The region’s oil is light and sweet, making it easier and cheaper to refine than Middle Eastern oil. Moreover, most of it is located offshore, which means decreased transport costs and reduced risk of political violence.

“Given the hundreds of thousands of barrels of Nigerian crude that are lost every year as a result of fighting, community protests, and organized crime, this is something the industry gets rather excited about,” writes journalist John Ghazvinian in his new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil.

Click here to read article: Council on Foreign Relations

Their mission is to provide policy-neutral data, forecasts, and analyses to promote sound policy making, efficient markets, and public understanding regarding energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment.

Click here: West Africa analysis

“In 2005, Firestone started an aggressive replanting effort to rehabilitate our rubber tree farming operations following 14 years of civil war which prevented any replanting,” said Dan Admitis, President, Firestone Natural Rubber Company. “Replanting up to 5,000 acres a year means we have a lot of old trees to clear. While we wait for the new trees to reach maturity [around 7 years], we’re excited to be developing a new business for Liberia and providing new jobs.”

Rubber trees will be processed after they reach the end of their lifecycle for producing latex, which is typically around 30 years. The old trees will be cut down and transported to the rubber wood mill. At the mill, the trees will be cut to size, pressure-treated and dried to desired moisture content. The resulting product is an ecologically friendly, durable hardwood that is often used in furniture and flooring throughout the world.

Rubber wood processing required a significant investment by the company in a new plant facility and equipment. The company plans to complete work on its rubber wood factory, located in Division 16, and expand production into veneered and kiln-dried rubber wood later this year. It is expected that production will expand in the coming years, and this will result in additional jobs being created.

For the full story click through to: The Inquirer, Monrovia 

The West Africa Water Partnership supports the establishment of capacity building and an information sharing program in the sub-region together with the promotion of the involvement of the youth and children in water resources management.

Accomplishments in West Africa

Hydropart is a database of all the people in West Africa involved in working on water resources management. Presently, data has been collected from Burkina Faso, Benin, Ghana, Niger, Mali, Senegal and Togo.

West African Water Partnership

We ensure that children are involved in all aspects of our programmes, working with adults who have learnt to value their contribution.

Plan International

As part of this global movement toward partnership, the West Africa Water Initiative (WAWI) was born. Inspired by the vision of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Initiative grew from years of experience with the international NGO World Vision and other partners in Ghana to provide rural water supply and sanitation as the entry point for community development.

WAWI

PennWell Corporation is a highly diversified, business-to-business media company providing authoritative print and online publications, conferences and exhibitions, research, databases, online exchanges and information products to strategic global markets.

Developed in 1997 by a socially responsible South African advertising company, Roundabout Outdoor, “PlayPumps” are innovative, low-tech devices that serve as both children’s merry-go-rounds and sources of rural water supply.

Installed directly above water wells at schools in rural areas, they harness the energy of children at play to supply villages with 1,400 litres of clean drinking water per hour into low maintenance storage tanks. This is a much faster and more reliable rate than any hand-driven pump can achieve.

Locally installed, often by black-owned micro-enterprises at average cost of $9,500 per pump, PlayPumps are an effective solution to one of rural Africa’s most pressing needs. The PlayPump business model recovers the costs of maintenance through commercial advertising sales from firms such as Unilever, Colgate Palmolive etc.

The storage tanks have also been used for public awareness messages such as HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns, thus extending the health benefits of the water pumps from access to clean water to alleviation of spinal problems to HIV awareness and prevention.

Background
In rural Africa, the lack of access to clean water is a serious on-going problem. Traditionally, village women and girls collect water at the nearest stream and then carry the containers filled with water back home.

This not only takes up a lot of time that could otherwise be spent in school or at work, but the water from such open sources is often not clean, and carrying such a heavy load can have serious health effects, causing severe headaches and spinal damage.

PlayPump International

Question by Jean Bachir Ghabache, France

“Where do you stand on the issue of China becoming a major player in Africa in terms of trade, investment and diplomacy? Regarding all the implications - low use of local workers by Chinese companies, no share of technologies, new debts for African countries - do you consider this a positive or rather risky movement for Africa’s development?”

Answer - “China’s recent entry in Africa is on the whole highly positive for Africa.China is acting as a buyer of African commodities, raising their prices and increasing African incomes. China is, of course, a supplier of low-cost goods and services. And China is becoming a significant donor.

The West is complaining that China is not following “good behaviour” as a donor, but the main complaints are because of jealousy that China is encroaching on traditional U.S. and European geopolitical and economic turf. The fact is that the Europeans
and Americans have been unreliable donors, promising one thing and doing another, or doing little of anything. China is much more pragmatic, helping African countries to build roads, power plants and factories.

Not all is ideal, of course, and never is. Commercial interests can make for unsavoury friends, like China’s apparent support for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, but once again, the blemishes of siding with unsavoury allies are certainly not unique to China”.

International Herald Tribune

Read Daniel Altman’s past columns and join the discussion on the Managing Globalization blog.

Estimates suggest nearly two billion people worldwide have no access to any form of electricity supply and most live in rural areas. There are countless others who have some form of supply but suffer frequent outages making daily life even harder and virtually impossible to develop any kind of serious business enterprise.

In contrast, the sun supplies 15,000 times more energy than is currently used worldwide, and wind has the potential to generate over 40 times the current global electricity use. The opportunity exists to harness the power of water for these nations who invariably have rivers and benefit from a coast. Hydro power stations have operated for decades but this technology needs to be exploited for use in supplying smaller communities.

Solar, hydro and wind power all offer an environmentally friendly power solution for Africa’s developing nations and offer hope to communities isolated by distance from any existing power grid network. Solar and wind power are now established technologies. To date, however, solar equipment has been considered specialist and therefore costly but this is changing as technology develops and economies of scale bring about significant cost reductions.

The developed world is facing the challenge of global warming by electing to reduce emissions from fossil fuels.They have the money and luxury of choosing to develop solar and wind technology, no matter the cost, because they already have power! The globes poorest and least developed continent is being told to use these expensive power supply methods and not contribute to climate change by exploiting their vast quantities of fossil fuels, that so far have remained buried because of infrastructure issues.

Wind power is seeing huge global growth in recent years, and wind power generation more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2005. Most modern wind power is generated in the form of electricity by converting the rotation of turbine blades into electrical current by means of an electrical generator. Wind energy is abundant, renewable, widely distributed, clean, and mitigates the greenhouse effect if it is used to replace fossil fuel-derived electricity.

So its time for the developed world to put the serious investment needed into developing these resources to not only benefit those 2 billion people mentioned earlier, but in all honesty, every single one of us.