The Challenge of African Potentials
The Challenge of African Potentials

Author: Ofosu-Kusi, Yaw

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG

Published: 2020-02-22

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9956551147

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This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africa’s latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised ‘magic wands’. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originating in Western modernity. The keyword of the Accra Forum was futurity. Africa’s future is laden with possibilities, latent power, and potential. It is bright and hopeful but, simultaneously, bleak and thought-provoking. For nascent democracies and economically challenged communities, the value of this potential lies not in its static qualities but in how these qualities can be harnessed and translated into beneficial practical outcomes. As a concept, ‘potential’ connotes a time to come; a futurity that is full of known and unknown possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.

African Potentials
African Potentials

Author: B Ohta

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2022-03-23

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9956552542

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This book challenges colonial and age-old Western academic views that have dominated and marginalised African indigenous knowledge system. It spreads further the wings of knowledge and endeavour about an African way of thinking on conflict resolution and co-existence, and analytically connects this to the pursuit of Africa's sustainable development frameworks. Ohta, Nyamnjoh and Matsuda are teachers you always wished for but never had. Together, they have made this book a path-breaking one, and essential reading for a broad based understanding of the African mindset.

People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa
People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa

Author: Takehiko Ochiai

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2021-01-18

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9956551201

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The term 'African Potentials' refers to the knowledge, systems, practices, ideas and values created and implemented in African societies that are expected to contribute to overcoming various challenges and promoting people's wellbeing. This collection of articles, focused on African societies, is based on the idea that 'Africa is People'. In this book, African people are placed at the centre of the discussion. The book's contributors, all of whom believe in African people and their potentials, consider women, minors and young people, people with disabilities, entrepreneurs, herders, farmers, mine workers, refugees, migrants, traditional rulers, militiamen and members of the political elite, and examine their predicaments and potentials in detail. Africa is people, and African potentials can be found only in African people themselves.

Unlocking Africa's Business Potential
Unlocking Africa's Business Potential

Author: Landry Signe

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0815737394

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Africa welcomes business investment and offers some of the world's highest returns and impacts Africa has tremendous economic potential and offers rewarding opportunities for global businesses looking for new markets and long-term investments with favorable returns. Africa has been one of the world's fastest-growing regions over the past decade, and by 2030 will be home to nearly 1.7 billion people and an estimated $6.7 trillion worth of consumer and business spending. Increased political stability in recent years and improving regional integration are making market access easier, and business expansion will generate jobs for women and youth, who represent the vast majority of the population. Current economic growth and poverty-alleviation efforts mean that more than 43 percent of the continent's people will reach middle- or upper-class status by 2030. Unlocking Africa's Business Potential examines business opportunities in the eight sectors with the highest potential returns on private investment—the same sectors that will foster economic growth and diversification, job creation, and improved general welfare. These sectors include: consumer markets, agriculture and agriprocessing, information and communication technology, manufacturing, oil and gas, tourism, banking, and infrastructure and construction. The book's analysis of these sectors is based on case studies that identify specific opportunities for investment and growth, along with long-term market projections to inform decision-making. The book identifies potential risks to business and offers mitigation strategies. It also provides policymakers with solutions to attract new business investments, including how to remove barriers to business and accelerate development of the private sector.

What Colonialism Ignored
What Colonialism Ignored

Author: Sam Moyo

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2016-03-02

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9956763756

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As Julius Nyerere once noted, Africa has largely been the continent of peace, though this fact has not been widely publicised. In reality, Africa possesses dynamic potentials for resolving contradictions and violent ruptures that colonial authorities, post-colonial states and global actors have failed to capture and capitalise upon. Drawing on the everyday experience of rural and urban people in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Zambia, this book brings into conversation leading Japanese scholars of Southern Africa with their African colleagues. The result is an exploration in comparative perspective of the fascinating richness of bottom-up African potentials for conflict resolution in Southern Africa, a region burdened with the legacy of settler capitalism and contemporary neoliberalism. The book is a pacesetter on how to think and research Africa in fruitful collaboration and with an ear to the nuances and complexities of the dynamic and lived realities of Africans.

Knowledge, Education and Social Structure in Africa
Knowledge, Education and Social Structure in Africa

Author: Shoko Yamada

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2021-03-14

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 9956553158

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In searching for the potential that lies in African societies, the chapters of this volume consider relationships between knowledge, education and social structure from multiple angles, from a macro-continental scale to national education systems, schools and local communities. The themes that cut across the chapters include education as a mode of transmitting values, the contrasting effects of school credentials and knowledge for use, politics and interactions among people surrounding a school and knowledge acquisition as a subjective process. The rich empirical analyses suggest that the subjective commitment of, and mutuality among, people will make the acquired knowledge a powerful 'tool for conviviality' to realize a stable life, even given the turmoil created by rapid institutional and environmental changes that confront African societies.

'African Potentials' for Wildlife Conservation and Natural Resource Management
'African Potentials' for Wildlife Conservation and Natural Resource Management

Author: Toshio Meguro

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2021-10-01

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9956552623

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This book focuses on two specific areas: wildlife conservation policies and projects, and the interaction between local societies and the surrounding environment in Africa. Against the internationally dominant approach that regards Africa as being a state of 'deficiency', this book demonstrates, based on fieldwork concerning various natural resources (e.g. wildlife, forests, fruit, fish and land) as well as many famous protected areas, that African people are collectively and actively trying to solve the environmental problems they are facing by strategically utilising both indigenous means and new extrinsic opportunities. Meanwhile, it also becomes clear that wildlife conservation still continues to cause local societies a multitude of problems, and the 'potentials' of local people and societies are existing but unnoticed and suppressed by powerful outsiders, and therefore, remaining informal and invisible.

African Virtues in the Pursuit of Conviviality
African Virtues in the Pursuit of Conviviality

Author: Gebre,Yntiso Gebre,Yntiso

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9956764787

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African societies have rich histories, cultural heritages, knowledge systems, philosophies, and institutions that they have shaped and reshaped through history. However, the continent has been repeatedly portrayed negatively as plagued by multitudinous troubles: famine, conflict, coup, massacres, corruption, disease, illiteracy, refugees, failed state, etc. Even worse, Africans are often viewed as incapable of addressing their problems on their own. Based on such erroneous perspectives and paternalism, exogenous solutions are prescribed, out of context, for African problems. This book sheds light on the positive aspects of African reality under the key concept of African potentials. It is the product of sustained consultation over a five-year period between seasoned African and Japanese anthropologists, sociologists and scholars in other areas of African studies.

The Challenge of African Potentials
The Challenge of African Potentials

Author: Yaw Ofosu-Kusi

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2020-02-07

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9956551759

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This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africas latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised magic wands. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originating in Western modernity. The keyword of the Accra Forum was futurity. Africas future is laden with possibilities, latent power, and potential. It is bright and hopeful but, simultaneously, bleak and thought-provoking. For nascent democracies and economically challenged communities, the value of this potential lies not in its static qualities but in how these qualities can be harnessed and translated into beneficial practical outcomes. As a concept, potential connotes a time to come; a futurity that is full of known and unknown possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.