Dayo Olopade

The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves."A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise." --New York Times Book Review Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. 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 young social entrepreneurs, driven by kanju--creativity born of African difficulty. It's a trait found in pioneers like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned cheap VHS tapes into the multimillion-dollar film industry Nollywood. Or Ushahidi, a technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief. A shining counterpoint to the conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa's challenges as opportunities to innovate and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world. "For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start." --Reuters " An] upbeat study of development in Africa...The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension." --The New Yorker

For years Dayo Olopade struggled to reconcile the medias image of Africa as warring, impoverished and pitiful with the Africa she's known since childhood: resilient, joyful and innovative, a continent of impassioned community leaders. She reports first-hand on the explosion of commercial opportunities and technological innovations that are improving outcomes for families, children and the environment. The Bright Continent joins the conversation started by authors such as Jeffrey Sachs, Nicholas Kristof and Dambisa Moyo. Olopade rejects stale and ineffectual foreign interventions, arguing that the increasingly globalised challenges the continent faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. In many ways, Africas model of doing more with less of working around dysfunctional institutions to establish strong informal networks can be a powerful model for the rest of the world. Behind the dire headlines, Olopade discovers many convincing rays of hope.