Emergent Megacities ~ VC Visualizes thru 2100

Visual Capitalist animates Top 20 Megacities by 2100...

Human Capital Index ~ Developing Youth...

BBC Africa's Farouk Chothia reports on the World Bank's Human Capital Index...

"...a new way of measuring economic success and gauges how much effort is being put into developing the youth. The higher the investment in education and health the more productive and higher earning the workforce tends to be, the World Bank says. African countries dominate the bottom of the index."

Rising Region ~ The True Size of Africa

Thanks to MapPorn for revisiting The True Size of Africa!

Saving Timbuktu's Treasures ~ Heritage Writings

in the WSJournal writes of The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda...

"Mr. Haidara knew that many of the works in the city’s repositories were ancient examples of the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the jihadists, with their intolerance and rigid views of Islam, wanted to destroy. The manuscripts, he thought, would inevitably become a target. [...] Mr. Haidara recruited his nephew, and they reached out to archivists, secretaries, Timbuktu tour guides and a half-dozen of Mr. Haidara’s relatives. The result was a heist worthy of “Ocean’s Eleven.” They bought metal and wooden trunks at a rate of between 50 and 80 a day, made more containers out of oil barrels and located safe houses around the city and beyond. They organized a small army of packers who worked silently in the dark and arranged for the trunks to be carried by donkey to their hiding places. [...] By the time French troops invaded the north in January 2013, the radicals had managed to destroy only 4,000 of Timbuktu’s nearly 400,000 ancient manuscripts. “If we hadn’t acted,” Mr. Haidara told me later, “I’m almost 100% certain that many, many others would have been burned.”

Teaching Teachers ~ PEN Hands-On in Ghana!

Our MIT alumna Dr Heather Beem and team ran a big handful of workshops this past Summer 2015 for over 300 science teachers in Ghana, introducing them to the Practical Education Network (PEN) method of providing inexpensive, DIY physical experimental examples of the concepts taught in the standard core primary and secondary school curriculum!

African Infra ~ The Underdeveloped Continent...

Globaia shares via the Telegraph composite images of Earth showing impact and role of humans, here illustrating how Africa is the most underdeveloped -- and thus most promising -- Continent...

Desperate Flights ~ Refugee Flows Globally...

Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace in the NYTimes visualize Around the Globe, a Desperate Flight From Turmoil...

Sambany ~ Health Empowered via Mercy Ships!

One of the latest beneficiaries of the Mercy Ships floating hospital organization (and one of my favorite examples of flexible & fast floating solutions) is Sambany, a 55yo burdened by an 8kg facial tumor. Not only is his treatment story epic, but so too is the essential life-affirming mission of MS... See more on the MS channel.

Soweto Gold ~ Brewing SA Economic Prosperity!

PBS Newshour's special correspondent Martin Seemungal spotlights South African entrepreneur Ndumiso Madlala, micro-brewer of Soweto Gold... South African columnist Barney Mthombothi comments...

"We are coming to realize that political freedom on its own is meaningless without economic freedom. Now, if you have people actually doing things for themselves, that is actually very good, actually because they also create jobs, rather than actually expecting things to fall in their lap simply because they are actually free. And I think people need to understand that freedom actually is the freedom to really do things on your own."

Afripedia ~ African Arts & Cultural Creatives

Thanks to Africa Unchained's Emeka Okafor for spotlighting Afripedia. Check out their first handful of trailers...

I Belong ~ UNHCR End Statelessness Campaign

Bronwen Manby at African Arguments asks How will the UNHCR’s statelessness campaign affect Africa?

"On 4th November the UN launched a global campaign to end statelessness within ten years. I confidently predict that the result of this campaign will be to ‘increase’ statelessness by many millions of people. This is not because I think that the campaign is misconceived -- far from it -- but because the statistics on the numbers of stateless persons are currently so inadequate that one of the main impacts of greater attention to the issue will be that currently uncounted populations will come into focus. This is a good thing."

Read the rest, it's important.

Effective Lessons ~ J-PAL on Edu Investments...

From last year's Science special issue on Grand Challenges in Science Education here's MIT J-PAL Executive Director Rachel Glennerster speaking about her teams piece on The Challenge of Education and Learning in the Developing World summarizing lessons from randomized control trials (RCTs) of programs that aim to improve the learning outcomes of school-age children...

Ebola Ward ~ BBC on Treatment Facilities...

BBC shows How Ebola is being treated on the ground...

"The treatment centre is designed to separate confirmed Ebola patients from probable or likely cases. Upon entry, patients are examined by medical staff in full protective gear. Following the initial diagnosis, they are then split into low or high probability wards until the laboratory results come in, which could take anything from a few hours to days, depending on the facility. There is little that medical workers can do for their patients, as there is no cure for Ebola. All they can help with is to care for the patients and treat symptoms like dehydration, as well as wash and comfort them. According to MSF, good care increases the chances of survival from a disease that has a 50% fatality rate and whose symptoms include vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding, sometimes from the eyes and mouth. However, overcrowded facilities and a shortage of staff on the ground have made this difficult so far."

Slum Urbanism ~ UCT's Edgar Pieterse on Africa

Thanks to Emeka Okafor at Africa Unchained for spotting UCT Professor Edgar Pieterse, head of the African Centre for Cities, exploring the reality of Slum Urbanism and future of Africa's cities...

First Taste ~ Ivory Coasters Try Chocolate, Finally

MissC spots Ivory Coast cocoa farmers tasting chocolate...

"It’s touching that the first thing the farmer does is to gather his friends and show them what chocolate tastes like. However, the kids will only get to see the wrapper. The video is a clip from the Dutch show Metropolis."

See the whole Dutch Metropolis episode!

R.I.P. Sheik Umar Khan ~ Sierra Leone Ebola Doc

Exceedingly sad to hear that Sierra Leonean Dr Sheik Umar Khan, one of the leading fighters against epidemic Ebola, has also succumbed to that deadly virus after treating over 100 afflicted countrymen. This just underscores that this currently West African-centered situation is in fact a global public health emergency. More must be done ASAP.

Mozambique LNG ~ Anadarko's African Dev'ts...

South-East Africa is a new hotbed for natural gas exploitation, perhaps best exemplified by Mozambique LNG project...

"Anadarko and its joint-venture partners are advancing one of the world's most important LNG developments in the deepwaters off the coast of northern Mozambique."

Shooting Lagos ~ Wecyclers on My Africa Is!

Africa Is A Country spotlights Shooting Lagos by Nosarieme Garrick who's creating My Africa Is documentary! First in the sequence of Lagos Chronicles is our own Bilikiss Abiola co-founder of our MIT Development Ventures class alumco Wecyclers Check out the other two in the Lagos sequence as well... Producer/Director Garrick writes...

"The next season of My Africa Is will be available in September of 2014, and will feature three amazing stories from Dakar, Senegal."

Growth with Depth ~ African Transformation...

K.Y. Amoako, President of the Africa Centre for Economic Transformation, introduces their new report Growth with Depth at African Arguments...

"We hear a lot these days about “Africa Rising” [...] But beneath the surface it’s not that simple. The rate of African growth may have increased, but the structure of most Sub-Saharan economies has not changed much over the past 40 years. [...]

Thus the headline statistics disguise both residual problems and inherent vulnerabilities. [...] How can we prevent this pattern repeating itself? This is the question our inaugural Africa Transformation Report aims to answer. Its core argument is that to ensure growth is sustainable and improves the lives of the many, governments need to address structural weaknesses, and deliberately and vigorously promote economic transformation, or growth with DEPTH. This acronym stands for Diversification of production and exports, Export competitiveness, Productivity increases, and Technological advances -- all leading to Human well-being."

Read the full report and see preview...

African Tech Hubs ~ Mapping Creative Hotspots...

WhiteAfrican spotlights map of African Tech Hubs...