 April 25, 2005A Fragile Success in Africa
What they have in mind are people like Kofi Asare, who labors mightily on his modest farm high in the hills near his village SamSam, carrying his ripe yellow pineapples on his head to get them from the fields to his truck. Dripping with sweat, the 28-year-old Mr. Asare is the very picture of Africa getting its act together. Last year, he made $10,000; enough to make the transition from mud hut to cement house. This year, with an eye warily on the future, he has planted 2,500 of a new "low acid" pineapple pioneered by the Del Monte Foods Company that threatens to smoke the Ghana "smooth cayenne" variety out of Europe's supermarkets. But Ghana is a good kid in a really bad neighborhood. Its West African neighbors, from Liberia to Sierra Leone to the Ivory Coast, have bred so much fighting in the last 10 years that they make Ghana seem like Iowa. Ghana does not have insurgents running around its hinterlands dressed in wedding gowns and wigs (like Liberia and Sierra Leone) or 8-year-old rebel soldiers toting machine guns (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast). It has had four successful elections since 1993, and has actually experienced a peaceful transfer of power between democratically elected governments, another rarity in the neighborhood. Indeed, it is becoming a haven for refugees who come not only from Ghana's unruly neighbors to the west, but also from other conflict zones in Africa. Last week, a group of refugees from Darfur, Sudan, showed up. It remains unclear how they made it across the continent, crossing the Togolese border from five countries away, but the Accra government is busy making plans to settle the Sudanese refugees. Ghanaians like to brag that they have passed the point of no return in making their humid patch of West Africa a functioning democracy with all the perks that brings: a free and vibrant press, steady though slow economic growth, tourism. There is even a shopping mall with a multiplex cinema going up in Accra. With such obvious payoffs for adopting good governance, many Ghanaians say it is inconceivable that the country will turn back to the failed-state practices that have taken so many other African countries down the drain. "If anyone tried anything like a coup here, this place would immediately become ungovernable," says Kweku Sakyi Addo, the host of one of Ghana's innumerable political talk shows. "We've seen what happens in other African countries. There is no way people will put up with that here." But for all the talk of what a model African country Ghana is, it is still, literally, dirt poor, a fact of life that demonstrates just how removed Africa is from the proverbial rising tide of the global economy that is supposed to be lifting all boats. Ghana has a per capita income of $421 a year; most people survive here on $300 to $400. Ten-year-old girls still run barefoot up to stopped cars in the sweltering midday heat trying to sell anything they think will bring in money - from oranges to cellphone batteries to toilet paper. Street children still sleep on the median separating highway lanes. And while the Ghanaian government appears to have a clear idea of exactly what steps it must take to try to alleviate the huge divide between Accra's growing middle class and the country's rural poor, some goals are already slipping. Child mortality rates, already high, increased in 2004; nobody seems to know why. A huge gender gap remains in primary-school education: far more boys make it to school than girls. Almost half of Ghana's national budget comes from foreign aid; Britain is its largest single-country donor. But the size of the country's budget, a scant $3 billion, supporting some 20 million people, is testament to just how far Ghana still has to go, and just how much more it still needs to climb out of poverty. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal for rich countries to drastically increase their aid to Africa in a Marshall Plan approach would be a huge step toward helping to bring the continent back into the folds of the rest of the world. Ghana shows what a tough road this is going to be. But it also shows that bringing Africa back is eminently doable. |
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April 25, 2005Specialists Say 'Healers' in Angola Are Helping to Spread Deadly Virus
The experts suggest that the healers, who lack medical training and supplies but are a substitute for doctors in many rural African communities, are administering injections in homes or in makeshift clinics with reused needles or syringes. In the northern Angolan province of U�ge, where all but 11 of the 244 deaths reported in the outbreak have occurred, epidemiologists say they must convince people that such practices can be fatal. Dr. Pierre Formenty, an expert in hemorrhagic fevers like Marburg and a member of the World Health Organization's team in U�ge, said on Saturday that unsafe injections could explain why an average of three people per day continue to die of the virus a full month after international teams arrived in Angola to battle it. Although it is not clear what solutions the healers are injecting, specialists said, the virus can easily be transmitted from an infected to an uninfected person through a contaminated needle or syringe. "I would say it is bit bizarre that we still have these high numbers per week," Dr. Formenty said in a telephone interview. He said medical workers had developed a campaign against injections at home "asking people to use other kinds of medicines or to come to hospital or the health center to have a safe injection with new devices." Another expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, insisted that unnecessary shots were common, saying, "There is a notion in Africa that if you haven't been given an injection, you haven't been treated." Dr. Formenty said that while intense efforts to track possible cases and limit the potential for transmission of the virus were helping to curtail the epidemic, it was not clear whether the outbreak had peaked. "I would say that it's just a gut feeling that maybe things are going better in the sense that people are reporting more and more systematically the deaths," Dr. Formenty said. Other encouraging signs, experts said, include the arrival on Thursday of a 28-member Angolan medical team in U�ge and the opening of a fever ward at the provincial hospital. "Certainly we are breaking the chain of transmission," said Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization's alert and response operations. "This is the most critical time now in the response, now that we are beginning to get things under control," he said. When asked why it took a month for Angolan health authorities to send a significant team of specialists to U�ge, Dr. Ryan said only that the authorities had been worried the epidemic would spread to Luanda, where crowded conditions and an international airport could help the virus spread out of control, and to elsewhere in Angola. |
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