Africa's answers are found down below
■"Neglected Poor in Africa Make Their Own Safety Nets: Neighbors come together to create health insurance cooperatives," by Marc Lacey, New York Times, 28 August 2005, p. A3.
Interesting article on how healthcare networks begin spontaneously in Africa from the bottom up. Governments too corrupt and too weak to do much good, so the people provide for themselves. The poor make their own safety nets in some classic, Hernando DeSoto "informal economic" activity.
Some governments, like Nigeria, try to set up national health care, but people are afraid to join, assuming it will just be a scheme to enrich politicians. They are probably right.
This poor-helping-the-poor approach is what will ultimately lift Africa from its knees. Our job is simply to reformat the bad governments standing between the people and their collective future worth creating. The right kind of incentive-laden aid can work in most instances, and here the Bush Administration's Millennium Challenge Account is a good start. But in certain key instances, we'll need to go in militarily to remove the bad and give the good some time to flourish. We'll also need to build up a local SysAdmin capability that's virtually non-existent (the African Union's peacekeeping troops) at this time.
But make no mistake: we send in the cavalry, we build and man the forts, and the settlers will most definitely come . . . because they're already there—ready and able to provide for themselves if only the minimal security rule sets can be established.
In short, the Big Push that Jeffrey Sachs talks about needn't cost the Core that much.