Noli Irritare Leones

Andrew Sullivan and Jim Henley point to this article on Africa Rising.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy. The rebellion in Sudan’s Darfur region keeps threatening to flare back up and inflame neighboring Chad. Somalia’s government is barely holding on against Islamic rebels. Zimbabwe collapses further and further into economic ruin and political thuggery. According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS.

It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story. By many standards, Africa is doing better than it has in decades. The number of democratically elected governments has risen sharply in the past decade, and the number of violent conflicts has dropped. African economies, and African businesses, are starting to show impressive results, and not just by the diminished standards the rest of the world reserves for its poorest continent. The runaway inflation that crippled African economies for decades is on the ebb, and foreign investment is rising. Last month, the World Bank reported that average GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has averaged 5.4 percent over the last decade, better than the United States, with some countries poised for dramatic expansion.

Developing a science culture in Ghana.

African universities.

More wind powered cell phone base stations in Africa.

Poor man’s Broadband.

Hausa Database Online Dictionary and Academic paper: Attempts at a web presence inventory of African minority languages.

Doctors seek low-cost IVF for Africa’s infertile.

South Africa: Stormhoek’s social media innovation.

Uganda: When a mobile phone is not just a mobile phone.

Other links:

Someone from my meeting is now blogging from Kenya, where she’s gone to work with the International Humanity Foundation.

And, totally unrelated to Africa, but Nate Nelson is back again at a new blog (at this point most of the posts seem to be about the 2008 presidential election).

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 8:33 am and is filed under African Ingenuity Blogwatch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.