Africa’s Blurry Bright Spots

With my copy of Dayo Olopade’s just-published “The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa” in hand, I settled into the first row of the intimate discussion on the book in DC for what I expected to be an animated and perhaps dicey conversation.
Africa’s Blurry Bright Spots
4/6/2014
Updated:
4/6/2014

With my copy of Dayo Olopade’s just-published “The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa“ in hand, I settled into the first row of the intimate discussion on the book in DC for what I expected to be an animated and perhaps dicey conversation. After all, Olopade’s thesis that in “lean” African economies, citizens’ use of kanju solutions – a terms she gives to the innovative ways sub-Saharan Africans make lemonade from a whole lot of lemons – might provide a better map to solving the region’s development issues (and mapping what those issues are in the first place) is borderline heretical for many in the development and aid sectors. By ignoring on-the ground realities and strengths in mapping “north-to-south” solutions, she posits, much of the aid sector has completely missed the mark. Or, rather, it has not cared to thoroughly involve the proposed recipients of aid in deciding what the mark should even be.

I must admit I came to the presentation biased towards Olopade’s point of view. After working on a range of human rights and development-related projects in Latin America, I’ve seen my share of “deductive, centralized development practice” and its effects rather than the “inductive, decentralized development practice” Olopade advocates. Among the many projects I’ve seen operate under what Olopade described as the “unreasonable assumption that Western convenience matters more than the actual needs of the intended recipients,” I count rarely-used playgrounds built by well-meaning volunteers flown half-way across the world, boxes of inedible “food aid” rotting un-delivered and lightly-used winter coats piled high under the Caribbean sun. Consequently, I was eager for a conversation that might offer up a bevy of unorthodox solutions.

The diverse crowd’s pre-talk chatter teemed with enthusiasm for the promise of bottom-up challenges and cross-sector engagement. That is to say, a mix of undergraduate students interested in doing “something” to “help” sub-Saharan Africans, mid-career development workers who’d been “in the trenches,” and a smaller, graying “expert” contingency dotted the tightly squeezed chairs. I wondered how Mimi Alemayehou, the second panelist and the Executive Vice President of Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the U.S. Government’s Development Finance Institution, and former U.S. Executive Director at the African Development Bank would react to Olopade’s informality bias. Would Alemayehou and Olopade spar over how we might rethink the business of development?

Alemayehou, at first, seemed in agreement with Olopade, as she shared one of her earliest development experiences. While interning at the World Health Organization (WHO) she learned from interviews that providing bicycles to clinic doctors serving rural communities would prove far more helpful than sending boxes of WHO’s annual reports; reports that, as one of her interviewees explained, were a waste of paper since most of his patients could not read and, if they could, certainly could not do so in English or French, the reports’ languages. When she took the recommendation to her superior, they scrapped it because it lacked the requisite numbers and statistics that donors wanted to see.

After her story, some attendees laughed and nodded, waiting for a conversation beyond the acknowledgement of an imperfect system to ensue. It never did. You see, there is a very large chasm between Olopade’s stance and that of a majority of the donor community, and by extension in the consciousness of many in the so-called developed world. Though organizations and projects have begun to sprout that advocate and employ a multi-sited process for structuring development solutions – a process that involves intended aid recipients, in-country and out-of-country stakeholders, and investors or funders– very few operate outside of the binary construct of development itself.

This is understandable. Conceptualizing development as a problematic construct would not only call into question the fundamental existence of a development economy but would also need to acknowledge a great deal of financial loss. How can astronomical aid expenditures be justified if not to develop the rest of the world? This, however, is not the only reason for the chasm. Even if we assume the most benevolent of motivations behind foreign aid, and realistically there are and perhaps should be country-specific strategic reasons for aid investment, Olopade’s book also calls into question the very ways through which we measure improvement and success.

Olopade pointed out, for example, that perhaps “butts-in-seats” is the wrong way to go about measuring education success. Attempting to meet UN Millennium Development Goals, arguably problematic themselves, sub-Saharan African countries rushed to expand primary education after the UN announced the goals in 2000. Poorly trained teachers, overcrowding, and other issues, Olopade argued, now plague many schools. The numbers of enrolled students, one of the oft-analyzed deliverables, tells little in terms of actual learning taking place. But because the number of enrolled students can be tracked through formal channels (assuming accurate tracking) and expert panels and stakeholders can digest these figures rather easily, there is a bias for pushing this method to measure “progress.” Olopade spent much of her time citing these types of examples, slowly exposing the problems behind the status quo while offering up solutions already in place. In the case of measuring education objectives, she talked about an organization doing in-home surveys asking children who had dropped out of school in their home language what they actually know.

A key moment in the event – a moment that illuminated what the conversation could have been and what needs to be done to get it there – came during one of Alemayehou’s final points. Government, Alemayehou contended, must be part of the equation; it cannot simply be side-stepped. Noting that Olopade’s book enriches the development conversation, articulating built-in strengths in the continent and creative solutions around infrastructure challenges, Alemayehou nonetheless didn’t seem to envision foreign aid or large-scale investment without planning for the role of sub-Saharan Africa’s political infrastructure. A better point of departure, and one that may be reached after many events like this one, might have been: Given the state of many sub-Saharan governments, what does it mean moving forward to consider that governments could be beside the point, or, at the very least, could compete with other, more responsive and responsible, structures?

“I don’t think there is a single person who doesn’t hope that institutions improve, it’s clearly in the interest of many millions of people currently held hostage by [their] government that those governments improve,” Olopade stated.

Perhaps it would behoove us to consider, as sub-Saharan Africans clearly have, what can be done to achieve economic growth and job creation in the meantime, using sub-Saharan Africa’s strengths rather than concentrating on its weaknesses.

Scarlett Aldebot-Green is a senior policy analyst at New America. This article was originally published in The Weekly Wonk, New America’s digital magazine.