New Hope for Africa through Investment and Freedom from UN interference

There are two worlds in countries of sub-Saharan Africa and many other underdeveloped countries, the urban world of development, investment and progress, and the rural world that is isolated, poor and struggling to survive. Between these two are the more developed agricultural areas near cities and the slums surrounding cities where rural people who come to cities for more opportunity, end up living in deplorable conditions without proper infrastructure.  The areas with modern agriculture have many of the amenities of the city such as access to electricity, clean water, sanitation and roads, but the slums have more in common with the rural poor, without access to clean water, sanitation and sometimes electricity.

In most developing countries the leaders tend to concentrate infrastructure development in urban areas while largely ignoring the needs of the isolated rural poor. Because the businesses of the cities attract investment, and bring in both market value and taxes, they are given priority.  This is natural since the cities are the hope of future economic development, and attracting investment from other countries is one of the main means of improving the lives of all of their countrymen in the long run.  However, part of the funds available from this economic development should go into extending electrical distribution and transportation over time to the rural communities.  In the short term it makes sense to support the cities, but in the long term extending support to the rural poor can further raise the overall economy and attract more investment. Rural electrification, transportation and opportunities through markets and business investments will raise many of those in extreme poverty to a higher economic level.

Investment, not aid, is the answer to raising developing countries out of poverty. See next section for information about the investment climate in Africa. Aid should only be a temporary measure for support in emergencies and for infrastructure building in the form of loans that can be repaid when conditions have improved.  Aid should never be used for permanent or long term support of generationally poor populations.  What you subsidize, you get more of.  The rural poor don’t need hand-outs; they need jobs, electricity and roads so they can climb out of poverty.

The worst type of aid is government to government foreign aid, which should be ended as soon as practical. Typically less than 2% of this type of aid goes to improving the lives of ordinary people.  Most of it goes to corrupt leaders and their administrations. Ending the practice of government to government foreign aid will reduce or end much of the government corruption and make leaders more responsible to their constituents. If they are dependent on the tax base and not foreign donors they will have incentive to build the infrastructure in order to attract business investors and grow the economy, and thus the tax base. Building the transportation and energy sectors into more rural areas would then make practical sense in order to attract investors and open markets to rural agricultural production.

China is investing heavily in African energy projects such as hydroelectric and fossil fuel power plants. While I would like to assume that China has only benign motives, that has not been their history.  The Western world would be wise to invest in similar projects and not just throw money at corrupt governments in an attempt to stave off Chinese communist incursions and power.

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The book: Saving Africa from Lies that Kill: How Myths about the Environment and Overpopulation are Destroying Third World Countries was published in September, 2018. Print and ebook are available online.

My first book, Perverted Truth Exposed: How Progressive Philosophy has Corrupted Science was published in 2016. It is available in print and ebook, on line only, through Amazon, Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble.  See the companion blog at www.realscienceblog.com  for related posts and pages.