The Return of Africa’s Strongmen

which is very relevant to SMEs, the driving force for about 98%+ of economic activity, jobs, tax revenues etc and the economic progress to increase the standard of life, you don't really see language as a variable. (and it's a pretty comprehensive report).

I mean, how bad is it, really? Most countries have multiple languages, but also a single official language. I've been to Africa many times and due to its colonial history French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, they get you pretty far in most places. In my own city we have over 175 nationalities, but communication is never a problem. It would be a mistake for an outsider who never visited to look at that number and then claim it's the origin of any particular problem in the city without any extra information. So I'm genuinely interested if you know of any studies that show the language diversity is a stifling issue.

Here's a couple posts (from an unexpected source) that go into depth on these kind of numbers, and the things that come up when you take seriously the assumptions that went into generating them and seeing where that leads.

http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-we...

http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mustachianism-around-the-we...

""" On the subject of famine it is also important to have some perspective regarding the incredible pressures the communist countries were subjected to, and the desperate programs of industrialization they were forced to adopt. From the outset, the west was intensely hostile to communism and placed it under perpetual threat of military defeat. This was true from the early invasion of the newly declared USSR by WWI allied governments, to the runup to and ultimate defeat of Nazism by the Soviet Union, to the Cold war, to the western backing of the Nationalist government in China, to Eisenhower's threats of catastrophic nuclear retaliation against China during the 1950s. In every case, it was absolutely imperative that the communist governments industrialize as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible, costs be damned. In the USSR, the wisdom of the industrialization policy was proven by the defeat of fascism in 1945; but throwing every possible hour of labor into industrialization meant that other aspects of the economy were neglected and catastrophic mistakes like the famine in Ukraine could occur. The exact same motivation and consequence were what caused the Great Leap Forward and the famine associated with it."""

Note that this is very different than the famines we know about that were actually engineered by a government, such as, to pick just one example, the Bengal Famine of 1943 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)