1) C, Nigeria. Hollywood may produce all the blockbusters, and India’s Bollywood has the market cornered when it comes to song and dance, but Nigeria’s Nollywood rakes in cash by churning out low-budget, direct-to-video flicks. Movies are filmed in less than two weeks for about $10,000 to $25,000, edited in a day or two, and sold dirt cheap by street hawkers. With 2,400 films produced every year, the movies pull in nearly $290 million in revenue across Africa.

2) B, 7. The greenback may be weak, but it is still the official currency in East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, and Panama. Guatemala permits use of the dollar and other currencies, but businesses aren’t required to accept them. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar is the de facto currency in many other countries, such as Cambodia, Cuba, and Liberia.

3) C, 42 percent. As wild fish stocks are overexploited worldwide, the percentage of farmed seafood is predicted to rise to more than half of the world’s total in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. Presently, the most farmed seafoods are those that are low on the food chain, such as carp, tilapia, and shellfish. China produced a whopping 70 percent of the world’s farmed seafood in 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available. The world’s top 10 countries for aquaculture are all in Asia, except No. 10, Chile.

4) C, 30 times. West and Central African countries such as Ghana and Guinea-Bissau have become increasingly popular transit points for cocaine trafficked from South America to European countries such as Portugal and Spain. According to the 2008 U.N. World Drug Report , seizures of cocaine in Africa increased from 0.5 metric tons in 2000 to 15 metric tons in 2006. And these numbers surely underestimate the extent of trafficking due to unreported data and weak law enforcement.

5) B, 24. Almost all countries without regular military forces, such as Liechtenstein, Iceland, and Samoa, are landlocked or island countries with small populations. But also on the list are Costa Rica, whose constitution prohibited the armed forces in 1949 in the wake of its civil war; Haiti, whose then president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, demobilized the army in 1995; and Panama, which abolished the military in 1990.

6) C, 61. Using NASA satellite data and estimates of the number of trees typically found in different environments, an ecologist at Evergreen State College in Washington state has calculated that in 2005, there were approximately 400 billion trees on Earth. Divided by a world population of 6.5 billion people at the time, that’s 61 trees per person.

7) B, 12. Women served as the heads of just 12 of the world’s top 500 corporations last year. The group includes Angela Braly of health insurer WellPoint, Patricia Woertz of Archer Daniels Midland, and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo. And though having women in the corner office of just 2 percent of the world’s top businesses is hardly news to celebrate, signs point to an increasing number of cracks in the glass ceiling. In 2005, just six of the top 500 companies were led by women.

8) B, Yomiuri Shimbun . With a circulation of 10 million, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun is the world’s most-read newspaper, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Germany’s Bild ranks as the No. 4 paper with 3.5 million in circulation, and China’s People’s Daily comes in at No. 9 with 2.8 million. Of the world’s top 10 newspapers, five are from Japan, perhaps because Japanese newspapers typically put just 20 percent of their content online.

• The slogan: “The Winner Is Georgia”
  The architect: Bahrain office of London’s M&C Saatchi
  The pitch: Georgia lost decisively in its short war with Russia last summer, but don’t tell that to the government’s PR people. “The Winner Is Georgia” campaign pits the country against other nations—Georgia vs. France, Georgia vs. China, Georgia vs. Australia—and asserts that when it comes to the best place to do business or to visit, Georgia wins—even if not on the battlefield.
• The slogan: “Korea, Sparkling!”
  The architect: New York’s BCA Marketing Communications
  The pitch: In October, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak voiced what many of his citizens privately feared: Their neighbor to the north, Kim Jong Il, was tarnishing South Korea’s reputation among tourists and investors. So, to counter Kim’s moves, South Korea’s spin doctors are pushing an effervescent new slogan to win over skeptics: “Korea, Sparkling!”
• The slogan: “Colombia Is Passion”
  The architect: Independent consultant David Lightle
  The pitch: Cocaine trafficking, guerrillas, and assassinations color much of the world’s view of this war-scarred nation. But as the country’s civil conflict winds down, the Colombian government wants its rep to be among the first things to change. The solution? Play up the people’s passion “for life, for family, for nature, and . . . for peace,” according to the campaign.

O n a recent morning in a village in eastern India, Hirya Devi, a rail-thin woman in a tangerine sari, told a crowd of a few hundred poor laborers how she came to participate in the largest employment program in human history. For two months last year, Devi worked on a government-funded well construction project as part of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which promises 100 days of employment each year to the head of every rural household. Since the program began in 2006, 90 million Indians have been temporarily put to work, usually on road and well construction projects, earning minimum wages of about $1.60 a day.

The program isn’t simply extraordinary because of its scale—though, incredibly, it could affect nearly 70 percent of India’s 1.1 billion citizens. What makes the program truly exceptional is its transparency. Regular, public reviews of all documents—wage cards and bank records, engineers’ reports and work completion papers, for example—ensure that laborers are being paid fairly. If shady practices occur, villagers like Devi can air their grievances at village meetings.

For many of India’s rural poor, access to regular work is a life-changing development. “It’s not the end of poverty,” says Jean Drèze, one of India’s most famous social activists and a chief architect of the program, “but it means the kind of extreme insecurity that people live in today is basically not there anymore.”

What’s more, the program’s attempts at accountability represent a radical, game-changing agenda in a country where local politicians and businessmen often collude for kickbacks. As such, there has been a fair amount of backlash from local leaders, who contend that public access to documents challenges their authority. Many villagers complain bitterly that the program itself has become corrupt.

That’s what brought Devi to the front of the crowd that morning. After two months of hard work, she had been denied her wages by a thieving contractor. “I’m an old woman,” Devi explained. “I don’t have money to go run after government officials.” Although the top district official listened patiently, Devi likely won’t receive her lost wages. No one expects such a large government program to be free of corruption overnight, but the fact that a chauffeur-driven bureaucrat showed up to listen to poor villagers surely suggests that men and women like Devi are learning they are entitled to more than just a handout. — Daniel Pepper

Malcolm Linton/Getty Images

Light it up: Solar use has skyrocketed in poorer countries.

L incoln Dahl, managing director of a company that markets alternative energies to African businesses, recently stepped into a used solar panel shop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He had come in to scope out his competition’s wares. A few of the shop’s solar panels looked stolen, still bearing the nameplates of their original owners. “Theft is a problem,” Dahl says. “We find that to be a compliment—that means that there’s a demand.”

After years of slow growth in solar use, a rash of solar panel theft on five continents suggests that the alternative power source may finally be catching on. Missing panels have been reported this year in Australia, Spain, and the United States, but it’s in the developing world where solar theft has been most glaring. In July, South Africa scrapped a year-old program to install solar-powered traffic lights throughout the country because of their vulnerability to theft. Streetlight panels in Calcutta also went missing, leading city leaders to abandon a plan to expand their use. And throughout Latin America, thieves frequently plunder banks of mountain-top solar panels that power telecom and Internet services. “They end up destroying the system,” complains Romulo Bisetti, regional sales director for Kyocera, a tech company that produces solar products.

Construction of the panels is complex, so thieves are unlikely to melt them for minerals or metals. Instead, the stolen panels are most often sold on the black market and reused.

In poorer countries where electricity is expensive or scarce, the panels have grown in popularity thanks to their reputation as reliable energy sources—useful for resurrecting dead car batteries, recharging cellphones, and fueling a night of television viewing. Between 1999 and 2005, electricity generated from solar power increased 300 percent in India. Across Africa, it jumped 2,500 percent, compared with just 11 percent in North America. “Due to the lack of infrastructure, sometimes solar is the only alternative for people in these countries,” Bisetti explains.

To ward off thieves, many solar companies now recommend antitheft protection, from barbed-wire fences to elaborate surveillance systems. In South Africa, one of the most popular methods is to paint the unused side of the panels neon pink or orange to tip off police to theft. More bright ideas are sure to follow if solar power remains the rage.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

I WENT TO SEE Gen. [Pervez] Musharraf in Islamabad about four years ago. I remember going into his room, just the two of us. We were trying to get Pakistan’s help in the war against terrorism. And I said to him, ‘So, what can we do to help you?’ And he just said, ‘Palestine. A peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.’ I expected to hear that in Riyadh or Cairo or Ramallah, but I didn’t expect to hear that in Islamabad.

THE BIG THING FOR ME [as Middle East envoy] has been to go there and experience the life of the Israelis, the life of the Palestinians. It’s only when you get out, and you see it with your own eyes and hear it with your own ears, and you touch and feel and smell the politics, that you get a sense of how to resolve [the problem].

THE FIRST THING you’ve got to contradict is the belief that [Middle East peace] is hopeless. The second thing you’ve got to contradict is the belief that if you lock people in a room, they’re going to come out with [a] peace settlement. They’re not. It’s gone too far for that.

[WHAT DO I MISS LEAST?] You mean, besides Prime Minister’s Questions?

THERE’S MASSIVE SYMBOLIC POWER in resolving this dispute. Elements within the region and within Palestine try so hard to stop the resolution because they know the symbolic power of peace. They know that if America and Europe were involved in peacemaking between Israel and Palestine, it’d be very hard to rouse up their people against the iniquities of America.

THE PROBLEM FOR THE WORLD today is that globalization is pushing people together. Actually, I think that’s a good thing. There will, however, be reactionary forces against that. And if religious faith becomes the focal point of reaction, it would be very dangerous. So, to me, [interfaith dialogue] is a major part of making the world work.

I ENTERED POLITICS because I realized I was not going to play for Newcastle United and I was never going to be Mick Jagger.

Tony Blair, special envoy to the Middle East, was prime minister of Britain from 1997 to 2007.

AFP/Getty Images

Out of reach: 500 million Chinese can’t pay for a doctor.

F or decades, China has been content to let the invisible hand of the market work its magic on the country’s economy. But there’s one area where the government wants to reassert state control: healthcare. The government recently developed a strategy to provide affordable medical insurance to 90 percent of its population by 2010 and 100 percent by 2020.

Today, 500 million Chinese—or nearly 40 percent of the population—can’t afford to see a doctor. Respondents in a January 2008 poll of 101,000 households around the country named healthcare their top worry. Since the free market reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, out-of-pocket healthcare payments have ballooned from 20 percent of medical spending in 1980 to 49 percent in 2006. By comparison, Japanese pay just 15 percent of their medical spending out of pocket. The average hospital stay in China costs nearly as much as an individual’s annual per capita income in the country.

Frustration with the high cost and low quality of care has recently reached fever pitch. Healthcare grievances have been at the heart of thousands of organized protests countrywide in recent years. Some hospitals have even had to hire police to protect medical staff from angry mobs. The dissatisfaction has caught the attention of the government, which is beginning to address social development now that it has met many of its economic goals.

In an unusual sign of its commitment, the government posted its “Healthy China 2020” plan online in October and allowed public comments until November 14. “To meet the demand of the public, the government this time tried to please the public, say[ing], ‘We want to release this draft reform plan, seek your comments and suggestions, and try to be more democratic,’” says Shenglan Tang of the World Health Organization’s Beijing office. More than 25,000 comments were left online, and the government plans to synthesize them into a report for the State Council.

Many of the comments are personal stories, especially from farmers, of frustrating experiences with the healthcare system. Addressing such woes is bound to give any government a headache. Still, the effort might be just what the doctor ordered.