Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
This video exchange captures our existential fight today.
The woman we might call the heritage French woman, a socialist, is willing to surrender her nation out of white guilt. The immigrant from the Congo could not be more French and capitalist, and she has to fight for her livelihood against this evil of white guilt.
What makes the values and principles of the West immensely great is that they were never about color, even when those in the West fell short, but about who was willing to embrace the freedoms in order to have the opportunity to pursue their dreams.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
I’m going to be in conversation with Joe Studwell on Thursday evening. Will be live-streamed on YouTube here - youtube.com/live/hgOl0zGk8ZI…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
Politics is probably the occupation where someone of mediocre intelligence can hope to achieve the greatest level of influence, which creates incentives that are very unfortunate for the public good.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
Think that this tweet and the ones under it are (to me) the most fascinating aspects of China in Africa. Forget all the roads and trains from Chinese investment - this is the one where trade is likely to be a vehicle (or Trojan horse, depending on your taste) for cultural change.
Wrote about it here (open.substack.com/pub/1914re…)
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
My latest with @oliverhanney in IN DEVELOPMENT, on the impact of AI-related job loss in developing countries—most of all, in India's IT services sector
Discourse about AI and job loss is omnipresent right now. But what do we actually know about AI job loss in developing countries?
@oliverwkim and @oliverhanney do (to our knowledge) the first analysis of AI's effects of IT in India in @indevmag: indevelopmentmag.substack.co…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
Since the launch of ChatGPT, the Philippines offshore industry (8% of country’s GDP) has actually grown much bigger.
Employment in IT and business outsourcing is up by +20% to 1.9m workers and industry revenue is up +30% to $42B.
“AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe.”
***
More here: economist.com/asia/2026/08/0…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
The Americas comprise 55 states and territories with permanent populations, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. How many still have a total fertility rate above replacement? Four: Haiti, Guyana, French Guiana, and Saint Martin.
These four hold about 13 million people. The Americas hold about 1.05 billion. So fewer than 1.3% of the hemisphere's population lives in areas where fertility is still above replacement.
The data for Haiti, Guyana, French Guiana, and Saint Martin are not good. Still, most observers working from recent figures put their TFR between 2.4 and 2.6. My guess is that all four will fall below replacement before 2035.
Among the region’s demographic giants, the U.S. now has the highest TFR, ahead of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. This is not a Hispanic effect, though Hispanic fertility is relatively high. The non-Hispanic white TFR in the U.S. exceeds the TFR of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina.
A few observations. First, none of the four holdouts speaks Spanish or Portuguese. Three of them, Haiti, French Guiana, and Saint Martin, are francophone, even if local creoles are more common than standard French. The fourth, Guyana, is anglophone. I stress this because many observers have not noticed that all of Central America, Guatemala and Honduras included, is already below replacement. A quick-and-dirty calculation puts the current TFR of the main language groups in the Americas at Portuguese: 1.5, Spanish: 1.55, English: 1.55, and French: 2.0.
Second, at this rate, the Americas will begin recording more deaths than births around 2040, perhaps sooner. From that point, all population growth will depend on immigration from outside the continent.
Finally, a few caveats. The data for many countries, especially in the Caribbean, are awful. I doubt better data would change any of these conclusions, but I want to be careful. And given how fast the TFR has fallen over the past decade, part of the drop may be a tempo effect. I lean toward those who think tempo will not matter much here, but I may be wrong. And, as always, whenever I can, I use data from each country’s National Institute of Statistics rather than the UN WPP (or databases like the World Bank’s, which rely on it). On a few occasions, to update time series, I built the TFR myself, using past TFR, CBR, and population data as input. While this creates some noise, none of it is particularly important to my arguments.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
"That’s how the winning teams are created nowadays. Socially, ex nihilo."
My today's Substack:
A different game
On football’s extreme commercialization
branko2f7.substack.com/p/a-d…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
Economic growth is literally beautiful
Rwanda at night, 2013 → 2025. Over the same period, electricity access grew from ~19% to 82%.
I built this map using real NOAA VIIRS satellite data, retrieved via Google Earth Engine, and animated it in Python.
i am fascinated by this kind of data visualization and what it means for the future of impact reporting.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
After a long break, I'm back to devposting! I argue that the development econ focus on "institutions" was a mistake – not (just) because the evidence was bad, but because the concept of "good institutions" is tautological and uninformative for policy.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
It will take Malawi 21 years of Chinese-style 7% growth to reach Kenya's current GDP per capita.
There's huge variation in incomes within Sub-Saharan Africa, which often goes ignored.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
Many African countries have a lot to learn from what went wrong in Haiti, which this article summarizes. It’s by @KayTiKal
An excellent post by Carl-Henri Prophete
(Haiti should be one of the most interesting countries to study: its decline from relative prosperity, early independence, and high land ownership to poverty and export of labor is a great study case in what went wrong.)
My Totally Accurate Model of What Happened to Haiti
substack.com/home/post/p-195…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
An excellent post by Carl-Henri Prophete
(Haiti should be one of the most interesting countries to study: its decline from relative prosperity, early independence, and high land ownership to poverty and export of labor is a great study case in what went wrong.)
My Totally Accurate Model of What Happened to Haiti
substack.com/home/post/p-195…
Excellent piece on how export-led growth can help the world's poorest.
"But consider what the world actually needs: not more development consultants, but more exporters without borders—people willing to trade the conference circuit for the factory floor, who go to places where formal employment barely exists and build the supply chains that bring it into being."
indevelopmentmag.com/exporte…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
Vietnam is a great example.
Vietnam used to be a command economy, but during the 1980 & 1990 Doi Moi reforms, while still socialist, Vietnam took 2 IMF loans (including a structural adjustment in 94), made market reforms, and is now a fast growing "Market Socialist" economy.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
In this piece, I collaborate with Africatalyst on the distinction between aesthetic modernity (visible highways) vs Institutional modernity (invisible sewage systems)
open.substack.com/pub/africa…
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
EVERYTHING CHANGES TODAY.
SUPPORT US.
REPOST.
SHARE OUR STORY.
STAND WITH US AS WE MAKE HISTORY.
YOUR SHARE CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING.
PUSH THIS BEYOND YOUR FEED.
HELP US GIVE THIS THE ATTENTION IT DESERVES.
THIS IS @3FARMATEBOTS —
GHANA’S FIRST AUTONOMOUS AI-POWERED FARMING ROBOT.
WE LAUNCH TODAY.
“THE FUTURE IS HERE.” 🤖
3farmate.com
tomorrow 23.03.26
everything changes.
we will share with the world a more detailed video highlighting our contribution to agricultural engineering, as we fully unveil Ghana’s first autonomous farming robot (FAMA).
behind this historic milestone is a team of three engineers working across robotics, embedded systems, software, and mechanical design.
we have worked tirelessly to come this far—now standing at the edge of commercialization—and we are proud of what we have achieved as young people inspired by the Nkrumah Pan-African dream. but this is no longer a dream. what we have accomplished is the realization of a vision to turn ideas into tangible, visible outcomes.
@3farmatebots built everything in-house, right here in Ghana; and now, we need your help and support to tell our story to the world.
welcome to the new era of farming.
Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 retweeted
My today's Substack.
To work or not to work
Can nations not work hard and continue to prosper?
branko2f7.substack.com/p/to-…






































