For years Dayo Olopade struggled to reconcile the media's image of Africa as warring, impoverished and pitiful with the Africa she's known since childhood: resilient, joyful and innovative, a continent of impassioned community leaders. She reports first-hand on the explosion of commercial opportunities and technological innovations that are improving outcomes for families, children and the environment.
The Bright Continent joins the conversation started by authors such as Jeffrey Sachs, Nicholas Kristof and Dambisa Moyo. Olopade rejects stale and ineffectual foreign interventions, arguing that the increasingly globalised challenges the continent faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. In many ways, Africa's model of doing more with less – of working around dysfunctional institutions to establish strong informal networks – can be a powerful model for the rest of the world. Behind the dire headlines, Olopade discovers many convincing rays of hope.