Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and Dwarfnumerous schools, train and pay teachers, built maternity wards and children’s clinics andpay obstetricians, paediatricians, children’s nurses or at least midwives. A labor market ina country without fast economic growth is filled with a mass of frustrated young men andwomen waiting around for any opportunity to earn an income.The roadsides in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Kampala and all other African cities are full ofpeople like this. Some of them will not be able to resist the lure of criminal gangs, some ofthe women drift into prostitution in order to earn some money and become a vector for thespread of venereal diseases, while a number may start to rebel and revolt. In such a flammablesocial environment a small impulse may serve as a spark starting a fire which is difficultto extinguish. Therefore, a mass of frustrated youths costs society a lot: what is savedon schools is diverted towards the police and the army to suppress unrest and uprisings. Inthe process the natural resources of the country are disappearing in order to feed too manyhungry mouths, the forests are cut down, poor soils are exhausted of minerals, rivers, lakesand coastal seas suffer from overfishing and water levels in aquifers are declining.Population growth cannot be sustained in the long term 13 and fast population growthcan only be sustained for a short time. Sooner or later the limits are reached, as can be seenin the broad belt of the Sahel stretching from Mauretania and Mali in the west as far asSomalia in the east of the African continent. Africa, neither her people nor her ecosystemscan prosper with unchecked population growth. This does not apply only to Africa, but alsoto the rest of the world. Is this reality reflected in development aid strategies? We shall lookfor the answer in the following chapters.13 Readers are recommended to see the lecture by Professor Albert Bartlett of University of Colorado titled“Arithmetic, Population and Energy” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY). The lecture wasdescribed as “the most important video you’ll ever see” and it may well be the most popular lecture aboutmathematics, which, at the time of writing this book, had been seen by more than 4.7 million people.24