Sam Lakha, Manager, Volans Outreach.
The future of African leadership
I’m currently in Johannesburg for a World Economic Forum retreat organized for my cohort of Global Leadership Fellows (GLF). The GLF program is 3 years long, with the retreat representing the final gathering for the fellows. We are only into our second day of the week-long retreat, and we’ve already visited areas of poverty, engaged with civil society leaders and had dialogues with CEOs of local businesses.
Today, we had the privilege of visiting the African Leadership Academy (ALA). Co-founder, Fred Swaniker, spent the opening session explaining the mission of the Academy, which essentially seeks to bring together the most entrepreneurial and passionate young minds from all around Africa and put them through a high school program steeped in leadership, ethics and entrepreneurship courses. ALA has assembled students like William Kamkwamba, a school drop-out in Malawi who taught himself how to build a windmill by flipping through the pages of local library books. William subsequently went on to electrify his whole village and dug wells to provide clean water supply to everyone there. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that some approaches at ALA were adopted from my high school alma mater, Raffles Junior College.
That evening, we dined with the students at ALA, where each table discussed a different topic of education, sports, the environment, energy, etc. The students leveraged the experience of the fellows to come up with projects that they would tackle over the coming school year; my table discussed issues around education and how to make it engaging and fun, while seeking to create support mechanisms for the teachers and students. This resulted in the creation of “MAD Radio” (MAD - “Make A Difference”), a radio station run by the students, for the youth, focused on educational content and issues. Other tables had equally exciting ideas which were presented to everyone. With such a group of bright, articulate and passionate students going through an institution like ALA, I cannot help but feel hopeful for the future of Africa.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/02/2916/.
- Kevin TeoUK social index backed by banks helps entrepreneurs
The first index enabling social enterprises to chart their growth and measure their social impact will be launched tomorrow, according to Social Enterprise magazine, and is designed to provide £50,000 in prizes to leading performers. “The RBS SE100 Index has been created by Social Enterprise in partnership with the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and NatWest and will track both the growth and social impact of the sector. It will be launched at the national social enterprise conference Voice and entry to the index is via a website.”
One caveat: Only social enterprises that have been trading for more than three years are eligible for the top two prizes of £10,000, ten days business consultancy and a trip to the Social Enterprise World Forum in California in 2010. These prizes will be given to a growth champion and a social impact champion.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/02/uk-social-index-backed-by-banks-helps-entrepreneurs/.
- John ElkingtonThe Coming Age of Lithium-Politics
The future ‘zero-carbon economy’ will not be free of the geopolitics of natural resources that have dominated the 20th Century.
As carmakers, governments, and entrepreneurs around the world accelerate their bets on electric cars and infrastructures, a recent article in the New York Times reminds us that half of the world’s lithium reserves, the mineral required to manufacture the car batteries, are in Bolivia –a country that may not be as welcoming as global extractive industries would like.
“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.”
But peasant communities, who have for centuries relied on small-scale salt trading and are pushing for a share of the profits, could find themselves out-maneuvered by the central Government’s effort to quickly put in place the industrial infrastructures to exploit lithium on a large-scale.
The 20th Century has taught us about the so-called ‘resource curse’. From Venezuela to Russia, and Saudi Arabia to Nigeria, the discovery of oil has fueled corruption and inequality, reduced democracy and freedom, and fueled military interventions around the world.
Thomas Friedman talks about the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the price of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich developing countries. He defines a coming Energy-Climate Era as one where ‘issues related to energy, its price, availability and impact on the world and the climate are going to really shape more politics than any factors as we move deeper into the 21st century.’
Lithium will soon begin to dominate the markets and politics of the 21st Century through new global supply chains and trade agreements between resource providers and battery manufacturers, such as China.
In this new age of Lithium-Politics, will new winners such as Bolivia follow the example of Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria, or will an imminent renewable energy revolution also bring distributed benefits and more transparent extractive industries? The way Bolivia decides to structure its policy, extraction and global trade of lithium will offer many clues about that future.
(Photo Credits: The New York Times)
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/02/the-coming-age-of-lithium-politics/.
- Alejandro Litovsky