Posts tagged ‘africa’

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18/12/2014

India’s tech opportunity: Transforming work, empowering people | McKinsey & Company

Millions of Indians hope for a better future, with well-paying jobs and a decent standard of living. To meet these aspirations, the country needs broad-based economic growth and more effective public services. Technology can play an important role in enabling the growth India needs. The spread of digital technologies, as well as advances in energy and genomics, can raise the productivity of business and agriculture, redefine how services such as healthcare and education are delivered, and contribute to higher living standards for millions of Indians by raising education levels and improving healthcare outcomes.

India’s tech opportunity: Transforming work, empowering people

Empowering technologies in India

McKinsey’s Noshir Kaka and Anu Madgavkar discuss how India could transform its economy by employing 12 technologies.

A dozen empowering technologies

A new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report identifies a dozen technologies, ranging from the mobile Internet to cloud computing to advanced genomics, which could have a combined economic impact of $550 billion to $1 trillion a year in 2025. The selection of the 12 technologies for India was based on a similar process established by MGI’s earlier work on disruptive technologies.1 For India, we used additional criteria to identify the technologies that would have a direct impact on the country’s economic and social challenges in the coming decade. As a result, we include technologies such as electronic payments, which are well established in other parts of the world but not well developed in India. By 2025, however, electronic payments could help 300 million Indians join the country’s financial system.

We group the 12 technologies into three areas: digitizing life and work, smart physical systems, and energy technologies:

digitizing life and work—the mobile Internet, the cloud, the automation of knowledge work, digital payments, and verifiable digital identity

smart physical systems—the Internet of Things, intelligent transportation and distribution systems, advanced geographic information systems (GIS), and next-generation genomics

energy—unconventional oil and gas (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing), renewable energy, and advanced energy storage

Each of these technologies has the potential for rapid adoption in India between now and 2025 (exhibit) …

via India’s tech opportunity: Transforming work, empowering people | McKinsey & Company.

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07/12/2014

India Says Pollution Levels Need to Rise Further to Boost Growth – Businessweek

India said its pollution levels will need to increase in the years ahead to support its economic development and it won’t discuss limiting greenhouse-gas emissions at United Nations climate talks that began this week.

Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar also said the government is preparing to make a pledge on how India will develop cleaner forms of energy, though he stopped short of indicating when the country might take on the sorts of caps for emissions that the U.S., China and Europe are adopting.

“We have a need to grow, so our emissions will grow,” Javadekar said at a press conference in New Delhi today. He said the onus on reducing emissions should be on richer industrial nations most responsible for global warming to allow poorer countries “space for more development.”

The comments indicate the difficulty in bringing all of the 190 nations gathered at the UN climate talks in Peru this week into a deal that will cut back on the pollution blamed for driving up the Earth’s temperature. While India’s emissions are the third-highest in the world, 30 percent of its residents live in poverty, scraping by on 75 cents a day or less.

Javadekar spoke before departing for the UN talks in Lima, Peru, which run through next week. They’re aiming to put together the building blocks for a deal by the end of next year that would cut pollution in all nations from 2020.

India is under pressure to make its environmental goals more clear after China and the U.S. jointly agreed Nov. 12 to rein in fossil fuel emissions. It was the first time a big developing country said it would take on a mandatory limit on pollution.

via India Says Pollution Levels Need to Rise Further to Boost Growth – Businessweek.

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25/11/2014

China’s Railroad Ventures Abroad Project Soft Power – Businessweek

Last week state-owned China Railway Construction Corp. (CRCC) signed a lucrative contract with Nigeria to build an 870-mile coastal railroad from Lagos to Calabar, two of the West African nation’s leading cities. The price tag: $12 billion. That makes it the largest single overseas engineering contract awarded to any Chinese company, according to state-run Xinhua newswire.

Chinese and Venezuelan construction workers build an elevated platform at China Railway Engineering Corporation's (CREC) Tinaco-Anaco railway project in Los Dos Caminos, Venezuela in 2012

Beijing hopes many more deals will follow. In recent months, Chinese leaders on overseas missions have often bragged of the country’s prowess in building railroads, including high-speed bullet trains.

In May, Li Keqiang made his first diplomatic trip as China’s premier to Africa, visiting Ethiopia, Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya. At the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he said he envisioned a bright future for the continent when African capitals would be connected by high-speed rail. And China, he added, according to Xinhua, could “help make this dream come true.”

In early November, a consortium of Chinese companies led by CRCC won a $3.7 billion contract to build a bullet train in Mexico; that contract was canceled a few days later due to suspected corruption on the Mexican side. But the aborted deal is still a sign of overseas demand for China’s rail technology.

Nor are rail deals limited to developing nations: In October, Boston’s transit authority signed a $567 million contract with China’s CNR Corp. to build 284 subway cars.

In addition to stimulating domestic manufacturing demand for steel and rail equipment exports, China’s leaders hope the flurry of railway deals will have soft power benefits as well. The Nigerian railroad will be “a mutually beneficial project,” as CRCC Chairman Meng Fengchao told Xinhua. He pledged to hire at least several thousand workers from Nigeria; in the past, Chinese companies have been criticized for bringing in Chinese workers to complete large engineering projects, thus denying work opportunities to local populations.

via China’s Railroad Ventures Abroad Project Soft Power – Businessweek.

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17/09/2014

Africa’s Ebola Should Be China’s Problem – Bloomberg View

China may be Africa‘s biggest trading partner and one of its biggest investors, but you wouldn’t know that from the size of its contribution toward fighting West Africa’s Ebola outbreak.

China: big on investing, not so much on humanitarianism. Photographer: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty ImagesIn fact, the contrast between its assistance and that of the U.S. is instructive: Today, President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. would raise the total of U.S. personnel now in Africa dealing with Ebola to 3,000; the U.S. has committed more than $175 million in aid. With much fanfare, China has said it will increase the number of its medical personnel in Sierra Leone to 174 and raise its total amount of assistance to roughly $37 million.

I know, I know: Relative to the U.S., China remains a poor country, and its growing willingness to extend humanitarian assistance outside its borders is a good thing. But consider this: China has close to 20,000 citizens working and living in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Setting aside U.S. money flowing into Liberia’s lucrative shipping registry, China’s investment in those three countries dwarfs that of the U.S. (In fact, China’s trading relationship with Africa overall is twice that of the U.S.) It recently signed deals for iron ore mining in the region that collectively run into the billions of dollars.

via Africa’s Ebola Should Be China’s Problem – Bloomberg View.

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25/07/2014

Ethiopia Vies for China’s Vanishing Factory Jobs – Businessweek

Ethiopian workers walking through the parking lot of Huajian Shoes’ factory outside Addis Ababa in June chose the wrong day to leave their shirts untucked. The company’s president, just arrived from China, spotted them through the window, sprang up, and ran outside. Zhang Huarong, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier, harangued them in Chinese, tugging at one man’s polo shirt and forcing another worker’s into his pants. Amazed, the workers stood silent until the eruption subsided.

Turning Ethiopia Into China's China

Zhang’s factory is part of the next wave of China’s investment in Africa. It started with infrastructure, especially the kind that helped the Chinese extract African oil, copper, and other raw materials to fuel China’s industrial complex. Now China is getting too expensive to do the low-tech work it’s known for. African nations such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, Senegal, and Tanzania want their share of the 80 million manufacturing jobs that China is expected to export, according to Justin Lin Yifu, a former World Bank chief economist who teaches economics at Peking University. Weaker consumer spending in the U.S. and Europe has prompted global retailers to speed up their search for lower-cost producers.

Shaping up employees is one part of Zhang’s quest to squeeze more profit out of Huajian’s factory, where wages of about $40 a month are less than 10 percent of what comparable Chinese workers may make. Just as companies discovered with China when they began manufacturing there in the 1980s, Ethiopia’s workforce is untrained, its power supply is intermittent, and its roads are so bad that trips can take six times as long as they should. “Ethiopia is exactly like China 30 years ago,” says Zhang, 55, who quit the military in 1982 to make shoes from his home in Jiangxi province with three sewing machines. He now supplies such well-known brands as Nine West and Guess (GES).

Almost three years after Zhang began his Ethiopian adventure at the invitation of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, he says he’s unhappy with profits at the plant, frustrated by “widespread inefficiency” in the local bureaucracy, and struggling to raise productivity from a level that he says is about a third of China’s. Transportation and logistics that cost as much as four times what they do in China are prompting Huajian to set up its own trucking company, according to Zhang. That will free Huajian from using the inefficient local haulers, but it can’t fix the roads. It takes two hours to drive 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the Huajian factory from the capital along the main artery. Oil tankers and trucks stream along the bumpy, potholed, and at times unpaved road. Goats, donkeys, and cows wander along, occasionally straying into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Minibuses and dented taxis, mostly blue Ladas from Ethiopia’s past as a Soviet ally, weave through oncoming traffic, coughing exhaust.

via Ethiopia Vies for China’s Vanishing Factory Jobs – Businessweek.

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08/07/2014

Indian Budget 2014: Biocon chief wants more R&D incentives, fewer essential drugs – Reuters

India’s $15 billion healthcare industry has taken hits on several fronts in recent years, from slow approvals for drugs in clinical trials to several run-ins with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the quality of its generic drugs.

Market growth fell to less than 10 percent last year after the increase in the number of drugs that the government said should be subject to price caps so that poor and middle-class people could afford them (Only 15 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people have health insurance).

Now, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi hinting at a “bitter pill” to rescue India’s economy, the pharma industry wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of tough decisions; it would be difficult for a business that’s used to making medicine instead of taking it.

via India Insight.

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26/06/2014

Chinese tycoon’s stunt to feed New York homeless ends in shambles – Telegraph

A stunt by a Chinese tycoon to provide free lunch to 300 homeless people in one of New York’s finest restaurants degenerated into a shambles as word spread that the participants would not be receiving an anticipated cash handout.

A waiter serves dessert to a table of men listening to Chinese billionaire Chen Guangbiao during a lunch he sponsored for hundreds of needy New Yorkers

The first simmerings of discontent emerged in the Central Park Boathouse as sesame-encrusted tuna appetisers were being served.

By the time the main course of rump steak was on the tables, the mood had turned thoroughly sour, as news that there was to be no cash give-away passed around the room.

And as white-gloved bow-tied waiters cleared berries and creme fraiche from the tables, there was near-mutiny, with burly private security men forced to prevent some angry diners from storming the podium.

Chen Guangbiao, a controversial recycling magnate, self-publicist and philanthropist, had earlier sung a version of We Are The World, the Michael Jackson hit written to raise charity funds for Africa.

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But the mood of goodwill and gratitude quickly dissipated as diners learned that they would not be receiving the $300 in cash that Mr Chen had originally promised everyone who attended after the meal.

Officials at The New York City Rescue Mission, which the billionaire had approached to help organise the event, told him they would only participate if the money was donated to their organisation to provide meals for the homeless.

“We work with the homeless every day, many of them unfortunately have drink and drugs problems, and it just isn’t a good idea to give that sort of cash out to people,” said Michelle Tolson, the mission’s spokeswoman.

“Mr Chen agreed that he would donate the $90,000 to the mission and that is the basis on which we are here today.” That message had not, however, reached many of the recipients of the free meal who were bused to Central Park from a downtown shelter.

“We have been duped to come along here under false pretences and now we are just part of a propaganda trick for the rich” said Harry Brooks, a Vietnam war veteran who tried to reach the stage to voice his complaints in person.

“We don’t need their steak, we need the money so that we can pay for food and clear debts. Now we’re never going to see it. This is a disgrace.”

via Chinese tycoon’s stunt to feed New York homeless ends in shambles – Telegraph.

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09/05/2014

China to earmark over half of foreign aid for Africa: Premier Li – Xinhua | English.news.cn

ABUJA, May 8 (Xinhua) — China will earmark more than half of its foreign aid for Africa and attach no preconditions, visiting Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said here Thursday.

ANGOLA-CHINA-LI KEQIANG-ARRIVAL

“China will, as always, continue to increase its assistance to Africa in both quantity and quality to the extent of its ability, ensuring that more than half of its foreign aid will go to Africa,” Li told a World Economic Forum on Africa in the Nigerian capital.

Hailing Africa as an important pole in world politics, a new pole in global economic growth and a colorful pole in human civilization, Li said that the development of Africa will make the world more democratic, stable, dynamic and colorful, and is conducive to world peace, development and progress.

“It would be better to have more poles than less in the world political and economic landscape,” he said.

The Chinese premier pledged that Beijing will help Africa develop the networks of high-speed railways, expressways and regional airports, saying infrastructure construction, transportation in particular, should be a priority in achieving inclusive growth.

Referring to an African “dream of the century” depicted by African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to connect African capitals with high-speed railways, Li said China stands ready to help with the mega project.

China is ready to carry out all-dimensional cooperation with Africa on high-speed railways, including their planning, designing, construction and management, Li said.

China is also willing to set up a high-speed railway research and development center in Africa, he added.

Li stressed that cooperation between China and African countries is based on good faith and openness, saying his country is willing to share its advanced and applicable technologies and management expertise without reservation.

China is also ready to step up collaboration with international organizations and relevant countries to make a joint contribution to Africa’s development, he added.

Li also pledged to strengthen China-Africa cooperation in green and low carbon development and make sure the Chinese enterprises operating in Africa fulfill their social responsibilities.

He stressed that China will never attach political conditions to its assistance to Africa and will never use its aid programs to interfere in the internal affairs of African countries.

Li also assured the audience that China continues to enjoy solid foundation for sustained economic growth despite recent slowdown.

China will give more attention to the quality and efficiency of growth and make growth more inclusive and sustainable, the premier said.

“We have the confidence and capability to meet the expected growth target of around 7.5 percent for this year and maintain a medium-high growth for a fairly long period of time to come,” he said.

This is good news for African countries and the global economy at large, he said.

The Chinese premier, currently in Angola for a visit, started on Sunday his first Africa tour since taking office in March last year. He had visited Ethiopia and Nigeria, and will travel to Kenya.

via China to earmark over half of foreign aid for Africa: Premier Li – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

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08/05/2014

Study Released at World Urban Forum Shows Value of Waste Pickers – Businessweek

You don’t rummage through piles of garbage looking for recyclable items if you have other options in life. Waste pickers are pretty close to the bottom of the career prestige ladder. But they do provide a useful service, simultaneously reducing the volume of waste that goes into landfills and providing useful raw materials like glass, plastic, and paper to manufacturers.

Indian rag pickers search for usable material at a Dhapa dump site, the waste zone in eastern Kolkata

A study released last week at the World Urban Forum in Medellín, Colombia, based on interviews with hundreds of waste pickers, street vendors, and home workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, finds that all three types of workers “could make greater contributions if local policies and practices supported, rather than hindered, their work.” The study was performed by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (Wiego) and its partners in what’s known as the Inclusive Cities project.

Waste pickers are a prime example. Local governments often seem ambivalent about whether to support them or shut them down—for example, by trucking away waste and burying or burning it before anyone has a chance to pick through it.

via Study Released at World Urban Forum Shows Value of Waste Pickers – Businessweek.

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07/05/2014

China’s Premier Li Goes to Africa – Businessweek

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is visiting Ethiopia, Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya this week in his first trip to Africa since assuming office. Accompanying him is his wife, Cheng Hong, who is making her first public appearance on a diplomatic mission—and a splash in China’s domestic media, given the relative novelty of top leaders’ wives appearing in public in official roles.

Li speaking on May 5 in Ethiopia

Over the past decade, China’s economic ties to Africa have grown quickly. Trade has risen (PDF) from $10 billion in 2000 to $166.3 billion in 2011. Meanwhile China’s foreign direct investment in Africa has jumped from $392 million in 2005 to $2.5 billion in 2012, according to figures from China’s commerce ministry. Much of that money has gone to infrastructure projects, including roads, dams, mines, and oil rigs.

On Monday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, Li laid out his vision for the future of China-Africa relations. Speaking at the headquarters of the African Union, he said he imagined a day when all African capitals would be connected by high-speed rail—quickly adding that China’s experience and technology could “help make this dream come true,” according to state-run newswire Xinhua.

via China’s Premier Li Goes to Africa – Businessweek.

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