Art of Survival - Debunking Third World Myths

This entry was inspired by this video of Hans Rosling, talking about world economics but specifically in Africa. He uses data visualization software to really show what he is trying to get across to the audience – without the software I think his talks would not be nearly as informative. The point he is trying to make it that far from being an area of little to no development (which is what a shockingly large amount of people believe it to be) Africa, as a continent has come a long way from the ‘pre-medieval’ state it was in at before the 1900’s. He goes on to criticize lumping the whole continent together as one homogenous unit, but using the software shows that there is massive economic diversity in Africa, with countries in both the upper and lower percentiles of healthcare standards and GDP. He goes on to ‘prove’ that conditions across the continent will keep improving until they are at the place most of Europe/North America is at now. (This trend has already been observed in parts of South America).

So across Africa there is such diversity in conditions that for us to try and design for a whole continent is impossible, and ‘us’ designing for an individual community is inefficient. What the individual areas need is a self-instigated, self-governed system of some kind on behalf of the populace. This is what has already been observed, bringing some countries into the upper levels of ‘development’. With these sorts of systems in place the individual states within Africa are more than capable, and some have been able to, pull themselves out of economic strife.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YpKbO6O3O3M