KENYA: Credit key to breaking cycle of poverty

This is all fine if consumer credit, which is killing Americans, isn't included.

Besides education, health and good infrastructure, access to credit ranks high among the priorities of millions of Kenyans living in informal settlements in urban and rural areas.

Even small amounts can be enough to break out of the poverty trap.

"I started this business of selling chips [French fries] two years ago using money we raised as a group of 30 women," Mary Mwihaki, 27, a resident of Mathare, one of Kenya's large slum areas in the capital Nairobi, told IRIN.

Every day, each of the women in Mwihaki's group contributes Sh20 (30 US cents) and the resulting Sh600 ($9) is given to a different member of the group on a rotating basis. Mwihaki had to wait three months to raise the $27 she needed.

Please read the snippet again and look at the amounts of money these people are working with.

Then its fine to cry.

Via Reuters.

US gives Kenya $12.7 mln to help graft fight

This shit writes itself. Halliburton's and Parsons' pockets are full?

The United States has given Kenya $12.7 million to stop graft in government procurement, which has traditionally offered the richest pickings for corruption, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya said on Friday.

It is the first positive signal to Kenya from a Western government after years of criticism by donors about how President Mwai Kibaki's administration has handled the battle against graft, a daily fact of life for most Kenyans.

"It reflects our judgment that Kenya is making progress in fighting corruption. We hope this will reinforce those efforts and give them momentum," U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger told reporters.

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Evangelicals try to keep ancient skeleton in closet

Turkana Boy
Well, yeah, if you just ignore science it may go away.

Deep in the dusty, unlit corridors of Kenya’s national museum, locked away in a plain looking cabinet, is one of mankind’s oldest secrets.

Turkana Boy, as he is known, is the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found, hailed by scientists as one of the world’s most famous fossil finds.

But his first public display later this year is at the heart of a growing storm - one pitting scientists against Kenya’s powerful and popular evangelical Christian movement.

The debate over evolution – once largely confined to the United States – has arrived in a country known as the cradle of mankind.

“I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it,” says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of the country’s 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims has around 10 million followers.

“These sorts of silly views are killing our faith.”

He’s calling on his flock to boycott the exhibition and has demanded the museum relegate the fossil collection to a back room – carrying some kind of warning that evolution is not a fact.

Can you say geocentric? Yeah, I thought you could.

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