Zambikes team members at the factory in Zambia holding one of their bamboo bicycles. Photo:Zambikes.org

*This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.*

Zambikes has been helping Africans get around on locally-made bikes since 2007. Now they want to get the rest of the world rolling, too, but with a twist: these new cycles are almost 100 percent bamboo.

Zambia, where Zambikes is based, ranks a staggeringly low 150 out of 169 on the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Vaughn Spethmann and Dustin McBride witnessed the company’s dire economic straits and high unemployment rate first-hand during a 2004 university trip and founded Zambikes upon their return to the U.S., according to The American. Believing business to be the best way to remedy the country’s woes, they wanted their new company to “employ and empower the uneducated and underprivileged,” Spethmann told Social Capital Markets Europe. Spethmann says that as of May 2011, "Zambikes has distributed more than 8,000 bicycles, 900 bicycle ambulances and cargo carts, supplied much-needed spare parts, sold upwards of 200 bamboo bicycle frames worldwide and have employed more than 100 Zambians." Zambians who use the cargo cart can increase daily earning from $2 a day to $20, he said.

Zambikes wants to expand overseas, and they plan to do so sustainably. In addition to the metal bikes they produce in Africa, they now export bamboo bicycles to the United States. Bamboo is exceedingly easy to grow and can shoot up 2 inches an hour under the right conditions, according to PlanetGreen.com. It’s flexible and light, and the bikes made from it can be put together using basic tools and machinery, according to the BBC. Some might question the structural integrity of a bamboo bicycle, but the bikes’ proponents say they’re just as sturdy as the traditional metal frames. The Guardian’s GreenLiving Blog took one of Calfee’s bamboo models out for a spin in 2009 and found that it was comfortable, with great shock absorption. If you need to see it to believe it, check out this video of three large men piling onto a bamboo bike made in Ghana.

Zambikes isn’t the only company getting in on the action, though. Bamboosero and the Bamboo Bike Project are also trying to help Africans ride to economic prosperity. Now those in the market for a shiny new cycle can get a killer set of wheels and help support African entrepreneurs, too.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Over one billion people live on less than one dollar a day, according to the U.N. But what can you actually buy with a dollar?

It seems like something that would vary across countries. Luckily, the World Food Programme recently released a series of videos in which it seeks to answer that question. Country specialists in Nepal, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guatemala, Somalia, Kenya, and the Philippines each went to their local markets with the equivalent of about one U.S. dollar and attempted to put together a meal. Watch as Reem Nada visits a market in Alexandria, Egypt.

The shorts are entertaining, but present a rather bleak reality. Almost all of the investigators come up short nutritionally. In Nepal, Deepesh Das Shresta leaves the market holding a few small bananas and a loaf of white bread. Meat is categorically too expensive, and staying within budget means many investigators can’t purchase all of the components necessary to create the meals that are considered cultural staples. It appears that those living on less than a dollar a day are also living far below their daily caloric and nutrient requirements.

Feeding oneself on less than a dollar is tricky business under the best of circumstances. Even worse, the recent volatility of the price of staple foods such as rice has jumped three times since 2008, says the New York Times — meaning that dollar must now be stretched even further.

The rest of the videos can be found on the World Food Programme website. The videos for Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Philippines are listed separately.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act has generated many jobs in the clothing manufacturing sector, especially for women. Photo: Jenny Bussey Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Most Americans may have never heard of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, but their closets probably contain at least one article of clothing imported as part of it.

The act — AGOA, by its acronym — was passed by Congress in 2000. It’s a free-trade deal between the U.S. and a number of Sub-Saharan African nations that eliminates quotas and duties for certain goods. It allows African products to compete with those from other regions on a more level playing field on the U.S. market. 87 percent of these imports consist of petroleum and minerals, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s not all, though, as Florizelle Lizer, the assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa explained to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs:

The main focus of our efforts and our capacity-building assistance related to AGOA has always been to promote new nontraditional and value-added exports from Africa like apparel, footwear, processed agricultural products and manufactured goods.

This is where you’ll find AGOA’s selling point for the average Joe or Joanna in one of its member states. It’s created tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and many of these new employees are women. Some of the largest gains are in clothing manufacturing. For a poor, landlocked country like Lesotho, clothing exports tripled and 50,000 new jobs appeared following its entrance into AGOA, according to a report by Lawrence Edwards and Robert Lawrence. It’s also helping to empower women by providing them access to a regular income, comments Zambia News Features.

There’s a catch, though: AGOA says the materials used to make products exported to the U.S. must be manufactured in the exporting country or, at the very least, in another AGOA state. But being able to manufacture fabrics on an industrial scale is a tall order for developing nations that don’t already have that kind of infrastructure. Luckily for them, another piece was added to AGOA a few years after it debuted. It’s called the Third Country Fabric Rule, and it allows African countries to import their fabric from other parts of the world, manufacture the finished product at home, and then export it to the U.S. under AGOA.

The Third Country Rule doesn’t quite sync up with AGOA, and must be renewed more frequently. AGOA itself isn’t up for revision until 2015, while the Third Country Rule is set to expire in 2012. In May, AllAfrica reported that the U.S. had said that "its market would no longer be accepting garments whose raw materials could have been sourced from outside the exporting country." Since then, a U.S. congressman submitted a bill to extend the Rule until 2015, though an article from Forbes argues that recent U.S. actions concerning AGOA constitute a kind of "benign neglect."

Not everyone is in favor of AGOA in its current state, though. Some call it a fig leaf for the oil industry or a cap on the growth of African manufacturing. U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is a supporter, but in a recent speech at the AGOA forum in Zambia she pointed out some of its shortcomings, according to Procurement News. She said African governments need to work on providing greater support to manufacturers — citing the example of an American business that chose to import from Vietnam instead of an AGOA because Vietnamese government subsidies meant that the factory there could churn out products more quickly. Clinton also criticized the fact that countries "export only a handful of the 6,500 products," eligible under AGOA, while "the most common export is still a barrel of oil." Others see the Third Country Rule as actually stunting the growth of local textile industries. It might be cheaper to import from Asia in the short run, but local businesses could suffer the long-term.

But in the minds of many, allowing the rule to lapse — or even threatening to let it do so — makes investors nervous and hurts countries’ long-term prospects. Here’s hoping congressional inaction concerning your clothing’s origin won’t cost an African woman the shirt off her back.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Girls who lack access to sanitary pads may miss up to 40 days of school a year. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.

In the United States, missing close to two months of school every year might get you expelled. For millions of women and girls in the developing world, it's a routine.

They lack access to something many modern women in the developed world probably take for granted: sanitary pads. Even when pads are locally available, many girls simply can’t afford them: UPI reports that in South Africa, a pack of 10 might cost $2. In many areas, that is more than a day’s worth of wages, according to North Carolina State University. Girls who don’t have access to pads during their period miss school due to embarrassment, fear of being teased and cultural taboos. Some try to use newspaper, old rags, or mud instead, methods that pose health risks and barely even work.

Many girls fall behind in school or drop out entirely as a result of this simple problem. For a variety of reasons, it’s one that’s not often discussed openly. So how do you solve a problem that no one wants to talk about? Fortunately, many businesses and organizations are looking for solutions.

At the same time that FemCare, a part of Procter & Gamble, sells Always-brand sanitary pads in U.S. supermarkets, it seeks to provide the same products to African schoolgirls. But the problem is thornier than you might expect. Beyond a simple lack of supplies, schools also often lack the facilities that allow girls to use feminine products in the first place. They need private spaces to change pads during the day and running water to wash their hands. To address this, FemCare built bathrooms and constructed water pipelines to schools, says the New York Times. They also provide disposal containers and have taught teachers how to incinerate the waste. Of course, there’s something in it for P&G, too: they hope that girls in Africa will become lifelong users of their products.

The problem has also inspired a great deal of innovation as individuals attempt to design new products that can be manufactured more cheaply and sustainably than name brands. Swedish university students used water hyacinth, an invasive species that chokes off Kenyan water routes, to create the Jani pad. In a double whammy, It’s both biodegradable and made from a seemingly endless resource that no one likes.

Starting in 2008, Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) tried another tack: it designed a manufacturing process that anyone could replicate. Their award-winning approach makes pads from readily available materials like banana-stalk fibers, which are then processed on inexpensive machines that local people can purchase. Hopefully, SHE’s innovations will better enable people in developing nations to start their own businesses to manufacture the pads. This also lets the finished product be tailored to the needs of women and girls from diverse cultures.

Other projects are born from the creativity of local entrepreneurs. Makapads, invented by a university professor in Uganda, are made from papyrus and waste paper and produced on locally manufactured machines, reports IRIN.

Often, trying to solve a problem in the developing world is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. Each group toggles the pieces a bit differently. Hopefully, in the end, someone makes them all line up.

African leaders discuss the state of the African economy at the 2010 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings. Photo: International Monetary Fund (flickr)

The Economist

The Economist

Since 2001, the budding economies of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have dominated global financial headlines. But looking back, it turns out some of the so-called “African lion” economies (Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda) were just as fierce.

Six of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world hail from the “forgotten continent” of Africa — putting up annual average GDP growth rates of around 8 percent or more from 2001-2010. The monumental rates have even earned these sprinters a spot next to “Asia's tigers” of the 1980 and 1990s — Making Africa one of the fastest growing regions in the world, according to The Economist.

Over the past decade, sub-Saharan Africa’s real GDP growth rate jumped to an annual average of 5.7%, up from only 2.4% over the previous two decades. That beat Latin America’s 3.3%, but not emerging Asia’s 7.9%. Asia’s stunning performance largely reflects the vast weight of China and India; most economies saw much slower growth, such as 4% in South Korea and Taiwan. The simple unweighted average of countries’ growth rates was virtually identical in Africa and Asia.

That said, in the next five years Africa is set to take the top spot from Asia as the fastest-growing region in the world, writes The Economist. "Standard Chartered forecasts that Africa’s economy will grow at an average annual rate of 7 percent over the next 20 years, slightly faster than China’s."

Ironically, much of Africa's growth can be attributed to China's investment and demand for raw materials in the region. And more recently, another of the BRICS, Brazil, has been competing for assets in Africa, writes Fast Company.

The Economist also notes growing success in Africa's manufacturing sector, which Standard Chartered predicts will become "significant."

Even with challenges such as political instability, corruption and weak rule of law, the African lions have been able to compete with the economic prowess of the Asian tigers.

But before Africa's growling economies can dream of surpassing Asia's roaring ones, those structural problems will have to be fixed.

"Without reforms," The Economist says, "Africa will not be able to sustain faster growth."

This entrepreneur owns a telecentre in Tanzania and is among the small business owners in the unique position to create change for Africa's poor. Photo: IICD (flickr)

They own apartments instead of huts. They exploit technology to organize revolutions. They are Africa’s new middle class — and they are still living on less than $20 a day.

One in three Africans are earning between $2 and $20 a day and considered middle class. According to the Guardian, it is exactly this growing, educated population that is becoming the catalyst for change throughout the developing world.

According to a World Bank study cited by the Guardian, "countries with lower poverty will have a large middle class and see higher subsequent rates of both growth and poverty reduction." The reasons for this are both social and economic, but the growth of Africa's middle class seems to bode well for the continent.

Because the developing world's middle class still lives on less than $20 a day, it shares many of the grievances of those living below the poverty line, explains the Guardian. However, members of this income bracket pay more in taxes and thus are more likely to seek transparency and accountability from those in power. Since members of this narrowly defined middle class are generally business owners rather than government employees, they are unlikely to reap benefits from a corrupt system. Given these circumstances, they are often the ones most effective in lobbying for improved living conditions.

In developing countries, this mid-level income group is also particularly important in the small business sector. They have higher disposable income to invest in domestic economies and in education to produce a skilled workforce. As small business owners and entrepreneurs, they may also have the hiring power to employ new workers in difficult economic times.

Freeing Africa from poverty and corruption will take all these changes and more. But with one in three Africans qualifying as middle class, the continent may be on the right track.

A poster depicting the former President of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, who received the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership in 2007. Photo: Sakoku (flickr)

It's not exactly earth-shattering news that corruption continues to plague the developing world. According to Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, corruption is most widespread in African and Middle Eastern countries and is especially prevalent in countries recently or currently embroiled in violent conflict.

Frustrated with the pervasive corruption in African politics, Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim came up with his own way to honor the excellent leaders and shame the corrupt ones. The New Yorker recently profiled Mo Ibrahim and his crusade to end what he sees as an institutionalized legacy of deplorable, corrupt, and despotic rule in Africa through the establishment of a prestigious award for good leadership and an index grading the quality of governance.

The controversial Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership is a $5-million grant for African leaders who have transformed their countries, respected the democratic system, and “did not steal from their people,” explains the New Yorker article. In order to be eligible you must have left power peacefully and democratically at the end of your term (leaders still in office are therefore ineligible). The selection committee for the prize has decidedly high standards; the annual Ibrahim Prize has only been given out three times since its start in 2007, one of which was honorarily presented to Nelson Mandela.

From Ibrahim’s point of view, Africa’s richness in natural resources matches its shortage of good leadership.

[The greatest challenge faced by African countries] is a catastrophic failure of leadership and governance. There is no other explanation. We have had to a very large extent very lousy leadership in Africa: too many dictators, too many megalomaniacs, too many thieves, who bled this continent for their personal and family benefit.

And the solution to Africa’s problems is simply honest, active, democratic leadership, Ibrahim tells The New Yorker.

Governance is about managing this place. It’s a mess. There is a need to enshrine the rule of law. That is the first step toward building an advanced society. Transparency. Lack of corruption. Human rights of individuals. Building infrastructure. Taking care of education. Health. All these things are pillars of a civil society [and of good governance].

However, critics argue the prize is outright bribery, that “it creates perverse incentives,” and that it discredits the power of individuals by focusing so wholeheartedly on leadership.

On the other hand, proponents contend that the prize encourages African leaders to succeed and go above and beyond. Mohamed ElBaradei, former member of the selection committee, says that the Ibrahim Index and Prize function “to name and shame—but also to recognize achievement.” In other words, intracontinental competition for both the award and index rating increases motivations for not just ordinary leadership, but great leadership.

African politicians face an entirely different milieu than that faced by Western leaders when their political incumbency comes to an end. As the New Yorker article notes, Western leaders have opportunities for financial benefit after they leave office; such as book deals, lecture tours, etc. African leaders often do not have these same opportunities. Thus, as The New Yorker writes, “the aim of the award is to spur African leaders to excel—or at least to insure that they don’t stay in office because they lack a retirement plan.”

More important than the controversy surrounding the prize, is that it's an African solution to an African problem. It is funded entirely by Ibrahim and more than half the selection committee are Africans themselves.

Within the circles of African academics and outside experts on Africa, this prize is a big deal. The New Yorker article quotes Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank, saying: “Among African policymakers, no one is not aware of the Ibrahim Index and Prize.” It goes on to declare that Ibrahim “is often hailed as a hero in Africa." It is the popularity and domestic focus of Ibrahim's approach that affirms that the most positive and sustainable outcomes for the continent will sprout from brave and avant-garde African answers.

Youth finish work on an embankment to hold back floodwaters in Borini Sharifow, a small farming village in Jamame district, Somalia. Photo: Mohamed Jama/ Mercy Corps

"The African continent is going to be the golden continent of the period," raves a business leader at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos.

This sentiment is shared by economists, investors and world leaders around the globe, who are singing the praises of Africa's economic potential. And at long-last this optimism about Africa's economy may be warranted. Eight of the world's top 20 fastest-growing economies are African Countries. And the financial news and investing website The Street recently declared Africa to be the "hot new continent for trade and investment."

In some ways, the transition is already happening. Genetic research is finally delivering higher-yielding, more resilient so-called African crops, like sorghum and cassava, says to The Economist. And the BBC reported on a recently published book that suggests the continent could "feed itself in a generation" if top politicians genuinely commit to developing infrastructure, modernizing agriculture and implementing the use of genetically modified crops.

But alongside the excited buzz welcoming Africa’s new dawn, there are fears that a land rush could be more exploitative than beneficial. The New York Times article cites concerns that the scramble for African land threatens to become a series of “neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor."

There are clear reasons for the urgency and location of the rush. Arable soil is a limited commodity in many parts of the world. Fears about food security and the cultivation of biofuels are ramping up demand for the earth’s last remaining stretches of fertile land — most of which are in Africa.

The World Bank estimates that up to 115 million acres of farmland are already being leased to foreign investors across the globe, reports the Christian Science Monitor. "As much as 90 percent of Africa is under customary tenure, which means it's held by the state on behalf of the community, who are then given the customary right to the land." In short, land can be seized at the whim of those in power.

The particular circumstances of these types of deals are unique, but the context in which they are negotiated is often similar. The landlord country is poor with a high rate of unemployment and underdeveloped infrastructure. But it has an abundance of productive farmland. Huge zones are leased to a corporation or government of a wealthier nation. The latter pays the former. The investor brings in state-of-the-art technologies and skills to develop infrastructure and ideally employ citizens of the landlord country. But what happens next is key, explains the Christian Science Monitor article. In many of these deals, most or all of the product is exported to the foreign investing country. Land and labor are exploited and neither domestic food security, nor growth are improved.

Africa certainly can’t afford this fate. In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly two-thirds of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, and more than one-fourth is considered undernourished (pdf), according to the most recent U.N. Millennium Development Goals report.

If this is to be the continent’s long-awaited golden era, foreign investment and involvement will be essential. But the motives of the architects of these deals must be clear and the management carefully crafted. The New York Times quotes former U.N. security-general, Kofi Annan, who stresses the need to focus on food security in Africa, but also calls for sensitivity to Africa's colonial legacy.

The food security of the country concerned must be first and foremost in everybody’s mind ... Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won’t work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don’t think we want to see a second scramble of that kind.

At first glance, Africa’s prospects look good. But it would be a tragic lost opportunity if the continent’s bounty is exported, leaving its breadbasket empty.

There may be more people living in poverty in India than in 26 African countries. Photo: Pulguita (Flickr)

According to a new measure of poverty, there are more impoverished people in India than in the 26 poorest African nations combined.

The hope is that if given an education and training, kids like these will help transform Africa's economies. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

Africa is home to many of the poorest countries in the world. Yet a report released last month offers a bright perspective on the continent's collective economies, says the New York Times. Authored by researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute, the report is called "Lions on the Move" and depicts Africa's economic forces as fierce and full of potential power.

Africa owes its economic growth only partly to a natural resource boom, says the report. It credits several other factors, such as improved political stability, microeconomic reforms, urbanization, a growing consumer class and an expanding workforce.

Trends such as these bode well for the region, but what will it take to channel all this potential? A writer for the CIPE Development Blog looks to Africa's political leaders:

If properly harnessed, rising productivity, foreign investment, and cross-border trade could lift millions of Africans out of poverty over the next decade. Whether this will happen depends to a large extent on whether African leaders are willing to institute serious regulatory reforms, particularly in ways that encourage increased regional trade within the continent.

The McKinsey report encourages African nations to engage in the global race for commodities and form relationships with foreign investors. They also see huge economic potential in Africa's youth:

If Africa can provide its young people with the education and skills they need, this large work force could account for a significant share of both global consumption and production.

Of course, the report rightly recognizes that each African country faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities. But it sure is nice to hear some positive news about Africa's future.

"Start small with things we know are effective," suggests Esther Duflo. Photo: kalyan3 (Flickr)

Esther Duflo is once again in the news, this time for having won the John Bates Clark medal. This is awarded by the American Economic Association to the most promising economist in the U.S. under the age of 40. We last wrote about Duflo's work on Global Envision back in May.

Duflo is a 37-year-old native of France and an alumni and professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duflo is also the director of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, founded in 2003 with her MIT colleague Abhijit Banerjee and Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan.

Duflo's use of randomized controlled trials to assess aid effectiveness has become a hot topic among economists and the humanitarian community. Randomized controlled trials have been successfully used by drug companies, so why not for social policy measures? Controlled studies allow researchers to discover what works, what does not work, and why does it not work in a systematic scientific method. Sometimes the technology, the infrastructure, the funding, and the intention to "do good" is in place, but how do you know if the system is effective if you do not have a means for measuring progress and results?

Duflo is featured in this 16-minute TED talk, Esther Duflo: social experiments in poverty. In her talk she shows how her work with randomized trials has revealed answers to pressing issues in aid, like is it better to give away malaria nets for free, or make people pay for them? Watch the video to learn the answer.

Economist Glenn Hubbard argues that aid targeting local African business development would help the continent more than infrastructure projects like roads. Photo: Stefan Gara (flickr)

Foreign aid has failed to end poverty in Africa because it often funds the wrong kinds of projects, says economist Glenn Hubbard. As he explains in a recent podcast interview with NPR's PlanetMoney, Africa remains just as poor as it was 50 years ago, despite the $1 trillion in foreign aid that developed countries have spent since WWII.

How to fix this? Hubbard argues that funneling aid money directly to local businesses is the most effective way to promote growth and end poverty, an idea he expands on in his book The Aid Trap. He contends in an interview with Columbia University Press that Western governments could model such an initiative on the Marshall Plan, the foreign aid program that the United States used to rebuild Europe after WWII:

Everyone in aid recognizes the Marshall Plan as the most successful aid program in history. What few realize is how the Marshall Plan actually worked. It made loans to Europe’s private businesses, who repaid them to a national fund, which spent the money on commercial infrastructure like ports and roads.

Hubbard believes that this aid model can also be applied to Africa, since small-to-medium sized business are the engines of any economy. "There is a collective amnesia among prosperous countries about how they themselves rose from poverty: their local business sectors," he writes in an article for CNNMoney. By contrast, large multinationals doing business in Africa rarely impact local poverty levels.

"We can do [this plan] without spending new money," Hubbard says to PlanetMoney, explaining that he just wants to restructure how aid is given. He also believes that "we have a moral imperative to act" to end poverty through aid, in contrast to the prominent economist Dambisa Moyo, who argues that Africa would be better off without any aid at all (see Manasi Sharma's "Is Foreign Aid Helping or Hurting Africa?"). Hubbard tells Columbia University Press that not all aid money should go to business either, since humanitarian aid and microfinance programs are both successful and necessary for the poor.

Hubbard admits to the PlanetMoney team that the idea has some risks, such as the possibility that local elites could siphon off many of the benefits without improving the lives of the poor. However, he says that it's even easier for them to do so under the current system. "The traditional aid has definitely strengthened the elites," he explains.

Despite possible drawbacks, as Hubbard points out to PlanetMoney, it's clear that when one aid plan has already failed, we shouldn't try to duplicate it for another sixty years — we should move on to something new. And as he tells Columbia University Press, "It’s not that business hasn’t worked in poor countries, it’s that business never had a chance in poor countries. Let’s provide that chance."

Add banking to the growing list of things your cell phone can do.

A September special report in the Economist took a look at the expanding use of mobile banking in Africa and explained how it could play a large part in improving personal financial stability in the region. In essence, here's how it works:

You take your cash to a mobile banking agent and tell the agent that you want to send money to a friend or family member. They credit your mobile banking account. Once the funds are available, you transfer money by sending a text message to whomever you want. The recipient then goes to his or her local agent to access the transferred money. People can even pay utilities or pay for cab rides with the service.

There is a strong correlation between the increase in a developing nation's cell phone use and it's rise in GDP, notes the World Bank. Mobile money offers similar effects on the individual level. A study by researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that users of the Kenyan mobile money service M-PESA have seen a 5 to 30 percent increase in their incomes since the service began in 2007.

One reason for this is the increased convenience that M-PESA offers. Like many men in Kenya, Nairobi resident David Omuchilili used to have to take time off from work and pay for travel costs to deliver money to his family, whose village is nearly 200 miles away. With M-PESA, he is now able to avoid the traveling and can be more available for work, as he explains to Business Week.

Mobile money transfers also offers a safer, more reliable way to send cash. Citizens without the means for traveling no longer have to take the risk of giving an envelope full of cash to a middleman — like a bus driver — and telling him where to deliver it. In the aftermath of the 2008 Kenyan election, M-Pesa was used to send money to those trapped by the rampant violence.

One thing is for certain. As mobile banking continues to grow in popularity and scale, users will find opportunities for better financial stability.

Could Africa be the world's next breadbasket?

Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne of The Atlantic seems to think it's a real possibility if African farmers adopted more modern farming technology and used better-quality seeds and fertilizers. And the payoff for agricultural investment would make a huge difference for poor African countries.

Agricultural investment in Africa — and in a few other high-potential places such as Ukraine and Russia — may be the world’s best bet for keeping food plentiful and cheap. This investment could bring other benefits too; the World Bank estimates that agricultural development is twice as effective at reducing poverty as other sources of growth. In Asia, as cereal yields rose, poverty rates plummeted. Investment in Africa’s agriculture — by donors, farmers, and African governments — may allow the continent to feed the world and save itself.

Plumpy’nut is frequently used by humanitarian agencies in emergency malnutrition situations. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Humanitarian agencies have long been using protein and energy bars filled with nutrients and vitamins when responding to food emergencies. Though these "ready-to-use foods" are seen everywhere on grocery shelves in the West, they're often viewed as lifesavers when food crises strike the developing world.

BBC News recently highlighted the efforts of two British doctors, Steve Collins and Alistair Hallam, who saw the great results these easily accessible foods can have on malnourished populations. The doctors have taken the idea of ready-to-use foods even further with their company, Valid Nutrition, which manufactures foods supplemented with important nutrients found in meat and vegetables — foods most Africans can’t afford. While majority of emergency food packets contain high sugar concentrations and supplements that help in emergency relief areas, Valid Nutrition's products contain nutrients that are important in a person's daily diet and are sold at an affordable price. The company has opened manufacturing factories in various African countries, creating jobs for locals and helping the economy by using local crops.

Instead of only using these foods during emergency relief situations, the doctors want to help treat severe acute malnutrition, where a person's weight for height measurement is 70 percent below the median range due to food shortage and/or illness, according to the World Health Organization.

"The idea is to target people suffering from a less acute, but more widespread form of malnutrition that affects a staggering two billion people worldwide," reports BBC News.

Fortification of food for the developing world is not a new idea. Other companies such as Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, a Swiss nonprofit, has programs in various developing countries providing food for the poor. In fact, Gain is trying to put more market pressure on firms to “develop new, affordable nutritious foods by convincing business it is missing a vast untapped market.”