A comment on my post by Anon about the Arab Sorry Situation, triggered me to post these facts about Africa:
1. Africa is the second-largest of the Earth's seven continents - covering about 30,330,000 sq km, which makes up about 22 per cent of the world's total land area.2. 90% of all malaria cases are in sub-Saharan Africa
3. 3,000 children under the age of five die each day from malaria in Africa.
4. 1-5% of GDP in Africa covers costs of malaria control and lost labour days
5. Did you know, that Africa would have been an estimated US $100 billion better off in 1999 if malaria had been eliminated years ago?
6. 17 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have died of AIDS.
7. At least 25 million people in Africa are HIV-positive.
8. 12 million children who have lost their parents to AIDS face a precarious future.
9. Internal conflicts are burning up many African societies.
10. The media and the rest of the world loves to ignore Africa and leaves Africans to either fend for themselves or fry each other.
Africa is the troubled continent, that the rest of the world prefers to ignore, it is the continent where Aids and Malaria eat at human beings day after day while the world's superpowers never turn to think about them for a second, well because, they are just the third world, unworthy of our time, effort or money!
Seriously now, the world needs to wake up!
What do you think? What other burning questions need to be answered regarding Africa? What other major problems do you think plague this continent today? Would love to hear your feedback!
Love,
SoulSearch
2 comments:
Africa has more problems than I can count. The question that plagues me is WHY? Colonialism, imperialism, western exploitation of the continent still does not explain everything that is wrong. I have no expectations of the UN, it is at best a weak peace-keeping force that is unable to stop all the ethnic cleansing, child slave labor, genocide etc. What is needed as an overhaul of the societal, cultural and education system, replacing the economic structure with one that works. But how will this be implemented and who will over see it? I dunno. Can you force change upon a people, do you even have the right to?
Thank you soo much for writing this. Now please allow me to engage in self-criticism: I think we Arabs and Muslims have a deep dissociative disorder. We cry out loud asking the world to take up our cause, help us, solve our problems, yet we are- collectively- unprepared to support or help others. Western-governments aside, there are strong popular/student NGO movements supporting medical & monetary aid to Africa (red campaign, save darfur coalition, etc). It took me a while to grasp how self-absorbed we are as a culture...
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