[sighsighsigh]

Sigh. SIGH.

How dare our charity be used for practicalities! We must over-engineer harder! Only our brilliance can save poor, poor Africa!

Same nonsense I've been reading about since the 1800s. The Africans figured out how to deal with public health a long, long time ago: spread your villages and use air and time to isolate outbreaks. This has worked for longer than human history has been recorded. And this technique has survived countless imperial collapses as well.

We simply wish to mold Africa into an urban scheme because we don't know how to bring "progress" without packing millions of people into city blocks. That causes disease spreading, which puts diminishing returns on the urban scheme. There's one city in Africa who loses about 1% GDP from city-based malaria alone.

If you want to over architect something, the net isn't the problem. Learn to engage in feel-good progressivism without the dependency of industrial organization models. Billions of dollars to whoever figures it out first.

[themodelplumber]

As many problems as this particular net situation brings, it would be foolish to step back and blame first world efforts. Further education is sorely needed. As education seeps into these system, corruption and foolish decisions are eventually called to account.

Africa is not a monolithic problem with identical inputs and outputs everywhere. Assistance from first-world countries does actually make a difference, and comes in many, many forms, from medical care to microloans to security assistance and psychological trauma support.