Afrimambo

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, was Nigeria's Finance Minister and then briefly Foreign Affairs Minister from 2003 to 2006, the first woman to hold either position.

During her tenure, she worked to combat corruption, make Nigeria's finances more transparent, and institute reforms to make the nation's economy more hospitable to foreign investment. The government unlinked its budget from the price of oil, its main export, to lessen perennial cashflow crises, and got oil companies to publish how much they pay the government.

Since 2003 -- when watchdog group Transparency International rated Nigeria "the most corrupt place on Earth" -- the nation has made headway recovering stolen assets and jailing hundreds of people engaged in international Internet 419 scams.

Nicholas Negroponte lays out the details of his nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project. Speaking just days after relinquishing his post as director of the MIT Media Lab, he announces that he'll pursue this venture for the rest of his life. He takes us inside the strategy for building the "$100 laptop," and explains why and how the project plans to launch "at scale," with millions of units distributed in the first seven countries. "This is not a laptop project; it's an education project," he says.

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.Thier Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.

LINK: http://cnx.org/aboutus/

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk has a giant vision: to create a free global online education system that puts the power of creation and collaboration in the hands of teachers worldwide. He's realizing that vision with Connexions, a website that allows teachers to quickly "create, rip, mix and burn" coursework -- without fear of copyright violations. Think of it as Napster for education.


"[Connexions] is trying to reshape the way academe uses both peer review and publishing. The project also has hopes of becoming a major curricular tool at community colleges." Inside Higher Ed

With probably over US$100 million in its purse, a new Pay Tv company later in the month of June begins beaming its programmes in the five East African countries before rolling out to 13 other African countries in an ambitious project.

The direct-to-home, satellite-based Pan-African pay-TV, GTV, a subsidiary of UK’s Gateway Broadcasting Service will be available from June 22, with a phased roll-out across sub-Saharan Africa.

“Our aim is to demystify Pay Television and it is still too early to put a final cost to the project,” is all a guarded Kagwe could tell Business Week a fortnight ago when asked about the cost of the project.

The $100 million given by industry experts however, is a conservative figure required to set up such an ambitious project in 18 countries.

Viewers will have access to major international channels as well as GTV’s own channels screening news, sports, movies, popular series, music, and religious content.

World Economic Forum on Africa
Africa’s economic development and investment potential are to come under the spotlight at the World Economic Forum (wef) on Africa 2007 in Cape Town this month (June). The wef is perhaps best known for its annual meeting of world political and business leaders in the Swiss town of Davos, but it also holds similar regional conferences and the Cape Town event will be the latest in the series of African meetings. Delegates at the three day conference will discuss a range of issues, including job creation, good governance and improving the competitiveness of African states and economies.

Two themes seem to permeate much of the World Economic Forum’s deliberations: the increasing integration of African countries into the world economy; and the need to build capacity.

In the past, many economies have been so isolated from the international political economy that they have been relatively unaffected by global recessions or booms. Economic interaction with neighbouring states has often been very limited while trade with the rest of the world has usually been reliant upon the export of a handful of commodities and the import of refined petroleum products and consumer goods by the more prosperous countries. Yet it has now become clear that many African economies are feeling both the benefits and disadvantages of globalisation more than ever before. The Ghanaian IT sector, for example, is growing on the back of the outsourcing of services from North America and Western Europe.

Despite the negative impact of trade barriers – particularly in the agricultural sector where African producers are restricted from exporting to many industrialised nations – global tariffs and duties are gradually falling while new technology makes it easier to transfer the operations of some companies to parts of the world where salaries and other costs are much lower, such as most of Africa.