African solutions to African problems

Hardly a week goes by when there isn't someone adding to the debate about how Africa is portrayed. This week the BBC ran an article by Binyavanga Wainaina on why the international portrayal of Africa is unfair. Wainaina is the author of the much circulated How to Write About Africa. For its part, Foreign Policy magazine also wrote about how the media shamefully neglects Africa.

My take on the topic is pretty simple. When you fixate on the problems you usually fall into the trap of overlooking the solutions.

Take the New York Times' recent coverage of Zimbabwe's financial woes for example. When rampant inflation made using the Zimbabwe dollar untenable, the country changed over to doing business in US dollars. This has brought the economy under control, but has created other problems - like change for instance. A shortage of currency means getting change in a store is difficult if not impossible. This week the NYT posted a long article explaining Zimbabwe's problem, but gave no air time to possible solutions. I found this surprising given that two days earlier an entrepreneur newsletter I subscribe to was heralding the achievements of Yo Time, a Zimbabwean company that allows shoppers to receive change in the form of airtime.

Clearly the NYT knows what makes good copy, but the bottom line is that African entrepreneurs are out there. And they will continue to keep coming up with state of the art solutions to the issues at hand whether anybody writes about them or not.


photo credit: africa






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