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Jun232015

Chinese Trade in Angola Helps Recovery

Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 9:50AM

Two-way trade between Africa and China has been an outstanding success story of the past decade. It has led to significant new investment in the continent and brought many new job opportunities. The Chinese community in Africa comprises a mix of entrepreneurs and workers. In formerly war-torn Angola, Chinese workers and investors have led an economic boom as the country recovers from decades of conflict.

The Chinese are generally young, well-educated, English-speaking, ambitious and hard-working. Estimates put the number of Chinese people in Angola at 100,000, and about 1 million across Africa.

The reason these bright young things need to come to Africa goes back to the essential reality of modern China: despite rapid economic growth, per capita incomes classify it as a poor country. While the outside world sees the glitzy, go-go progress of China’s cities, the country’s rural poor go unseen. Around 400 million of China’s 1.3 billion people have annual per-capita income equivalent to US $8,000, while the remaining 900 million have per-capita incomes as little as one-tenth that amount.

Some 6.3 million people in China will graduate this year from university, and it is still very hard for a well-educated Chinese person to get a good job right away. More than a quarter of these graduates will be unemployed, according to the Education Ministry.

There has also been disquiet in parts of Angola over China’s role, with some calling it “neo-colonialism”. But clearly, both Africa and China have much to gain by increasing cooperation.

In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou), a trading hub nicknamed “Africa Town” has emerged since 1998. There are officially 20,000 African traders and entrepreneurs in the city of 18 million, but unofficial estimates put the number at more than 100,000. This African trading hub has emerged to the benefit of both the Chinese and Africans. It is a coming together of small traders matching Africa’s strong demand for consumer goods with China’s manufacturing powerhouse.

In Angola, the mix of entrepreneurs and workers is having a big impact on the country’s development.

Betty, a 22-year-old Chinese woman who has various projects in Angola, including the local Chinese language newspaper, is a typical go-getter.

“I am doing much better here than if I had stayed in China,” she told the BBC.

Another beneficiary of the two-way trade is Deng, a construction a worker: “I earn twice as much as I would at home and I have got a better job,” he said.

For most Chinese, foreign travel is still rare and the excitement of going to Africa to work both attracts and repels because of the continent’s reputation.

“At first I found it frightening, “said Wang. “You hear lots of stories of Chinese people being robbed by the locals.” But he found “there are great opportunities here.”

Another, Jet, who runs an air conditioning business, came to Angola five years ago.

“Everything had been destroyed,” he recalled. “There were no roads, railways, shops, nothing. Some Western companies were already here selling their products but I knew I could import things cheaper from China.”

The large infrastructure projects being undertaken by major Chinese companies are also creating new opportunities. Many Chinese labourers are working on building roads, railways, hospitals and vast housing complexes.

One of the more visible symbols of Chinese investment in Angola is the restoration of the Benguela Railway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benguela_railway), considered one of the great routes of Africa and built by British contractors. An engineering triumph, its 1,344 kilometres (835 miles) of track stretch up the Angolan coast, right into southern Congo. The railway took almost 30 years to build in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but little remained. Until very recently all but a tiny stretch of the line was closed. Now Chinese investment is rebuilding the railway and bringing economic improvement in its wake.

“I couldn’t do this before the railway was fixed,” a woman using the train to get to the market to sell her plump red tomatoes told the BBC. “Before, I had to travel by car which was much more expensive.”

And her income has improved along with the refurbished railway. “I am not rich, but a bit richer,” she said.

And unlike the British, who used the railway to export copper without paying for the resource, the Chinese labourers are getting paid and the Angolan government is paying back the Chinese loan for the railway repairs by selling oil overseas for a market rate.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: October 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.

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Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iymYBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+october+2010&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsoctober2010issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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David South |

From Warriors to Tour Guides

Friday, June 19, 2015 at 7:14AM

In the wake of conflict, demobilizing combatants is as critical as ending the fighting if there is hope for the peace to last. When conflict ends, former fighters usually find themselves unemployed. But tourism is proving a viable way to deal with the social and political dangers of neglecting former fighters post-conflict.

Global tourism accounts for more than 10 per cent of global GDP and eight per cent of total employment worldwide. It grew by six per cent in 2007, according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. The Asia-Pacific region grew by 10 per cent, and Africa by eight per cent.

Ironically, much conflict has taken place in areas of natural beauty that offer a strong pull to tourists. While perception judging from the media is that conflict is getting worse, in fact trends show the opposite: according to Global Conflict Trends, “The levels of both interstate and societal warfare declined dramatically through the 1990s and this trend continues in the early 2000s, falling over 60% from their peak levels.”

A lot is at stake and it proves it is worthwhile to make peace pay – and that it is possible.

Battle-hardened rebels like 28-year-old Marjuni Ibrahim lived in the jungle and fought as guerrillas in Aceh, Indonesia. On the northwestern tip of Indonesia, Aceh was devastated by both a 30-year war that killed 15,000 people and the 2004 tsunami. Marjuni lost his sister and parents in the tsunami, in which more than 170,000 died or are missing.

Much of the coastline was destroyed, but the shock of the catastrophe pushed both sides into peace talks. The separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) battled the Indonesian army (TNI) up to 2005, when they signed a peace agreement.

Marjuni is now cashing in on a guerilla’s best survival technique: being tough. He now takes adventure and extreme-hiking enthusiasts deep into the jungle, where they once fought and lived. It is a habitat of steep, rocky trails, enormous teak trees – all with the reward of pristine waterfalls and refreshing rock pools for the hardy travelers.

The tours target mainly the community of aid workers in the area helping to re-build Aceh, but the hope is to expand: “I want to make the Acehnese aware of the potential for community-based tourism, and put Aceh on the map as a friendly tourism destination”, said Mendal Pols, a Dutch tour operator and founder of Aceh Explorer on the island, to Reuters.

The jungle is home to endangered Sumatran tigers, deer and hornbills.

“The area is very beautiful. I like trekking and I was interested to see what life was like during the conflict,” said Hugo Lamer, a Dutch trekker. “It’s difficult to imagine but three or more years ago they were running around here with guns and fighting the TNI. When I went, they took us to a place where they had lost some of their friends. And then you realize that we are there for fun, but for them this was really serious.”

In Vietnam, the famous Cu Chi Tunnels, formerly used by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, have become major tourist attractions. The vast network of underground tunnels in Ho Chi Minh City link up with a tunnel network stretching across the country, and were used as hiding spots and as supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon dumps and living quarters.

In Rwanda, the government turned to tourism to help heal the wounds of the massacre that led to the deaths of almost 1 million people in 1994. It markets its population of mountain gorillas, diverse landscape with volcanic ranges, hills, lakes and savannah. But it is also not covering up the past: genocide sites are also on the tourist itinerary. And it is meant to shock: in the town of Murambi, classrooms still contain the bodies of the people who were killed there, covered in lime to preserve them. In Kigali, a museum documents the genocide. Survivors lead the tours to help them heal from the horror.

The goal is to restore the country’s tourism industry and generate US $100 million a year by 2010. It is currently bringing in US $45 million. The approach is to target the ethical end of the tourism market. The idea is to use tourism as a means to avert the tensions that helped to cause the genocide in the first place: poverty, illiteracy and government hording all the wealth. The idea is to employ as many people as possible and spread the wealth as wide as possible.