Amelioration is no cure

About 2.8 billion people - between a third and a half of the world's population - burn solid fuel such as wood, crop waste, charcoal, coal and dung to cook their food in open fires and leaky stoves. Inside those homes, cooking smoke is eye-stingingly visible, and it blackens the walls. But the invisible effect it has on the tiniest, branching airways of the lungs is what makes this a global crisis. Those smoke particles are taken up by cells that form part of the natural defences of the lungs. In doing that, they diminish the function of these cells, increasing the risk of infections and chronic illness. Crucially, smoke is a key driver of child pneumonia - a leading cause of death in children under five in many countries across the developing world. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that four million premature deaths every year - in children and adults - can be attributed to indoor air pollution. That is why in 2010, the United Nations Foundation and the US State Department launched the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), with a mission to "foster the adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels in 100 million households by 2020".

Cleaner cookstoves, the alliance says "save lives and reduce illness". There is, however, a problem. A study run by Kevin Mortimer in Malawi over the last two years, and written up in the Lancet, shows that the cookstove alone does neither. A big clinical trial in Malawi was expected to show children are less likely to die of pneumonia if they live in a home where food is cooked on a smoke-free stove rather than an open fire. Instead it suggests the stove makes no difference. "We followed up and monitored the health of 10,000 children for this study, and our results basically show that there is no difference in cases of pneumonia between the intervention and the control group," he says. "The hard science - certainly from our study - is perhaps at odds with the claim that stoves along the lines of the ones we've used here save lives and reduce illness."

Where does this leave a huge UN-backed project to get 100 million clean cookstoves into homes in the developing world by 2020?

"Exposure to household air pollution is a problem of poverty," says Kevin Mortimer, a medical doctor and a respiratory health researcher at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. "If you're not poor, you're not exposed."

Charging or free charges

Batteries by Tesla Motors can revolutionise electricity for the world’s poorest citizens the way mobile technology disrupted the telecommunications industry. Coupled with solar panels or wind turbines, powerful lithium-ion batteries can store energy and provide electricity for people facing what’s called “energy poverty.”

“In a lot of places there are no utility lines,” Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, said at the introduction of itsTesla Energy products. “This allows you to go completely off grid.”

About 1.3 billion people worldwide don’t have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. Almost 97% of those people live in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, according to the agency. Those regions could be good locations for so-called micro-grids—self-contained systems of solar panels and batteries.

Peter Asmus, an analyst with Navigant Consulting explained that if declining prices of solar panels and batteries continue as expected, “that’s the game changer.” Asmus said solar and battery systems can be used to replace dirty and expensive diesel generation commonly used in developing countries. Whether a poor community would use smaller home batteries or a shared system isn’t yet clear. In some cases, people might pay for electricity using their mobile phones. “The challenge is how do you get people to pay,” Asmus said.

Isn’t it tragic that a new technology that is not merely a game-changer but a life-changer eventually comes down to how to charge people (and make a profit) rather than provide the energy charge for free so they can go about their daily lives.

Saving Africa

Western “solutions” to African’s problems don’t solve anything except Western NGO workers’ need for a regular salary.

Since 2005 LifeStraws proclaimed as a “cheap, portable personal water purifier,” has been picking up awards; Esquire said it was an innovation of the year in 2005, Time called it the “best invention of the year,” Gizmag, without any contrition, called it the “invention of the century” and Forbes called it “one of the 10 things that will change the world” in 2006. The “straw” is a long blue tube that “provides access to safe drinking water by converting microbiologically contaminated water into safe drinking water.” Publicity images of it show black Africans, sometimes half naked, bending over to drink purified water through it. Paul Hetherington, a spokesman for WaterAid in the UK, claimed “it is something that may well have very useful applications in an emergency scenario. But it’s not a development tool, it doesn’t really solve the problem of getting water to people.” Innovative devices like LifeStraw aren’t created with malicious intent, nor are they necessarily ineffective; many work perfectly fine.

But let’s look at the images again; young, half-naked Africans hip deep in a pool of water, stooping to drink the water through one of these devices. When Europeans travel to countries with sub-standard water, they sometimes bring water filtration systems, tablets or other means to purify water. We don’t see pictures of them bending over streams, cow-like, drinking water through LifeStraws. High-tech straws are not suggested as a means to solving filtration problems for white people, say, in parts of rural Russia or Romania, where there might be contaminated water, so why are they “good enough” for Africans? And it isn’t just about straws: the device is emblematic of an entire industry of suddenly popular, quickly forgotten programs and devices that will “save” Africans or “solve” Africa’s problems.

Lack of access to safe drinking water is the problem. Almost a billion people worldwide are estimated to not have access to safe water; and supposedly around 35 percent of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Basically that means most of Africa doesn’t have access to decent water. That’s a problem. It was also a problem for Europe and the West well into the 20th century. So why is it that all the processes that led to safe drinking water in Europe are not seen as workable for Africa? Why is it the “answer” to African problems is always some charity with portable toilets or stoves or some other device – even cardboard bicycles – that no one would ever expect poverty-stricken Europeans to use? Google “solve Africa’s drinking water problems” and you come across “a giant basket that uses condensation to gather drinking water.” Looks pretty, next to some grass huts. But they won’t be using that in Nevada. Nope. Just for Africans.

Another website claims to have “15 concepts for providing clean drinking water,” which include a photo of African children who “pump while playing” and another that proposes transforming “sewage to drinking water.” Sounds wonderful. No one expects people in America to drink sewage, but in Malawi it’s a great idea. Another system made by SunDwater uses a “green...low-cost, low maintenance system that converts dirty or salty water into potable water.” It involves a four-square-meter photovoltaic dish (like a satellite dish) and the water is condensed on it. It sounds nice, but it isn’t a real solution; after all, no one is going to be using it in Portugal, so why expect it to be used widely in Uganda?

A story in 2013 tells of a school in Tel Aviv where ninth and tenth graders are testing the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to solve the problem of malnutrition.” In plastic bottles they had bred a blue-green algae called spirulina, that looked like green slime, and the theory was this would be good for Africa. I have a better idea: serve this in the cafeteria of schools in the wealthy communities of Israel, and if the kids there agree to eat it for a year, then export this idea to Africa. Because if a bunch of nice kids in your community don’t want to eat green algae, don’t expect “Africans” to want to.

“Watering the grassroots” was a project to train African women to solve water problems.” Using a “rainwater harvesting system” Oddly, that wasn’t the solution to China’s drinking- water issues. Just Africa. In China the Ministry of Water Resources estimated that as of 2005 three-hundred million people were unable to access safe drinking water. Almost 200 million people in rural areas were still exposed to harmful substances. To combat these problems the government was investing in a massive “11th five year plan” which envisioned plowing $5 billion into safe drinking water. By contrast 334 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were estimated in 2010 to not have access to clean drinking water. That’s roughly the same as in China, yet in China they are digging up rivers, laying pipe and building massive infrastructure projects worth twice the GDP of Malawi to combat this scourge; they are not handing out straws, solar panels and baskets.

Solutions to problems in Africa tend to involve handing out 21st century high-tech gadgets to infrastructure-poor countries that require massive 20th century reforms and solutions. All of the problems Africa faces, whether it is the supposed need for “smokeless stoves” or clean water, are ones every other country in the world faces or has faced. Yet the solution for Africa almost always does not take into account incremental changes that people want; rather they envision some miracle device that “solves all these problems, and would help reach the Millennium Development Goals,” or some foreign imposed solution. The Western concept of “saving” and “solving” Africa’s problems too often derives from a sub-conscious racist “white man’s burden” mentality, wherein the “starving African” is “saved” by the white man from abroad. The solutions offered are manifestly inadequate and ridiculous, but serve industries of charity and self-promotion. The legions of nonsensical awards for these inventions are part of this “salvation” culture. If you want to save Africa, demand that the technology be exported there to bring it up to Western standards. Don’t expect people there to live a life drinking out of straws like cattle and eating algae slime.

“Saving” Africa, or “building schools in Africa” has nothing really to do with Africa.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Stop-saving-Africa-385994

Fact of the Day

There are fewer people with internet access in the entire continent of Africa than in New York City alone.

failed solutions on offer once aagain

Daniel Howden is The Independent's Africa correspondent writes
Up to 14 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of starvation and the root of the problem in almost every case is political, not scientific. For agriculture in Africa, the real problems stem from a global trade system that favours richer countries and large corporations, chronic under-investment by corrupt governments, and the gross distortion of food prices caused in large part by the explosion of biofuels. Trade inequality has seen rich countries dumping subsidised food on to African markets, while erecting barriers themselves. Now prime African farmland is being switched from food to fuel – on the most food-insecure continent on the planet.

Making matters worse is the prospect of African governments selling off prime farmland to wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia, creating the horrifying prospect of fortified farms exporting food from starving countries. The agribusiness giants who have developed and patented genetically modified crops have long argued that their mission is to feed the world, rarely missing an opportunity to mention starving Africans.
Their mission is, in fact, to make a profit.

Unfortunately , he mars this insightful article by repeating those well worn platitudes of fair trade and fair markets and ethical investment . Capitalism exists to make a profit and it is capitalism that requires to be abolished . Smoothing the rough corners of such a system in the hope for eventual benefit to the poor is the utopian dream of reformers .

The Government's former chief scientific adviser Sir David King counters that it is science and not politics that will become Africa's salvation . He argues that advanced approaches to agriculture, such as GM crops, are the only way Africa will be able to feed itself.
"The position taken by non-governmental organisations and international organisations is to support traditional agricultural technologies. These technologies will not deliver the food for the burgeoning population of Africa," he said. "Suffering within that continent is largely driven by attitudes in the West which are anti-science and anti-technology. We have the technology to feed the population of the planet..." Sir David said. "It is astonishing that we are better able to land a spacecraft on Mars than deal with millions of deaths each year from HIV-Aids and malaria, and poor nutrition; or develop renewable CO2-free energy sources,"

Indeed , science and technology has furnished the means and methods to satisfy the needs and wants of the people of the world , but that has been the situation for many decades now . However , it is the essence of the capitalism to obtain a profit that has meant all these technical scientific applications have not been employed to end poverty and starvation . A political and economic revolution is required , possessing the tools to do it is not suffice .