$154 Billion. Free Money for You, Come December 25

One hundred and fifty four billion dollars can be yours to spend on the charity of your choice, come December 25. By sacrificing one day in a year, we could put enough money in the hands of all non profits in America to operate for six months without raising a penny. That includes all non profits that help orphans and widows, do disaster intervention, save dogs, cats and gorillas, protect the environment, and many others. If all Americans decided to skip Christmas and use the money to save the world, we could have enough money to run 22 countries in Africa debt free for a full year.

If all Americans gave one Christmas away, we could have enough money to pay off all the debt for the whole continent of Africa.

In two months from today, on December 25th, Americans will spend money equal to what it would take to feed four million orphans three meals a day for ten years.

Merry Christmas everybody!

How to Catch a Runaway Dog

We had a very wayward dog when I was growing up. Twelve hours out of twenty four we had her tied up on a rope so she couldn’t bite people during the day. We let her loose at night. But once in a while she got off the hook during the day. Very hard to catch her when she did. But my mother knew how; get a bone, dry or not, and wave it in her (the dog’s) face.

This is true not only for dogs. Marketing uses the same concept. Research and development use the same concept. What do people want? How do they behave? How can we reach them? New might be good but not interesting. People resist the new. A good salesman will sell the new using the old language. “You will love this”, he says to an 84-year old woman; “my grandma loves it so much”.

This lands me on the page where I wanted to be. Social entrepreneurs. Change agents. Non profits. A very meaningful non profit had mercy on us when we were growing up in a refugee camp. Someone from far away working with an international non profit came to our refugee camp and found us playing a soccer ball made out of banana fibers. He was so moved that he went home, collected money and sent 100 soccer balls to us. I was 10. But the new soccer balls had one problem. They bounced a lot and we played on dry gravel, sand and soil. We didn’t find bouncing balls very useful in our game. So we decided to make some changes. We started by reducing the air inside. But that too did not work because the thing could not get off the ground. So we did what we knew how to do best. We sold the balls and bought plastic bags. We had always dreamed of making balls out of plastic bags. Plastic bags were way cooler than banana fibers. But we never had money to buy plastic bags. So we upgraded using the money we made from our new imported soccer balls. I think we sold the balls for a 10th of what it actually cost our friend to buy them. But who cared. We saw the balls as an opportunity to get what we had always needed, not what someone else thought we needed. I wish our friend had asked. He would have changed our lives for way less than he paid

The Communal Challange in Africa's Economic Development

The African society is highly communal. This presents both an opportunity and a threat to economic development. Advantages of a highly communal society are many. Collective education and information sharing is possible by utilizing existing informal leadership structures. On the other hand, highly communal societies can become a liability especially where structural differentiation is not possible and community subunits are not organized for mutual benefit through functional specialization and interdependence.

The four factors of production as we know them, land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship, interact within a productive society to create wealth. In Africa, however, especially in rural Africa, some of the factors of production are not developed or there is just so much of one factor in relation to the others. To ensure economic development, the four factors of production need to be developed into meaningful production linkages. In order to do this, a few changes must take place. First there is need to increase differentiation of production units into patterns of functional specialization and interdependence. Second, new mechanisms of integration, coordination and control should be developed. Thirdly, there is need for structural changes to the key features of society such as cultural values, goals, and distribution.

Countless efforts are being made today to bring about economic change in Africa. One of the most popular ones is micro finance. Large amounts of funds are being pumped into small villages to improve food production, crop yields, and healthy living. What such interventions lack though is the facilitation of structural adjustments which must go with any financial or moral support. There is need to create inter-village linkages to foster productivity, differentiation and specialization. The economy needs to be looked at as a sum-total of individual specialized units. Eeconomic interventions should put the responsibility of, and resources for, development into the hands of villagers who manage their resources through collective responsibility. In order to create wealth, technical expertise using existing structural/cultural arrangements must be strengthenedThere is need to create economic activity through providing access to external market linkages between neighboring villages.Fostering cross-village communication by expanding general social norms, and creating functional and responsible democratic associations could be an added advantage as well.

French Electronic Music

Justice, a French electronic music duo consisting of two friends, Gaspard and Xavier, warms up the crowd on a chilly French evening. French being my fifth language, I can hardly put two words together to understand what in the world these two are singing about. I don’t care as much for French music any ways as I do for French poetry. On this warm western evening though, watching Justice from my SONY VGN, I know I should not be dreaming in French; unless, of course, I am Julie Delpy or Adam Goldberg in “Two Days in Paris”. Of course I can’t stand a whole two days in Paris unless my smart pumpkin has fallen off my shoulders.

Back to Justice. I am stuck with a wrong name (Justice) singing the wrong kind of music (electronic music) in a wrong language (French) from a wrong city (Paris). But the name of the band arouses an impressive imagination. The name “justice” reminds me of the unattractive sounds that we all make to the children of the world; children suffering from Malaria, Kwashiorkor, HIV/AIDS; children from war-ton countries striving to keep their skin on their bones. We sound like a French electronic music band when we kneel down beside our beds and say the Lord’s prayer, wishing well those far away, as if they are too far to be touched. There is French electronic band music in each and every one of us. It sounds unpleasant to the hungry and sick listeners. And we love to play our depressing electronic music. We play it from the pulpits, in our political speeches, in our leftovers tossed in collection baskets with everlasting noises. We play too much French electronic music we have lost touch with real music- real lyrics from the classics of love and the country ballads of tenderheartedness.

There is a song in each and every one of us. That song is calm, kind, tenderhearted, compassionate, and caring. It’s the song of humanity. The peaceful sound of “I will do something to end the suffering of the world”.

Sun-Kissed

I have been sun-kissed. I am talking about a pre-birth tan. And that gives me a foot forward to complain about my fellow sun-kissed friends especially in the west-most part of the sun. And without measuring melanin content, I believe I am a few ancestors away from big foot in Zimbabwe. So when he hurts I hurt. When he hurts others I cry. And he has been making me cry non-stop. And then he sarcastically calls for a meeting, the like of which journalist Heidi Holland mistakably calls a “father and son” reunion with Brother Morgan. Come on Heidi! Do you have a father?

Dogs and Sheep

A friend of mine once asked me if carrots grew on trees. Which reminds me; some time back I was driving through a local town in Hawaii and came across a herd of sheep. A friend of mine who was riding with me wondered why some one would keep all those dogs in their backyard. But that was not far from a good friend of mine that has just returned from a mission trip to Rwanda who was asked if he saw gorillas in town. I mean, come on! Gorillas in town!!, are you kidding me! Now wait when you hear this: “Do you eat cooked food in Africa?” Okay, that really got me. I mean, fire was discovered in Tanzania by a caveman a few years ago in African history. Are you wondering whether cavemen eat cooked food? The answer is yes. Of course we are so many years ahead of caveman living. Little wonder we eat cooked food. But seriously, what’s up with our education system? I mean, why are our kids getting slower and slower about world events and simple visual recognitions? Did I say kids? I meant, why, including more than kids, are we so… uninformed?

A few days ago I was talking to a western investor (and by WEST I mean from Jupiter) about real estate investment in Kampala Uganda; Talk about 50% ARR (Annual Rate of Return). The gentleman looked me in the eyes with an absent-minded-I-know-the-answer-kind of look and said “what about Joseph Kony? Is it safe to invest in a city where Kony’s soldiers vandalize houses everyday?” I know you were going to laugh at this. If you didn’t laugh, please stop reading this because what follows is probably going to annoy you even more.

I called this note YELLOW AFRICA because of my affinity to bananas. My wife knows I can have bananas for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Did you just say MONKEY? Please!! Anyways, yes, bananas. According to my banana preservation technique, there is a time in the life of a banana when it is the sweetest. It’s normally between the stickiness and the stinkness of a banana. Imagine if a country like Rwanda was a banana. Maybe we could call the time period between 1991 and 1994 “sticky Rwanda”. But ten comes 2005 and 2006. Close your eyes before you read this because your Jupiter-mind will not believe it: Percentage change of Rwanda’s GDP growth rate was a stinking 477.78%. In the same year, United States’ percentage change in GDP growth was a sarcastic -27.27% (we are talking minus in terms of negative growth. It’s like walking to heaven backwards).
Now let’s talk future. In 2007, United States’ GDP growth was, you got it, Zero. What about predictions for 2008? Yeah, that’s right: minus (negative) thirty one point two five percent (31.25%) “ungrowth”.

Now going back to our sticky Rwanda, 2007 figures show that Rwanda’s GDP outgrew one hundred and twenty two (164) countries of the world at a whopping 11.54% growth rate. Now that’s what I call a really-yellow-banana ready to go. And we have so many of them in Africa. Lots and lots of them. But our Jupiter minds have not been programmed to see them. We miss them. Everyday. Until we hit rock bottom. Then we wake up to India, and China, and Taiwan, and Singapore… and it’s too late to jump onto the boat. Fasten your seat belts. And if you would excuse me, we are off to we-told-you-we-were-really-ripe-for-investment land”.