It seems that good news stories from Africa are rather like the buses of London. You wait thirty years for good African news, and then two lots come along within a week. Last week I linked to this story. And now, also from the New York Times, comes news that Africans have wearied of ever getting proper health insurance from their politicians, and are doing it for themselves.

When they get sick, they receive free consultations at the clinic down the road, cut-rate medicine and peace of mind. The chances are lower now that a bout of illness will bring the family to total ruin.

So who is doing this? Politicians? No:

The bigger push is coming from everyday Africans who are tired of waiting for politicians to address their needs and have begun spinning their own safety nets. Plans in which neighbors come together and create their own makeshift health coverage are the rage in Africa, particularly in the continent's west. Here, the plans now have a significant presence in 11 countries and membership has grown beyond 200,000 people.

So, Africans are creating what as an Englishman I can only call Friendly Societies:

These were self-governing mutual benefit associations founded by manual and skilled workers to provide against hard times – sickness, accident, old age, death and support to widows and orphans. They strongly distinguished their guiding philosophy from philanthropy which lay at the heart of charitable work. The mutual benefit association was not run by one set of people with the intention of helping another separate group, it was an association of individuals pledged to help each other when the occasion arose. Any assistance was not a matter of largesse but of entitlement, earned by the regular contributions paid into the common fund by every member and justified by the obligation to do the same for other members if hardship came their way.

That is how David Green describes the Friendly Societies of Britain, and Africa is now starting to play out the same drama, of organised collective self help.

The New York Times is perhaps not the kind of newspaper that you might expect to see being admiringly linked to from a blog like this one. Yet these two stories suggest, not just that there is good news to be found in Africa if you are prepared to look for it, but that it is good news caused by free people helping themselves and capitalists doing business, rather than by those dreary old panaceas, charitable and state action.

(Brian Micklethwait writes here).