Any other African expats? Rwanda? In fact, I'll see your small central African nation and raise you a Burundi, Uganda, or Eastern Congo if it's not buried in lava by next week.

It's not particularly surprising that ending poverty isn't that simple. Most developed economies were brought to their current stage through hundreds of years of innovation, investment, protectionism, and use of inexpensive raw materials and labor from the global South (among other things), and the ones that industrialized more quickly (like Singapore) often had unique geographical or political characteristics that aided this. The development of a stable, diverse economy (and correspondingly high standards of living for a population) depends on far more things than a simple infusion of capital.

For that matter, poor African states are usually poor for very different reasons. Congo's poor despite its great natural resource wealth because the Belgians systematically sabotaged its ability to rule itself before independence even arrived, in the early '60s, and then it got stuck with corrupt dictators who robbed it blind for four decades. Rwanda's poor because the genocide destroyed everything it had built, and even the stable, non-corrupt government that's in power today can't overcome such odds in a generation (and has virtually no natural resources to help it along). Botswana's actually not that poor, because it has a competent government that's used its diamond wealth well. Rather like different aid organizations are differently competent, different African governments are better- and worse-positioned to benefit from A) aid or B) participation in the global economy in general.

However, measured intelligence can also change over time within a single race, depending on the external environment. I can't find it now, but recently saw an article pointing out that the average IQ of students from one of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark?) had increased measurably over the last 50 years. Like everything else, intelligence has both biological and societal components. I certainly don't know enough about intelligence to comment with confidence on its biological bases and how immutable (or mutable) they are, but as long as there is a societal component, then I see no inherent moral problem in trying to provide disadvantaged racial groups with the same favorable milieu that other groups have already profited from.

(And, for that matter, I think the actual harm suffered to white people by affirmative action on behalf of other groups is probably fairly small. There might be a zero-sum calculation about a specific job or specific slot at a college, but whites aren't being systematically shut out of every opportunity they might have. There's also a difference between promoting people who are blatantly unqualified for the positions they're given because of their race, and favoring people who are perhaps at the margin of qualified but could easily improve. The spirit of American affirmative action appears to be the latter, although it's surely implemented with greater and lesser degrees of faithfulness to that ideal.)

I'm curious - is your personal evidence anecdotal, qualitative, quantitative...?

Michael Vassar also makes a good point - the values and implications of "traditional roles" vary a great deal across time, and especially across socioeconomic status. There are certainly career women in the West who perceive taking time off to care for children as a relief from the rat race and a chance to contribute to society in another positive way. They might feel differently had they been, say, a 12-year old Zimbabwean girl who never attended school, was married to an older man to help her family's finances, developed an obstetric fistula in childbirth, and never left her husband's compound again. That isn't just traditional, it's an active reality for millions of poor women around the world. There are also many happy, healthy, educated African career women and stay-at-home-moms, of course. The context of "tradition" is very important.

Annoyance, do you intend the last sentence to broadly mean "treatment is less effective than prevention," or "Western medicine is a crock," or "Doctors specifically are not as effective as other aspects of modern medicine," or something else?

One of those things that's become a cliche because it's true: traveling is a great way to do this, at least at an age when children are old enough to rationally process the new information to which they're being exposed. The more different the destination culture from the host culture, ultimately the better. Lived experience provides information very differently than written, oral, or 2-D visual transmission of knowledge - not necessarily better or worse, depending on the context, but definitely with a valuable variety of perspective.