What do YOU think of this Big Idea? Check out this Sunday Times article:Tycoon sets out to save Africa
BYLINE: Grant Ringshaw
Business Section of the Times
October 29, 2006
Telecom's billionaire Mo Ibrahim wants to fight corruption by offering an annual prize of $5m to the best political leader on the continent. Grant Ringshaw reports
SEATED on a Versace sofa in his seven- storey Mayfair townhouse, Mo Ibrahim does not look like a man who spares much thought for the problems afflicting Africa.
But he does care about the continent -with real passion and hard cash. This week, Ibrahim, a 60-year-old Sudan-born British citizen and telecoms billionaire, unveiled an ambitious initiative to foster and reward good government in Africa, where 300m people still earn less than $1 (53p) a day.
He has set up a foundation to award a $5m annual prize -$500,000 a year for a decade -to the former African head of a democratic state who has shown outstanding leadership by delivering health, education, security and economic progress.
It is an extraordinary commitment by the man who made a fortune selling Celtel, his pan-African telecoms company, last year for $3.4billion.
The prize, funded entirely by Ibrahim, is the world's biggest -far larger than the £ 800,000 scooped by the winner of the Nobel peace prize. On top of the $5m, each winner will get $200,000 a year for life at the end of the 10-year period. The overall running costs of the award are expected to soar to $20m annually after a few years.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation uses the very thing that has corrupted so many leaders in Africa -money. But this time the power of money is being used as a force for good.
Ibrahim said that "nothing, simply nothing, is more important to African development than good governance".
Read the rest of the article at LexisNexis
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