Zoo Station

I met Jennifer Brea, a freelance journalist when I was at TED Global. Now, she has done amazing writing on the conference and its aftermath. Her first piece was titled, "Africans to Bono: 'For God's sake, Please Stop!'" In my opinion, it is a must-read piece, but here are a few excerpts:

Africa has never loomed as large in the popular imagination of the West as it does today, thanks to the Jeffrey Sachs-Bono ambition to Make Poverty History, and of course to Angelina Jolie and Madonna's commitment to adopting African babies. Their message of hope is one that seems to deny Africans a role as agents of their own transformation. We can save Darfur. We can save Africans from disease. We can even save Africans from themselves. Africa can be saved if we just try hard enough.

It is true that from the villages of Darfur to the slums of Soweto, thousands of people on this continent die unnecessary deaths each day, but Africa is home to 900 million. Tragedy is a small part of a much larger and more complex story. Of the 47 countries that make up sub-Saharan Africa, only five-Sudan, Chad, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia-are home to active conflicts. Last year, Africa saw its highest growth in GDP in two decades. Sixteen African countries have favorable sovereign credit ratings. Botswana's is higher than Japan, yet it still struggles to attract investment.

For the thousands of foreign-educated lawyers, businessmen, and architects from the Diaspora who are leaving cushy corporate jobs to return home with their skills and their dynamism to open businesses, it's about creating wealth, not reducing poverty. Africa is not a victim in need of saving: it's a land of opportunity.
[...]
Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.

The perverse result is that many of Africa's best and brightest become bureaucrats or NGO workers when they should be scientists or entrepreneurs. Which is why some are wondering: why not just take the aid money and invest in local business? "If you make Africans rich, they'll be less poor," said Idriss Mohammed, a financier who wants to raise a private equity fund for Sub-Saharan Africa. "Forget making poverty history. I want to make Africans rich."
[...]
Here's a radical idea: if we really want to help, why not ask Africans, not their governments, how they perceive the challenges before them, the dreams they have for the future, and the resources they think they need to realize them? Instead, we let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa. And in the process, the story of the other Africa, the Africa that is dynamic, creative, and wants to work as a partner and the leader of its own future, is being drowned out by the clarion cry of the anti-poverty glitterati–and our own appetites for gripping, salacious headlines of war, poverty, and grief.

This is just one among the many stories Jen has written post-TED and each one is worth reading. In the meanwhile, she (and several others) pointed to a Nick Kristof op-ed, in which he actually talks about investment opportunities in Africa, written the week after my run-in with him about my TED round-up. Now, I am not vain enough to think that my piece was responsible for the positive story from Kristof, but if there was even the slightest impact, that's good enough for me.