

Africa's "Crisis": Africa in better shape than most experts think - cwan
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/31/think_again_africas_crisis?page=0,0

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dawie
I think some of the stats are skewed.

"Breast-feeding, hand-washing, sugar-salt solutions, vaccines, antibiotics,
and bed nets together save millions -- and could save millions more -- and
none need cost more than $5 a pop"

Also living of $280 a year $5 is a quarter of your monthly income which is
quite a bit for these people. They don't save and all live hand to mouth.

Africa is screwed.That's why I left.

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pistoriusp
The whole entire Africa is screwed? Surely you come from just one of the 47
countries in Africa?

I'm assuming with a nickname like Dawie you're a South African? Where did you
immigrate to?

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dawie
I am from South-Africa.

I moved to Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

~~~
pistoriusp
That must have been a long time ago considering that you've already forgotten
how to spell South Africa. It's not hyphenated in English.

Anyway, good luck over there.

~~~
dawie
Dis omdat ek Afrikaans is dat ek sukkel met die spel. God dank vir MS Spell
Check.

~~~
pistoriusp
Ek weet, ek speel maar net. :)

~~~
wlievens
Hilarious, I can actually read this (I'm Belgian).

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tokenadult
The article makes the important point that Africa has been enjoying
improvement in daily life through technological diffusion just like every
other continent, but I think the crisis comes from Africa being worse off than
other continents in an era when people have intercontinental mobility. The
year I was born, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan. Many African
countries had a reasonably good start as colonialism ended. But during the
1960s and 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan (and Korea, etc.) made far more progress
than countries in Africa that had a head start in economic development, and
today people with a choice move to the places with the best opportunities.
That includes smart Africans with means who leave the countries of their birth
to study and work abroad. Emigration isn't zero-sum: often countries gain from
citizens who go abroad and learn about new ways of doing things and who send
back money to relatives. But investment tends to flow to the areas with the
best opportunities, so every country has to be an APPARENT place of
opportunity to gain investment.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> The year I was born, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan.

Out of curiosity, what year were you born? I have family connections to pre-
war Zambia/Zimbabwe, and that situation immediately came to mind when I
started reading this article.

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tokenadult
_Out of curiosity, what year were you born?_

Near the end of Eisenhower's presidency in the United States. I actually heard
that exact statement about the year my wife was born, a few years later. It's
very hard for me to imagine now that Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. were
once wretchedly poor, but they were within my lifetime.

~~~
dkersten
Or Zimbabwe was rich once? You never specified that Taiwan was as poor as
Zimbabwe now (or that Zimbabwe was as rich as Taiwan now), just that Zimbabwe
was richer than Taiwan.

~~~
tokenadult
The now fully industrialized countries of east Asia were poor a half century
ago, and the newly independent countries of Africa were in several cases less
poor. But later the countries in Asia grew and prospered much faster,
resulting in the huge gap we see today.

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pistoriusp
Time and time again Hans Roslings talk about statistics is posted here on HN.
([http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html))

His message is clear.

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yanowitz
I think a more important point is that most of Africa lags the rest of the
world in gains. I made the larger point here: <http://bit.ly/1pJjHg>

