Oluyomi Ola-David Insights

The experience of countries around the world indicates the relationship that subsists between industrial development and economic growth on one hand and with environmental degradation on the other hand.  Given the myriad challenges of environmental degradation and climate change, current policy advocacy centre on strengthening legal, regulatory and political institutions that guide domestic and international investment activities. i Further, discussions on a Post-2015 development agenda brought to fore issues of economic, social and environmental sustainability.  For instance, with respect to international capital movements, in as much as foreign direct investment (FDI) holds the promise of positive externalities, there is also the tendency that FDI may induce negative externalities (pollution, natural resource degradation, inadequate protection of worker health and safety, and complicity in the violation of human rights all of which confound the tenets of sustainable development

A frica’s demographics, emergent middle class and rich natural resource endowments has made it a toast of trade and investment, with traditional partners in Europe and emerging partners from global south. Notably, the structure of Africa post-colonization has been toward resource extraction and being feeders for developed countries’ industries.  However, as south-south cooperation deepens, new models of development assistance, trade and investment are emerging. In the past, development assistance held most African countries bound to the whims and caprices of their respective western donors, mostly OECD countries.  Also, most of the bilateral and multilateral development assistance to developing countries came with stringent conditionalities, such as the structural adjustment programme (SAP), which produced a long term backwash effect. Consequently, for many low-income as well as post-conflict and fragile African states, aid-dependency is still a present reality. 

At different points in time, while exercising my pedestrian rights walking through zebra crossings on a serene campus, I have almost been knocked down by moving vehicles!  Sometimes other ‘ignorant and unlearned’ motorists yell out at your effrontery to walk through a zebra crossing when you can see them approaching!    At other times I have also noted the plight of several pedestrians who ‘love their lives’ having to wait at zebra crossings while impatient motorists drive by.  Interestingly, I recently read incidences of disregard for the road culture of giving pedestrians the right of way at zebra crossings in Egypt, as documented by an Egyptian blogger.  Thinking on these recurrent phenomena, I question the effectiveness of training offered at driving schools in instilling civil road behaviour. Whereas in some developed societies, the process of obtaining a driver’s license is one of the ‘biggest deals’ ever, for some African countries, especially Nigeria, the giant

Small business growth has been widely acknowledged an engine of economic growth and industrialization, from highly industrialized countries to South East Asian exemplars. Accordingly, empirical evidence is replete which show the essence of entrepreneurship development in the proliferation of small and medium scale enterprises.  European governments, in the wake of the Euro zone crisis and beyond, perceive entrepreneurship as a vehicle of job creation and steady economic growth, and provide supportive policies to foster entrepreneurship development.  Also, there are a number of conceptual models that link government initiatives for entrepreneurship education with poverty alleviation. Besides, i n countries of Africa where the rate of population growth oversteps employment growth, promoting entrepreneurship is both desirable for employment creation and as a strategy for poverty alleviation. Consequently, several public policies of African countries have begun to pay incr