The ALB Foundation, along with IE Business School, Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Graduate Management and Thunderbird School of Global Management have united with the goal of providing a simple yet sustainable solution to promoting economic development in emerging markets with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Find TheFoundation for African Leadership in Business on Facebook, visit their website at www.albfoundation.org/ and follow them on Twitter at @ALBFoundation.
We are thrilled to announce our new partners in bringing MBA scholarships to socially responsible business leaders... fb.me/MCffpfdy
Welcome to the 15th Annual Africa
Business Conference at Harvard Business School, hosted by the Africa
Business Club, a member of Student Clubs of HBS, Inc. The theme for this
year's Conference, "Re-defining Africa: The Emergence of a New African Story",
is in recognition of the fact that as Africa evolves, so too must the
World's perception of Her. The aim of this Conference is to showcase
those who continue to shape and influence the African story through
business and enterprise, and to create an environment for like-minded
individuals to meet, exchange ideas and spur one another on to action.
The Africa Business Conference is the
world's largest student-run event focused on business in Africa. It
brings together about 1,200 participants and is the ultimate networking
opportunity for business and community leaders, corporate sponsors,
students, educators from around the world and anyone passionate about
business opportunities in Africa.
Panelists and moderators exchanged ideas throughout the 23 panels
covering a broad range of fascinating and relevant issues. These
included the following:
• Venture Capital in Sub Saharan Africa,
• Media Roles and Responsibilities in Defining Africa,
• Tackling Corruption and Good Governance in Africa,
• Africa Debt Capital Markets,
• Empowering Women in Business,
• Transportation Infrastructure in Sub Saharan Africa,
• Private Equity: Creating Value during the Investment Holding Period,
• Education and Healthcare, Infrastructure and Natural Resources
• Agribusiness in Africa
• Oil and Gas
• Insurance in Africa
• Scaling up the African Pharmaceutical Industry
• New Era of China-Africa relations
• Foreign Investment
• Finance
• Business and Geopolitics
The Ibrahim Scholarships are a range of programmes to support
aspiring leaders for the African continent. The scholarships reflect a
range of priorities for African development.
From a focus on the education of women in Sudan to support for
historically marginalised Nubian people in Egypt, the Foundation is
committed to showcasing the best talent from the African continent,
particularly amongst those groups who are often denied the opportunity
to contribute to their society’s development.
Investing in the future of young people in Africa is key to
improving the continent’s governance. The Foundation highlights areas in
which dramatic impact can be demonstrated when young Africans are given
the opportunities they deserve to build their own and their countries’
futures.
American University in Cairo
The Foundation provides two graduate fellowships and two full
undergraduate scholarships to students of Nubian origin, with a working
knowledge of the Nubian language, who wish to support the enrichment and
preservation of Nubian culture and heritage.
enrolauc@aucegypt.edu, +202 797 5011/2
London Business School
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation scholarship for sub-Saharan Africa
supports outstanding students on the full-time MBA programme at London
Business School. Each year one scholarship, providing full payment of
fees, is awarded to an exceptional MBA candidate from sub-Saharan Africa
with financial need.
mbainfo@london.edu, +44 (0)20 7000 7000
School of Oriental and African Studies
The Governance for Development in Africa Initiative aims to build the skills of bright young Africans. Angelica Baschiera ab17@soas.ac.uk, +44 (0)20 7898 4370
Together for Sudan
The Foundation provides support for Together for Sudan to sponsor
higher education for female students in all faculties, with a particular
emphasis on business studies.
enquiries@togetherforsudan.org
University of Birmingham
The Foundation provides a scholarship for an MSc in Governance and
State-Building at the University of Birmingham. The two-year programme
includes a six month internship at the Foundation Secretariat. An
exceptional African national receives full tuition fees, a living
allowance and airfare to the UK.
For more information and to apply:
www.birmingham.ac.uk
This is a course for those who are interested in the challenge posed by massive and persistent world poverty, and are hopeful that economists might have something useful to say about this challenge. The questions we will take up include: Is extreme poverty a thing of the past? What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Are the poor always hungry? How do we make schools work for poor citizens? How do we deal with the disease burden? Is microfinance invaluable or overrated? Without property rights, is life destined to be "nasty, brutish and short"? Should we leave economic development to the market? Should we leave economic development to non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Does foreign aid help or hinder? Where is the best place to intervene? And many others. At the end of this course, you should have a good sense of the key questions asked by scholars interested in poverty today, and hopefully a few answers as well.
PREREQUISITES
This course is intended to be an introduction to the issues of global poverty, as conceptualized by leading economists and political scientists. Previous exposure to economics would be beneficial, then, as concepts such as income vs. substitution effects, Engel curves, and utility functions will be discussed. Similarly, some experience with statistics will also be helpful: we will be examining, for example, empirical evidence in the form of regression results.
That said, these prerequisites are not critical to understanding and learning from the course. Links will be provided, as much as possible, on background issues and further reading to allow all participants to gain from the course.
COURSE STAFF
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Abhijit Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the government of India.
Esther Duflo
Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. She was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by The Economist magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the “Forty under 40” most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010.
Collaboration
Professors Banerjee and Duflo, together with Prof. Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003. In 2011, their book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
The Economist acknowledged the turnaround in December 2011, featuring another cover story on Africa, this time calling it the “Rising” continent and with a far different tagline: “the continent’s impressive growth looks likely to continue”.
New E-book: African voices of hope and change
Our latest ebook is dedicated to people and stories of Africa’s
Sub-Saharan region as told by local netizens.
...Because we are involved with “Financieros sin Fronteras” (FsF - Financiers without Borders, www.fsf-ngo.org/en) an NGO founded in 2010 by a group of people linked to IE Business School in Madrid.
FsF offers free consultancy services to MFIs in order to help them gain better access to the financial market and guarantee a stable source of financing for their operations. The consultants are students of the Finance Masters at IE Business School who have chosen to do this voluntary work as the final project of their Master program. Back in Madrid they will present their analyses and conclusions to the examination committee as part of their final exam to obtain their degree.
During the past two years, 49 students have travelled to Ghana to work with six MFIs...
Marco Trombetta is Professor of Accounting and Management Control and Vice-dean of Research at IE Business School in Madrid (Spain). He holds an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in Economics from the University of Oxford (UK). Marco has also an extensive experience as a consultant and in in-company trainer. Among others he has worked for Whirlpool Europe, Accenture, Pricewaterhouscoopers, CEIM.
An African-led high-speed internet network has been launched to connect
academics and researchers throughout Southern and East Africa to peers
across the two regions and in Europe. The network will promote African
collaboration in research globally.
Called UbuntuNet, the network is financed under the AfricaConnect project, which receives funding from the European Commission (80%) and African beneficiaries (20%).
The European launch of UbuntuNet took place at the 2012 Africa-EU
Cooperation Forum on ICT, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 28-29 November,
according to a press report.
The European event followed a similar launch held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, at the UbuntuNet-Connect 2012 annual conference from 15-16 November.
UbuntuNet is a collaboration between the UbuntuNet Alliance, the regional research and education network for Southern and East Africa, and DANTE – Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe – which operates the pan-European research and education network, GÉANT...
GSB Dean Garth Saloner (20min40) and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair discussed the African Governance Initiative (AGI). Blair said that much-needed economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot go forward without improvements in governance.
The AGI works in Liberia, Guinea, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
The speech was sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law; Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies; Center for African Studies; Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society; Stanford Association for International Development; Associated Students of Stanford University; and Stanford Speakers Bureau.
Launched in 2007, HHI's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning examines the use of information communications technologies in conflict and disaster settings. Research focuses on identifying patterns in humanitarian emergencies to improve response. HHI examines the impact of crisis mapping, geospatial and crowd sourcing technologies to prepare, mitigate, and respond to emergencies.
The Satellite Sentinel Project is a game-changing collaboration, combining commercial satellite imagery, academic analysis, and advocacy to promote human rights in Sudan and South Sudan and serve as an early warning system for impending crisis.
(The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative manages the day-to-day operations of SSP, developed SSP's methodology, leads the analysis of all satellite imagery and information from the field, and writes and produces SSP's reports. HHI is a university-wide center with a mission to relieve human suffering in war and disaster by advancing the science and practice of humanitarian response worldwide.)
Jagdish Bhagwati is a Chazen Advisor, Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University, and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He recently edited, with Gordon Hanson, Skilled Migration Today.
While developed countries are angst-ridden over mostly illegal immigration by unskilled workers from developing countries, a different set of concerns has surfaced in Africa, in particular, over the legal outflow of highly skilled people to developed countries. This outflow is supposedly a new and damaging “brain drain,” with rich countries actively luring away needed skills from poor countries.
This fear is misplaced...
The Solution
First, stop crying over the fact that the diaspora is not returning home. Instead, nurture the loyalty of professionals settling abroad, so that they assist their home countries in a variety of ways...
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...when development has taken off, and conditions have improved sufficiently to attract people back to their homelands, the hugely increased diaspora would indeed return, as they have done in India, South Korea, and China.
East Africa is experiencing the worst droughts for the past 60 years. Seasonal rains failed to arrive in October – December 2010 so this spring livestock was lost. As a result over 10 million people are facing severe food shortages or are malnourished. Read the rest of this article...
...According to a 2010 McKinsey report Lions on the move, the rate of return on foreign investment in Africa is higher than in any other developing region. Which explains why it appears that everyone wants a piece of the action.
IE is an international institution dedicated to educating business leaders through programs based on core values of global focus, entrepreneurial spirit and a humanistic approach.
IE's 500-strong, international faculty teaches a student body composed of more than 80 nationalities in Undergraduate (IE University), Master, and Doctorate degrees, and Executive Education programs. Alumni, now numbering over 37,000, hold management positions in some 100 countries worldwide.
When the business school industry discusses the exciting topics of
the moment, developments in Asia – particularly China and India – are
top of the list. Few pundits are focusing on Africa, but they would be
unwise to overlook it.
“Economically we are the lost continent,”
says Juan Elegido, dean of the Lagos Business School in Nigeria. But he
and others like him are planning to change that. Like many of his peers
in African business schools he sees it as part of his mission to bring
economic stability and growth to the country he represents...
In 2005, the Global Business Schools Network, which was funded by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), announced the launch of the Association of African Business Schools, a group with 12 member schools from various African countries that is developing partnerships among educators to determine best practices and help expand the management training available on the continent (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/26/05, "Give Africa's B-Schools a Boost").
In 2005, the Global Business Schools Network, which was funded by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), announced the launch of the Association of African Business Schools, a group with 12 member schools from various African countries that is developing partnerships among educators to determine best practices and help expand the management training available on the continent (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/26/05, 
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