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The article offers information on voting trend in Africa. It mentions that ruling parties find it easier to corral old, poor and rural voters, as compared to young and rich vote. It also mentions that Kimuli Kasara of Columbia University and Pavithra Suryanarayan of Johns Hopkins University, who surveyed voting patterns in poor countries, many of them in Africa, found that the poorest fifth of citizens tended to vote more assiduously than the richest fifth.

The article discusses the move by African countries to improve their welfare state schemes. Some governments have developed their social safety-nets to expand the number of people covered by their welfare programmes. The effect of welfare state schemes on poor Africans' expectations of their governments is discussed, as well as the challenge of removing the schemes in the future.

The article focuses on the lack of efforts to persuade poor people, particularly in Africa, to change their cooking method from wood and charcoal to cleaner fuels like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and electricity. Topics include the negative health effects of household smoke produced by burning primitive solid fuels, the factors that influenced the poor change in cooking methods including weak markets and shortage of jambaar stoves, and the need to improve promotion of clean fuel for cooking.

The article focuses on economic and infrastructure development on Angola in 2012. It states that Angola's economic success is a result of oil exports and mentions it is Africa's second-largest oil producer after Nigeria. It comments most of Angolans are poor, with 40 percent undernourished and a third of adults illiterate. It mentions that the political party People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola has run Angola for 37 years and talks about parliamentary elections on August 31, 2012.

Discusses the idea of microcredit lending, which are small loans given to poor people to set up or expand business. Details of African communities, which use microcredit organizations; Local problems of microfinance, including diseases in Africa; How organizations have encouraged poor borrowers to form groups to cross-guarantee each other's loans; Success of microcredit.

The article anticipates demographic shifts in Africa, reporting that the population of Lagos, Nigeria will exceed that of Cairo, Egypt in 2013. Topics include the construction industry in Africa, job creation, the poor, improvements in public transportation, and the impact that first-time voters could have on African elections in 2013.

The article comments on the views of Jeffrey Sachs, head of the United Nations "Millennium Project". Mr Sachs admits that foreign aid has not achieved much in the past. Development aid has failed to stimulate much development. Lavishly aided countries have grown no faster than those that have been neglected. This is one reason why rich countries refuse to give much. Though most have promised to donate 0.7% of gross national income, the average for the richest 22 countries is 0.25%. David Dollar and Lant Pritchett, among others, have dug up solid evidence that aid, when directed towards poor countries with sound economic policies and competent institutions, tends to accelerate growth and lift people out of poverty. In a study published earlier this year, Mr Sachs looks at tropical sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty seems most intractable, and challenges the popular idea that this is mostly down to poor governance. He cites other obstacles to Africa's growth, such as its extraordinary disease burden, the lack of deep ports and navigable rivers, the infertility of much of its soil and the colonial legacy of borders that slice the continent into lots of tiny nations with negligible markets and too little sense of nationhood to remain stable. Mr Sachs envisages funnelling most of the money through national governments, who would have to train many more teachers, engineers, nurses and other professionals, and then persuade the best of them not to emigrate to rich countries. Mr Sachs's grand plan depends on there being plenty of governments in poor countries that are clean and competent enough to be entrusted with a sudden infusion of free money.

The article contends that Africa is the only continent in the poor world where people ended the 1980s worse off than they were at the start. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are convenient targets. The typical African grumble against them runs thus: from their plush offices in Washington, these institutions make life miserable for Africans, so that African governments can take out loans which they are then unable to repay. Most of the Bank's economists say that Africa's performance has been disappointing not because the gospel is wrong, but because it has not been properly implemented. The Bank's other defense is that some of its recent studies on Africa- of which there are horribly many- suggest that the closing years of the 1980s did indeed see stronger growth and lower inflation in the countries it lent to. Most of all, governments must not feel that the Fund and Bank have trampled on their sovereignty.