Africa's "Crisis": Africa in better shape than most experts think | Hacker News Reader

Africa's "Crisis": Africa in better shape than most experts think

foreignpolicy.com

17 pointscwan15 comments

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.

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?

I am from South-Africa.

I moved to Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

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.

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

Hey, Suid Africa is nie so sleg :)

You cannot really count South Africa with the rest of Africa.

Ek weet, ek speel maar net. :)

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

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.

>> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

His message is clear.

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

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