[ExI] Africa wants to double in size

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 3:34 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> BillK, a recent development has fired my imagination.  I have been aware of many of Africa’s problems for a long time, and pondered how we in the west can help (and profit of course (hey, capital makes things happen.))  Africa has repeatedly tried to build something analogous to a western power grid, but this takes a lot of copper, and thieves come with wire cutters.  I am friends with a former African missionary who describes bringing in a bunch of western building materials, couldn’t get a local crew, imported a group of builders, set up what looks like a small but modern western clinic.  There was civil unrest, the westerners had to get scarce, they came back a coupla years later, couldn’t find a trace of the building.  Everything had been taken apart, gone.

In a nutshell, that seems to be one of their biggest problems: need
and greed are so endemic and primal, that in many places you just
can't set up infrastructure, even local infrastructure.  And thus, the
people continue to suffer the problems that we'd just casually set up
infrastructure to solve, trusting that people would largely let it be.

One might consider this to be an aspect of crushing poverty that is
experienced by the masses.  Okay, so, how does one fix mass crushing
poverty before infrastructure can be set up?