General

By Obed Fung, Director From a Promising Sector to an Agricultural bank Of the close to 20 million inhabitants of Cameroon, about 8.5 million (42 percent of the total population) live in rural areas where informal agriculture is the predominant source of employment. Despite its subsistence nature, this sector employs more than 55 percent of the total workforce, while providing 22 percent of its GDP by sector and 30 percent of its export revenue on average. In the past couple of years, the agricultural sector has exhibited an average 5 percent growth rate and this is encouraging especially when compared [...]

Recently, I met two young men who will contribute greatly to the healing of those in their countries who have suffered unspeakable injustices. Paul Kut Kelei’s family was forced to flee South S?udan and he grew up as a refugee in Ethiopia. When he was a child, Joseph Munyambanza escaped civil war in the Congo and spent his formative years in the Kyangwali refugee camp in Uganda. Today Joseph is 23, Paul is 22 and they are studying biochemistry and international affairs respectively in the United States. At The MasterCard Foundation, we work with extraordinary young people from across Africa [...]

By Mike Van Graan In the past 10 to 15 years, a number of African countries have seen sustained and high economic growth, yet this has not lifted the continent’s inhabitants out of poverty. While poverty has been massively reduced in Asia in the past 30 years—in China and India in particular—50 percent of Africans in 2013 still eke out an existence below the poverty line of $2 per day, just as they did in 1981. Of the 46 countries in the Low Human Development category of the Human Development Index (HDI), which measures health, education, and living standards, 36 [...]

By Isobel Coleman In the early 2000s, Africa’s future seemed grim. The Economist’s May 13, 2000 cover declared “Africa: The Hopeless Continent.” But over a decade later, when The Economist again devoted a feature story to the continent, the message had changed entirely to “Africa Rising.” A new book by Jonathan Berman, Success in Africa: CEO Insights from a Continent on the Rise, aims to explain how this transformation happened and what the world can expect from a now-hopeful continent. Berman argues that three simultaneous revolutions – in governance, education, and communications – have catapulted the region forward. Indeed, for [...]

By Lenora Ebule Foretia [dropcap type="circle" color="#8C212A" background="#B06606"]C[/dropcap] hina’s impressive growth represents one of the greatest economic success stories of the last three decades. Since it adopted an “open market” policy in 1978, the country has grown at a remarkable speed and enjoyed an average GDP growth of 10.3% in the last decade. It has also succeeded in lifting more than 400million of its citizens out of poverty, more that any country in modern history. While China’s GDP grew by almost 380% between 1980 to the late 2000s, Cameroon’s GDP shrunk by about 10% in the same period. On a [...]

By Karen Brooks Sub-Saharan Africa has the world's youngest and fastest growing population. With enough support from African leaders, agricultural initiatives will boost employment and the economy. Agriculture employs most of Africa's young people and is likely to continue to do so in the future. But to meet the aspirations of millions who want rewarding work, the continents's agricultural sector will have to change markedly. Today's farming by machete and hand hoe does not appeal to young Africans or to policymakers. Farming is not even viewed as a "job" by many young Africans, who instead reserve the term for employment [...]