It's hard for those of us who work day in and day out, on the ground to fight poverty to see such flippancy and carelessness in the media. This is especially true in this case, where the facts are so easy to ascertain.

Africans have urgent needs, but they have urgent needs for things that work, and many of them have been disappointed by well-intended outsiders in the past.

Amid news reports headlining the summit of a group of 20 of "the world's most powerful economies" in Toronto, Canada, some are wondering: What about the weaker ones?

Tourism in Rwanda helps eradicate poverty and hunger. It makes it possible for more children to go to school. It helps bridge the divide between cultures, not deepen it.

In Rwanda and across Africa, the Millennium Villages project has demonstrated that food scarcity can be all but vanquished if the required resource management, investment and political will are available.

The project has achieved its goal of sustainably reducing poverty in the community, and on that foundation of stability, the community has begun real prosperity-creation projects.

Poverty in Africa will be eliminated not by aid, but by entrepreneurial job creation, by real entrepreneurs creating scalable enterprises that will ultimately create millions of jobs.

The deaths of African children are all about food, water and cooking stoves. There is usually no public health system in place to address this tragic litany of otherwise very approachable issues.