Editor,

RE: "Experts underline solutions to migration crisis in Africa” (The New Times, July 16).

For the economic cure to work, it needs to be participatory. For example, projects need to be designed such that social, cultural, environmental and infrastructural factors are balanced.

We find many instances for example where new apartments built for slum-dwellers actually deprive them of the little livelihood they had. That they are not coming from a certain lack of African confidence that seems to think that:

• All solutions, heavily dependent on monetary capital, have to come from outside Africa;• Everything has to be done by the "book”, written in the West. The trickle-down theory, which turned out to be a 1929 stand-up comedian’s joke (he meant the rich urinating on the poor below hem) devastated Africa in the "80’s and 90’s during World Bank prescriptions (Go back to Cheick Anta Diop and his culture based "Black Africa: the economic and cultural basis for a federated state "written in 1960 and similar works by other Africans, continental and diaspora);• The neglect of African civilization and mistaken belief that development equals westernization and he somewhat insulting modernization.

Anthony Kariuki Kiragu