State of Africa Today - Another Africa Is Possible

Today's Africa still has many challenges and negative issues that get articulated very clearely consistently by many of us, including Africans. However, there are some positive signs that not all is lost.

For a three year period ending in 2006, Sub-Saharan Africa had a GDP growth of 6%. This is a great improvement for the continent and there has been a five year growth in the standard of living for many Africans as well. Cell phone technology and the use of the Internet more than doubled in the last seven years. Foreign capital of nearly 30 Billion in 2006 was higher than foreign aid.

These are just a few of the many encouraging signs that there are positive achievements that are happening in Africa that need to be highlighted and celebrated. Africans be they on the continent or in the Diaspora are all working hard to show very clearly that, "Another Africa Is Possible".

Books

• Conversations With Powerful African Women Leaders: Inspiration, Motivation and Strategy
  by Sharon T Freeman
  This is the first book of its kind to allow readers to have intimate and revealing "conversations" with powerful African women who are changing the face of Africa. The conversations reveal what inspired them to excel, what motivates them to continue to excel, and their strategies for managing their important portfolios.
  Available at Amazon.com
   

Articles

	Programs like Grameen Foundation's Village Phone project in Rwanda is empowering local villages with technology and communications that connects them to local and global information and resources. (Courtesy of Grameen Foundation)

• Another Africa is Possible!
  By George Nyongesa, Programs Manager- Rural Integrated Community Development
  From: The African Executive
  Kenya recently hosted the first ever World Social Forum to be held in Africa. While the forum was about making some quick tourism euros and dollars for most Kenyans, the rest of the delegates gathered in solidarity for other businesses - to churn out new rhetoric on the problems facing Africa in areas such as trade discrimination, hunger, illiteracy, poverty and disease. Speaker after speaker cried out: "it is indeed possible to have another world" and that "another Africa" is possible.
   
• 2007: A Sankofa Year
  Emira Woods | January 5, 2007 Foreign Policy In Focus
  Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
  In West African mythology, the "Sankofa" is a bird that flies forward while looking backward, with an egg symbolizing the future in its mouth.
   
• Women are Africa's Political Hope
  By Emira Woods and Lisa VeneKlasen | March 15, 2006, Newsday
  Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf will address a joint session of the U.S. Congress today. This historic honor, bestowed sparingly on international dignitaries, is a fitting tribute for Africa's first democratically elected female president. But Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is not an anomaly.
   

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