The African Successes post has generated a vigorous exchange of ideas. I appreciate receiving your comments on the study, your suggestions for success stories, and your views on development approaches that have worked and those that have not.
Many of you felt, as I do, that we need to highlight Africa’s recent successes. Your responses voiced strong support for a focus on education, knowledge and dissemination, health, private-sector development, agriculture (irrigation and fertilizer), community-level development, governance, infrastructure, and information and communication technology.
Ces dernières années, de nombreux pays africains ont commencé à faire preuve d’un dynamisme remarquable.
Le taux de croissance enregistré au Mozambique est fulgurant, affichant une moyenne annuelle de 8 % sur plus de dix ans. Le Kenya est devenu l'un des plus importants fournisseurs mondiaux de fleurs coupées. Le service M-Pesa, qui permet d’effectuer des transferts d’argent à partir d’un téléphone mobile, rencontre un succès grandissant tandis que le programme KickStart aide les petits agriculteurs à irriguer leurs cultures à moindre coût. Le tourisme rwandais fleurit depuis qu’il s’est axé sur la vie des gorilles et dans la ville de Lagos au Nigéria, les nouvelles infrastructures du BRT (réseau de transport rapide par bus) facilite un développement urbain plus efficace. En deux mots, l’Afrique est en train de vivre une réelle transformation.
Unlike other diseases in Africa (malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, etc.), which mainly affect the young and the old, HIV/AIDS takes its toll on prime-age adults during the most productive years of their lives. The death of an adult family member can have large consequences for the surviving family. Given prevailing social norms in many African societies, the burden may likely be heaviest for women.
Most studies focus on the consequences for orphaned children – their schooling and health. We know less about how older adults are impacted. In our study, we track individuals and their households in northwest Tanzania, an area of high HIV prevalence in the 1990s, over a 13-year period.
We find that, when a family member dies, women (even old women) end up working more on the farm; men do too, but not as much. Having an asset such as goats enables them to work less.
An excellent special issue of the New York Times magazine on Women and Development had an article on the “daughter deficit”—the phenomenon, observed in India and China, of many fewer girls than boys being born, and surviving to age 5. Up to now, I had been thinking of this as an Asian phenomenon, associated with cultural values in India and China. But the finding by my colleagues Jed Friedman and Norbert Schady, reported in this blog , that in Africa the mortality rate from a drop in income is about twice as high for girls as for boys, makes me think that the daughter deficit (or “son preference”) may be coming to Africa.
Unlike other diseases in Africa (malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, etc.), which mainly affect the young and the old, HIV/AIDS takes its toll on prime-age adults during the most productive years of their lives. The death of an adult family member can have large consequences for the surviving family. Given prevailing social norms in many African societies, the burden may likely be heaviest for women.
An excellent special issue of the New York Times magazine on 
