June 17, 2009: Africa is winning against war and poverty. While Africa is still the site of most of the word's wars, the trend since the early 1990s (when the Cold War ended) has been towards less war and more peace and prosperity. Thus while there were only five democracies in 1991, there are over 25 (depending on how you measure such things) now. At the end of the Cold War, there were 13 wars going on, but now there are only three. Several other countries have a lot of civil disorder, but it's not so massively out of control as in Congo, Somalia and Sudan.

Africa is still beset by corruption, disease and poverty. But while the 1980s were a decade where everything seemed to be going wrong, the first decade of the 20th century has seen most of those trends reverse.