When they talk about development all this talk about GDP growth, foreign investment , ext detracts from the essentials.
What do people need?
1.A roof over their heads(housing)
2.clean water
3. food.
4. a source of income
5.education
Most of development efforts depend on foriegn aid and direction,
why cant we think local, source things locally .
As i see it there are millions of unemployed and uneducated men out there chewing, depending on handouts from relatives abroad and sitting all day talking about politics and qabyalad when there is so much work to be done out there.
That is if you do not have a problem with manual labour.
good old fashioned manual labour is the solution.
Let me start of by throwing some ideas about the first 2.
Housing:
The best solution for somalia is CEB Compressed earth Block
A simpler lever action machine that can even be built by your own hands can produce 3-6 bricks per minute from carefully selected earth from right next to where you build.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_earth_block
There is an open source design that any garage in africa can build from discarded car parts.
you can by them from commercial sources for 15-25000 dollars or from china for half of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_earth_block
school in burkina faso

other examples

