regional level.

Portfolio Investing Solely in African Markets

Ryan Shen-Hoover writing in the Cheetah Index asks the question:

Would a portfolio consisting of equal allocations to each of these 10 African markets be exposed to unacceptable levels of risk? To find out, I back-tested such a portfolio and compared it to the S&P500 and EEM using the most recent 16 months of returns.
The S&P500 returned an average of –0.04% per month with a 3.42% standard deviation. The Emerging Market Index posted better returns of 1.71% but was more volatile with a 6.31% standard deviation. Our Africa portfolio returned 2.90% with a 2.36% deviation. Better returns and less volatility. Could Africa be an investor’s safest and most rewarding bet?

40 years of Pillage-Omar Bongo

The Guardian profiles the life long rule of Omar Bongo,president of Gabon:

Bongo's rule has been a masterclass in the use of patronage. His ascent to the presidency coincided with Gabon's rise to being Africa's third-biggest oil producer, and he quickly realised that money could be more effective than bullets in keeping power...The scale of the high-level cronyism and corruption astonishes diplomats from other African countries. "In Gabon, government and business are one and the same," said one. "If you want to do business here, you must know a minister, or at least somebody with the surname Bongo."

Living Cultures

In his 2006 piece The Case for Contamination, Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote:

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.

From Prototyping to Production?

The website of RSUST's Department of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering is testament to the innovation at many of the continent's underfunded and neglected universities.It does however raise a number of questions:

• To what extent are their engineering departments and others like them liaising with their business counterparts to explore the possibilities of developing spin-off enterprises?
  
• The sizable number of standalone research institutes and in-house institutional facilities (within the continent) are yet to spawn any startups of note. Why is this so?
• Could the Civil-Servant university mindset be impeding the awareness of realizable assets that exist within the confines of the same institutions?
• To what degree do local industries,businesses, agricultural concerns etc., perceive the results of prototyping and research as aligned with their business needs and objectives? Could we be looking at the most deleterious examples of the ivory tower syndrome writ large, where it can be least afforded?
• How can we begin to kickstart the process of bootstrapping innovation and entrepreneurship within existing institutions that are reservoirs of talent and appropriate research?
  

Africanhiphop

"...The Africanhiphop.com site serves the goal of unifying everybody who's inspired by hip hop and by the cultures of Africa and of African origins. The info at Africanhiphop.com is provided mostly by the artists themselves...It is a project of the African Hip Hop Foundation, a non-profit organization registered in the Netherlands which is run by a group of young volunteers from different countries and backgrounds..."

White Elephant Redux:Grand Inga Project

Akin dissects what may become the benchmark in White Elephant projects - The Grand Inga Dam Project:

When I read of the instigation of the largest dam project in the world being planned for Africa in a hydro-electric configuration last week, I skipped the news as one of those grand schemes of delusion...I find it interesting that for a project that would affect so many African countries, as it also involves 7 African countries with the intention of distributing electricity from DR Congo to Egypt in the North, Nigeria in the West and South Africa down South is coordinated by the World Energy Council in London.
This represents the Genesis of why this project probably serves no particular purpose to Africans in general, it is a project that would cost $80 billion and a good deal of that would not go to Africans but we would be saddled with the debts...There is no people-driven element about this grand scheme, it is a résumé boosting project that would be completed by 2022 and would probably collapse in 3 years with the big names involved having moved on to another grand white elephant.

G. Pascal Zachary also states:

For the forseeable future, however, there are many more practical and beneficial African hydro schemes. Talk of Inga is irresponsible and should cease, pending some clear watershed in the Congo's own stability. The country is riven by civil wars, badly governed and fatally wounded by its own sprawling geography. Supporters of Inga should be forced to shelve any financing maneuverings until the Congo sorts out politically and socially. Today, the country is essentially a fiction, propped up by the armed forces of the United Nations and the money of foreign donors.