Sometimes progress can seem like one step forward and two steps back. Take Africa. This vast continent only makes it to the news page when the news is bad. Every day now, we are witnessing the murder and mayhem in Zimbabwe as the world stands by and watches its tyrannical leader Robert Mugabe run what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa further into the ground.

Or Kenya with its post-election violence after a suspicious result denied the opposition a likely victory.

Or the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or Somalia or Ethiopia where six million children are said to be in danger of malnutrition.

It's not a pretty picture and those who see progress as one step forward and two back would argue that the more we do for this continent, the more aid we throw at it, the more our peace-keepers intervene, the worse the situation becomes. That, in short, Africa will never be able to stand on its own two feet.

But, despite these and other obvious 'black spots', the continent of Africa has never been in better shape and has never been more ready to take a place on the world stage.

At the turn of the century Africa had an annual growth rate of 3% and political skulduggery, conflicts and wars were an everyday feature for the peoples of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi and Sudan to name just some.

The continent was in danger of being brutally marginalised as globalisation gained momentum.

Today, the picture is a lot better. Sub-Saharan Africa has sustained growth rates in excess of 6% and the conflicts in the Horn of Africa have been stabilised, if not resolved.

There is a peace agreement between north and south Sudan, although the sorry situation in Darfur is the focus of peace-keeping efforts both on the continent and internationally.

Today, there are fewer dictatorships in Africa than at the Millennium and the continent's self-regulation bodies — the African Union, the New Partnerships for Africa's Development and the Africa Peer Review Mechanism — have created inroads to political and economic transparency and good governance, despite the sorry situation in Zimbabwe.

According to Freedom House, a non-governmental organisation that monitors democratic processes around the world, the number of free democracies in Africa has tripled from four to 12 since the year 2000 and more than half of the remaining 41 countries are in the transition process towards full and free democracy.

The first post-independence governments in Africa tended to largely mirror the autocracy of the colonial power. Despots, crackpots and tinpot leaders like Emperor Bokasso of the Central African Republic or Uganda's Idi Amin ended up running one party states and lining their owns pockets at the expense of the ordinary people who suffered as much, if not more, under these systems as they had in the bad old colonial days.

What is happening in the last decade or so — as witnessed in Kenya and Zimbabwe today — is that increasingly the people are trying, more effectively than before, to win the right to govern themselves. This threatens power-holders like Mugabe who no longer have a mandate from the people and so are fighting back, with all the means at their disposal, in the desperate hope of stemming the tide.

In some places they have failed, in others they are winning. But, overall, we are seeing an unprecedented fight between power mongers and the push for democracy. While this battle is often tragically violent, and the good guys don't always win it, there is now a ground-breaking attempt throughout Africa to move forwards.

In the last decade South Africa has emerged as one of the fastest growing investors in Africa. Led by the private sector, the country is opening mobile phone operators in quantum numbers, supermarkets, pay-TV channels and banks while its petro-chemical companies like Sasol and Petro-SA are involved in energy projects right across the continent.

China's trade and investment in Africa has exceeded expectations and, while it is going after — some would argue plundering — much-needed minerals and raw materials, it is leaving in its wake a well-defined infrastructure.

The Chinese Export-Import Bank is now the largest lending institution to African countries and is set to surpass the World Bank and the African Development Bank combined in the next three years with some $20bn in infrastructure loans to Ethiopia, Angola and Nigeria.

Africa has oil and the commodity, for the obvious reasons, is being increasingly sought after. The US has declared interests and China now sources 25% of its growing demand for oil from Africa — much of it from Sudan.

Progress on the digital front is phenomenal, with the mobile phone proliferating at a staggering rate.

Internet and mobile usage has doubled every year since the Millennium and has allowed for an explosion of entrepreneurial activity that is creating a grassroots economic revolution in many countries.

The African professional class is contributing to the success of many of the leading industrialised democracies, the secret being to make sure that the benefits of that expertise can be passed down. Witness South Africa with its average growth-rate of 4.7% in the past three years while the rest of the world has been going into recession.

In Zimbabwe there is a highly-educated class, many among the opposition calling for change, others in exile, just waiting to move in when Mugabe is moved out, as are leading potential investors who wait on the sideline to see what happens next.

Last year alone foreign capital inflows into Africa were $38 billion, more than all the foreign aid to the continent.

In the meantime, the G8 leaders have insisted in keeping Africa on the international agenda and again attention has been refocused on the Millennium Development Goals — not least by Gordon Brown who will tell the leaders in Japan next week that they are not doing enough to honour the pledges of 2000 which promises to half poverty and achieve universal primary education by 2015.

There are other problems ahead like the consequences of removing agricultural subsidies and levelling the playing fields on international trade. And the daunting task of increasing food production to feed not just a growing Africa but a growing world.

At the end of the day the world needs to put its money where its mouth is: what is needed to pave the way for an African economic renaissance, and make it sustainable, is more trade and investment rather than more handouts and debt relief.

But, thankfully, it is all a far cry from what was once dubbed the 'Hopeless Continent'.