I am very familiar with the purchasing process of satellites by LATAM countries. Basically the Chinese or the French (i.e. Airbus) come in and offer you a satellite that ranges between 180M-380M USD in price depending on what you want. The price includes a building with a ground station, the launch, and some basic training. If you negotiate correctly, the full telemetry is send only to you and you process it all locally. If you don’t, then they have a hook on you and hand hold you through the entire process - at an additional cost.
Additionally, after a country purchases one, they tend to have their own development path for the future ones.
For example, the Argentinians did their first four satellites with the help of the US (SAC-A, SAC-B, SAC-C, SAC-D), the next two were done by themselves (ARSAT-1, ARSAT-2), two more with the Italians (SAOCOM-A, SAOCOM-B) and one with the Brazilians (SABIA-MAR).
It is a process filled with a lot of politics, questionable monetary interests, and pseudo national pride.
It is the new shortcut process by which countries are entering the space era. Buy a satellite when you don't know what you are doing, then co-build it with somebody, then build it by yourself. It effectively saves you billions in trial and error tests that other countries had to go through... but it really begs the question of when is it truly yours, because if you don’t follow the rules (e.g. taking high res imagery of an area you are not supposed to), “your” satellite can easily be temporarily or permanently disabled... and there goes your 300M
I dunno how true this is but my african friends have told me that telecom in africa is extremely expensive and calling someone the next village over can have huge charges. So african countries under the African Union created the African Telecommunications Union to send out an african owned telecom sattelite instead of having to pay for western owned telecom sattelite usage.
Again this is second hand info and I don't know much about African politics but telecom is clearly one important reason.
I included the data from 2011 because it includes mobile services cost whereas the other is newer but on data costs.
Not sure what your point is at all other than to be pedantic and obfuscate the general point to be honest. The point being that african telecom costs are some of the highest in the world and this would be one use for a satellite...
My point is that "it's too expensive for Africans (from an unspecified country, because of course the entire continent of 1.3 billion people has the same socioeconomic status everywhere) to call people in the next village (and it being the next village is somehow relevant because mobile call rates are tied to literal physical distance, obviously)" is exactly the kind of poverty porn nonsense that Westerners lap up about SSA without thinking, and I make an effort to call it out everywhere I see it.
I am curious about your thoughts on satellites as a particularly cost-effective way to improve mobile telecoms, considering that cellular networks are largely driven by masts that are very much on the ground and (in West Africa for instance), backed by submarine fibre-optic cables.
As an aside, it's extremely interesting to me that in most of my interactions with Westerners they seem rather incapable of finding very easily discoverable primary sources on living conditions in Africa. It would take maybe ten seconds to pull up actual December 2019 call rates and tariff plans from telecoms companies in Ethiopia or Nigeria or Rwanda or Botswana or wherever, but I instead get linked to data that aggregates mobile device and data plan prices from years ago. Then again I suppose that if one unironically believes that people here are stuck unable to call people in the next village it wouldn't occur to them that this sort of information is widely available from Africans themselves.
For example, I use MTN and pay a flat rate of (the equivalent of) $0.0003 per second for calls and $0.011 to send texts. I'm on a 15GB data plan that costs $13.83, and the monthly plans go down to $2.77 for 1.5GB. There are also plans that will give you access to certain social media (Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) for a month for less than a dollar.
> "it's too expensive for Africans to call people in the next village"
What's the point of using quotes if you're not quoting...
What was actually said: "I dunno how true this is but my african friends have told me that telecom in africa is extremely expensive and calling someone the next village over can have huge charges.
Again this is second hand info and I don't know much about African politics but telecom is clearly one important reason."
If we consider saying "in the midwest fiber optic internet is extremely expensive" to be poverty porn then I suppose I'm guilty...
I think the other poster is trolling and intentionally strawmanning against your mild embellishment you used to make a point. It's not worth continuing a discussion with that person.
5 seconds on Google reveals that, surprise, you're right[1]; mobile data in Africa (as an example) is more expensive than elsewhere especially when considering relative income versus other regions, and there are few providers with limited competition. I think most readers understand what you're getting at, so it's better to disengage if another poster is being impolite!
Actually "the other poster" is a Nigerian that is beyond fed up with how easily Westerners swallow up barely coherent narratives about the politics and economics of my continent.
I do find it impressive how you link an article that talks about the actual solution already being implemented to drive down mobile internet costs in SSA - expanding the existent fibre-optic cable networks like MainOne and stimulating the growth of the local telecoms providers - to apparently support the idea that we're trying to launch satellites to get better internet (or, as per the original post, call rates within a country. Have you ever actually used a satellite phone?)
> The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, climate, mining and environmental observations, allowing the Horn of Africa to collect data and improve its ability to plan for changing weather patterns for example.
I guess the real question is whether this is cheaper than to just license these services.
And a second question: how much power do others have over you? I'd your agricultural output or tax system becomes dependent on a certain provider/country they have a lot of leeway over you. Same reason Europe and Russia and China built their own satellite-based positioning system: can't trust the US to keep GPS accessible.
On the other hand any satellite built for you might have the same issue through some hidden software-based off switches.
I wouldn’t underestimate the political value of a satellite launch. There is a lot of propaganda value, both domestically and internationally, to entering the “club” of space-faring nations. Not to be crass, but “launch a satellite” is literally an achievement in the Civilization games. The very act of launching it means something, even if only symbolic.
Each satellite is launched into an orbit that has it fly over certain areas more than others. Most satellites are stationed over the richest countries, so there is very little satellite image coverage of many parts of Africa. These images help monitor everything from weather to crop health. Just like building a road, buying a satellite for your country provides critical infrastructure which can boost an economy.
But is this true? Sure if you want coverage of Siberia you may need your own, but doesn't every orbit cross the equator? I would have thought plenty of satellites cross Ethiopia every hour, although perhaps not bothering to run all their cameras without a customer?
I’m by no means an expert on satellite orbit selection, but from my experience as a consumer the quality and frequency of imagery for an area has to do with a variety of factors - how often the overhead pass occurs in daytime vs. nighttime, how much data capacity they will devote to downloading the imagery, and what angle they point the sensor at.
Here’s a real world coverage map from a European earth observation mission, you can see they were able to select and orbit that gives them daily coverage of Europe but only biweekly coverage of Africa: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Slater12/publicat...
Thanks, nice to see a map. But all those lines which stop at the mediterranean coast... those satellites surely cross north africa at almost the same time of day, it's just not marked because they are turned off? As you say, perhaps limited by daily bandwidth (or perhaps power?)... but that sounds like a commercial consideration.
I'm reasonably sure satellite imaging happens pretty far below geostationary, though. It'd be interesting if we could someday park satellites in geostationary and just stare at a given spot continuously, but lens technology just ain't there yet, last I checked.
Yes, they will. The only place you can put a geostationary satellite is on the equator. In theory, they stay in position above the selected point on the equator. In practice, they aren't perfectly stationary, and they will move around the designated point, which will, of necessity, cross the equator.
The same reasons any country needs satellites. Telecommunications, resource monitoring, science, weather... Sorry, but unless you believe that satellites are superfluous in general, why are you asking if these countries need satellites? Are they something only rich/western countries need? Or should other countries simply be dependent on the countries that already build/launch them?
Bolivia bought a communication satellite from the chinese to provide TV and Internet to the entire country - which is mostly rural areas that are difficult to reach (think the Andes). The other countries use multi-spectral and radar-based satellites to do several things like:
Nothing is "truly yours" at a national scale. Inventions happen everywhere and nations get concentrated expertise by either accumulating it by being on the receiving end of brain drain, purchasing it, or stealing it. This is purchasing, like buying a national course in basic space ops.
It seems like college students can design, build, & launch a microsat for $50k-$1M. Why jump straight to $200M+ for those learnings? It shouldn't take $Billions to start getting your feet wet.
I think there's a different scale involved when you're running an experiment on a CubeSat vs. trying to set up telecommunications. ARSAT-1 and -2 were both the size of a car (3 tonnes).
Ghana launched a satellite in 2017, for 500,000 dollars.
It was used for environmental monitoring. Since the Ethiopian satellite is to be used for the same thing, it will likely cost the same amount.
Sub-Saharan Africa feels like a missed opportunity now for Europe and the US.
While the US and EU has been focused on donating aid, or through NGOs merely shipping Africans into Europe without much of a plan and then shrugging their shoulders when problems arise, China has been making deals there and investing an utterly staggering amount on an on-going basis into its development and future prosperity.
Some will proclaim "But they'll owe China! That won't end well!", which is shortsighted, lacking in self-awareness and playing into the "everyone that isn't us is the boogeyman" narrative the West likes to maintain.
In the same time that China has been spending its money on African investment, the US has been spending literally trillions on literally baseless wars, directly costing the lives of a countless amount of people in doing so and upending the lives of countless others.
Good on China, and good for Africa. I hope to live to see that continent prosper, although if any success is in sight I'm sure we'll see the US find somereason to deploy the so-richly invested military there.
> While the US and EU has been focused on donating aid, or through NGOs merely shipping Africans into Europe without much of a plan and then shrugging their shoulders when problems arise, China has been making deals there and investing an utterly staggering amount on an on-going basis into its development and future prosperity.
If these really cared about Africa, they would have stopped subsidizing their agriculture. They don't. "Aid" here is a way to hinder development.
China is being scummy, but who's criticizing China here? Europeans who did far worse to the African continent and their inhabitants? talk about lacking of any sense of self-awareness.
Aid is a way to keep these people in servitude and dependent of the west, and it's actually killing their agriculture, that and the west subsidizing their own agriculture. Africa need foreign investment, not foreign aid.
> And we can be critical of what China is doing is now as well as critical of all of the colonial misadventures over the years.
No, you can't, it's hypocrisy. Whatever you think China is doing, European did 1000% worse by dehumanizing africans for profit.
>> Some will proclaim "But they'll owe China! That won't end well!"
That's being "proclaimed" in that case because there's increasing and obvious evidence of that country's government using debt being to control governments, political decisions and societies:
Yes when China does something worth being positive about.
But it's a bit hard when they trap poor countries in debt, detain millions of Muslims in death camps and try and bully their way into every situation e.g. South China Sea, Hong Kong.
There was a time, probably late 60s to early 80s when western firms went into LatAm and had moderate success and the economies began to transition from (subsistence) farming to light manufacturing, but due to pop explosion ran into a gringo go home resistance. Wonder if China will manoeuver around that kind of thing.
People on this site really don't know anything about history. And if you try to show them, they just ignore you. There are lots of libertarian tech bros on this site.
> Some will proclaim "But they'll owe China! That won't end well!", which is shortsighted, lacking in self-awareness and playing into the "everyone that isn't us is the boogeyman" narrative the West likes to maintain.
Exactly. There aren't many Uighurs in Africa, so Africa should be fine.
And China doesn't care about who they are dealing with in Africa or anywhere else. As long as you have money, are willing to ignore China's human rights abuses and aren't a threat to the stability of the Chinese governing structures you're all good.
You'd better stay away from Istanbul then, it's full of unspayed Socrates-es.
In seriousness, China's problem is not with all Muslims, it's with the Uighurs as a threat to their national integrity (especially in a region with such strategic importance, bordering Pakistan and India, and containing many railheads linking China to the rest of Eurasia). One of China's largest partners is Pakistan -- which is in its own words an Islamic republic -- and whose government generally turns a blind eye to what's happening in Xinjiang.
I mean no disrespect to Ethiopia but no, China launched it.
This is important because the ability to put an object in space is a huge achievement with geopolitical consequences. If you can put an object into space (even low earth orbit) you can put one in Time Square or the Kremlin and no one can stop you. That's why it's a big deal when a country first launches a satellite...
Sorry to be the arsehole here. But it should be made clear Ethiopia has NOT just jumped up on the possible threat scale...
It would be interesting to see what the geopolitical consequences would be of another nation "helping" a smaller nation become ICBM capable. I know that this was basically the premise of the late Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis, but in all those instances the Soviet Union and United States owned all their missiles - their individual satellite states didn't have the ability to launch them.
But if, say, China were to give away ICBM technology to an ally, for "national security" reasons, so that they could claim plausible deniability...
Right now, Iran has a working ICBM but no nukes and North Korea has working nuked but no ICBM. The nightmare scenario is that they swap kit so both has both. That would make them both untouchable. Nk is crazy enough, they'd demand cash (and fuel and food) not to just press the button and likely get it.
Ethiopia's GDP growth has been on a tear since 2000. [1]
If you visit the capital, you can't miss the Chinese influence. Last time I was there, a huge Chinese bank building was going up kiddy corner to the Airport in Addis.
BTW, if you haven't visited Ethiopia, put it on your list. It's an amazingly beautiful country.
I just spent three years driving around Africa. I visited 35 different countries all around the continent. [1]
The Chiense influence is staggering. I'm writing a book about it now. Many, many parts of Africa are developing faster than any of us can comprehend, because we've never seen it.
In the last ~20 years cities like LA and Vancouver have gotten bigger, but they're more or less what they were - there were skyscrapers, electricity, water, freeways etc. Now it's just a bit bigger.
There are hundreds of cities in Africa that have gone from dirt streets to modern city with skyscrapers, 4G internet, subways (or above ground rail), running water end electricity, etc. in just 10 years.
No, there aren't. There is exactly one (1) city in sub-Saharan Africa with a modern urban rail system, and it's Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In the rest of the continent's megacities (Nairobi, Lagos, etc) decent urban transit remains a dream. China has funded a bunch of long-distance rail, but that's primarily for trade (read: exporting raw materials).
But I still tip my pith helmet at you for crossing the DRC by Jeep!
While it's not surface light rail, I'd argue that the Gautrain in Johannesburg & Tshwane counts as a modern urban rail system, especially as it incorporates substantial subway sections.
Depends on the deal the government of whatever country made with China. In many cases China build tons of stuff (bridges, highways, rail, hydro plants, etc. etc.) and give them to the country typically in exchange for super cheap mineral rights. So then you come across immense swaths of forest that have been decimated, with all the timber being shipped to china. Same goes for monster mines all over the place.
In the case of Mozambique they gave away fishing rights to China.
The GDP growth rate per capita is a better measure in my opinion. The population of Ethiopia is growing very fast and despite the high GDP growth rate there is still serious concern about the job market for the nation's under 18 population about to hit the labour market.
1. National Museum of Ethiopia - Lucy and other early humans
2. Mount Entoto
3. Ethnological Museum - Haili Selassie's palace is here
4. Shiro Meda - street vendors. Take a Ethiopian friend to get the best deals.
5. Yod Abyssinian Traditional Restaurant - Traditional music and dancing. Worth going at least once.
6. Addis Ababa Golf Club - Fun place to catch lunch outdoors with some green space in Addis.
Outside:
1. Simien Mountains National Park
2. Church of Saint George
3. Blue Nile Falls
4. Danekil Depression
Obviously a country over 50x bigger is going to emit more CO2. At a minimum, they need to cook 50x more food, which they do with inefficient biomass or coal stoves.
> The Chinese satellite was designed and built at a cost of $8 million, with China paying around $6 million of the capsule’s price
It is odd that the article mentions these details about the satellite cost, but then completely ignores the much larger cost of the launch itself, which should be on the order of $50M.
Ethiopia is on a real tear right now! The prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, came into power about 2 years ago and the first thing he did was release 100% of political prisoners in the country. It's the first time the country has had no political prisoners in decades. He then grabbed all his opposition together and worked with them. The reforms he's introduced are incredible, and show how things can be fixed in a nation that's torn apart for years by dictatorship and war. Abiy is definitely the greatest leader of our modern era. The man took a totalitarian country at war with its neighbors and flipped it 180 degrees in 18 months. He ended the war, removed totalitarian policies, and the country's people can even admit that there were government funded murder campaigns, something that if you'd talked about previously, you'd have been murdered. A great story all around. He heartily deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
Almost every time there is a story about a non western country launching rockets or satellites, the trolls come out commenting on how these countries need to be focusing on poverty instead of launching satellites. As if science isn’t a way to improving the lot of people. As if science isn’t a way to motivate a new generation of kids. As if all the communications, weather monitoring, and resource management that satellites make possible aren’t ways to improve the place. As if national pride amounts for nothing. As if countries can only focus on one thing at a time. As if western countries fixed all of their social and economic problems before working on technological advances.
Racism has many forms, and this is one. Learn to recognize it and move away from it.
> The EPRDF won the 2010 elections by a landslide, taking 499 seats, while allied parties took a further 35. Oppositions parties took just 2. Both opposition groups say their observers were blocked from entering polling stations during the election on Sunday, May 23, and in some cases the individuals were beaten. The United States and the European Union have both criticized the election as falling short of international standards. Additionally, the EPRDF won all but one of 1,904 council seats in regional elections.
Ethiopia is also an early adopter among developing nations to adopt NSA style surveillance. And like all countries with weak or nonexistent judicial oversight or independent courts, it was used immediately to target the ruling parties political
adversaries phones. Including journalists and lawyers.
Citizen Lab based out of Canada did a lot of great research exposing it. Of course the Ethiopian gov bought it all from that Israeli “we don’t sell to bad guys” NSO and other western companies.
From my understanding the recent election switched the ruling tribe which has resulted in some positive movement and economic development. One of their big issues recently was the ruling tribe suppressing one the other major ones which resulted in big protests and protestors getting killed. I believe that tribe got into power or at least in a better position.
> And like all countries with weak or nonexistent judicial oversight or independent courts, it was used immediately to target the ruling parties political adversaries phones. Including journalists and lawyers.
To be fair, that was done in the US (though not immediately, that came to light), which is why we have FISA.
I don’t consider secret courts like FISA sufficiently comparable to independent judicial oversight. It’s oversight theatre.
The FISA rulings and arguments never become public, most of the domestic surveillance warrants are justified merely by the fact the people will never find out they were surveilled and therefore won’t be “harmed” by such behaviour (this was the exact argument which Yahoo was given and lost trying to fight it in one of the only public FISA rulings available online).
Most importantly only the NSA government lawyers gets to argue the grounds for surveillance is justified. There is never a point in time where it is critical analyzed by outside parties so we put 100% of the trust in the FISA judge panel doing their due diligence and standing up for American citizens rights.
But as we saw with the recent Carter Page FBI investigations the feds can feed the FISA courts complete crap and they’ll sign off on it anyway. Multiple times.
I love when people act like this isn’t some rubber stamp
court and is actually sufficient to protect Americans constitutional rights. It so obviously isn’t and you’d have to be a serious military authoritarian hawk not to see through that nonsense.
These secret courts live and die because the average person doesn’t understand how it works and the government is just telling everyone to ”shut up and trust us”... including decades of congressman on the House Intelligence Committee.
> I don’t consider secret courts like FISA sufficiently comparable to independent judicial oversight.
I never said they were, that's a different discussio. I said the concrete fact of abuse of the national security surveillance apparatus against political opponents when we didn't have even that is why we have FISA (the law, which involves a lot more than the two courts it creates.)
China is looking for an African location for its deep space network. Perhaps a dual use station in Ethiopia will fill in that gap. The third partner is Argentina.
There is a dead comment by someone whose grandma kept donating to charity for Ethiopia. The grandma died poor save the poster is upset that nobody from Ethiopia ever thanked her and now they are prospering. I don't like that comment, but it is actually quite interesting, especially if taken together with another comment on a parallel discussion about the huge growth in Africa and the very visible Chinese influence.
It makes you wonder how China's involvement has lead to do much growth in such short time, while the West had been focused on providing to poor, starving African children for decades. I wonder how much the attitude reflected in the comment about the donating grandma is common and how it contributed to the connotative lack of results from Western aid efforts. Did we deep down not want results, but instead mainly make ourselves feel good while keeping Africa in a position where they can provide that feeling to us? What concretely is China doing that we failed to do? How will this pan out on the long term for Africa? So many interesting topics in here!
Not sure how your links support your argument. Literacy rate data is from 1994 onwards, steadily up except one hiccup (by the way I can’t imagine how literacy rate could drop 6% in a year; short of mass extinction of a literate group it must be a change of methodology); life expectancy growth accelerated from ~2000 and is slowing down a bit again; hunger data is from 2000 onwards, same for HDI which you already removed.
So, how is GDP per capita, an important metric, “a bit of a exception” among two other random stats (one of which even accelerated)?
That one takes off in 1993, about a decade before GDP exploded. Maybe the secret to Ethiopia's growth is just that the population became educated enough to do something useful with the money invested by foreign entities?
The food sent over via charity often had a religious conversion implied.
China's belt and road initiative has specific goals in Africa that require something closer to real economic development. With a tether of course, but real development.
Very anecdotal evidence here but I worked in the African Union in the 2000s. There were already many Chinese businessmen around which surprised me a bit. To be honest the difference in the interactions couldn't have been much clearer. Most European and U.S. consultants/business people that I met basically treated Africa as a lesser continent to be exploited. I got a very colonial vibe, except with some sugarcoating. Either that or a obnoxious "we need to save poor Africa" attitude.
At the same time the Chinese almost religiously mentioned that they saw Africa as an equal partner. It seemed like a very conscious and deliberate strategy.
So my anecdotal summary would be...the Chinese got involved early, went in guns blazing (money wise) and didn't behave like total pricks out for a quick buck but rather like friends and real business partners.
It's important to look at the political component of our approach as well. The Western political-economic growth model for the third world - fostering democratic institutions while giving basic aid to the poor - is not productive from the perspective of nation building and wealth creation. Democracy is not conducive to growth for poor, diverse nations, especially those still deeply rooted in genuine tribalism as many nations in Sub Saharan Africa are.
While I fundamentally disagree with China's political model, we may have better luck in third world development deemphasizing democracy and focusing instead on rule of law, stability and cultural cohesion.
I would say the approach should be more economical than political focused. Donation is very socialistic way needs no accountability from donation receptors, while business deals require responsibilities from both side and have risks attached. In fact China doesn't care about the political system. Ethiopia Happened to be a democratic country.
Yet even this exploitative relationship may prove much more helpful than the grain and occasional squad of observers the US or UN sends. It's a funny sort of problem isn't it - perhaps the only way to get genuine investment in these areas is an almost parasitic relationship. More interesting would be if this forces the US or other western countries to more aggressively step up to the plate...
The West will never step aggressively to the plate. We aren’t allowed to by our own domestic politics. One of the major reasons China can become so directly and aggressively involved is they aren’t white. They don’t have a history of African colonialism, Apartheid, or slavery in Africa. They’ve done all these (or similar) and worse, but not in Africa and not in a way which found domestic disapproval.
If the West ever entered Africa the way China has the politicians leading it would destroyed at home. It’s more domestic politics and history than geopolitics.
We have no quarrel here. As you’ve clearly demonstrated, these topics are touchy subjects in the West. China is unrepentant about its history and has no issues being exploitative if it gets them ahead. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not trying to make some cosmic moral comparison of all the various atrocities ever committed in human history and by whom.
If the US or Europe was digging in as blatantly as China we'd be accused of going back to our colonial roots. Good thing China has so many other controversies surrounding them, it makes their activity in Africa look generous by comparison.
> Yet even this exploitative relationship may prove much more helpful than the grain and occasional squad of observers the US or UN sends.
Any economic program set forth by the West and any decisive intervention to stabilize a country is promptly accused of being neocolonialism.
I recall a few years ago there was a military coup in Guinea Bissau and the West stepped in to stabilize the country by getting the Community of Portuguese-speaking countries (Portuguese acronym CPLP) involved and send ground troops. Even so, it was decided that the ground troops needed to be from Angola and leave Portugal to handle logistics because having Portuguese troops on the ground would help the narrative that the former colonizer was controlling the fallen democratic government as a sockpuppet.
They're most probably installing levers everywhere on the planet. Now how they're gonna use it is to be seen. Of course without opposing forces China will be free to exploit them to their limit but maybe they won't.
At least the intent is transparent. "we're here to help ourselves, but it will help you too" is a lot less suspicious than "we're here because we care..."
There is some historical context that a lot of people outside of China don`t know. China is a big country with a huge diversity in development as well as Chinese people( You believe Chinese are diligent? You are wrong. Not all of them. Even Han Chinese). Many places used to be historically poor areas for very long time. China used to have a very socialist policy for long time before late 70`s which resulted in the associated mentality. The policy of "helping poor" was mostly donations. This was a failure policy that resulted in the poor area stayed in poor. There were many stories such as the people kill the donated plowing ox for meat because they know next year donation will come again. The people in developed areas often feel upset about the wasted donation. The "helping poor" policy changed later towards encouraging entrepreneurship, vocational training (Sounds familiar?), etc. In other words: The policy of giving fishing tool instead of giving bread works better.
That's why most of today's "Chinese Influence" are bound with conditions like business deals. It's a better way to help others in addition to capitalist selfish greediness described in many media. It's mutual beneficial. The approach was from hard lessons that donation can not stimulate sustainable growth.
Yes, but China benefits in several ways that temper this positive take.
1. by owning the (often insane) debt from the programs
2. by getting a lot of Chinese jobs in the country
3. by gaining influence over the country (at the expense of Western influence, if you see this as a competition.
Another problem here, although it’s not a benefit to China, is that the quality of infrastructure built by China is often terrible, making the cost and debt even more problematic.
Now, having said all that, the US isn’t necessarily doing much better. And the poor quality Chinese roads (just as an example) are still infinitely better than the competing local-built roads.
Yes, China benefits tremendously. However the African countries reap some rewards too. It’s hard to take away infrastructure once it’s built short of starting a war. If the African countries can figure out how to maintain and add to all the new infrastructure, they may have the upper hand in the very long term.
Yes, unless it's useless infrastructure, like the Mattala International Airport in Sri Lanka. And to be clear, roads don't generally fall into that category. And also, China owns major roads in Indiana, and I'm not necessarily opposed to that happening anywhere. I'm just saying that there are reasons to temper the rhetoric that claims China is doing such an amazing job "helping" third world nations.
And as for starting a war, China doesn't need to threaten to start a war with a country in order to have the threat of such playing into Ethiopia's leadership decisions. You don't want to piss off China any more than you want to piss off the USA.
Is this why countries with democracies in North America, Europe, East Asia, South East Asia and South Asia have see such decades long explosive growth?
Actually most developed Democracies have economies that are relatively decoupled from their governments and their politics. Corporations operate relatively autonomously, and it is corporations which fuel the explosive growth we observe.
On the other hand, developing countries often have bloated bureaucracies and corrupt governments that are heavily involved in the private sector and corporate activity.
The difficulties I mentioned in my original post are those in which the Government is heavily involved. Corporate investment in properly functioning nations are free from (public) political hindrances.
It's the type of offer they can't refuse even if they wanted to.
I get it, but this "help" has a tremendous cost, a cost many future generations of Ethiopians will pay dearly.
While the "West" has been a mixed bag between good and bad, there's always been some kind of moral "checks and balances" and pressure from their voters. You get none of that with China.
What are the "moral checks and balances and pressure from the voters" in the west?
As a voter in the west I don't recall ever hearing candidates talk about Africa (although I haven't necessarily been looking out for it and may be a bit too young depending on when it happened).
When accepting funds directly from the US government, or a source tied to it (e.g. World Bank, IMF), a country commonly has to undergo some amount of economic reform in order to ensure that the money can be paid back in the future. In order to get money from the US, you typically also have to adhere to similar political values such as democracy.
Exceptions of course are the oil states, due to strategic need.
China on the other hand does not care who you are or what you do so long as you can pay.
In this way they are really similar to private equity markets, but unlike private markets, they do have a navy and can use it to ensure that far away governments pay back their money.
China is doing what Europe did in the 19th century. Anti-colonial independence movements and wholesale nationalization of existing infrastructure put a hell of a clamp on that sort of investment after the second world war. Why would you put up money to build ports or railroads or factories when political instability could mean that next year a tinpot dictator might decide that he was taking it at bayonet-point and seizing all your in-country assets? Especially when your government had demonstrated time and again that they had no interest in retaliating for that kind of trespass.
> Did we deep down not want results, but instead mainly make ourselves feel good while keeping Africa in a position where they can provide that feeling to us? What concretely is China doing that we failed to do?
I'd argue that it's more important to understand the context from the African perspective, and not just from the Western or Chinese perspective. Ethiopia, for example, has transitioned from a monarchy to a communist dictatorship/Soviet satellite to a non-communist dictatorship to a semi-democracy in just the last 40 years. They've fought a major war with a neighbor, had several famines, and are in the middle of a massive population boom.
So, "did _we_ not want results" isn't a great the best way to view the situation on the ground. China came in at a time where they had money to burn and found a semi-stable group of countries to trade with. That stability was created via the work of Western efforts and massive amounts of hard work by the Africans themselves.
Also, FWIW, the dead comment was likely just a troll: most (all?) donations to the major relief groups get a thank you letter.
Finally: it's worth noting that it's not like Western influence isn't apparent, either. The US Embassy in Addis is hard to miss and steps from the Prime Minister's palace.
Be careful what you wish for: economic growth in Africa is going to come directly at the expense of the local and international environment, in the form of land clearance and coal and oil emissions.
Africa desperately needs to stabilise its population, so that it can focus on infrastructure and capital deepening. The West can help by redirecting all food aid instead towards education, contraception and abortion for women.
1. Could you please explain the connection between economic growth and the population problem a little more?
I would expect economic development to gradually cause a decline in birth rates? Is there a GDP marker where delta GDP > delta population?
As far as overpopulation, the entire continent of Africa has roughly the same population (1.3b) as India with ~9x the land area so the absolute population density is not dire.
2. If you look at carbon emissions per capita, African countries are relatively carbon neutral. Ethiopia relies mostly on renewable energy and they are also building the largest hydroelectric power plant on the continent. I would expect younger economies to “leap frog” to cleaner and greener tech, having polluted less in total (than countries before them) by the time they attain middle income status.
Sounds like a surviving version of Victorian "blame the victim" thinking. It was a popular and heavily flawed idea that the people the British invaded and robbed (of food in many cases), if faced with food shortages, should have just "had less kids".
When a parasite finds a good host, the logic can get really warped.
Are you trying to say that this is some kind of waste of money? This is literally a weather satellite to help them plan for future events, which should have a direct impact on agriculture. In my mind, a country that can go from famine ravaged to space faring within a single generation should be tremendously lauded. And the fact that it's trying to do something to help prevent another famine is commendable too.
(I realize that it's not black & white and there's likely a lot of corruption and other not-nice-things happening along the way.)
“I gave that money so children wouldn’t starve, not so that you could at some point in the future win some Internet argument.” Unfortunately, someone stands at the ready to turn the works of others to their own purposes. Make a very big note to yourself when the story teller has no participation in the otherwise compelling story. (“My grandfather didn’t fight Mussolini just so we could...”)
Additionally, after a country purchases one, they tend to have their own development path for the future ones.
For example, the Argentinians did their first four satellites with the help of the US (SAC-A, SAC-B, SAC-C, SAC-D), the next two were done by themselves (ARSAT-1, ARSAT-2), two more with the Italians (SAOCOM-A, SAOCOM-B) and one with the Brazilians (SABIA-MAR).
It is a process filled with a lot of politics, questionable monetary interests, and pseudo national pride.
It is the new shortcut process by which countries are entering the space era. Buy a satellite when you don't know what you are doing, then co-build it with somebody, then build it by yourself. It effectively saves you billions in trial and error tests that other countries had to go through... but it really begs the question of when is it truly yours, because if you don’t follow the rules (e.g. taking high res imagery of an area you are not supposed to), “your” satellite can easily be temporarily or permanently disabled... and there goes your 300M