The Egyptian ambassador to Iraq was murdered on the same day as the London bombings. The London thread went on to have close to 1000 replies, the other, less than 100....
Anyone here see this documentary? the website is pretty cool also.
Website
A CHANGING CONTINENT
The Africa You Never See
By Carol Pineau
Sunday, April 17, 2005; Page B02
In the waiting area of a large office complex in Accra, Ghana, it's
standing room only as citizens with bundles of cash line up to buy
shares of a mutual fund that has yielded an average 60 percent
annually for the past seven years. They're entrusting their
hard-earned cash to a local company called Databank, which invests in
stock markets in Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya that consistently
rank among the world's top growth markets.
Chances are you haven't read or heard anything about Databank in your
daily newspaper or on the evening news, where the little coverage of
Africa that's offered focuses almost exclusively on the negative --
the virulent spread of HIV/AIDS, genocide in Darfur and the chaos of
Zimbabwe.
_____Related Content_____
• Growth Across Africa (The Washington Post, Apr 17, 2005)
Signs of Progress
EXPORT SUCCESSES
Kenya exports cut flowers and vegetables to London markets.
Senegal grows cherry tomatoes for sale in French supermarkets.
Madagascar's shrimp and Botswana's beef are reaching other markets.
FINANCIAL IMPROVEMENTS
Inflation, which ran at 8.5 percent in sub-Saharan Africa in the
1990s, subsided to 3.9 percent in 2003.
Net foreign direct investment rose to an estimated $11.3 billion in
2004, up from $6.3 billion in 2000.
POVERTY REDUCTION
Uganda reduced the percentage of people living in absolute poverty
from 56 percent in 1992 to 35 percent in 2000.
Mozambique has reduced poverty by 16 percent since 1997.
Outlook
The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.
• Outlook Section
Free E-mail Newsletters
* Today's Headlines & Columnists
See a Sample | Sign Up Now
* Breaking News Alerts
See a Sample | Sign Up Now
Yes, Africa is a land of wars, poverty and corruption. The situation
in places like Darfur, Sudan, desperately cries out for more media
attention and international action. But Africa is also a land of stock
markets, high rises, Internet cafes and a growing middle class. This
is the part of Africa that functions. And this Africa also needs media
attention, if it's to have any chance of fully joining the global
economy.
Africa's media image comes at a high cost, even, at the extreme, the
cost of lives. Stories about hardship and tragedy aim to tug at our
heartstrings, getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to
send more aid. But no country or region ever developed thanks to aid
alone. Investment, and the job and wealth creation it generates, is
the only road to lasting development. That's how China, India and the
Asian Tigers did it.
Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. government's Overseas Private
Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on direct
foreign investment, it attracts the least. Unless investors see the
Africa that's worthy of investment, they won't put their money into
it. And that lack of investment translates into job stagnation,
continued poverty and limited access to education and health care.
Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the list
of the world's highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with its A+
credit rating, boasts one of the highest per capita government savings
rates in the world, topped only by Singapore and a handful of other
fiscally prudent nations. Cell phones are making phenomenal profits on
the continent. Brand-name companies like Coca-Cola, GM, Caterpillar
and Citibank have invested in Africa for years and are quite bullish
on the future.
The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional
caricature of a complex continent. Imagine if 9/11, the Oklahoma City
bombing and school shootings were all that the rest of the world knew
about America.
I recently produced a documentary on entrepreneurship and private
enterprise in Africa. Throughout the year-long process, I came to
realize how all of us in the media -- even those with a true love of
the continent -- portray it in a way that's truly to its detriment.
The first cameraman I called to film the documentary laughed and said,
"Business and Africa, aren't those contradictory terms?" The second
got excited imagining heart-warming images of women's co-ops and
market stalls brimming with rustic crafts. Several friends simply
assumed I was doing a documentary on AIDS. After all, what else does
one film in Africa?
The little-known fact is that businesses are thriving throughout
Africa. With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries like
Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling, their
economies growing at surprisingly robust rates.
Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations.
You can't find a more war-ravaged land than Somalia, which has been
without a central government for more than a decade. The big surprise?
Private enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the cheapest cell
phone rates on the continent, mostly due to no government
intervention. In the northern city of Hargeysa, the markets sell the
latest satellite phone technology. The electricity works. When the
state collapsed in 1991, the national airline went out of business.
Today, there are five private carriers and price wars keep the cost of
tickets down. This is not the Somalia you see in the media.
Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good governance
-- or even just some governance -- but it's also true that, through
resilience and resourcefulness, Somalis have been able to create a
functioning society.
Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of infrastructure,
but the people I met were too determined to let this stop them. It
just costs them more. Without reliable electricity, most businesses
have to use generators. They have to dig bore-holes for a dependable
water source. Telephone lines are notoriously out of service, but cell
phones are filling the gap.
Throughout Africa, what I found was a private sector working hard to
find African solutions to African problems. One example that will
always stick in my mind is the CEO of Vodacom Congo, the largest cell
phone company in that country. Alieu Conteh started his business while
the civil war was still raging. With rebel troops closing in on the
airport in Kinshasa, no foreign manufacturer would send in a cell
phone tower, so Conteh got locals to collect scrap metal, which they
welded together to build one. That tower still stands today.
As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually astounded
by their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These people are the
future of the continent. They are the ones we should be talking to
about how to move Africa forward. Instead, the media concentrates on
victims or government officials, and as anyone who has worked in
Africa knows, government is more often a part of the problem than of
the solution.
When the foreign media descend on the latest crisis, the person they
look to interview is invariably the foreign savior, an aid worker from
the United States or Europe. African saviors are everywhere,
delivering aid on the ground. But they don't seem to be in our
cultural belief system. It's not just the media, either. Look at the
literature put out by almost any nongovernmental organization. The
better ones show images of smiling African children -- smiling because
they have been helped by the NGO. The worst promote the
extended-belly, flies-on-the-face cliche of Africa, hoping that the
pain of seeing those images will fill their coffers. "We hawk
poverty," one NGO worker admitted to me.
Last November, ABC's "Primetime Live" aired a special on Britain's
Prince Harry and his work with AIDS children in Lesotho. The segment,
titled "The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho," painted the
tiny nation as a desperate, desolate place. The program's message was
clear: This helpless nation at last had a knight -- or prince -- in
shining armor.
By the time the charity addresses came up at the end, you were ready
to give, and that's good. Lesotho needs help with its AIDS problem.
But would it really have hurt the story to add that this land-locked
nation with few natural resources has jump-started its economy by
aggressively courting foreign investment? The reality is that it's
anything but a "forgotten kingdom," as a dramatic increase in exports
has made it the top beneficiary of the African Growth and Opportunity
Act (AGOA), a duty-free, quota-free U.S.-Africa trade agreement. More
than 50,000 people have gotten jobs through the country's initiatives.
Couldn't the program have portrayed an African country that was in
need of assistance, but was neither helpless nor a victim?
Still the simplistic portrayals come. A recent episode of the popular
NBC drama "Medical Investigation" was about an anthrax scare in
Philadelphia. The source of the deadly spores? Some illegal immigrants
from Africa playing their drums in a local market, unknowingly
infecting innocent passersby. Typical: If it's a deadly disease, the
scriptwriters make it come from Africa.
Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent's
booming stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper
financial pages. How often is an African country -- apart, perhaps,
from South Africa or Egypt or Morocco -- featured in a newspaper
travel section? Even the listing of worldwide weather includes only a
few African cities.
The result of this portrait is an Africa we can't relate to. It seems
so foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we can't
relate to it, we ignore it.
There are lots of reasons for the media's neglect of Africa: bean
counters in the newsroom and the high cost of international coverage,
the belief that American viewers aren't interested in international
stories, and the infotainment of news. There's also journalists'
reluctance to pursue so-called "positive stories." We all know that
such stories don't win awards or get front-page, above-the-fold
placement. But what's happening in Africa doesn't need to be cast in
any special light. The Ghana Stock Exchange was the fastest-growing
exchange in the world in 2003. That's not a "positive" story, that's
news, just like reports on the London Stock Exchange. I imagine a lot
of consumers would have found it newsworthy to learn where they could
have made a 144 percent return on their money.
My independent film was made possible by funding from the World Bank,
for which I am extremely grateful. But the bank wouldn't have had to
step in if the media had been doing their job -- showing all Africans
in all facets of their lives. In a business that's supposed to cover
man-bites-dog stories, the idea that Africa doesn't work is a
dog-bites-man story. If the media are really looking for news, they'd
look at the ways that Africa, despite all the odds, does work.
Author's e-mail: [email protected]
Carol Pineau, a journalist with more than 10 years of experience
reporting on Africa, is the producer and director of the film "Africa:
Open for Business," which premiered last week at the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.
Anyone here see this documentary? the website is pretty cool also.
Website
A CHANGING CONTINENT
The Africa You Never See
By Carol Pineau
Sunday, April 17, 2005; Page B02
In the waiting area of a large office complex in Accra, Ghana, it's
standing room only as citizens with bundles of cash line up to buy
shares of a mutual fund that has yielded an average 60 percent
annually for the past seven years. They're entrusting their
hard-earned cash to a local company called Databank, which invests in
stock markets in Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya that consistently
rank among the world's top growth markets.
Chances are you haven't read or heard anything about Databank in your
daily newspaper or on the evening news, where the little coverage of
Africa that's offered focuses almost exclusively on the negative --
the virulent spread of HIV/AIDS, genocide in Darfur and the chaos of
Zimbabwe.
_____Related Content_____
• Growth Across Africa (The Washington Post, Apr 17, 2005)
Signs of Progress
EXPORT SUCCESSES
Kenya exports cut flowers and vegetables to London markets.
Senegal grows cherry tomatoes for sale in French supermarkets.
Madagascar's shrimp and Botswana's beef are reaching other markets.
FINANCIAL IMPROVEMENTS
Inflation, which ran at 8.5 percent in sub-Saharan Africa in the
1990s, subsided to 3.9 percent in 2003.
Net foreign direct investment rose to an estimated $11.3 billion in
2004, up from $6.3 billion in 2000.
POVERTY REDUCTION
Uganda reduced the percentage of people living in absolute poverty
from 56 percent in 1992 to 35 percent in 2000.
Mozambique has reduced poverty by 16 percent since 1997.
Outlook
The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.
• Outlook Section
Free E-mail Newsletters
* Today's Headlines & Columnists
See a Sample | Sign Up Now
* Breaking News Alerts
See a Sample | Sign Up Now
Yes, Africa is a land of wars, poverty and corruption. The situation
in places like Darfur, Sudan, desperately cries out for more media
attention and international action. But Africa is also a land of stock
markets, high rises, Internet cafes and a growing middle class. This
is the part of Africa that functions. And this Africa also needs media
attention, if it's to have any chance of fully joining the global
economy.
Africa's media image comes at a high cost, even, at the extreme, the
cost of lives. Stories about hardship and tragedy aim to tug at our
heartstrings, getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to
send more aid. But no country or region ever developed thanks to aid
alone. Investment, and the job and wealth creation it generates, is
the only road to lasting development. That's how China, India and the
Asian Tigers did it.
Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. government's Overseas Private
Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on direct
foreign investment, it attracts the least. Unless investors see the
Africa that's worthy of investment, they won't put their money into
it. And that lack of investment translates into job stagnation,
continued poverty and limited access to education and health care.
Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the list
of the world's highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with its A+
credit rating, boasts one of the highest per capita government savings
rates in the world, topped only by Singapore and a handful of other
fiscally prudent nations. Cell phones are making phenomenal profits on
the continent. Brand-name companies like Coca-Cola, GM, Caterpillar
and Citibank have invested in Africa for years and are quite bullish
on the future.
The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional
caricature of a complex continent. Imagine if 9/11, the Oklahoma City
bombing and school shootings were all that the rest of the world knew
about America.
I recently produced a documentary on entrepreneurship and private
enterprise in Africa. Throughout the year-long process, I came to
realize how all of us in the media -- even those with a true love of
the continent -- portray it in a way that's truly to its detriment.
The first cameraman I called to film the documentary laughed and said,
"Business and Africa, aren't those contradictory terms?" The second
got excited imagining heart-warming images of women's co-ops and
market stalls brimming with rustic crafts. Several friends simply
assumed I was doing a documentary on AIDS. After all, what else does
one film in Africa?
The little-known fact is that businesses are thriving throughout
Africa. With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries like
Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling, their
economies growing at surprisingly robust rates.
Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations.
You can't find a more war-ravaged land than Somalia, which has been
without a central government for more than a decade. The big surprise?
Private enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the cheapest cell
phone rates on the continent, mostly due to no government
intervention. In the northern city of Hargeysa, the markets sell the
latest satellite phone technology. The electricity works. When the
state collapsed in 1991, the national airline went out of business.
Today, there are five private carriers and price wars keep the cost of
tickets down. This is not the Somalia you see in the media.
Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good governance
-- or even just some governance -- but it's also true that, through
resilience and resourcefulness, Somalis have been able to create a
functioning society.
Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of infrastructure,
but the people I met were too determined to let this stop them. It
just costs them more. Without reliable electricity, most businesses
have to use generators. They have to dig bore-holes for a dependable
water source. Telephone lines are notoriously out of service, but cell
phones are filling the gap.
Throughout Africa, what I found was a private sector working hard to
find African solutions to African problems. One example that will
always stick in my mind is the CEO of Vodacom Congo, the largest cell
phone company in that country. Alieu Conteh started his business while
the civil war was still raging. With rebel troops closing in on the
airport in Kinshasa, no foreign manufacturer would send in a cell
phone tower, so Conteh got locals to collect scrap metal, which they
welded together to build one. That tower still stands today.
As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually astounded
by their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These people are the
future of the continent. They are the ones we should be talking to
about how to move Africa forward. Instead, the media concentrates on
victims or government officials, and as anyone who has worked in
Africa knows, government is more often a part of the problem than of
the solution.
When the foreign media descend on the latest crisis, the person they
look to interview is invariably the foreign savior, an aid worker from
the United States or Europe. African saviors are everywhere,
delivering aid on the ground. But they don't seem to be in our
cultural belief system. It's not just the media, either. Look at the
literature put out by almost any nongovernmental organization. The
better ones show images of smiling African children -- smiling because
they have been helped by the NGO. The worst promote the
extended-belly, flies-on-the-face cliche of Africa, hoping that the
pain of seeing those images will fill their coffers. "We hawk
poverty," one NGO worker admitted to me.
Last November, ABC's "Primetime Live" aired a special on Britain's
Prince Harry and his work with AIDS children in Lesotho. The segment,
titled "The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho," painted the
tiny nation as a desperate, desolate place. The program's message was
clear: This helpless nation at last had a knight -- or prince -- in
shining armor.
By the time the charity addresses came up at the end, you were ready
to give, and that's good. Lesotho needs help with its AIDS problem.
But would it really have hurt the story to add that this land-locked
nation with few natural resources has jump-started its economy by
aggressively courting foreign investment? The reality is that it's
anything but a "forgotten kingdom," as a dramatic increase in exports
has made it the top beneficiary of the African Growth and Opportunity
Act (AGOA), a duty-free, quota-free U.S.-Africa trade agreement. More
than 50,000 people have gotten jobs through the country's initiatives.
Couldn't the program have portrayed an African country that was in
need of assistance, but was neither helpless nor a victim?
Still the simplistic portrayals come. A recent episode of the popular
NBC drama "Medical Investigation" was about an anthrax scare in
Philadelphia. The source of the deadly spores? Some illegal immigrants
from Africa playing their drums in a local market, unknowingly
infecting innocent passersby. Typical: If it's a deadly disease, the
scriptwriters make it come from Africa.
Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent's
booming stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper
financial pages. How often is an African country -- apart, perhaps,
from South Africa or Egypt or Morocco -- featured in a newspaper
travel section? Even the listing of worldwide weather includes only a
few African cities.
The result of this portrait is an Africa we can't relate to. It seems
so foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we can't
relate to it, we ignore it.
There are lots of reasons for the media's neglect of Africa: bean
counters in the newsroom and the high cost of international coverage,
the belief that American viewers aren't interested in international
stories, and the infotainment of news. There's also journalists'
reluctance to pursue so-called "positive stories." We all know that
such stories don't win awards or get front-page, above-the-fold
placement. But what's happening in Africa doesn't need to be cast in
any special light. The Ghana Stock Exchange was the fastest-growing
exchange in the world in 2003. That's not a "positive" story, that's
news, just like reports on the London Stock Exchange. I imagine a lot
of consumers would have found it newsworthy to learn where they could
have made a 144 percent return on their money.
My independent film was made possible by funding from the World Bank,
for which I am extremely grateful. But the bank wouldn't have had to
step in if the media had been doing their job -- showing all Africans
in all facets of their lives. In a business that's supposed to cover
man-bites-dog stories, the idea that Africa doesn't work is a
dog-bites-man story. If the media are really looking for news, they'd
look at the ways that Africa, despite all the odds, does work.
Author's e-mail: [email protected]
Carol Pineau, a journalist with more than 10 years of experience
reporting on Africa, is the producer and director of the film "Africa:
Open for Business," which premiered last week at the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.
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