According to a recent poll by the Reuters Foundation Canada is leading the G20 pack when it comes to the best country to be a woman. There’s a huge disparity between the best and the worst countries in terms of health care, equality and ending gender-based violence. 

In a sprawl of plastic refugee shelters and mortar-blasted buildings in Mogadishu, a mud-caked Turkish engineering team monitors the drilling of a new borehole while their armed guards chat lazily under a tree, guns across laps.  These government contractors are on the frontline of a huge Turkish development effort in one of the world’s most dangerous cities - one which U.N. agencies and international charities prefer to deal with from the safety of neighboring Kenya.

Across the Somali capital, a bombed-out shell after two decades of fighting, residents say Turkey has done more in eight months to shatter the perception that Mogadishu is a no-go zone than the international community has achieved in twenty years.

“Our government likes to help anyone in crisis so we came here without thinking anything,” said the lead engineer, Mehmet, who asked Reuters to use a pseudonym because government employees are not authorized to talk to the media without permission.

The retreat of al Qaeda-linked rebels from the city in August ended the daily street battles and shelling between the militants and African troops, and offered a rare chance to ramp up aid as a famine gripped central and southern Somalia.  Some 500 Turkish relief workers and volunteers poured into Mogadishu’s bullet-scarred wastelands, unleashing a wave of humanitarian aid as the militants struck back with a string of suicide bombings and roadside blasts.

“Of course it is dangerous but we don’t think about those things. Inshallah, nothing has happened to us. If we are afraid, we can’t operate,” the engineer said.

Turkish flags - white crescent moon and star on red background - flutter in the coastal breeze and billboards marking out Turkish reconstruction projects dot the capital, where potholed streets are lined by rubble-strewn ruins and mountains of garbage.  Turkey’s “Arab Spring” forays into Middle Eastern diplomacy, have drawn much attention on the international stage. Its launch into Africa, however, has gone little noticed by a world more focused on China’s involvement in the sub-Saharan region.  A hotspot in the U.S.-led war against militant Islam, Somalia offers Ankara an opportunity to bolster its image as a soft power on the global stage.

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Before they purchased a hulking former leather tannery in Kitchener – a symbol of disappearing traditional Ontario jobs in the city’s core – two Toronto-based developers asked to meet with this city’s planners. When they arrived, Cadan Inc. partners Lana Sherman and Gary Maister were greeted by a contingent of top city officials and Mayor Carl Zehr, who broke off his vacation to head the meeting in the summer of 2007.

“That sent such a positive, strong signal to us,” says Ms. Sherman, managing director of Cadan, still astonished by the reception which put their Tannery project in motion. “It meant the city was going to work with us.” The meeting highlighted Kitchener’s strategy of tax tools, zoning and an open-door attitude to woo investors to shed its blue-collar image. One recent success – renewal of the Lang Tannery as a 21st century home for digital media start-ups and giants – offers lessons for municipal leaders and developers.

“The city of Kitchener really put its money where its mouth was,” observes Karl Innanen, managing director of the Waterloo region office of Colliers International. “We have overcome inertia and things are happening.”

Three years before Cadan’s visit, the city imposed a special property tax levy of 1.25 per cent a year for a decade for an economic development investment fund worth $110-million. Its focus was postsecondary education and knowledge industries, not manufacturing, as catalysts for growth.  “We needed to make a bold statement,” Mr. Zehr says. “We had a number of older buildings and sites without buildings that could be ripe for employment lands.”  The city invested $30-million to locate the University of Waterloo’s $147-million school of pharmacy on a former eight-acre industrial site, purchased earlier by the city for $1, across from the Tannery. The city also put up $6.5-million to bring Wilfrid Laurier University’s faculty of social work to a vacant school several blocks from the Tannery.

“The combination of those few things really got people’s attention that something is happening here,” Mr. Zehr says.  In 2005, picking up on city signals, Andrin Homes sold out residential lofts from a $40-million conversion of a former rubber plant, one block from the Tannery.  The quickening pulse caught the attention of Cadan, which bought the Tannery for $10-million in 2007.

“The city’s involvement with the university frankly gave us confidence that the whole area was about to change,” Ms. Sherman says. Significantly, the Tannery is three blocks from a new transit hub that, by 2017, will bring a new regional light-rail service, Via Rail, GO Transit and buses under one roof.  In purchasing the building, a mix of storage and workshops since leather production ended in 1954, Cadan embarked on an environmental cleanup to convert 350,000 square feet to Class A office and retail.

Under a brownfields incentive program, Kitchener will reimburse the developer over a 10-year period, starting in 2013, for $891,000 in cleanup costs. In effect, the city funds the reimbursement from increases in property taxes tied to building upgrades.

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By: Reagan Charles Cook for Frontline Defence Magazine

November 16^th 2011

 Over the last decade the Canadian Forces and its allies have worked to liberate Afghanistan and destroy the country’s insurgent network. Major General (MGen) Michael D. Day was first deployed in Afghanistan in March of 2002. Since then he has been back and forth on more than 30 occasions. MGen Day was at the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. this November to discuss NATO’s mission to develop a self-sufficient Afghan defense force.

Canada ended its combat role in Afghanistan on July 9^th 2011, but the mission remains far from over.

“I want to remind people, we didn’t just leave Afghanistan,” said MGen Day “We got ahead of the curve, and now are helping to solidify the local Security Forces.” 

“If you’re just going to move in and move out, you’re liable to leave the national security infrastructure in an even more fragile state than when you arrived,” warned MGen Day.

The NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) is two years into the five year mandate; it is the largest national rebuilding project in terms of size and expenditure since WWII. As the highest ranking Canadian in the Theatre, MGen Day has been tasked by NATO to modernize the Afghan National Army (ANA) and lay the institutional foundation for a stable and long-lasting defense network.

The mission is based on a three-pillared security structure: recruiting, training and equipping.

“We are still rebuilding this army,” said MGen Day. “And it is largely from the ground up.” There are 4,500 to 6,000 young men recruited every month. By 2012 the total force will reach 352,000. 

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For a monthly fee of $50,000 plus expenses, the U.S. agency offered a tantalizing prospect to the Rwandan government: a burnished image, a sophisticated media campaign – and a chance at “drowning out” those pesky opposition voices on the Web.

It was 2009, and the authoritarian regime in Rwanda was facing mounting criticism of its human-rights record. It was accused of censoring the media, suppressing freedom, shutting down newspapers and creating a climate of fear. So it turned to a public-relations agency, Racepoint Group, that had already polished the image of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The contracts reveal the increasingly high-tech tactics of the publicity war between African strongmen and their foreign critics – a war in which many governments are becoming more aggressive and sophisticated in their efforts to deflect attention from their human-rights abuses.

Here are some other examples,

Equatorial Guinea ($60,000 a month)

This oil-rich country with one of Africa’s worst records for corruption and human-rights abuses, hired a U.S. consultant, Qorvis Communications, for $60,000 a month in 2010 and 2011 to massage its public image. Its long-time ruler, Teodoro Obiang, who seized power in a military coup, enjoys an estimated fortune of $600-million in a nation where most people survive on less than a dollar a day. He has ruled Equatorial Guinea for 32 years.

Angola ($675,000 annually)

Another repressive oil-rich country, Angola, signed an agreement in 2008 with a U.S. company, Samuels International Associates Inc., to improve its global image and “facilitate” its meetings with senior U.S. officials for an annual fee of $675,000. Its autocratic president, José Eduardo dos Santos, has ruled Angola for 32 years.

Ethiopia ($2.5-million)

Known for arresting hundreds of opposition politicians and repressing the media, the Ethiopian leader, Meles Zenawi, spent more than $2.5-million on three U.S. lobbying firms in 2007 and 2008. Its elections have been widely criticized as unfair and undemocratic, but it is a major recipient of Western aid. Mr. Zenawi, has ruled Ethiopia for 21 years.

Senegal ($150,000 plus a monthly $50,000 fee)

When Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, decided last year that he wanted a third term in office, despite a constitutional ban, he signed a contract in October with a U.S. law firm, McKenna Long & Aldridge, promising to pay $150,000 plus a monthly $50,000 fee for the company to prepare a research paper on the third-term question and to “share” the research with U.S. and Senegalese officials. Mr. Wade has ruled Senegal for 12 years.

From The Globe and Mail

Much of Africa, Somalia in particular, has had a tough time since independence in the 1960s, becoming synonymous with staggering levels of misery and leading many people to simply shrug and mutter “here we go again” when they hear of a new drought or a new war. But this current crisis in Somalia is on a different order of magnitude than the typical calamity, if there is such a thing. Tens of thousands of people have already died, and as many as 750,000 could starve to death in the next few months.

But support — meaning dollars — has been frustratingly scant. While many more lives are at stake in Somalia’s crisis, other recent disasters pulled in far more money. For instance, Save the Children U.S. has raised a little more than $5 million in private donations for the Horn of Africa crisis, which includes Somalia and the drought-inflicted areas of Kenya and Ethiopia. That contrasts with what Save the Children raised in 2004 for the Indonesian tsunami ($55.4 million) and the earthquake in Japan earlier this year ($22.8 million) — and Japan is a very rich country.

“Americans are incredibly generous when they understand that children are in desperate need,” said Carolyn Miles, president of Save the Children. “If they knew millions of children were facing death in Somalia, I believe they would give. Unfortunately, all American’s see is a hostile land of militias, warlords and 21st-century pirates.”

If you had $10 to donate towards a human development initiative, would you rather have it go to buy some rice, or some concrete?

 The energy sector is the lifeline in the development of any nation and therefore access to reliable and affordable energy supply on a sustainable basis, particularly by industry, agriculture, and the commercial sectors, is an important catalyst for achieving high economic growth and poverty reduction. For the West African state of  Sierra Leone’s less than 10% of total population has access to electricity, compared to 49% in Ghana, 46% in Nigeria, 96% in North Africa, 73% in Asia, 99% in China and a 76%  global average.

For Sierra Leone the biggest single challenge is making the transition away from costly emergency electricity generation. Right now petroleum imports, the bulk of which are for electricity generation, account for 26% of total imports in Sierra Leone.  The most obvious answer to this problem is the investment in hydroelectric capability.   The Bumbuna Dam project of 2009 was a significant initial step; finished in 2009 it now produces 50MWh of electricity, sending regular electricity to most parts of Freetown.

While it is not the primary sort of investment most people think of when it comes encouraging human development, this effort towards hydro-electric infrastructure has dramatically improved life for thousands of people; returning life to a young generation of entrepreneurs.

Akimatu Turay is a perfect example of how the hydro-electric project is impacting the  nations citizens. Turay runs a streetside stall selling biscuits, sweets, and cigarettes under a large multicolored umbrella. Two bare bulbs strung from a nearby building light up his wares. For 25 cents, he will charge your mobile phone.  

Turay says since the powerplant was switched on, he has seen many changes. Business is much better. In the past, when there was very little light, he had to use a generator which cost him a lot of money. The lights still go off every now and again, but the money he saves on diesel, he says, he invests into his business.

Turay says his two lightbulbs are essential for attracting customers. And with an average income of $7 a day just from charging mobile phones, he is pleased with the new power.