LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Africa: World
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Despite disease and low life expectancy, the population of Africa continues to increase at a rate disproportionate to the rest of the world. The rate of population increase is significantly greater than other tropical areas. The result of this high fertility rate is that a disproportionate percentage of the population is under the age of 15. Because this portion of the population is mostly not economically productive, this reality further hampers economic progress.
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In Namibia, in one of the most desolate regions of Africa, lives the Himba tribe, one of the last tribes trying to maintain a traditional way of life. With the modern world pressing in on them and the real menace of HIV/AIDS, the Himba find their situation threatened from all sides.
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According to DATA, Africa has lost 6% of world trade since the 1970s. If they could regain just 1% of that, Africa would earn $70 billion a year. They currently receive only $22 billion a year in aid.
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These foods are endangered by "botanical colonialism," the export system of "cash crops" and "one-crop agriculture" imposed on West Africa and the rest of the continent by European colonialism. In addition, "structural adjustment programs" of the 1980s, designed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to increase the role of exports in the economy and reduce Africa's deepening debt crisis, have actually intensified low agricultural productivity for domestic consumption. Poor families, in an effort to meet urgent food needs, often intensively cultivate lands and forests for subsistence or exports, frequently in areas that once yielded ancient crop species or medicinal plants, or those that are sometimes erosion-prone, where crop yields drop severely after a couple of years. Food shortages, famine, disease, and widespread poverty are the result.
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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Feb. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- IFESH, The International Foundation for Education and Self-Help, has received a $900,000 grant from The World Bank Group to expand its child soldier repatriation programs in The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Africa. Those programs help counsel and train children, some as young as eight or nine years old, who were forced to become child soldiers in order to survive.
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The oldest existing art from Africa are 6,000-year old carvings found in Niger, while the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was the world's tallest architectural accomplishment for 4,000 years until the creation of the Eiffel Tower. The Ethiopian complex of monolithic churches at Lalibela, of which the Church of St. George is representative, is regarded as another marvel of engineering.
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