"Rhino poaching is a white issue"

Just had an interesting twitter debate with Kay Sexwale (niece of Tokyo) about the value of protecting rhino for the well-being of our broader wildlife economy. Sadly, irrational Kay and her followers think rhino poaching is a white problem and has little to do with maintaining the R186 billion tourism supplied into the South African economy in 2012. I grow more disillusioned by the day by the lack of sustainable thinking and the integral role that protecting our natural resources and heritage means for the majority of rural economies that do not have other industrial sectors to depend on for their livelihoods. Perhaps the prevailing bias will only be shaken when our ecotourism industry collapses and millions of economic refugees make their way to the troubled mines or urban centres in search of work. Read the whole sad state of affairs  on my twitter feed @africanscribe

The real African Land grabbers

A recently published article by Fred Pearce in the Daily Mail makes a really poor and reckless job of representing an extremely complex issue. My response:

Firstly, citing two examples from Brazil hardly builds a case for an article about supposed land grabbers in Africa. Brazil is experiencing the highest economic growth among developing countries and their new economic model based on commodities is worth exploring separately. They have rebuilt their economy and boast the lowest unemployment rate in the developing world.

If you had done your research correctly and understood the dynamics of food security and land issues in Africa you will have discovered that that many of these so called agricultural pursuits are in fact smoke screens for earning mining concessions in resource-rich, unstable African territories. Whether these individuals are unscrupulous or not, the real emphasis should be on unethical African governments who allow the exploitation of their own people by selling tribal land to the highest, typically foreign, bidder. You can read the real story of how Phil Edmonds, Andrew Groves and Daniel Och bankrolled the 2008 ZANU PF Zimbabwe election in exchange for a platinum concession in the latest issue of Mail & Guardian. 

When the mining concessions turn out to be fruitless some of these territories have become test grounds for biofuels which prior to the economic downturn in 2008 where tipped as being the highest potential earners for a new green economy.

We ( Africans)  don’t need finger pointing and reckless tarring of foreign investors with an old (Imperial) brush, what we need is some ethical policy structures that encourage skill transfer and infrastructure investment to support small scale farming and commercial innovation of indigenous farming techniques. Your indignation would be better directed at Pan African structures like the African Union and NEPAD who are struggling to conclude pro-poor trade agreements with foreign powers after more than ten years in existence. 

And what Richard Branson has to do with this topic is beyond me. His investment into the Sabi Sands Private Game Reserve has helped keep intact a vital ecologically pristine chunk of the Kruger Park biosphere and create hundreds of jobs for the local villages such as Dumphries. The concession fees paid by private landowners go into supporting local conservation and Ulusaba’s community outreach Pride and Purpose has also built schools, clinics and supported home based care initiatives, which are really the obligation of the local government. Isolating Paul Bayliss’efforts of building a clinic in Liberia are quickly diminished  when placed in context of the ecological damage that palm-oil production has over deforestation and food security. Bayliss should probably be doing a great deal more.

Even the shady Phil Edmonds has built a women’s clinic in Maputo to no doubt earn favour with the Mozambique government. What this says is that African governments have become masters at shirking their own responsibilities by using foreign investors to bankroll social development infrastructure for the betterment of their own people. The enemy is not Imperialism; it is a lack of ethics that traverses individual business interests and corrupt governments.

265 Rhinos killed this year

We cannot continue to behave like victims while the Chinese profit from Africa's forests, coal, mineral wealth and now our wildlife heritage due to our lack of sustainable conscience and easily bought government officials, but appealing to the Chinese appetite for commerce may be an option.

We need to call for a moratorium on Chinese imports and an immediate boycott on all Chinese goods until the Chinese government makes some sort of moral stand to publicly renounce the medicinal value of rhino horn and criminalise possession of it in its own country. I believe USA, UK and Europe would support this, they are Safari's biggest fans. The UK is already making a stand.

We also need to put pressure on President Zuma to use his influence with the Chinese Government to address this. If the Big 5 is diminished to the Big 4, the entire tourism industry will suffer and Zuma's big hope for new jobs will disintegrate.

We may also need to consider how all the rhino sold into Chinese 'breeding' projects are being managed. If the poaching slows down its only because China have purchased a sufficient breeding population to harvest their own horn and once again claim the domain on an economy that we should have led.

Right now, we need foot soldiers. Making an appeal to CITES for a once off sale of South Africa's stock pile of rhino horn could help fund this army and considerably devalue its appeal as rare commodity. It would also discourage unscrupulous private rhino breeders from fetching a high price. The enemy is not only in Asia.

This kind of brutality makes it hard to avoid an emotional response that will invariably end with prejudice. The world has enough prejudice-driven hatred to contend with. We need to maintain that this is not a cultural issue but rather an economic one, fuelled by China's massive population and buying power.

Let's be sure the way we fight this is a precedent we will be proud to to retell in the history books.

Water not energy constraining growth in South Africa

South Africa's climate change debate has, so far, largely focused on the country's overdependence on coal-fired energy and how it makes the country one of the world's highest per capita polluters.

A failure to factor in the cost of water in producing electricity is starting to have negative consequences. Little consideration has been given to the link between water, energy and climate change and indeed how dependent energy production is on water...Read more

A participatory approach to rural development - by Kristina Gubic

"Development has become an increasingly academic field. As the CSI industry in
South Africa has matured, there is much evidence to show that the sector has
graduated from random acts of philanthropy to more strategic interventions.
But as practitioners strive to maximise the CSI rand, has this more targeted
approach disconnected CSI from the very communities we are seeking to uplift?
In this feature article, Kristina Gubic sets out a compelling case for involving
beneficiary communities in project implementation and evaluation...."

To read the full the article scroll down the page provided in the link and click on the article entitled " A participatory approach to rural development"...

Somalia - celebrating tweny years of madness

I am currently reading Aidan Hartley's 'The Zanzibar Chest' - a very gritty memoir of his upbringing in East Africa, retracing his father's steps through Yemen and his days as one of the bang bang club - the war correspondents sent in to capture live accounts of wars in deepest Africa that the world has never really cared about.

Hartley was at the frontline of the civil war that erupted in Mogadishu in 1991, and one of the first journalists to coin the phrase 'Warlords.' He saw how gunmen literally created a famine and then continuously ambushed food aid deliveries until many NGO's eventually gave up trying to get aid in on account of the high risk.

I woke up this morning and checked the news. Somalia occupies the first three stories on CNN's Africa page. It's been twenty years and yet the stories of brutal killing, weapon stashes and explosions killing civilians are unchanged!

What is the point of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force or the African Union for that matter if they have failed in quelling one of Africa's longest running wars?

My suggestion, if you're a blogger hiding out in a Somali bunker is to send a tipoff to the media that you have just discovered oil. Maybe that will help dispatch the cavalry.

Communication training course for NGo's in Africa

http://www.ngopulse.org/event/africanscribe-media-communications-toolkit-grassroots-ngos

Africanscribe Media 2010

Africanscribe Media Power Pressed

View more presentations from africanscribe.

'No-till' farming the answer?

Worldwide, there are 923 million people who go hungry. The FAO estimates that 75 million of those are suffering as a result of high food prices. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, the number of people who cannot afford to eat is 24 million.

While food costs continue to spiral, the environmental cost of growing food is also mounting as the world struggles with another less tangible but far more imminent challenge to food security. All across the region of Southern Africa, the effects of climate change are already being felt as droughts intensify, rainfall patterns shift and biodiversity is lost as agricultural refugees seek out new potential farm land. In a region that is classified as arid and is already grappling with the challenges of conflict or political instability or a lack of skills among new emerging farmers, food security in these developing countries is under severe threat.

As food prices climb, it is imperative that agricultural output of these developing nations does not fall further so as to make them net importers of food and add to the already high cost burden of meeting development needs. While emergency food aid has its place in so far as addressing a short term crisis, it remains an expensive and unsustainable intervention.

With virtually no resources available to these regions for increased spending on infrastructure, mechanical equipment, pesticides or fertilizers, a grassroots approach that draws on the available capacity and resources of local communities is needed.

The UN's agency for food and agriculture is advocating a return to traditional farming techniques. Could Conservation agriculture be the answer?

Conservation agriculture (CA) is not a new concept to farming. It is governed by three major principles which have been employed in small scale subsistence or permaculture for centuries that calls for farming in harmony with nature.

1. No-tillage
Mechanical disturbance of the soil has not only shown to increase soil erosion and water runoff, but also to inhibit the natural activity of micro-organisms in the soil – essential for strengthening the soil profile.

In Southern Africa, where the agricultural workforce is facing a deepening health crisis as a result of HIV / Aids, the no-tillage approach means less energy and labour can be spent preparing the soil and more time planting and reaping. In rural areas, where communities are experiencing a demographic collapse as the men abandon their post as head of household to seek migrant labour in cities, women and in particularly the elderly have been left to tend to community food gardens.

The overwhelming environmental benefits of no-tillage as has begun to be practiced around the world showed a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 10 million metric tons in 2004 and 14.8 million metric tons in 2006 as tractors and fuel were set aside in favour of the no-tillage approach.

2. Mulching
Covering the soil with organic plant matter has shown to not only protect the soil from exposure to the elements but also to slow down evaporation of water and rainfall.
As the organic matter breaks down it returns nutrients to the soil and stimulates micro-organism activity, so reducing the need for costly fertilizers. Working hand in hand with the no-tillage approach, planting is implemented through the soil cover, further reducing labour and time costs.

3. Crop-rotation
As is the key to the success of biodiversity in nature, diversity in cropping is imperative to reducing soil degradation and maintaining the natural balance of potential pests.
Crop homogenisation over large tracts of land has shown to strengthen certain pests that have had time to adapt and strengthen to its surroundings.
In regions such as China or the United States, where rice or maize and wheat have replaced crop diversity with homogenised fields, a single disease could trigger a food crisis of epic proportion.

In East Africa, where forests were cleared to make way for coffee planting, the coffee borer beetle has had a devastating impact on the coffee crops of Kenya and Tanzania. Farmers are since returning to shade-grown coffee where natural predators like birds are re-introduced through the preservation of forest habitat.
Employing crop-rotation and cross planting techniques encourages natural predators and reduces the need for herbicides and pesticides that ultimately damage natural resources.
As ground water quality comes under increasing pressure from drought and contamination from human settlements, conservation agriculture has the potential to halt the demise of one of our most precious and shrinking resources that until now has been subjected to contamination from leeched chemicals.

Conservation Agriculture seems to be what communities are practicing already with permaculture and small scale agriculture, but is this method really able to work for commercial scale farming?

Tourism building our schools

The island of conservation in Africa

I just had a really exciting conversation with IUCN about conservation. They asked me what I thought the greatest challenges facing our continent were and whilst I managed a few off the cuff responses, sometimes great ideas need a little time to percolate, a bit like good coffee.

So my answer IUCN is as follows:

Transfrontier Conservation Areas!

This is not a new concept. We've had experts mapping areas of ecological importance and linking of biodiversity corridors for more than a decade. The potential to conserve and protect Africa's precious wildlife resources are possible and available, but the foundation of TFCA's or peace parks rely on cross-border co-operation between different governments to acknowledge the importance of collectively conserved land and to commit to preserving it.

Nature does not obey political boundaries. The ancient migration routes of herd animals continue despite borders and fences with increasing casualty and conflict, yet despite ecotourism proving its economic worth, the borders persist.

In artificially managed ecosystems that exist behind fences, limited access to resources such as grazing and water and the emergence of stagnant gene pools can be addressed through increased conserved territory. Not to mention the threat of fire or homogenisation of vegetation as a result of these artificial forces.

When I read about how rhinos are being poached on the Kruger fence line, I feel angry over the lack of comment from stakeholders like Peace Parks. Instead of continuing with community stakeholder engagement on the Mozambique side of the park to encourage the community towards conservation, SanParks is spending R2 million rand on employing more patrols.

Critics will say that the dream of Kruger - Ghaza - Ghonerazou failed because Zimbabwe pulled out and all the elephants that were relocated to Mozambique came back. But little effort has been made to engage the communities in Mozambique and show them how ecotourism can help them feed their families over poaching. Consider for a moment why the Great Migration across the Serengeti and the Masai Mara is the most successful drawcard for ecotourism - because it is given space to exist!

Returning to the question of the impending Kruger peace park, the 100 metres of fence line dropped for the unveiling press conference ( 10 years ago) has yet to widen and remains nothing more than a hollow gesture.

Our biggest challenge is the lack of communication to local communities living along the hemlines of national parks that their livelihoods can be improved as a result of conservation. The creation of peace parks should not be seen as competition to food security, as these areas have already been identified and in many cases are established conservation areas that generally enjoy some level of protection as conserved land, but what has happened in the last ten years to drop fences and deliver results has been precious little.

I seem to recall Peace Parks Foundation being set up with this specific mandate and also to have received considerable funding to execute this.

So IUCN, my answer is we need to re-engage governments that gave their commitment to the vision of TFCA's and challenge the NGO's who have already been bankrolled to get the programme moving. There is no need to spend additional resources re-inventing the wheel when enough studies, road maps, policies and frameworks have been done to set us on a sustainable path. Can we just get on with rolling up our sleeves, already?

Lifesaver water purification bottle

Water crisis in KwaZulu Natal

I just got back from a field trip where I explored several rural communities that currently do not have access to clean drinking water.

Situated on the hemline of a collection of conserved land such as Phinda Private Game Reserve, Mkuze Game Reserve and the IsiManguliso ( St Lucia) Wetland - now a World Heritage Site, I visited, Makhasa, Mnqobokasi, Kwajobe and Kwangwenya. The first two villages have very recently been hooked up to the Hluhluwe Dam delivery scheme, but the latter two rely on rivers and rain tanks assembled under their roof gutters for water.

If you were an environmental purest - you could argue that their rain harvesting techniques are the most sustainable solution for a continent that is constantly battling water shortages, but as weather patterns change, the rainfall in this area has proved increasingly elusive and drought cycles have increased.

Much of the positive development that has been initiated in these communities is through the support of &Beyond Foundation - that works closely with Phinda Private Reserve. What I love about their development model is that it is community-led, rather than donor dictated and so has spawned real grassroots success by empowering the local leadership.

On assignment for Water For All, I was tasked with finding 5 rural schools in the province that currently do not have access to clean drinking water. This NGO works in several countries across Southern and East Africa and is making a real difference in helping to reduce the number of deaths that occur daily as a result of water borne disease.

Water For All, target mainly schools as beneficiaries, as children are traditionally tasked with collecting water from far away sources - often preventing them from attending school. Water in schools, therefore has a multiple, positive impact in addressing health, education and children rights issues.

In addition, Water For All's new direction embraces renewable technology options that generate no carbon emissions and have no running cost implications to the school or community. The NGO also provides free maintenance of the pump. In short - I'm a huge fan of Water For All, but what concerned me about this last trip were the number of collapsed boreholes in the area that could suggest a serious depletion of ground water.

Ground water quality and quantity can be very area-specific. Drilling for water does not always yield positive results and what I have experienced in recent years is that South Africa's ground water resources are under severe pressure.

Apparently there are all sorts of sophisticated studies that have been commissioned to map all the boreholes across the country and register their abstraction rates. The agricultural industry is responsible for 50% of the country's water resources through irrigation, but this figure is over 5 years old and as the new democratic government has increasingly supplied more of its previously disadvantaged citizens with access to water, either in their residential communities or as emerging farmers, the numbers must have changed.

Before I left for my trip I contacted the regional offices for both the Department of Education and the Department of Water Affairs. Neither could tell me with any kind of certainty which schools used boreholes and how much.

Seems to be yet another case of an a very expensive study sitting in someone's bottom drawer - unread.

Global recession could teach Africa a valuable lesson

‘Credit crunch…global financial crisis…economic downturn… recession…correction.’ These are just some of the phrases that have become part of our daily vocabulary in recent months. For the poorest segment of the world’s population however, the daily dramas of Wall Street, Washington and Brussels mean very little. The reality is that few Africans understand how their economic fate is linked to a crisis instituted by a few overzealous stock traders and war lords. In the meantime African leaders are conveniently using the global scapegoat to mask their own blunders.

The projections from the world’s leading economic experts continue to spread gloom about how Africa will be hardest hit as a result of what is happening in world markets. What few can explain however - is how China remains seemingly immune to the global crisis and continues to prosper.

Despite conventional wisdom, this is no time to be looking to history for the answers. While analysts hark back to the Great Depression or other cataclysmic dips in the economy as a benchmark for what we are currently experiencing, there are no common denominators that can help us draw on the past for a possible solution.

Consider for instance, that the total world population in 1929 was just 1.8 billion. Today there are 2 billion people alone living below the poverty line out of a total population of 6.2 billion. The pressure on the earth’s resources is unprecedented, unevenly distributed and unevenly consumed. In the meantime, since the Great Depression the world has endured two world wars – three if you’re honest enough to include the collective conflicts taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza right now - developing nations have broken free from colonisation, and the world’s trade markets have become inextricably linked to eachother as a result of globalisation.

Diseases that are treatable claim the lives of 25 000 children every day and yet, after military spending, the pharmaceutical industry is the second biggest sector in which the wealthiest countries choose to spend their money. Despite the 3 trillion dollar war and a more modest 780 billion dollars spent on narcotics, there are more conflicts around the world right now and more people dying of mostly curable diseases than at any other time in history.

If anything, what the current global economic crisis could teach us is that the path in which the wealthiest nations of the world have lead us down in the last fifty years shows little insight or foresight. If we are to challenge the doomsayers over the impending fate of Africa’s economy, we need to develop solutions of our own, which bring me back to my initial question of how did China overtake us.

Since Africa’s emergence from colonialism in the last fifty years, foreign aid intended to rebuild our African economies has plunged us from 10% of the continent living in poverty to 66%. I am not entirely naïve to the added burden that foreign debt, trade barriers and subsidies that protect first world markets have had on our own progress, but if Africa has the largest deposits of mineral wealth in the world – including oil – how did China surpass us in productivity and growth in just two decades??

It seems fair to start then by assessing the Neoliberal economic policy that the wealthy developed nations have followed in recent decades and inadvertently imposed on the rest of us. Neoliberalism when applied to economics, is supposed to spawn prosperity and free trade for all by creating self regulating markets, privatisation of public enterprises, greater assumed individual responsibility because of reduced spending on social services and broad scale economic prosperity as it trickles down to every level of society – using the principles of capitalism as the key driver.

Neoliberalism on paper - sounds like a great idea, but just about every one of its pillars has collapsed in recent years to now reveal markets that require regulating, bail outs and urgent spending on healthcare in even the wealthiest of countries.

Where China first took a foothold as major world exporter was through labour-intensive industries such as textiles and the manufacture of cheap goods, this is no longer the case. China is now the world’s third largest exporter of electronics and technology based equipment. In just a few decades it has transformed itself from a predominantly rural based, labour intensive economy to on that is increasingly boasting new technology skills and degrees of sophistication. While South Africa with a population of just 44 million continues to blame the legacy of Apartheid for the backlog of service delivery and education, in the same period of time, China - a country with over a billion people - has transformed seamstresses into engineers.

A recent report from the University of Nottingham’s Globalization and Economic Policy Centre (GEP) is accusing China of unfair trade practices since its study revealed that the secret to China’s economic success lies in production subsidies. How these subsidies can be viewed any differently to the EU subsidizing their farmers to keep their prices artificially low or the imposition of trade barriers on finished goods out of Africa I fail to see – but then I’m not the World Trade Organization.

What is important though is that these production subsidies have served to incentivize a nation, boosting exports and GDP. While China’s exports continue to surge, Africa continues to shoot itself in the foot by importing redundant commodities like maize and chicken from Brazil, which it is quite capable of producing itself.

Similarly, Africa sells off it gold, platinum and steel to the rest of the world as raw materials, while other countries profit by adding value to our mineral wealth. China too has joined the scramble by buying our hardwoods and coal without any need for sustainable accountability since our lack of environmental legislation doesn’t require it.

Our people starve, while we allow our landmass that can engulf China, the Unites States and Europe collectively to turn barren. Our continent enjoys enough rainfall to irrigate the entire continent three times over and yet 500 million people do not have access to drinking water and entire countries report crop failure due to annual droughts.

In South Africa we enjoy an average of 2500 sunshine hours per year yet 96% of our energy needs are coal powered. While we labour over building a new power station (coal of course) for six years, the Chinese have built four!

South Africa in the last year has shed 400 000 jobs as a result of the recession, but the new incoming President, Jacob Zuma has promised to create 500 000 jobs in just six months. Nobody has asked how many of these newly created jobs will remain after the feverish construction taking place to ready us for the 2010 Fifa World Cup - since this might imply that we live in a forward thinking world.

What all these ironies suggest for me is that the doomsayers may be right about Africa after all, but not because of the domino impact of a credit crisis that began in the north, but rather as a result of self inflicted victimisaton.

Talking deforestation in Malawi

Eyewitness account

A friend of mine recently returned from a month-long trip around Southern Africa and in our catch up conversation, I learned about how Malawi - in the ten year interval since we last travelled there - is almost unrecognisable in the face of rampant deforestation.

Malawi - affectionately known as the warm heart of Africa - has dropped off the donor aid and media radar in recent years, but it remains one of the poorest countries in Africa with 60% of its 12 million population living below the poverty line.

The result is a desperate attempt by the people of Malawi to eek out an existence from the country's remaining natural resources.

The economy has never been a sophisticated one, with people subsisting from fishing in Lake Malawi and to some extent craft where 'Malawi Chairs' became an iconic feature of African carving, but agriculture has never been the country's strong suit.

In the south of the country where the population is densest - the people have begun chopping down the forests at a rate of one football pitch every ten minutes. The wood is used for firewood or to make charcoal and yields little more than $15 for each tree felled. In return, the country is now battling the devastating effects of soil erosion, silting up of its dams and impoverished soils - so that growing the traditional cassava is futile without added fertilisers..

Malawi's accelerated descent into poverty

When did it all start going pear-shaped? It seems fair to suggest that in 1994, when the new constitution decentralised the government and returned autonomy to the local chiefs that resources begun being consumed without any regard for an overarching conservation strategy and certainly without any thought for sustainability.

Corruption and a lack of national law has allowed illegal logging to extract vast quantities of hardwoods without any responsibility to the people or the environment.

Since virtually no new infrastructure has been added to the country in twenty years, only 2% of the population have access to electricity. The bulk of the population therefore rely on biomass for their energy needs. The poorest people - largely illiterate - have little understanding of the consequences of their actions from famine to flood as the daily challenge of feeding themselves is prioritised.

Grassroots development agency making ripples...

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. A local development agency called Ripple Africa is working on establishing 400 nurseries that will be capable of planting 12 000 trees a year each and produce 4 million tree saplings in total. Sustainable forestry is a policy that should have been applied thirty years ago in Malawi - through ongoing consultation with the regional chiefs, this is exactly what Ripple Africa is trying to achieve.

In addition to planting tree saplings, Ripple Africa are also encouraging the locals to plant ground nuts which return nitrogen to the soil and can be cross-planted with other cash crops.

I'm always amazed at how casual conversations with like minded people can produce incredible ideas. My friends are people who are as passionate as I am about a prosperous Africa. Take a look at this video clip to hear about some of the other ideas we came across to strengthen Malawi's food security and lift her people out of poverty:

The Big Promise | Oxfam International

The Big Promise | Oxfam International

The Big Promise

Do you think a promise should be kept? We do…especially when the lives of millions are depending on it.

Four years ago leaders of the eight richest nations promised to give an additional $50 billion a year in aid to the world’s poorest countries by 2010. Now they threaten to break that promise in the wake of the global economic crisis.

Join Oxfam’s Big Promise today – make a promise and keep it! We'll add your promise to thousands of others from around the globe, and deliver them to the G8 next month. Together, we’ll show them that the world demands they keep their promises to deliver health and education for all.

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Participate | A Global Call to Action | Mandela Day 2009

Participate | A Global Call to Action | Mandela Day 2009

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The untapped paradox of water and energy in South Africa

Image: Hartebeesport Dam in March 2009 by Kristina Gubic

Driving over the Hartebeesport Dam wall in March this year I couldn't help being struck by a wave of irony. Thousands of litres of water were pulsing over the dam wall - untapped, on its way to who knows where.

I was on my way to visit a rural community just 15 kilometres away from the dam that has been experiencing water shortages for several years. At the heart of Modderspruit's frustration is a supply line that sees water from the Hartebeesport Dam being taken on a 100 kilometre detour before trickling into the village. One sensible engineer could remedy this in a heartbeat, yet a group of dozens of officials at several municipalities continue to debate the solution while people from the community risk their lives daily crossing the N4 toll road to fetch water from a working borehole.

With several issues like climate change, a looming energy crisis and lack of water delivery to millions of South Africans in rural parts of the country, all colliding in my brain, I mused over the absence of a turbine on the dam wall that might harness the power generating capacity of the flow and help dilute our current dirty coal dominated energy mix.

Hydro power remains one of the cleanest forms of energy available to us. As the Gauteng rainy season has swelled over recent years - no doubt due to climate change - I wondered why has this avenue has not yet being explored? There is a real opportunity here to exploit a burgeoning environmental disaster and capture its megalithic flow for good. There are several opencast mines in the region of Brits and Rustenberg - who are no doubt massive energy consumers - and who all have an incentive from Eskom to reduce their energy demand on the grid and surely with some corporate collaboration, funding a feasibility study and the necessary technology would be a piece of cake?

Back in Modderspruit, as I stood talking to a women clad in an ANC campaign t-shirt, retelling the horrors of how those not nimble enough to haul their 25 litre drum of water back across the busy N4 without incident, I cast my own hopeful vote for a new government that will after 15 years stop blaming the legacy of Apartheid for the infrastrcuture backlog and just get on with the job.

Playpumps International - bringing clean drinking water to millions

During my time at PlayPumps International as their Communications and Media Manager I had the privilege of visiting over 100 rural school and communities around Southern Africa. I got to experience first hand how clean water is an instant bridge to good health and nutrition but also how it reduces the barriers of education for girls.....

Obama's Strings for development aid to Zimbabwe

So hats off to Morgan Tsvangarai for clinching a meeting at the White House within Obama's first 100 days of office.


On Saturday, Obama announced a $73 million aid package for Zimbabwe. The conditions? The money would not be diverted through government but through local development aid agencies.


This is great news as far as stemming the bureaucratic red tape that has delayed so much development manifesting on the ground, but then it really does boil down to which development agencies will be used. My experience with development agencies in Africa suggests the smaller they are and the closer they are to the original community impact zone, the more effective they are. Big agencies however, that have evolved into bureaucratic monsters are not too dissimilar from governments.


My concern for what Obama's conditions might spell for Zimbabwe, is this new aid package is likely to be diverted through USAid. I'm definitely not looking to undermine what positive impact USAid has had to date in Africa, but they do have some convenient restraints as far as service suppliers and consultants goes - which ultimately leads the money back to the US.

It would be revolutionary if USAid - recognising the potential power they hold here to achieve real sustainability would look at recruiting the wealth of Zimbabwean experts that now populate the globe as economic refugees.

There is not a single Zimbabwean I have met abroad that does not want to go home. Imagine the prospect the of Zimbabweans engaging in rebuilding their own country rather than temporary US expats?