The avoidable costs of population.
The social and economic consequences of current demographic trends in South Africa are analyzed using the concept of avoidable costs. The author presents projections of the population up to the year 2000 organized under four major categories: executive and managerial; professional; semi-skilled; and the unskilled, peasants, underemployed, and very poor. Comparisons are made with projections for the same four categories for Canada to show the problems faced by South Africa, in that relatively small growth in the first two classes is contrasted to massive growth in the other, and particularly the least privileged, classes. Consideration is given to the implications for the provision of schools and for the labor force. The author concludes that "if a problem is to be tackled at its rootsIn Chipendeke, Zimbabwe, a tiny remote village of a hundred or so simple thatched homes, 20km (12 miles) away from the nearest tarred road, a small, practically hand-built technological revolution has taken place, dramatically transforming the lives of the villagers. In short, the people brought electricity to Chipendeke.

With a little expert help from the charity Practical Action, a handful of local volunteer builders spent 12 gruelling months building their own community micro-hydroelectric plant to harness the power of the water that tumbles down from mountains.

"We had to carry all the pipes, cement, stones, power cables and the generator up the hill to build a dam, mini canal, aqueduct and hundreds of metres of water pipes," the secretary of the hydroelectricity scheme, Noah Sengasenga, explains proudly. "Ninety-five per cent