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Use cellphones to share Africa resource wealth
Reuters -- Mobile phone banking should be used to direct some of Africa's oil and mineral wealth straight to the population, reducing the role of corrupt governments and tackling poverty, according to a senior World Bank official. The continent is riding a commodities boom driven by high minerals and oil prices and analysts expect the trend to continue. But graft and bad governance means revenues have been squandered and resource-rich countries have consistently failed to deliver basic services to their people. "Imagine your country finds a valuable commodity and before it goes into the national budget, and people fear it will be wasted, it could be sent directly to people," said Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank's head of Poverty Reduction and Economic Management in Africa...

Tapping the Wealth of African SMEs: Standard Bank’s Example
AfriBiz -- Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Africa have been largely neglected in the past. Most industry analysts and experts agree that there is strong evidence of funding targeted at large corporations, and the micro finance industry has grown rapidly in the past few years; however, financing to the SME sector shows a yawning gap. In the South African economy for example, an economy more structured and better regulated than most African economies, SMEs are said to contribute to 40% of GDP and 40% of employment opportunities – providing the greatest contribution among types of businesses. However, even with this impressive potential, funding to SMEs in South Africa, though well above the African average, is still well behind the trends in other economies of the world...

The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Noam Chomsky -- Twenty years ago, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history...

The future of funding: Development aid as an investment
Huffington Post -- There is an intriguing dynamic developing in our nation's capital among the three major influences that could end up changing the future of American aid to developing countries. One is Congresswoman Kay Granger from Ft. Worth, TX. Another is Rajiv Shah, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). And then there is the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that has assumed the role of arbiter of the quality of the U.S. government's leadership in global agricultural development. Each of them has the power to exert enormous influence over the gristmill through which government funding is pulverized into short and long term support. Congresswoman Granger set the table recently at a luncheon when she praised Bill Gates and his foundation as a model for serving the world's poorest. "Foreign aid must be viewed as an investment, not an expense," she said. "Where money is wasted, it should be stopped. Where funding is ineffective, it should be redirected...