Blog posts tagged "DFID"

April 8, 2009 7:18 pm 6 Comments

DFID, the UK aid department, asked me to volunteer to come down here to Lusaka in Zambia to help “facilitate” the launch of the North-South Corridor project for which they and other donors have thus far raised $1.35bn. It involved four presidents, the head of the WTO, a DFID minister, an EU commissioner, international banks, [...]

12:19 am No Comments

Why is Africa poor? Here’s one reason – to ship copper from Zambia to a port in South Africa (the nearest) takes three weeks and costs $6,000 per week. The same journey in Europe takes 48 hours and costs a fraction of that. Bureaucratic border crossing, rotten and rotting railways, disintegrating roads… They all speak [...]