LAT: Africa Seeks More Positive Spin on Its 'Brand'

[DeepModem Mom]

Africa Seeks More Positive Spin on Its 'Brand'
At an economic summit, the media are blamed for not highlighting success stories on the continent as leaders seek financial relief.

By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer


CAPE TOWN, South Africa — It's not easy to market a vast continent of more than 50 nations as a desirable, upbeat sort of place when at any time there might be war breaking out, hunger, people dying of AIDS and malaria, others struggling in poverty, and entrenched government corruption.

But African leaders and businessmen meeting here for an economic summit this week took on the challenge of how to promote a positive "brand Africa." Many argued that the continent's real problems were not death, disease and criminality but the international journalists who wrote about them without noting African successes.

"We are not angels, but we can't all be devils all the time," Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa said at a news conference at the Africa Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum, which ended Friday. The talk of Africa's image problem comes at an important moment, with international attention focused on the continent in the lead-up to next month's Group of 8 summit of leading industrial powers in Gleaneagles, Scotland. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to lobby for doubling African aid to $25 billion a year and cancellation of all the debt of poor African countries....

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Despite Africa's rich natural resources and a flow of international aid, poverty there has worsened, not declined, in recent decades. The assistance is often highly conditional and in the form of loans, not grants.

The Cape Town summit's main purpose was to focus international business and political support before Blair's big Africa push. But although the U.S. agrees broadly with most of the goals, it has its own approach on aid and debt relief, and is wary of a British proposal to sell International Monetary Fund gold to help Africa....


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-africa4jun04,0,4241803.story?coll=la-home-world

[Deja Q]

1. But the white man is still the devil all the time.

Africa's rich resources undervalued; the poverty and such only made worse.

Why bother trading?

:applause: to Tony Blair, however. * wouldn't even begin to think the idea of helping them.