The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa Author: Dayo Olopade | Language: English | ISBN:
B00E78IB02 | Format: EPUB
The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa Description
The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves Africa is a continent on the move. It’s often hard to notice, though—the western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the last decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She found an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders.
Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty—a trait she began calling
kanju. It’s embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multi-million dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief.
The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad aid and bad government into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.
- File Size: 10892 KB
- Print Length: 287 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0547678312
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00E78IB02
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,973 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Globalization - #8
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > African - #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Development & Growth
- #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Globalization - #8
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > African - #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Development & Growth
The media is constantly reminding us of the destitution of Africa, a continent that is seen only as poor and undeveloped in the public eye. However, as Olopade makes evident, the situation that we are being told about is much more complex than it is made out to be. Olopade's account of African innovation to the problems that it faces as a comparatively underdeveloped continent is intriguing, and is certainly not an account we would often see in Western news sources. This book is a great read for anybody interested in development, anthropology or international relations, or even a non-academic just wanting to read a bit about Africa. 5/5 would recommend.
By Jennifer
VINE VOICE
I preordered the book and received it this morning. I read it with great excitement as fast as I could -- and was not disappointed.
Through this well-written book, Olopade is shattering the dominant Western perception of Africa as a poor and corrupt continent prone to disease and famine. She vividly describes how the entire African continent is teeming with ingenious entrepreneurs who can overcome great adversity to create frugal and sustainable solutions for their local communities. These modern-day alchemists are able to transmute constraints into opportunity and generate greater social value at lower cost. Their secret weapon, according to Olopade, is "kanju" -- a frugal, flexible, and inclusive mindset that enables them to see the glass as always half full and do much more with a lot less.
This resourceful kanju spirit reminds me of jugaad -- a Hindi word meaning the gutsy ability to improvise cost-effective solutions with limited resources in adverse circumstances. In my own book, I described how millions of grassroots entrepreneurs in India apply jugaad to overcome their every day challenges. These Indian entrepreneurs would be thrilled to discover, through Olopade's book, that their African brothers and sisters are equally pioneering a new approach to innovating faster, better, and cheaper.
In the West, this new frugal and flexible approach is being called "frugal innovation" and is gradually gaining traction in the academic and corporate world. I strongly encourage entrepreneurs, CEOs, academics, and policy-makers in the West to read The Bright Continent to understand how Africa is a breeding ground of frugal innovation -- and provides the entire world a proven blueprint for building inclusive and sustainable economies.
By Navi Radjou, coauthor "Jugaad Innovation"
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