Real Women 2009

Meet the founder of MyAfricanDiasporpa.com

Veronica’s 20 year IT career came to an end when her inner writer and entrepreneur inexplicably besieged her to give it all up. In her dreams, she is an international best-seller, penning her masterpieces from the shores of Africa. But in the meantime, she now spends her days writing, managing her websites and polishing up her rusty programming skills. In 2007, she traced her African ancestry to Sierra Leone and launched www.myafricandiaspora.com – a news and information website aimed at reconnecting the African diaspora. Born in Brooklyn, NY, she now calls Las Vegas, NV home. Visit Veronica at www.veronicawrites.com.

After Veronica and her partner traced their African ancestry and began researching West African culture, they ran across the Ghanian Adinkra symbols, which was the first product launched under their Kindred Gear line: www.zazzle.com/kindredgear – Afrocentric tshirts

Veronica’s short story “My Soul to free” was inspired by a trip to the Bunce Island slave castle in Sierra Leone. It was published by Expanded Horizons: http://expandedhorizons.net/magazine/?page_id=820

Dambisa Moyo

Dambisa Moyo was born and raised in Zambia, Southern Africa. She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters from Harvard University. She completed a Bachelors degree in Chemistry and MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington D.C..

She worked at Goldman Sachs for 8 years in the debt capital markets, hedge fund coverage and in global macroeconomics teams. Previously she worked at the World Bank in Washington D.C.. Dambisa is a member of the Boards of Lundin Petroleum and SAB Miller.

Dambisa is a Patron for Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), a hedge fund supported children’s charity. She serves on the Boards of the Lundin for Africa Foundation and Room to Read, an educational charity.
Dambisa argues for more innovative ways for Africa to finance development including trade with China, accessing the capital markets, and microfinance.

Dambisa has also been offered a contract for another book, entitled How the West Was Lost, scheduled for publication with Penguin and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2010. This book examines the policy errors made in the US and other Western economies which culminated in the 2008 financial crisis. And discusses why financial and economic experts missed the signs of the credit crunch. It also explores the policy decisions that have placed the emerging world- China, Russia and the Middle East, in pole position to become the dominant economic players in the 21st century.

Visit Dambisa’s website.

The New World Financial Order

Vanessa M. Cross, LL.M., Dr. Juris.

Tight credit and an increase in the price of commodities are not just impacting U.S. and E.U. market economies. The credit squeeze has had a rippling impact on developing and emerging economies. The African Trade Network (ATN), a coalition of trade related advocacy groups, has expressed worry about the imbalance in trade between the north and south. Fifty delegates from across Africa gathered in Accra, Ghana in August 2008 for the ATN’s 11th annual meeting. There, they openly acknowledged the impact of the U.S. financial, fuel and food crisis on African markets.

According to the ATN, the impact of the U.S. economic crisis has caused multinationals to speculate in the global market against the potential of a rise in commodity prices. According to Dzodzi Tsikata, a research fellow at the University of Ghana, cultivatable lands in Africa allocated for the production of various cash crops like cocoa is rapidly being taken over by international trade partners in a growing speculative market. The concern voiced was whether multinationals would effectively re-colonize Africa for food production where growing numbers of African farmers are enticed with money to sell off their lands to international trade partners.

Couple this with a recent Camp Davis visit in the U.S. by Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France. This visit marked a call by the Europeans for a global summit that sounds curiously like a Bretton Wood II. According to an October 19, 2008 Financial Times report, U.S. President Bush stated that he looked forward to convening a meeting in the “near future” in what he calls a move to “preserve the foundation of democratic capitalism.” Though there is no concrete information on when or where the summit will be, now is the time to determine who should be parties to this major global summit on regulating the global markets.
Bretton Woods, a site in New Hampshire, Connecticut, is where in July 1944, the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held after the end of World War II.

The Conference resulted in the Bretton Woods Agreement that established the International Monetary Funds (IMF) and the World Bank. Forty-four nations were represented at the Bretton Woods Conference. Thirty-five of the 44 nations signed the necessary multilateral treaties by the December 31, 1945 deadline. The World Bank, now with 185 member nations or sovereign shareholders, makes loans from its capital when private funds are not available in the global markets on reasonable terms. The five largest shareholders include the United States (16.9%), Japan (8.1%), Germany (4.6%), France (4.4%), and the United Kingdom (4.4%).

Furthermore, the IMF’s main mission has been to promote international monetary cooperation, stabilize exchange rates, and assist in removing barriers imposed on international payments by countries through currency restrictions. Like the World Bank, there are 185 member nations in the IMF. Member nations may borrow from the fund to meet temporary deficits in their international payments to maintain imports and avoid currency devaluation during financial difficult times. Both Bretton Woods institutions have had a huge influence on global economies.

A call to include Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC, in any 2008 summit conveyed to plan further regulating the global financial markets has already sounded among global financial analyst. The so-called emerging economies counted among African, Caribbean, Pacific, and South American nations were also not represented in 1944 and there has been no call for their inclusion in a future global summit. In fact, they are now positioned for exclusion though they account for a human population of over 700 million.

The issue should be to what degree emerging and developing economies should be included in creating a new global regulatory regime. The African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, an organization founded in 1975 and now comprising 48 sub-Saharan African countries, 16 Caribbean countries, and 15 Pacific nations, met in Lagos, Ghana on October 2 for a two day summit. Reaching out to organizations such as ACP starts the dialogue on how to include the voice of emerging economies in a future global summit.

The global crisis of 2008 is not the same as the global crisis of 1944. In 1944, European countries still effectively held the rest of the world as colonies. In America, a Black man running as a viable candidate for the U.S. presidency would have been an absurd idea for the times. The language has changed. The times have changed. Now, the so-called developed nations must change their thinking about who should be included in the dialogue on regulating globalize financial institutions.

Vanessa M. Cross, LL.M., Dr. Juris, is an international lawyer and U.S. attorney-at-law with the Law Offices of Vanessa Cross in Memphis, Tennessee, USA (www.vanessacross.com).
She can be reached at vcross@lawyer.com

Living like Roommates

By: Bernice Angoh

So many couples today live like roommates. A couple who were once inseparable, have now almost separate bedrooms, separate lives and they live like strangers. Are you in one of such relationships? Has it gone sour and you don’t know what to do? Are you stuck? Do you feel trapped and frustrated? Is she/he different from the person you used to date? Do you even recognize the person lying next to you?. If this is you, don’t be alarmed, you are one a million couples who have no place to turn. The trick is to turn towards and not away from each other. It is easy to turn away rather than the other way round. It is safe to risk destroying your relationship than facing the facts about what is not working and what needs to get done. Unfortunately so many of us choose the easy way out: we get too tired and discouraged to even want to fix things.

The goal is not to get to that point of exhaustion and to fix every little issue that comes up at the time when it does. If not, it will be like hiding trash underneath the carpet instead of taking it out to the trash.
One day, that growing dirt underneath the carpet will start to sip out and stink. When it starts to stink, no one wants to touch it, they want to move, buy a new house, change town, change ‘roommates’, and they do.

Communication is the key to a healthy relationship. How many times have you heard this? How many times have you turned away saying “Yeah, but he never listens to me”. We, women, love to be heard but we often don’t like to listen. We hear but we don’t listen. While our man is talking, we are busy looking for the next point in his ‘speech’ we’d like to comment on or what to say next to disprove the point he just made. We have a conversation in our heads when someone is talking to us.

I am guilty of that and so are many other women. Women are dying for the need to be heard but they don’t give it accordingly in return. What we say is usually right and that’s that. I have learned that men are very simple beings. Men want three basic things; Food, Sex and Respect (which is a product of love). I am not saying men are free of their own faults, they’re not. There are many men out there who are as guilty as there are women. Since this is a magazine for women and me being part of the clan, I am writing from a woman’s perspective.

Respect is also very important in a relationship. The rule is to do unto others what you want done unto you; it couldn’t be any more simplified. Learn how to put yourself into your partner’s shoes, it is a hard trait to learn, but once it is, things will begin to change tremendously in your relationship. Men and women alike deserve and love to be respected. It makes you feel special that someone would care deep enough to put themselves in your place and see things through your eyes. That is love.

Food and sex go hand in hand for men. A hungry man is an angry man; an undersexed man is an angry man. One fills the stomach, the other fills the heart. Women need to feel close to a man to have sex with him, men on the other hand, feel closer to a woman when they have sex with her(This point should be made clear: this is about people in a serious long-term relationship, not those who go around having casual sex)..
What to do to avoid starting to live like roommates?

1) Talk about every issue and resolve it or reach a compromise.

2) Make it a rule never to go to bed mad at each other.

3) Respect your partner and treat them like you would like them to treat you.

4) Go for dates, plan times for intimate sessions and have fun while you do it.

5) Find something you both like to do and set a time each week to do it.

6) What are your goals that match, is it something you can both accomplish together?

7) Read to each other.

8.) Love each other. Love, is to love someone in spite of them. Choosing to stay even when you know you can live without them.

9) Don’t be dependent, don’t become a burden, an emotional roller coater, you will drive your partner insane.

10) Change you and stop trying to change the other person. It works like magic.

Enjoy and build memories with each other, you have only one life so stop living like roommates and start living like soulmates.

Official Launching of the Black European Women’s Council in Brussels

(Joyce van Genderen-Naar Lawyer/journalist Brussels)

The Official Launching of the Black European Women’s Council (BEWC) took place on Tuesday 9th September at the premisses of the European Economic and Social Committee, Rue Van Maerlant 2, 1040 Brussels.

It was organised by AFRA – International Center Black Women’s Perspectives, Wien, Austria (in the framework of the European Year of Equal Opportunities for ALL,Vienna, September 2007) and Tiye International (Holland) under the leadership of Beatrice Achakele (AFRA) and Hellen Felter (TIYE) and facilitated by Brenda King, President of the Section for Employment, Social Affairs and Citizenship of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). www.blackwoncenter.org, www.bewnet.eu

For the first time in EU history black women, the majority coming from ACP countries and living all over Europe (Austria, Sweden, Ireland, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland) united and launched the black European Women’s Council in Brussels to become visible and take on the responsability to be active as European citizens in politic, economic and social life.

The stories were similar: about discrimination, racism, unequality, invisibility, struggle to survive and to be recognized. In some countries it is even worse than in others, like in Greece where black people can not be appointed in public jobs; in Switzerland where there is structural violence against women and courts refuse to recognize racism; in Italy where there is a terrifying women traffic; in Ireland where descendants from Africa who want to buy a house have to do a HIV-test before they can get a mortgage. But also in France, the UK, Austria, Germany and especially in Belgium and Brussels, the capital of Europe and the heart of the EU institutions, where black people and migrants are invisible and underrepresented everywhere. The BEWC stated that black women do not want to be victims anymore but actors who participate in all EU structures.

The EU commissioner Vladimir Spidla attended the launching and gave his support to this initiative. The multiple discrimination against black women has to be tackled by implementing existing rules and sanctions. Members of Parliament speeched and support the Black European Women’s Council. HUMAN RIGHTS 18 million black people in the EU, many descendants from ACP countries, are struggling for equal opportunties and economic, social and human rights. This is a serious and urgent issue. ‘Reaffirming Human Rights for All’ that was the theme of the conference that was held from 3-5 September 2008 in Paris UNESCO Headquarters at the occasion of 60 years Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The conclusion was that human rights are at stake because of the international trading system and economic situation today with its energy and foodcrisis. Human rights have to come first, they concern the integrity of each human being. Economic and social situations may never be an excuse to exploit people. 1400 representatives from 74 countries attended the 61 annual United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI)/Non- Governmental Organisations (NGO) in Paris.

They discussed the situation of the human rights in the world today 60 years after the Universal Declaration was concluded. The final conclusion was that there is not enough awareness and knowledge about the meaning of human rights, that there has to be more education, information and capacity building, especially among lawyers to safeguard the implementation of the Human Rights.