"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
Gaborone, Botswana – China will deepen joint medical research with Africa, particularly in training African medical scientists. Ren Minghui, director-general of the Department for International Cooperation within the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China, said research and development is one priority area of collaboration being explored.
These days, I find myself very much interested in matters relating to the Nigerian/African middle class. I’m not alone, journalists and academics and investment bankers and DFIs are all quite obsessed with it as well, if the number of articles and reports daily emerging is anything to go by.
A few years ago, a World Bank study revealed that Uganda was losing Ush500 billion a year to corruption, much of it in procurement of supplies and services. That is real money. One would have thought that the government of a poor country such as Uganda would have been spurred into action to end the rot.
“China’s gift to Africa.” The new headquarters of the African Union, a towering 20-storey building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is so called because China picked up the $200 million tab for the state-of-the-art complex. Ethiopia’s tallest building, completed in December 2011 in time for an AU summit the following month, includes a 2,500-seat conference hall.
Emerging market leaders want their Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa club to be taken seriously, and next month they are expected to make a decisive move towards setting up a development bank to give it real substance and credibility. “There is no doubt that the BRICS Development Bank will be a welcome development,” Sandile Zungu, the Secretary of South Africa’s Black Business Council, told IPS.
China’s growing role in Africa is no secret. Its expansive resource-backed infrastructural projects are widely reported on and the $200 billion/year trade between China and Africa has been turning heads around the world. Sino-African relations are covered abundantly in Western and African media. But now, China wants to narrate its own stories.
Ory Okolloh, the Executive Director of Ushahidi , is from Kenya but currently lives in Johannesburg. Her blog is "outlet for her opinions. While it is primarily focused on Kenya, she reserves to write about whatever she wants."
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian social justice activist living in Spain, with a background in technology, gender issues and human rights. She is interested in creating a community of grassroots African bloggers as a way for Africans to exchange ideas, share experiences and tell their own stories in our own words.
Native of Cape Town, Sean Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in Manhattan. He obsesses about the relationship between politics and popular culture, but the main rationale for his blog is to comment on what passes for media coverage of the African continent.
Rosebelle Kagumire is an experienced Ugandan Journalist. She won the best Journalist blogger English category at the Panos hosted competition in 2009. Currently she is a student of MA. Media, Conflict and Peace studies at University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
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