 I'm a journalist. My business is narrative. We need a new narrative for Africa. I think it's clear. This is the winning poster chosen by the United Nations for a competition to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals. It's some clever graphic design. The point is clear. At the top, you have the world leaders of the G8. You can tell because that's Angela Merkel there. And at the bottom, you have, well, Africa. We are shoeless. We are headless. We are voiceless. And as a tagline points out, we are still waiting. Still waiting. Now, this doesn't conform to anything I've seen in the time I've spent living, writing, working, and reporting about Africa. My mom came to visit me here in Nairobi. We were traveling to Uganda first thing in the morning. Traveling to the airport, we saw hundreds of people by the side of the road. And my mom turned to me and she said, where's everybody going? I told her they were walking to work. Behind this image, you actually have a continent full of people, not tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, who get up before dawn to plant crops to feed their family. That's the story we need to be telling. The question is why we don't hear more of that. I believe it's because people like me, journalists, economists, development specialists, and practitioners, spend a lot of time thinking about our formal institutions and our formal solutions, when the most interesting activity is somewhere else. The informal sector in Africa comprises up to 70% of economic activity in some countries. It's these guys. We call it Joakali here in Kenya. You call it Systeme Day in French West Africa. All of this is about selling ice when it's hot, selling umbrellas when it's raining. It's even the guys who made my country, Nigeria, famous for internet scams. It's about making do. And it's something we don't hear because we're too focused on income and gross domestic product, which, I'll remind you, leaves out all of the people who are working as hard as these guys. I've spent the last two years traveling Africa in search of these non-state actors, these creative systems that work around government and are creating solutions. Some of them are old solutions to old problems. These women in Mozambique have a very novel system for dealing with childcare. The woman with the youngest child takes care of everyone else's child so that everyone can work and benefit. Some solutions are more high-tech for more complicated problems. Many of you may know about Ushahidi, which was born here in Kenya as a response to post-election violence in 2008. What's important about Ushahidi is not the technology, but the network. I traveled to Nigeria last April for the election, where Ushahidi was being deployed. And the folks at Ushahidi knew the network mattered, but they couldn't figure out how to get information about who to text to so many people at once. Where did they go? They went to the tailors. They went to the welders. They went to the hairdressers. They went to the boat-a-boat-a-bicycle guys, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. These groups were already organized into trade associations with membership that paid dues and that could be deployed much faster and much further than a traditional formal network such as government. When you start to look at Africa's informal sector, more than you look at its formal statistics, you start to see really dynamic solutions. Dahab Shil is a money transfer service that's based in Somalia and around the world. Now Somalia, as many of you know, is an officially failed state. It hasn't had a government for 20 years, but an innovative business plan combined with a committed diaspora and a local population that wanted to build its country is able to provide financial services to the two in a $500 million a year. Now these solutions are useful for development, but one thing is clear that it's important to remember, you don't need a million dollars to solve these problems. This is one of my favorites. This guy, as a journalist, is also informally trained but has an analog blog. He works in Liberia on the streets of Monrovia. This was taken during their election last fall and every day he writes about what's going on and people stand and they read and they talk. A third space has developed that's not virtual because Intranet Access in Liberia is still spotty. The point of all of this is that these formal institutions may matter to the West, but they do not matter so much in Africa and if we can find a way to leverage them, we can do more. I'll leave you with a final example of how Africa works around and works differently. In Kenya, giving directions is not a matter of saying I'm going to one, two, three state street. Rather, you say, look for the petrol station. Look for the yellow building. Take a left and then ask someone. Now, in development, when you believe in formal systems and you expect an address, you miss the fact that there's more than one way to get from point A to point B. When you focus on formal institutions, you forget what Africa does best. It's as E.F. Schumacher, who is an evangelist for appropriate technology, says, a man who tries an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all. Thank you.