The Challenge for Africa (10 page)

Professor Sachs is heading a group that includes the Earth Institute, the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP), and the Millennium Promise in establishing a number of what are called “millennium villages” in ten African countries as part of an effort to realize the Millennium Development Goals.
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Eleven of the villages are in Kenya, in the Sauri district of Nyanza Province, not far from Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria in the west of the country. Progress in the Sauri millennium villages on key development indicators, including those within the Millennium Development Goals, has been made since the initiative began there in 2004. Incidents of malaria in Sauri, for instance, have dropped by 50 percent. Students came in second rather than 108th out of 253 in district school examinations.
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And corn production has, on average, tripled, enabling farmers to sell some of their harvest in the market and retain some for their families.
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These are significant achievements. The people in Sauri and the other millennium villages are, like those I have worked closely with through the Green Belt Movement, poor, largely outside of the mainstream development agenda, and stuck in a cycle of powerlessness and marginalization. The immediate results from the millennium villages indicate that when financial resources, including aid, are properly targeted and well spent, they have the potential to transform the lives of the world's poorest people.

Even as I welcome this progress, however, the very fact that the Big Five are needed raises a number of questions, some of which are uncomfortable, and several that touch on the same problems as the situation with malaria and bed nets. All of these questions lead to issues of leadership and governance, which may be defined as the way a country establishes its priorities, holds its officials accountable for their actions, makes decisions, empowers its citizens to feel invested in and engaged with their government and civil service, and communicates its vision to the people.

What was being done—or not being done—by African governments in Sauri and the other seventy-odd millennium villages throughout Africa before the team of international professionals conceived of helping the local people through these interventions? In the case of Kenya, the member of parliament who represents the region where Sauri is located is a professor of political science and economics, and was a minister for economic planning and development in Kenya's ninth parliament (2002-07). Given Sauri's low development status, one could conclude that either the MP didn't understand the policy prescriptions and economic conditions that the millennium village project identifies, or he didn't have the funds to implement a program like the Big Five, or, perhaps, he wasn't serious about dedicating funds to such purposes or implementing a holistic development plan.

One could also ask, given the demonstrable successes documented in Sauri, and the elementary nature of many of the interventions—ensuring that farmers have fertilizers, decent seeds, and markets, that villagers have access to clean drinking water, and that children receive good nutrition to support, in part, their academic studies—why the government hadn't made them a priority for
all
Kenyans. Why did implementation of the Big Five require the coordination of a range of international organizations and considerable infusions of donor aid? (In Kenya, to provide the Big Five to all those who, in Sachs's analysis, need them would cost about $1.5 billion a year.)

It is not because the Kenyan administration and other African governments are unaware of the validity of the components of the Big Five. Kenya, for instance, has a minister of agriculture, a minister of health, a minister of education, a minister of energy, a minister of roads and public works, a minister of information and communication, and a minister of water, all of whom are mandated to tackle the myriad development
deficits facing Kenyans, including the Big Five. Rarely, however, does one find African governments genuinely emphasizing these ministries. In general, they are more concerned with funding and staffing ministries of defense, provincial administration, finance, and security. Nonetheless, one can still legitimately question why it is necessary for a raft of international agencies to inform African governments that the Big Five are important to combating the poverty that is killing their people, and why, in turn, the international experts are establishing mechanisms to deliver the interventions—a function that surely should fall to the governments themselves.

One measure that could be immediately undertaken, for instance, is in the provision of latrines. Three hundred million Africans—a third of the continent's population—do not have access to clean water and sound sanitation.
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If the governments of Africa individually and collectively made it their mission to provide a latrine in every household and teach basic hygiene, particularly in schools and churches, countless lives would be saved, especially those of children, many of whom die from diarrhea and parasitical infections. In addition, this would provide all Africans with a degree of dignity that millions currently do not have. This would not have to be exorbitantly expensive, and the people themselves could provide the labor. The only reason I suspect this has yet to be done is because the elites who make these decisions have lived for many years with modern toilet facilities, and this level of privation is now outside their realm of experience. Nevertheless, they cannot say they do not know. If such a situation is unacceptable to donors, why should it not be for the elites?

It is true that the budgets of many African governments are stretched thin because substantial portions are being used to service their international debts (a topic I discuss in more detail in the next chapter). But it is also the case that for at least a century, Africa has been told that it is poor, and too
many Africans have come to accept this as an unchangeable truth—even though the continent remains richly endowed with natural resources, despite decades of ecological degradation. Africa is also wealthy in human resources. The challenge for its leaders, both governmental and nongovernmental, is to acknowledge and then channel Africans' capabilities and energies into effective action for development.

Unfortunately, too many African governments have used their budgets, and their natural resources, not to invest in their people, but in precisely the opposite manner. Most likely, the millennium villages' initiative has instituted management systems that ensure that the funds budgeted for Sauri and the other villages throughout Africa are used efficiently, accountably, and responsibly—making sure the monies are not stolen or data deliberately falsified. This recognition leads to further questions about the prospects for devolving programs such as those being piloted in Sauri to national and local governments—which must, surely, be the ultimate goal.

How are the governments of Malawi, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Kenya—to name a few of the countries in which millennium villages have been established—to be persuaded to continue to support these development investments when the aid flow ends or is insufficient in future years? The International Monetary Fund reports that the commitments made by the G-8 nations in 2005 to increase bilateral development assistance for Africa by $22 billion, for a total by 2010 of nearly $38 billion each year, are “unlikely to materialize.” As of June 2008, the nongovernmental organization DATA—Debt AIDS Trade Africa—founded by Bono reported that only 14 percent of the additional funds pledged by the G-8 nations had been provided.
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Only a handful of industrialized nations have reached the benchmark they set in 1992 to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national products as development assistance.

Given this scenario, what kind of financial and logistical
commitment will the African governments make to ensure that the millennium village models are self-sustaining and also templates for future development without requiring yet more donor aid to continue? And if the funds to support millennium village-like interventions are used efficiently, accountably, and responsibly but are still not enough to reach all who could benefit, are the long-term prospects for such development approaches realistic?

While it is necessary to challenge the governments, the citizens of African countries also have a role to play in demanding development that discourages dependency. Why didn't
they
prioritize investments like the Big Five? Or if similar programs were in place, such as an effective agricultural extension service that advised farmers on preventing soil erosion and capturing rainwater, why did they allow them to collapse? Why was the emphasis on development lost?

Certainly, after independence, most Africans had the expectation that their societies, and they themselves, would become wealthier. Instead, Africa as a whole became poorer and more dependent on an infusion of aid from the very regions that had colonized and exploited the continent. Such assistance was welcomed with little skepticism and, in my view, helped further internalize Africans' sense of their inferiority when compared to the rest of the world. If postindependence aid had been provided to Africa in a manner designed to empower the economies and institutions of the continent and not to instill a long-term dependency, the future of Africa might have been very different, and the Big Five initiative unnecessary.

As it is, Africa is like a person who's fallen into a hole. Someone is telling her, “I'll throw you a rope so you can get out.” While the rope provided is never quite long enough for her to grab on to it, it's long enough so she has a hope of reaching it. At the same time, the person holding the rope has thrown down a spade, and is encouraging the person in the hole
to dig herself in deeper. While aid can be a very useful tool for development, it may also be achieving a completely opposite outcome, undermining its stated objectives and leaving a majority of Africans dependent rather than empowered. For instance, donor nations ship or fly in food aid rather than helping to implement sound food and agricultural policies that would allow African countries to feed themselves when harvests fail and global food prices rise. Instead of encouraging and fostering capacities and skills in countries themselves, foreign experts continue to manage many essential tasks. Many aid programs still treat symptoms and manage emergencies rather than supporting investments for the long term so that crises either do not occur or can be handled and resolved with limited or no international assistance.

Nevertheless, the culture of aid is hard to change. The international community often expects fast returns from its development investments, but the problems of underdevelopment, marginalization, lack of self-esteem, fear, and cynicism didn't afflict Africa's peoples yesterday—indeed, they have accumulated over centuries. This is a reality the international community understands but doesn't always acknowledge. At the same time, it is harder to raise funds to address environmental sustainability and preventative measures that would have long-term impacts than it is to raise money for famine relief, refugees, children, HIV/AIDS, and bed nets. One reason why the culture of aid is difficult to change is because of the images used to depict Africa.

Although in recent years the state of development in Africa has risen on the global agenda, the voices of Africans speaking to these challenges are muted in comparison with those of the industrialized world speaking about the needs of Africa.
Unfortunately, this situation only reinforces the perception that African solutions for African problems don't exist, and that Africans are not equally equipped to propose a vision for Africa's development or provide concrete actions to bring it about.

Too often, Africa is still presented as a helpless victim of her own making. A representative image I saw a long time ago and that has stayed with me is that of an emaciated young girl with a distended belly on the cover of a UNICEF magazine. All of us have seen such horrific pictures. They prick our consciences, and may move many of us, including those with money or power, to try to help. Indeed, it was pictures of this kind beamed by the BBC from Ethiopia in 1984 that so disturbed the singers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure that they wrote the pop single “Do They Know It's Christmas?” to support Ethiopian famine relief. Their efforts grew into the fund-raising concerts Live Aid and, twenty years later, Live 8. It also inspired the launch of UK-based Comic Relief, a charity dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa and elsewhere, and with whom the Green Belt Movement works in Africa.

A set of images has dominated the world's view of Africa for centuries, some intended to excuse injustice against the peoples of the continent, others to elicit compassion and wonder. The continent south of the Sahara has been seen as a land of unparalleled riches, startling beauty, and extraordinary wild life; as a place of strange and at times primitive tribal customs, civil disorder, and armed militias; of child labor and child soldiers, mud huts, open sewers, and shantytowns; of corruption, dictatorship, and genocide. These and other perceptions have framed the world's response to Africa.

As someone who raises funds to support work in Africa, I understand the importance of images, and recognize that pictures of Africans in dire circumstances can, ultimately, lead to positive actions from those who are moved to want to help. However, on balance, I find these representations—and the
associations they bring with them—demonstrably negative, perhaps even shameful, since they risk stereotyping all countries south of the Sahara as places of famine, death, and hopelessness. Because the children or adults pictured are rarely named, the people remain abstract, symbolic, and no longer individuals. That starving toddler or weeping mother or child soldier is “Africa.” This projection only makes the task more difficult for those of us on the ground trying to help Africans to help themselves.

In addition, Africans themselves see these images of suffering and dysfunction on television, in newspapers, on websites, and in fund-raising appeals, and begin to internalize them. A dangerous and unfortunate psychological process ensues that subtly and perhaps unconsciously affirms to Africans their inability to be agents of their own destiny. Eventually, it may destroy the sense of confidence they should and must have to make progress.