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Obstacles to progress

Distortions

Negative and stereotypical images of Africa
Why NGOs prefer bad news
“ Reinforcing the sense of economic misery, between May and September 2010 the ten
most-read US newspapers and magazines carried 245 articles mentioning poverty in

Africa, but only five mentioning gross domestic product growth.
***
...the main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have
come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental

organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These
organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on

convincing people how much remains to be done.
As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures create
incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep attention

and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.
***
Stories featuring aid projects often rely on dubious numbers provided by the
organizations.

Take Kibera, a poor neighborhood in Nairobi. A Nexis search of major world publications
found Kibera described as the "biggest" or "largest" slum in Africa at least thirty-four

times in 2004; in the first ten months of 2010 the claim appeared eighty-three times.
Many of those stories focused on the work of one of the estimated 6,000 or more local

and international NGOs working there, and cited population figures that ranged as high
as one million residents.
Recently, however, the results of Kenya's 2009 census were released: according to the

official tally, Kibera has just 194,269 residents.
***
Questionable figures of another sort are to be found in reports on the United Nations
Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets on poverty reduction and other

measures of well-being. UN and NGO officials routinely describe Africa as failing to meet
the goals, and the press routinely writes up this failure.

But some experts, among them Jan Vandemoortele, one of the architects of the MDGS,
have expressed concern that the goals are being misused. He wrote in 2009 that the

MDGS were intended as global targets,but have been improperly applied to individual
countries and regions.