Fast Company has a six-part series on China’s incursion into Africa. Excerpt:
While America is preoccupied with the war in Iraq (cost: half a trillion dollars and counting), and while think-tank economists continue to spit out papers debating whether vital resources are running out at all, China’s leadership isn’t taking any chances. In just a [...]

South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes has won this year’s £10,000 Caine prize for the best short story in English by an African writer. Rose-Innes, whose story Poison is a haunting vignette of the “new” South Africa, received the prize at a ceremony last night at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
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“I want to hold the G8 countries to their promise. When you sign a contract, you absolutely must stick to it.” - Angelique Kidjo.
The Group of Eight (G8) aid to Africa will fall $40 billion short of the Gleneagles pledge under current plans, according to a report last month by an Africa Progress Panel, which [...]

Foliofn Investments, an American firm has just introduced the first-ever screening tool to let investors build portfolios free of companies that support and profit from the genocide in Sudan.
Foliofn Investments launched in May of this year help customers automatically screen out companies on the Genocide Intervention Network’s “highest offenders” list of firms that operate [...]

Crossed Crocodiles (crossedcrocodiles.blogspot.com) is a personal blog of Xcroc, one of the contributing authors on AfricanLoft; Xcroc has been quite vocal on the AFRICOM discussions, here and on his blog.
It is strange and disturbing to read his blog latest entry, titled: “Censored by Google Alerts - Crossed Crocodiles on AFRICOM”.
He states after [...]

South Africa takes a broad step toward renewable power supply:

South Africa’s first renewable energy power initiative feeding into the national grid was officially powered up on Friday. The R75-million Darling Wind Farm consists of four turbines of 1.3 MW capacity generating a total of 5.2 MW of beautiful clean energy!
The idea for Darling Wind [...]

Having each geopolitical region constituting the Nigeria nation fairly represented in the federal government is sound, but comes with several unwanted baggage.
Would Nigeria be better off with fewer states and a more compact government? Akin, a Nigerian blogger, thinks so. Some excerpts:
Too many pools very few talent pools
In fact, I would rather we had [...]

Fact: Africa generates abysmally low output of electricity. While Africa is flush with biomass, a sustainable and cheap source of energy, its use as an alternative fuel source for electric power plant is yet to take foothold.
This may be changing soon - Timbuktu Chronicles reports on a biomass/biogas powered “off-grid” power plant [...]

Mfonobong Nsehe highlights why African universities and venture capitalist need to encourage and support entrepreneurial students. Excerpt via African Executive:

Do any universities and colleges in Africa support student entrepreneurs, organize business plan competitions and fund student businesses which have mega potential? In the West, universities are eager to support student entrepreneurs and even go out [...]

Akin writes about “role of bureaucracies in stifling development, progress and economic growth”:
Corruption is exacerbated by the layers and hoops of unnecessary bureaucratic requirements that simply keep pen-pushers and deadwood in their positions of unwarranted privilege as enemies of change – people need to get things done and the only way to smooth out any [...]