prepaidafrica:

FG Excited As Nigeria Is Set To Host 2014 World Economic Forum On Africa

Nigeria is to host the 24th edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa in Abuja next year.

The Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, made the announcement at the close of the 23rd edition of the WEF in Cape Town, South Africa on Friday.

Okonjo-Iweala thanked the WEF for choosing Nigeria as the next host, expressing the readiness of the country to make the next edition as exciting as possible.

She said that the choice of Nigeria was appropriate given its position and huge economic potential.

“I think we epitomise a lot of things about Africa. We have the excitement, the passion, the entrepreneurship, the private sector drive and the glow for the future.

“But we also epitomise all of the difficult challenges of the continent such as infrastructure deficit, governance issues, corruption and transparency,” she said.

According to her, a combination of these opportunities and challenges in one country makes Nigeria the most exciting place to be on the continent.

Okonjo-Iweala said that the future of Africa was bright, judging by the commitment and passion demonstrated by participants in the forum, especially the Young Global Leaders, who represented the youths of the continent.

The Director General, Nigeria Economic Summit Group, Mr Frank Nweke Jnr, said that Nigeria was excited to be the host of the next WCF.

He said that President Goodluck Jonathan had already mandated the team to organise a successful forum.

scienceyoucanlove:

“I developed the pot-in-pot to help the rural poor in a cost-effective, participatory and sustainable way.”

Northern Nigeria is an impoverished region where people in rural communities eke out a living from subsistence farming. With no electricity, and therefore no refrigeration, perishable foods spoil within days. Such spoilage causes disease and loss of income for needy farmers, who are forced to sell their produce daily. Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba was motivated by his concern for the rural poor and by his interest in indigenous African technology to seek a practical, local solution to these problems. His extremely simple and inexpensive earthenware “pot-in-pot” cooling device, based on a principle of physics already known in ancient Egypt, has revolutionized lives in this semi-desert area.

read more about his AMAZING project and HEY he’s Nigerian!! :) Aren’t we innovative? ;) Source! 

“Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.”

— Kwame Nkrumah, P.C., M.A.

endilletante:

“Sénégal” de Armand Lunel, Editions Rencontre, Lausanne, 1966. Photographies d’Armand Dériaz.

prepaidafrica:

Entrepreneurs are using technology to develop ideas to introduce products and services to compete within the continent’s burgeoning ICT marketplace.

With the level of challenges that tech start-ups face in competing within the broader technology space, business incubation, funding and other resources have emerged as focal points for industry regulators and governments.

A number of technology-focused collective communities or Hubs, described as Innovation Hubs, Technology Labs and/or Science & Technology Parks, have emerged with the objective of fuelling innovation and building business. These tech-driven initiatives are often membership-driven and rely extensively on the concept of cooperation, mutual benefit and strength in association.

So what initiatives are available to those wanting to establish a technology business?

In this list we explore several high profile communities from across Africa, listed according to criteria that includes online presence, level of service/s, impact on socio-economic development, size, focus, cost and length of time in existence.

thepeoplesrecord:

Got this in my email today:

Dear friends, 

We are elders of the Maasai from Tanzania, one of Africa’s oldest tribes. The government has just announced that it plans to kick thousands of our families off our lands so that wealthy tourists can use them to shoot lions and leopards.The evictions are to begin immediately.

Last year, when word first leaked about this plan, almost one million Avaaz members rallied to our aid. Your attention and the storm it created forced the government to deny the plan, and set them back months. But the President has waited for international attention to die down, and now he’s revived his plan to take our land. We need your help again, urgently.

President Kikwete may not care about us, but he has shown he’ll respond to global media and public pressure — to all of you! We may only have hours. Please stand with us to protect our land, our people and our world’s most majestic animals, and tell everyone before it is too late. This is our last hope:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/maasai_fb_dm_3/?bNDofcb&v=23793

Our people have lived off the land in Tanzania and Kenya for centuries. Our communities respect our fellow animals and protect and preserve the delicate ecosystem. But the government has for years sought to profit by giving rich princes and kings from the Middle East access to our land to kill. In 2009, when they tried to clear our land to make way for these hunting sprees, we resisted, and hundreds of us were arrested and beaten. Last year, rich princes shot at birds in trees from helicopters. This killing goes against everything in our culture.

Now the government has announced it will clear a huge swath of our land to make way for what it claims will be a wildlife corridor, but many suspect it’s just a ruse to give a foreign hunting corporation and the rich tourists it caters to easier access to shoot at majestic animals. The government claims this new arrangement is some sort of accommodation, but its effect on our people’s way of life will be disastrous. There are thousands of us who could have our lives uprooted, losing our homes, the land on which our animals graze, or both.

President Kikwete knows this deal would be controversial with Tanzania’s tourists - a critical source of national income - and does not want a big PR disaster. If we can urgently generate even more global outrage than we did before, and get the media writing about it, we know it can make him think twice. Stand with us now to call on Kikwete to stop the sell off:

This land grab could spell the end for the Maasai in this part of Tanzania and many of our community have said they would rather die than be forced from their homes. On behalf of our people and the animals who graze in these lands, please stand with us to change the mind of our President.

With hope and determination,

— The Maasai community of Ngorongoro District

Sources: 

• The Guardian: Maasai fury as plan to lure Arabian Gulf tourists threatens their ancestral land

• allAfrica: Land Grab Could Spell ‘The End of the Maasai’

• IPP Media: Maasai villagers frustrate efforts to vacate for Ortelo 

• The Guardian: Tanzania denies plan to evict Maasai for royal hunting ground 

• The Guardian: “Tourism is a curse to us” 

• New Internationalist Magazine: “Hunted down” 

• Society for Threatened People: Briefing on the eviction of the Loliondo Maasai 

• FEMACT: Report by 16 human rights investigators & media on violence in Loliondo

• The Endorois people (also in Kenya) were removed from their sacred land in the 1970s under similar circumstances & for similar motives (the establishment of parks for colonial tourists.)

prepaidafrica:

We are at a juncture which makes investment in Africa good business. Our economies are growing, financial markets are getting stronger and new and smart partnerships are being used to unlock agricultural potential.

Up until recently, we all looked at agriculture through a development lens. We need a fundamental shift in approach if we want to unlock its potential for wealth generation.

We must look at agriculture as a business, not as a development program.

Increasing agricultural productivity is the pinnacle for realizing sustainable growth, not only to reduce the hunger still affecting one quarter of our population, but also to create jobs.

We need to solve the paradox that despite an abundance of arable land, Africa remains a net importer of food.

As the continent’s most populous nation, Nigeria is tackling this challenge through its Agricultural Transformation Agenda aimed at expanding food production and creating jobs.

We want to sustain the momentum initiated by the above average GDP growth rates we have achieved over the past decade by broadening the base of the country’s economic success. We have set course to diversify our economy from dependence on crude oil to agriculture.

With two thirds of our people still living in rural areas, only targeted investments in agricultural value chains and commodities sector will ensure employment creation and growth as well as lead us on the path to food security.

Significant foreign and local investments have already led to a number of proven successes in job creation as well as expanding domestic food production, reducing import dependency, and expanding value addition to locally produced agricultural products.

Our approach may well be the model for the whole region showcasing the positive role the agricultural sector can play in economic diversification, building resilience and reducing need for dependency on development aid.

fastcompany:

How To Power 10 Million Off-Grid African Homes In 10 Years

Taking cues from the pay-as-you-go mobile phone market, Erica Mackey and Off.Grid:Electric are working to deliver clean, affordable energy to the world’s rural poor.

“The poorest people people pay the most money for the dirtiest power,” says Mackey, the 30-year-old COO. “And these people are technically the most risk averse, because anything they lose is a huge hit to them. What we do is centralize that risk. And that allows us to serve the people the national grid doesn’t find profitable.”

Find out how they plan to do it here.

‘When he entered the room, everybody froze in reverence. He was not a physical giant with a booming voice. He was a gentle needle that sewed tattered clothes, a minuscule scorpion’s tail that packed venom. He answered every question with the precision of a sniper. He was a man who spoke gently, yet he was a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down,” as Nelson Mandela said.’