This book is about Tanzania and its development prospects. Within ten short chapters, each with well-chosen sub-titles, the text covers a wide range of subjects.Each subject highlights a specific theme or themes that are of topical interest in the current development debate. Under each theme the author, without trying to delve deeply into the subject, raises a number of pertinent questions, enough to whet the readers appetite and to cause him to think twice about the contemporary d...

An Inconvenient Truth of water.“Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert."“Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear ...

In this international bestseller, currently available in more than a dozen countries, Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke describe the real and worsening global water crisis, and reveal the plans of transnational corporations to profit from it. The authors present both a compelling case and a practical plan for fighting back against the corporate takeover of this most precious natural resource.

In this groundbreaking work, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement offers a new perspective on the troubles facing Africa today. Too often these challenges are portrayed by the media in extreme terms connoting poverty, dependence, and desperation. Wangari Maathai, the author of Unbowed, sees things differently, and here she argues for a moral revolution among Africans themselves. Illuminating the complex and dynamic nature of the continent, Maathai of...

Affluenza has not just changed the world, it has also changed the way we see the world. Short of money? Borrow some. Caught in the rain? Buy an umbrella. Thirsty? Buy a bottle of water and throw the bottle away. Our embrace of “convenience” and our acceptance of our inability to plan ahead is an entirely new way of thinking, and over the past seventy years we have built a new and different economic system to accommodate it.There is nothing inevitable about this current way of think...

"For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start" (Reuters).Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. And so she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges.She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and ...

"Probably the most eloquent call to arms we're likely to hear about the politics of water" ( The Globe and Mail , Toronto).In this "chilling, in-depth examination of a rapidly emerging global crisis," Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, two of the most active opponents to the privatization of water show how, contrary to received wisdom, water mainly flows uphill to the wealthy ( In These Times). Our most basic...

A cold, hard look at how modern economics has failed us and why we need a new measure of progressModern economics has fallen short. It has widened the gap between rich and poor. It has not allocated the world's resources fairly. It has brought the West to the brink of financial ruin. It has placed short-term gain before long-term progress. And it has made us focus on the individual, not the society. The end result is a worldwide financial crisis of epic proportions...

"This study is a contribution to the Transnational Institute's International Economic Order Project directed by Howard M. Wachtel.The first part deals with what the Third World is asking for; the second with what, in my view, it is actually getting. As one discussion after another on agricultural raw materials ends in stalemate, new kinds of food systems are meanwhile introduced in underdeveloped countries by the powerful nations of the North, led by the USA..."

Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer a troubled ‘dark continent.’ Most of its constituent countries are now enjoying significant economic growth and political progress. The new Africa has begun to banish the miseries of the past, and appears ready to play an important role in world affairs. Thanks to shifts in leadership and governance, an African renaissance could be at hand.Yet the road ahead is not without obstacles. As world renowned expert on African affairs, Robert Rotberg, expert...

In this thought provoking book the author takes a critical retrospective glance at the political development of Ghana from its colonial past to the attainment of her sovereignty, and highlights the insidious fundamental flaws in the governance of the new nation.He unequivocally asserts that the creation of a dysfunctional totalitarian governmental system, where a cadre of unseasoned politicians systematically arrogated all power to themselves, and zealously prosecuted their politic...

An earlier edition of this extraordinarily prescient, elegantly written book created a sensation among Washington media insiders when it was published more than five years ago under the title Demosclerosis. In it, Jonathan Rauch, a former correspondent for The Economist and a columnist for National Journal, showed with startling clarity the reasons why America's political system (and, in fact, other political systems as well) was becoming increasingly ineffective...