OFFBEAT MAIL

Africa needs engineers as much as doctors to stop people dying needlessly, according to the South African entrepreneur Ivor Ichikowitz. The industrialist says so many more people will survive if sanitation is made more effective, clean water better transported and other projects better maintained - that the importance of engineers to Africa should be put on a par with medical staff. Ivor Ichikowitz is the founder of Paramount Group , Africa's largest privately owned defence and aerospace business, which employs 1,500 people, including hundreds of highly skilled engineers. He said: "Across Africa, poor sanitation systems and environmental defences consistently lead to people requiring medical support, particularly during floods and droughts.  "If we dedicated more engineers and investment to proactively tackling these problems in the first place then we could save many more lives across the continent and doctors could tackle other emergencies." According to ...

Corruption, which always takes place in poorer countries, has hurt economic performance by reducing private investments, by adversely affecting the quantity and quality of public infrastructure, by reducing tax revenue, by resulting in a shallower and less efficient financial system, and by reducing human capital formation, says a 2011 report by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force. In its report titled "Laundering the Proceeds of Corruption," the task force claimed that corruption can also have adverse distributional effects as it hurts the poor disproportionately, adding that countries with high levels of corruption achieve lower literacy rates, higher mortality rates, and overall have worsen human development outcomes. The task force estimated that between USD 1.26 trillion to USD 1.44 trillion disappeared from the national coffers of poorer countries in 2008 due to corruption. "These numbers have increased and corruption plays a significant role in the il...