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It is easy to dismiss this part of the world as hopeless. Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the highest mortality rates, the lowest literacy rates, the worst unemployment, the most tenacious, soul-eroding poverty on earth. The problems are so vexing, so widespread, that the question is not so much what to do as where to begin.
Hammer Simwinga began here, in remote northeast Zambia, in a village that is little more than a gas stop for big semis plying the Cape-to-Cairo truck route. When Mr. Simwinga arrived in Mpika in 1994, farming was struggling, and poaching had supplanted crops as a money-earner. Nearby North Luangwa National Park had lost more than 15,000 elephants, thousands of antelope and buffalo, and all its black rhinos — slain for their tusks, their meat, their horns.
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