Africans living in the United States are twice as likely to graduate from college as the average American.

These African students often come from families who value education as a way to get on in life and place a high value on working and studying hard.

Sara Tsegaye, a straight-A student at UCLA, is one example of that success. Her parents fled Ethiopia in the late 1980s, first to Sudan and then, when Sara was one year old, they moved to San Jose, California.

Sara’s father works on a mobile ice cream truck in San Jose and her mother used to be a factory worker before she got laid off.

“We manage to pay for school because I’ve been working since I was 11,” Sara told Reuters Africa Journal. “I’ve been working with my dad on his ice cream truck, he’s been paying me and I’ve been saving the money. Also I had two jobs in high school and I saved up a lot of money. I understand the value of money.”

Sara wants to work with an NGO or a non-profit organisation after she graduates. She wants to travel and she wants to make a difference in the world. Other African students say they want to go home once they get a bit of experience in their careers.

But Africa is suffering from a massive brain drain just now and it’s questionable whether enough of those highly motivated students from America will return home in large enough numbers to really make a difference.

(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI with African bishops in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, 4  Oct 2009/Alessandro Bianchi)

Roman Catholic bishops called on corrupt Catholic leaders in Africa on Friday to repent or resign for giving the continent and the Church a bad name. Around 200 African bishops, along with dozens of other bishops and Africa experts, also accused multinational companies in Africa of "crimes against humanity" and urged Africans to beware of "surreptitious" attempts by international organizations to destroy traditional African values.

Their three-week synod, which ends formally on Sunday with a Mass by Pope Benedict, covered a range of Africa's problems, such as AIDS, corruption, poverty, development aspirations and crime. But it had a very direct message for corrupt African leaders who were raised Catholics.

"Many Catholics in high office have fallen woefully short in their performance in office. The synod calls on such people to repent, or quit the public arena and stop causing havoc to the people and giving the Catholic Church a bad name."

The message did not name any leaders. The international community has for years called on Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who was raised a Catholic and educated by Jesuits, to step down, saying he had brought his once-prosperous country to its knees.

Another African leader who was raised a Catholic and has been accused of corruption is Angola's President Eduardo dos Santos. Both men deny any wrongdoing.

In a section on AIDS, the bishops' message repeated the Church position that the spread of the disease could not be stopped by the use of condoms alone. Last March, on his way to his first trip to Africa, the pope caused an international storm by saying that the use of condoms could actually worsen the spread of AIDS.

Read the whole story here.

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One day this year, in all probability, the “billionth African” will have been born, a milestone that will only benefit the poorest continent if it can get its act together and unify its piecemeal markets.
   Nobody knows, of course, when or where in its 53 countries the child arrived to push Africa’s population into ten figures.
   The U.N. merely estimates that in mid-2008 there were 987 million people, and in mid-2009, 1,010 million.
   Given the difficulties of obtaining accurate data from the likes of Nigeria, where provincial population figures are often hostage to the ambitions of local politicians, or any data at all from the likes of Somalia, experts are reluctant to hazard any greater degree of accuracy.
   There is less doubt, however, about the underlying trend — that Africa’s population is set to grow faster than in any other part of the world in the coming decades, and to double by 2050.
   To some, the statistics from the U.N.’s population division will invite comparisons to the Asian giants, and inspire hopes of a flood of investment from Africans and outsiders to meet the needs of a continent likely to be home to one in five people by the middle of this century.
   By contrast, China’s projected population of 1.4 billion in 40 years will be shrinking, while India will only be adding an annual 3 million to its 1.6 billion people.
   To others, the numbers are stark reminders of the mammoth task Africa’s leaders face in providing the food, jobs, schools, housing and healthcare that are still so sorely lacking.
   UNFPA, the U.N.’s population arm, summarises by saying that sub-Saharan Africa faces “serious political, economic and social challenges” and points to the last two decades as evidence that more people does not mean more wealth.
   “Twenty years of almost three percent annual population growth has outpaced economic gains, leaving Africans, on average, 22 percent poorer than they were in the mid-1970s,” it says.
    Are Africa’s leaders ready and willing to create the truly unified common market needed to boost investment, trade and economic growth, or are short-term national interests likely to prevail, consigning Africa to a century of overpopulated poverty?

When Hillary Clinton visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in August, she spoke out against rape and said women should not be used as “weapons of war”.

The Secretary of State wanted Congo’s government to do more to stop sexual violence and prosecute offenders in an area where armed groups still use rape to terrorise local people seven years after the war was meant to have ended.

In Kiwanja in eastern Congo, counsellors are trying to rebuild the lives of rape victims, both women and men.

A 62-year-old widow, who does not want to give her real name, says she was attacked and repeatedly raped by a group of youths, who also killed her 20-year-old son.

“Esther” has already received medical help at a local hospital and is now being treated for psychological trauma.

Counsellor Mariette Paluku Nzaira says it is vital for rape victims to seek help.

“The advantage of counselling centres like this one is that when someone faces these kinds of problems they feel unworthy,” she told Reuters Africa Journal. “Often when the husband finds out he chases his wife away.”

For men such as “Francois” who have been raped, counselling is also important if they are to make sense of what has happened to them.

“Men who are raped have a feeling of anger. They are wondering how this could have
happened to them,” said counsellor Katungo Kilauri

“It is important for victims to go for counselling because when you have a problem and you don’t speak to someone about it, you can die. When you let out what is in your heart, the bad feelings go away.”

These counsellors are trying to raise awareness of sexual violence by encouraging more people to talk about it.

But is that enough? Human rights groups say hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped in Congo in the past decade by government forces and rebels. The perpetrators are almost never brought to justice.

Successive failed rain seasons in Kenya have led to a drought that experts say is the worst in the country since 1996.

And it is not just a problem for Kenya. Aid agencies estimate more than 23 million people will need food aid in the Horn of Africa region.

Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai says it shows how ill-prepared much of Africa is to deal with the effects of climate change.

Herders who depend on cattle for their food and income are having to drive their livestock hundreds of kilometres to seek pasture and water - but find little relief.

“The grass was green when I got here, but it is finished now and a lot of our animals are dying,” Grewan Lesakut, from the pastoralist Samburu community in the Rift Valley, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“The way I see it, all our cows are going to die,” fellow herder John Lenyarui said. “I know some people who had 50 cows but have nothing now, some with 200 and now have only 40 and myself I had 500 and now I have 100.”

Kenya’s Meat Commission is doing what it can. It has offered to buy thousands of cattle from their owners to be slaughtered for meat. But the government facility has been stretched to the limit and thousands of have died outside the slaughterhouse.

“This is a very ugly scene, a very disturbing scene that the country is facing,” Livestock Minister Mohamed Kuti said.

Most nomadic groups hold on to their animals even in times of severe drought, seeing them as their most valuable investment.  In desperation, Turkana villagers, from northwest Kenya, are selling their goats well below market prices to the European Union’s humanitarian wing which then distributes the meat to the hungry.

Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, says the drought is evidence of the long term effect of climate change.

“This is an excellent time for Kenya maybe to realise, and for the rest of Africa to learn, what we are talking about when we say that climate change is going to hit Africa very seriously, and it’s partly because Africa is completely unprepared for what is coming with climate change,” she told Africa Journal.

“For more than three decades we have been saying it is important to protect our forests, to protect our rivers, to protect our lands so that we stop soil erosion and to protect our wetlands.

“Somehow, all of them have come and have converged during this last two, now going to three, years and everybody and everything that is living in this country is feeling it.”

(Pictures: Turkana men slaughter goats at a livestock de-stocking centre in the Loyoro village of Turkana district in northwestern Kenya. Reuters/Thomas Mukoya. Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maathai delivers a speech in Japan. Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon.)

Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa grower, kicked off the 2009/10 season on bleak note on Thursday, with the head of the body overseeing the industry warning that even the most optimistic forecasts predicted a fall in production.

“Our plantations have suffered from the crisis,” said Gilbert Ano, echoing concerns about the West African country’s cocoa trees becoming too old, not being looked after properly by under-supported farmers and producing less cocoa as a result.

In talking about the “crisis”, Ano used the increasingly prevalent explanation for why things in Ivory Coast — once the region’s most stable, with an economy that boomed while neighbours stagnated or went to war — are not going very well.

He is referring to the political and military quagmire his country has been stuck in since a brief 2002-2003 war, during which rebels captured the north of the country. United Nations and French peacekeepers have since overseen a fragile peace, during which a return to war has been averted but elections have failed to take place.

For a long time, this “crisis”, didn’t appear to have much of an impact on cocoa. Exports, in fact, hit record levels in 2007/08. Roadblocks and a handful of flare-ups over the years meant transporting the beans, which are used to make chocolate, became more difficult and expensive. Nonetheless, solutions, which sometimes involved transiting through neighbouring countries, were always found.

But the real impact of the “crisis” is now being felt. As politicians rowed over election dates, voter lists or rebel disarmament, the lack of investment in the trees or small-scale farmers and alleged corruption amongst administrators has done its damage and output is falling. Some say it might fall by half over the next few years.

The reforms needed to reverse this have been talked about for years but cannot take place until the “crisis” is over, cocoa experts say.

So indeed the cocoa sector can quite justifiably talk about being in crisis. But in Ivory Coast, the “crisis” is now being used to explain just about anything. A once-vibrant business environment and professional class has been caught up in the “crisis”. Though some investors have remained, many others say they are waiting for the “crisis” to end before pumping in more money. Whether to explain increased corruption or poverty rates or even justify soldiers harassing drivers on the roads at night, the answer often comes back - “It’s because of the crisis”.

Once I was told that the crisis meant I shouldn’t worry about work and, instead, go and have a beer.

Has all this talk of a “crisis” adopted its own momentum? Ivorians are weary of the “crisis” but many say a small minority are doing what they can to extend it as they have worked out how to tap the “crisis economy”, which makes it more difficult to hold people accountable. Is this true?

The only way out of the “crisis” appears to be elections but they are constantly being
delayed. First due in 2005, they are now meant to take place in Nov. 29 but that date now looks in doubt.  Will elections really bring an end to the “crisis” or will they lead to another one?

Is the soaring gold price a ticket to a better life for struggling freelance miners in Burkina Faso?

The impoverished West African country is trying to revive its gold mining industry, spurred by the global financial crisis and the need to reduce the economy’s dependence on cotton.

Near the village of Mogen in northeastern Burkina Faso, artisanal miners are engaged in a dangerous hunt for gold in hand-dug pits.

Landslips kill miners almost every year, although mostly during the rainy season. When it’s dry, children help sift the soil in search of the nuggets that pay for food and school fees.

On a good day, a miner will unearth around five milligrams of gold, which earns about $10. But often they come up empty.

Jeremi Nacanabo, who helps run an association of informal gold miners, told Reuters Africa Journal: “We don’t have the technology to take out the gold. Right now we’re working in a traditional way, which creates enormous problems and causes many accidents.”

But gold mining in Burkina Faso is experiencing a revival after a halt in the late 1990s caused by poor management and inadequate capital.

Analysts say poor prices for cotton, the country’s main export, have rekindled interest in mining. The financial crisis is tempting investors to buy low-risk assets such as gold, which is now selling for about $1,000 per ounce.

Burkina Faso revised its mining codes in 2003 to attract foreign investors with tax breaks.

The goal is to join the ranks of Africa’s top producers — South Africa, Ghana and Mali — within the next three years.

In the dusty northeast of the country, the Taparko-Somita mine, which is run by the
Canadian-listed, Russian-controlled company High River Gold, is the first of four gold mines that have begun operating in the past two years.

Together they produced 5.5 tonnes in 2008 and they are heading for more than that this year. The government takes a 10 percent free stake in each mine.

Local miners, who once worked for themselves, are finding jobs with the mining companies. They earn a salary, work in safer conditions and are given training.

But even with the recent gold rush, Burkina Faso is still struggling to revive its economy and provide basic services for its 13 million people.

Of course everyone can’t be part of the gold mining revival, but global demand for Burkina Faso’s natural resources could at least provide some trickle-down benefit for the economy.

Millions of years ago, Madagascar separated from the other continents and evolved separately. Today it has about 12,000 plants most of which can be found nowhere else in the world. Many of these plants have medicinal properties, but their habitat is under threat.

In the town of Tolear, people rely on herbs as the nearest hospital is far away. Traditional healers combine plants and a little bit of magic to cure patients.

“The forest helps us to cure all illnesses,” Dimbiraza, a traditional healer, told Reuters Africa Journal. “So we need to preserve the forest everywhere in the world, not just in Madagascar, in the world because the forest is nature. It’s our second God. There’s God up there and the forest is our second God.”

The forest around Tolear is like a huge natural pharmacy.

Malagasy companies such as Homeopharma manufacture plant products for sale at home and for export to Europe and the United States.

Claude Ratsimivony, the company’s chairman, says the market is seeing growth rates of 30 to 40 percent and there are still medicinal plants to be discovered.

“We still have not discovered everything. We know that there are about 12,000 species, but Madagascar is a country that is mysterious in the respect that it still guards the secrets of its traditional healers.”

But some of Madagascar’s plant secrets may be lost before they can even be found as forests are being cut down for charcoal and farming.

The government has initiated several conservation projects and wants to do more to preserve the plants that contribute to both modern and traditional medicine. It will be interesting to see if they can keep ahead of the slashers and burners.

Since the end of international sanctions against Libya, leader Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam has symbolized hope in the West that a secretive, authoritarian oil and gas exporter can reform itself from within.

The sharp-suited, western-educated Islam has called for a new constitution, a freer press and an independent judiciary, music to the ears of the U.S. and of European governments all desperate to give a moral basis to their re-engagement with the oil-rich north African state.

Islam took the end of diplomatic isolation as the cue to press for a cautious public debate among ordinary Libyans about their future.

Two newspapers and a TV station linked to Islam have been holding government officials to account for their failings.

A new constitution that would bolster press freedom and an independent judiciary is ready for approval by Libya’s General People’s Congress, a newspaper editor and close ally of Islam told Reuters this month.

Optimism among advocates of liberal reform has turned to disquiet however, as attention shifts to Islam’s brother Mutassim, Libya’s head of national security who is viewed by some observers as a rival for power.

Mutassim is reported to have built a strong support base in Libya’s conservative
Revolutionary Committees and he held talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington in April.

Analysts are divided over whether the showdown between the Gaddafi scions is genuine or merely window dressing to keep Western governments believing in the chances of peaceful reform.

Islam’s globe trotting helped secure the end of sanctions and Libya’s return from
diplomatic isolation, but his liberal message has also grabbed the spotlight from exiled Libyan dissidents, whose voice is now seldom heard in the debate about Libya’s future.

“A scene has been set that portrays Saif al-Islam as the rebel successor to his father. But this scene is of course managed and controlled by the regime itself,” said Amel Boubekeur of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Macroscope has discussed the growth of sovereign wealth funds many times (see here or here). Just to recap, the global state-owned SWF industry is set to more than double in the next 10 years from the current $3 trillion, according to estimates from Deutsche Bank.

John Green, global head of business development at Anglo-African bank Investec, argues that Africa will play a key role in the expansion of SWFs in years to come.

"Africa is very rich in commodities. Africa in aggregate has gone from a significant fiscal deficit, largely funded by aid, to a continent that has a fiscal surplus. That's what has precipitated a lot of thinking around this issue," he says.

Green says he agrees with the view that in the next 5 years there will be enough surplus around in many African countries to begin to build future generation funds properly.

Libya is a leader here with the continent's biggest sovereign wealth fund, which manages $65 billion in assets. Nigeria is working on legislation to create a SWF aimed at softening any impact from falling oil prices.

Read the full Reuters interview here.