> West Africa could be so much more prosperous if only they would will their way towards it.

I have just spent a year and a half driving through 20 countries in West Africa. [1]

At times I would have agreed with your comments, though lately I have been taking another tact.

The developed world has stress, heart disease, cancer and hundreds of millions of people going to jobs every day they hate with a passion. People have little or no time for family. People have crushing debt. Life expectancy is going down in the USA.

Obviously West Africa is far from perfect, but I think it's very important to realize the Developed World is also far from perfect, and it would be a shame to have West Africa "Develop" into exactly what we have built with all our failings.

Maybe not working 40+ hours a week is OK.

[1] theroadchoseme.com

I'm with you on the absurdity of the West. The isolation, sterility and atomisation of life in large cities (self service checkouts, lack of street life/physicality, laws wrapped in regulations wrapped in rules) is soul destroying.

But we live until 80, our institutions work, we want for little (materially), and trust is higher. So depends on what you value.

Africa doesn't have to emulate anybody. It can move up the human development index any way it pleases, but, for the sake of its people, it must move up.

Do you miss queuing up to withdraw money or check the balance of your bank account? I don't see how self service checkouts are philosophically different from ATMs.

No, I love the convenience! I'm just using it as an example of how we continue to automate away human interaction.

Maybe that's fine. But spend time in Africa or South East Asia where you can't help but interact with people every day (just walking through a city like Bangkok makes you feel alive) and it feels clinical and cold by comparison.

That argument is very similar to the crazy idea that everything was better in the good old days.

We all like to romanticize, but truth is that present life in the developed world is the best it's ever been, anywhere in the world.

Not saying it can't be better, certain the US has issues :)

There are different ways to be a developed country. Canada and the US are similarly developed but Canada has a vastly higher quality of life.

I agree, and actually I came to West Africa after 10 years in Canada.

In many ways, West Africa has a better quality of life than Canada.

(yes, of course there are also many ways it's much, much worse, but it's worth remembering it's not all bad, and we in the West can learn a lot from people who love life more than money and family more than things.)

I have lived and been all over both countries. This is wrong - the quality of life is very similar. Of course, the US has famously higher levels of certain social ills than you'd expect for a country of its wealth, but that's not saying the same thing. Really curious about where your perception of it comes from. Do you live in Canada?

People far enough up the income ladder have a decent quality of life in North Korea

Evidenced by the constant brain drain from the US to Canada to take advantage of that massive increase in quality of life...oh shit wait.

I think you may be over-simplifying and over-generalizing "the African way" in this case. I'm actually surprised that they didn't want to learn the "loop button". Old cassette players even had a "loop button" that some of the not so educated could use. Their unfamiliarity with the computer and its likely "malfunctioning" in the past may be the reason they wanted to keep it as it was. The behaviour of the people is only a symptom in this case.

As for the low hanging fruit, there are many other more urgent areas of focus that bump this down the list - poverty and healthcare being a few [1]. Ghana's democracy is still very young and education hasn't completely permeated every region quite yet. It'll take some time to get where much of the developed world is right now.

[1] - http://www.our-africa.org/ghana/