Immigration has become an important issue for the people of the world. Recently there has been wide media coverage of the issue following immigrants’ demonstrations, which flooded the streets in the USA demanding for a relaxed immigration law that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants to live and work in the country. In these demonstrations protesters from Africa and other countries including Native Americans joined thousands of Mexican and Latino protesters expressing their desire for a policy of compassion that would take into consideration basic human rights.

     Millions of people in the world have been forced to leave their countries of origin, and live as immigrants in Europe, Canada, the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The highest number of immigrants lives in Europe, Africa and North America respectively.

     The continent of Africa is characterized by problems of poverty, disease and ignorance, social unrest and lack of democratic traditions. Although efforts undertaken in the past have introduced some positive changes, Africa still has along way to go to overcome the problems of underdevelopment. For Africa to live in peace, democracy and prosperity, a series of efforts need to be undertaken in the political, social, economic and cultural fields.

     Toward this end, it is imperative to empower the youth in order to bring about a behavioral change necessary for the realization of the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The aim of the Millennium is, of course, to reduce poverty by half, ensure universal quality education, gender equality and reduce mortality rate and halt the spread of HIV/AIDS and achieve environmental sustainability by 2015.

Corruption has become a serious problem in Africa and elsewhere in the World. People often wonder how the billons of dollars of development aid pumped into the countries of Africa have not alleviated the development problems of the people. Africa still languishes in poverty. Famine, disease and ignorance are still rampant in most parts of Africa.

On the other hand, democracy has become the buzzword for African governments to get foreign economic assistance to support their country’s budget. In many countries of Africa, the funds received as development aid are not accountable. Since the fund is given as direct budgetary aid to governments, there is no mechanism to control how the funds are managed because it is the government of that particular country, which has the upper hand to redirect the fund according to its political priorities.