An employee of Logistique Petroliere in Madagascar. Photo: Flickr user DavidDarricau

Ayo Johnson, a Worldfocus contributing blogger, writes about extraction of natural resources in Africa. The piece is excerpted from his blog, Africa Speak International.

The truth is that Africa is the next new frontier of mineral exploration. With major stakeholders battling, wilding and conniving their charm against a complex network of shady deals to outwit the cool, smart and calculative moves of the Chinese.

Africa’s strategic importance cannot be underplayed nor its value cheapened. Its geographical positioning and untapped mineral wealth make it a unique selling proposition to any investor. The trading ability of any multinational company is dependent on contracts signed and memorandum of understandings reached between hosts and investing governments.

African countries, dissatisfied by unequal trading relationships with the rest of the world, have hardened their political stance. China’s current interest in Africa is only a convenient opportunity for African governments to support another would-be investor.

China’s relationship building with Africa over the past 10 years has left the continent in relatively decent shape. African governments have realized that they need trade far more than aid. They need fair term without carrot and stick approach linked to investment. Africans clearly understand that they can choose between China from the East versus the rest of the world.

China has stolen the lead in Africa with over $60 billion worth of investment and untold influence.

Virtually in slow motion, overnight the Chinese had taken a grip of mineral extraction with Europe and the U.S. a distant fourth. Behind Russia and Brazil — both major players in their own right.

Industrialized nations’ appetite for oil goes unabated despite calls from pressure groups. Governments need to diversify into large scale production of new greener cleaner technologies of wind, solar and hydro. Wars in the Middle East, combined with strained relationships with many other oil-producing countries, have forced the West to look for new suppliers of oil.

China is also desperate; its rapid growth and technological advancement have increased its appetite for energy to fuel its enormous economy. This is the central driving force that justifies it presence in Africa. China’s dominance across the continent has come at a price. The Chinese have built bridges, road and general infrastructure all for free — in a bid to guarantee access to Africa’s precious minerals.

China has also provided soft loans to African governments, namely Angola, Sudan, Zambia, Congo and Rwanda as a means of raising much needed private capital outside of the framework of the IMF and the World Bank.

The Chinese have not imposed conditionality packages as part of their loan agreements, unlike the stringent and detrimental conditionality packages imposed by industrialized nations. Instead China has requested that African governments in receipt of Chinese money do business with Chinese companies and buy goods from Chinese firms.

Guaranteeing that the circulation of money is kept strictly with the China-Africa trade zone squeezes Western products and firms out of the picture. There are now little Chinatown enclaves popping up all over Africa with cheap Chinese goods replacing Western brand names.

It is therefore not surprising that President Obama visited Africa, flagged by an extended trip to various mineral hot spots by Hillary Clinton. The U.S. is eager to show support to Africa and to rekindle influence in a bid to up root and dislodge the Chinese iron grip on the continent.

African leaders and their advisers have finally awakened, realizing what the new type of global politics is all about. Who are the new major players, and what choices have to be made?

Africa finds itself in a very unique position to be able to choose among multiple investors all bidding for the same job. This increases the value of Africa’s currency, ensuring that the best deals are signed.

Africa’s choice will be at the expense of Western governments and their respective multinational companies. A liberalized continent is voting with its feet and changing suppliers, manufacturers and investors all at the same time. This is ground-breaking and truly unprecedented.

It collects surplus medical supplies — such as hospital beds from a facility that is upgrading — and ships them to Africa.

Dalijit Dhaliwal spoke last week with Doc to Dock’s founder, Dr. Bruce Charash.  He says the supplies are desperately needed in a continent where some hospitals are so ill-equipped that women give birth on the floor.

Children in Ethiopia’s highlands. Photo: Flickr user turkairo

Organizations large and small — from the World Bank to local NGOs — are working to eliminate public health scourges in Africa. Whether sending malaria prophylactics or collecting leftover medical supplies, Americans also contribute to the fight against major health problems.

Do you think the United States has a moral obligation to do more to alleviate hunger and disease around the world?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please remember to be respectful and on-point in your comments. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted and repeat offenders will be banned.

Shravan Vidyarthi and Christina MacGillivray of the International Reporting Project report from Kenya.

Dan Rubenstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary zoology at Princeton University, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the causes of the drought and water conservation efforts.

Connie Kargbo is an associate producer at Worldfocus and a native of Sierra Leone.  She blogs here about her opinion on Africa and climate change policy.

Floods are thought to be one of the more severe effects of climate change. Dakar, Senegal. Photo: IRIN

Throughout history Africa has repeatedly gotten the short end of the stick. Colonialism left the continent decades behind other developing regions. Diamonds mined deep in the heart of Africa breed bloody conflicts as they flee the continent to adorn the fingers of westerners.

There is a chance now to change the script.

World leaders gather next week at the UN General Assembly to discuss climate change and prepare for the larger climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. The Copenhagen conference is seeking to produce a successor to the Kyoto Protocol environment treaty.  This time, Africa has come out with its boxing gloves ready to fight for the best climate change deal for the continent.

African leaders have read the scientific studies and seem well aware of the stark facts behind the effects of climate change.  Despite how little their countries contribute to the overall global carbon emissions, according to a recent development report out by the World Bank developing nations will bear 75-80 percent of the cost of our changing climate.  This seemingly unfair contradiction is why African leaders such as Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi are defiantly threatening to walk out of the Copenhagen conference in December if Africa’s demand for monetary compensation from carbon-intensive rich countries is not appropriately addressed. In his own words, “”if needs be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent.” South Africa, one of the world’s top polluters, has entered the ring as well stressing that it will not sacrifice economic growth for the sake of reducing carbon emissions.

Although these various approaches to securing a better deal for Africa are controversial, one thing seems constant: Africa is unified as the Copenhagen meeting nears. It’s been a long time coming.

Using the detailed mapping software, you can see into your own backyard - literally. You can look out across the Himalayas from the peak of Mt. Everest. But how to navigate Google Earth’s decidedly un-user-friendly customization settings to make them suitable for a television broadcast? That’s a different story.

An example: thanks to increasingly specific satellite imagery, we now have the ability to zoom into cities not only in the U.S. or Europe, but also in many African cities, where for a long time detailed satellite imagery was lacking.

The problem: as you can see in this most recent 2009 composite view of satellite images of Africa, the continent now resembles a 19th-century impressionist painting. Pixelated splotches of color dot the landscape, where some areas have much more satellite coverage than others.

Happily, we were able to figure out a solution to this dilemma. Google Earth has an underused “history” button, which allows the user to view satellite images from different dates in the past. (Naturally, the number of dates available depends on what part of the world you are looking at and how far away from Earth you are.)

So if I want to show a view of Africa, but want to see a clean view of the continent, without all the satellite clutter, I can simply select the earliest date possible on the “history” view - in this case 1930.

This won’t actually show you 1930s satellite views if there were none from that time, but in the absence of such satellite imagery, Google Earth will automatically default to a clean satellite view of the landscape. So with this simple work-around, we’ve gotten one step closer to implementing Google Earth on our broadcast. Stay tuned!

Watch this video for some more Google Earth history tips and an interesting visual comparison of how the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has shrunk over the years.

They discuss the news made this week by a power couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began a major American diplomatic initiative on the African continent, Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea and secured the release of two American journalists.

View an interactive map of Hillary Clinton’s African tour.

Clinton pledged to expand America’s support for Somalia’s weak interim government as it struggles against Islamic extremists. As she makes her way through Africa, economic development and human rights are also expected to be high on the agenda.

Emira Woods, the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, joins Martin Savidge to discuss Clinton’s agenda in Africa and U.S. goals in Somalia.

Below, view an interactive map exploring Hillary Clinton’s tour of Africa. Click on a country to view her plans.

For more on the issue of rape in Liberia, watch the Worldfocus signature stories “Former child soldiers, sex slaves recover from Liberia’s war” and ”Liberian women occupy front lines of war on sexual violence.”

Tania Bernath, a researcher for Amnesty International, joins Martin Savidge to discuss efforts to combat rape and sexual violence in Liberia and other post-conflict countries, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s scheduled visit to Africa next week.

Modern buildings such as this nightclub and restaurant have emerged out of the old Accra.

Accra, the capital city of Ghana, was host to U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Africa, during which he pushed developing countries to strive to build prosperity and progress.

Although Accra continues to have problems with its sewage system, among other things, it is modernizing at a relatively quick rate. Ghana as a whole maintains an 11 percent unemployment rate and a 28 1/2 percent poverty rate, both comparatively lower than many of the country’s neighbors.

Ethan Zuckerman of the blog My heart’s in Accra visited Accra and compares the city now to the city he saw during a trip more than a decade earlier.

Visiting Accra feels like time travelling. [...]

I feel as if I could recreate the past by layering a thin film on top of the current reality - a scrim that covers that new four-story shopping plaza with the disused concrete and rebar hulk that stood there a decade before. Add some burning plastic and we’d be able to take me back to a past I remember, if I squint a little bit. It’s the same place, just gentrified, in a particularly Ghanaian fashion. My friend Amos met me for lunch at Asanka Local, a deservedly popular chop bar that’s new since my last visit, and mentioned that he was looking for a house in the area to use as an office. He figured he’d need to spend at least 100,000 cedis, or about $67,000. Makes me wish I’d bought the apartment building I used to live in.

When I visited the Accra Mall on Sunday, there was no amount of squinting that could have convinced me that I was in a country I knew and understood. Ten minutes past the airport, the mall features two supermarkets, a cinema, several high-end boutiques and an excellent bookshop. It’s beautiful, as nice as its counterparts in Nairobi and Cape Town, and it’s got a steady buzz of people, tourist, Filipino overseas workers, Lebanese traders and lots of middle-class Ghanaians.

The bookshop left me babbling. In 1993, the only bookstores we had in Accra were the university shop in Legon, which featured required reading texts, Akan-English dictionaries, and the occasional heavily used Mario Puzo novel, for $5.

[...] And then there’s the grocery store. When I first came to Accra, I asked the bartender at the hotel where I was staying where I should shop for food. “All the obruni go to Danquah Circle. You can get anything you imagine there.” I walked around for a couple of hours, visiting the handful of western-style food shops and discovering that my imagination now needed to be limited to canned corned beef, canned mackerel, dried beans and pasta. Add in the amazing fruits and vegetables on sale on almost every corner, and we had a perfectly servicable diet, but one light on the comfort food that everyone needs now and again. My family and friends ended up feeling like they were supplying a prisoner, sending me letters that included packets of dried orange cheese mix so I could buy pasta, oil and a little milk and make macaroni and cheese. A letter from Rachel included sheets of nori, which led to a sushi party, using soy sauce bought from one of the Chinese restaurants in town. I almost got into a fistfight with a housemate about his incursions into my most prized posession - a jar of Skippy peanut butter.

And now there’s a supermarket, and it has cheese. A whole cold case full of it. Apples aren’t luxury items sold for a dollar a piece by roadside hawkers - you can buy them by the kilo. I looked like a madman, walking through Shoprite with my camera, snapping photos of remarkable, miraculous sights - chickens, already gutted and plucked, frozen and in bags! - that looked completely ordinary to everyone around me.

I don’t know that one could come to Accra and pretend that it’s 1994 anymore. If the mobile phones don’t give it away - with phonecard sellers, repair shops and charging stations on every corner - the architecture does. [...]

My friends who support the NDC - the party that regained control in the most recent election - tell me that NDC won because people felt like eight years of NPP government had resulted in a lot of developments that looked like Citizen Kofi and not much improvement of schools or infrastructure. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair - driving throughout the city, I saw roads I knew to be almost impassible that are now paved and smooth. I ask about whether a particular neighborhood is still plagued by traffic jams and learn that a two-lane road has been replaced with a six-lane carriageway with two flyovers.

Is this just benefitting the comparatively wealthy who are lucky enough to live in the capital city? No idea - I was there for 51 hours, and I didn’t get outside Greater Accra. And I know it’s a mistake to characterize the direction of a country based on half a dozen long walks and conversations with a dozen old friends. But I felt like I was catching glimpses of a future Accra, the stylish capital of a middle-income nation.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ethanz under a Creative Commons license.

Obama’s message was described as a kind of “tough love,” encouraging democracy and at the same time warning African nations they need to take care of themselves.

Yaw Nyarko, a professor of economics and director of Africa House at New York University, joins Martin Savidge to discuss why the president chose Ghana and what is at stake for the U.S. in Africa.

Longtime CNN correspondent Gary Strieker, now a citizen correspondent, traveled to western Kenya recently, where he discovered a health project taking that very approach.

Michael Novacek, provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History, joins Martin Savidge to discuss scientific methods used to fight the ivory trade and animals that are at risk.

Mojubaolu Okome, a professor of political science from Brooklyn College, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the forum and how the global economic crisis has impacted African countries.

An educational poster in Africa provides facts on HIV/AIDS.

Health studies have shown that male circumcision can reduce the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.

In Africa, several governments have implemented male circumcision as part of their AIDS prevention strategies. Most recently, Botswana launched a massive circumcision drive targeting nearly half a million men.

Steve Jackson works with COPAAP, an organization that fights the spread of HIV/AIDS in Cameroon. He writes on his blog to discuss the dangers of relying extensively on circumcision.

Circumcision is a red herring

I work for an organization in Cameroon that supports local villages in helping to stop the spread of AIDS while assisting people living with HIV/AIDS to hopefully have as normal lives as possible.

If you can imagine what we are battling with in terms of getting messages across — I have some issues with ABC (abstinence, be-faithful, condom).  Personally I’d go with condom, condom, condom and let people choose their own ideals — but I can work with this. Now even within that area I can show you this picture. This is proudly on display at a local Catholic church.  And people believe this stuff. Recently the Pope decided to pay this country a visit and told everyone that condoms were making the problem worse.

On top of that you have traditional healers — recently my boss told me of one that had claimed to have cured two AIDS patients. It turns out where it said “negative” on their medical records was next to Malaria not HIV. But these claims and rumors take hold. I haven’t seen it here but we’ve all heard African tales of how having sex with a virgin will cure you of AIDS. [...]

I am saying this without any doubt at all — if you tell people that circumcision helps reduce the risk of AIDS then they will think they can have sex without danger.  The problem would get worse. [...]There are already so many rumors and half truths and downright lies that people are entirely confused. People are already willing to risk sex with people they know to carry the disease.  You start telling them a simply surgical procedure will make them less likely to contract the disease and it will soon be widely understood that you CAN NOT become infected if you are circumcised.

And how would that circumcision take place?  It’s not like there are mobile, sterile, clinics on hand.  How long before it becomes an extension of the body mutilation that is practiced here?

In other words — how long before circumcision is carried out by a traditional healer, witch doctor, family member etc — in entirely unhygienic circumstances? Hugely painful for an adult — hugely dangerous for a child. [...]

If you want to fight AIDS then you need foolproof methods.  It’s not enough to just lower the odds. [...]

Truth is there [are] already perfectly good, cheap ways to defeat the spread of HIV/AIDS, we just have to stop the misinformation (much of it coming from the developed world) and commit to teaching the same methods and same practices.

There are already enough red herrings without introducing another one.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Michael Novacek, the provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the significance of the fossil in understanding evolution.

Michael Novacek, the provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the implications of the study, how it was conducted and Africa’s importance to genetic research.

Over the past several decades, women politicians have made strides in Africa. The share of parliamentary seats held by women increased from 7 percent in 1990 to 17 percent in 2007.

The Rwandan parliament is a world leader in terms of female political participation, with 56 percent of its seats held by women. Liberia now has Africa’s first elected woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Watch Worldfocus’ signature story and an extended interview with Sirleaf: Africa’s first elected female president lifts Liberia.

But this heightened gender equality in government has not necessarily translated into equality in everyday life for the majority of African women, who still face disproportionate poverty, violence and challenges in accessing education.

Worldfocus.org’s weekly radio show explored the political, economic and social implications of the rise of women power players in Africa.

Thank you for your questions. Worldfocus anchor Martin Savidge hosted a panel of guests:

Micheline Ravololonarisoa is the chief of the Africa Section at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She has more than 25 years of experience as a sociologist, feminist and activist specializing in African development and women’s issues. Micheline began her activist career with a student movement in her native Madagascar and was forced to leave the country in 1974 because of this work. She has served as program director at the Agency for Cooperation Research and Development (ACORD) and remains a member of several African and international women’s networks, including Akina Mama wa Afrika and ABANTU for Development.

Lynn Sherr is an award-winning journalist and author who has contributed to Worldfocus reports from Liberia, Guatemala, Mexico and Nicaragua. She is a former correspondent with ABC’s “20/20″ and covered a wide range of stories, specializing in women’s issues and social changes, as well as investigative reports. Lynn is the author of “Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words” and “Tall Blondes.”

Aili Mari Tripp is a professor of political science and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Women’s Studies Research Center. Her research has focused on women and politics in Africa, women’s movements in Africa, transnational feminism, African politics (with particular reference to Uganda and Tanzania), and on the informal economy in Africa. She is co-author of “African Women’s Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes” and author of “Women and Politics in Uganda” and “Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania.”

See related Worldfocus videos and blogs:

Women rank high in Rwanda’s government

Africa’s first elected female president lifts Liberia

Liberian summit celebrates African women with laughter

Women’s movement transforms post-war Liberia

Credits:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producers: Nicole E. Foster and Katie Combs

Wangari Maathai is an environmental and political activist and the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. She also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss how to balance the economic needs of developing countries with the need for conservation, as well as the impact of climate change on Africa and how African governments are dealing with environmental challenges.

For more, listen to our online radio show on resources in the developing world.

Also, read more about the relationship between natural resources and war in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Rich natural resources partly fuel crisis in Congo.

Wangari Maathai will also be featured in ”Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai” on the PBS series Independent Lens next Tuesday, April 14.