Challenging Africa's survival
Faculty, students and alumni share insights into the challenges facing Africa
By Tammy Griffin-Kumpey MSPC '06 Photos by Tammy Woodard M.A. '98
Africa is a continent of nations, communities and people as complex and diverse as they are intriguing and beautiful. It is a continent with amazing resources, which have been the unfortunate target of others’ exploitation. Dragged down by a legacy of colonization that the industrialized world likes to pretend never existed, misperceived and misunderstood, its people struggle to reaffirm what it means to be African, while Africa strives to renegotiate its place in the world.
Wherever there are challenges that require innovative solutions, Clark faculty, students and alumni are there working to create positive change. Here, faculty, students and alumni share their knowledge of and experiences in Africa.
A landscape of challenges
HIV/AIDS, civil unrest, global climate change, major debt, racial and gender inequality, development failures: according to government and international relations professor and department chair Beverly Grier, these are the most significant issues that African countries face. Intricately interconnected, these give rise to a host of other problems and corrosive cycles, including widespread poverty and famine, the decay of social systems like healthcare and education, and few opportunities for employment or for creating thriving economies. Packaged together, they have crippled African nations.
“The most pressing issue for Africa is HIV/AIDS, which has deep impact on just about every aspect of society,” says Grier, whose recently released book “Invisible Hands” explores the history of child labor in Africa. “It’s almost as if AIDS has come along to challenge Africa’s survival.”
After independence, African countries made huge investments in social welfare programs, like education and health, and significant gains in life expectancy and infant-mortality rates. Today, African life-expectancy rates, which had been in the 60s, are now back in the 40s and even upper 30s. The drivers of the pandemic, says Grier, are poverty and gender inequality—symptoms of Africa’s struggling development issues. Poverty coupled with fewer employment opportunities for African women drive them to engage in risky behavior such as commercial sex work, which perpetuates the spread of the disease. Violence against women also increases the risk.
“The grasp of HIV/AIDS has far-reaching implications for African nations,” explains Grier. Teachers are dying, so children have no one to educate them. Doctors, nurses and healthcare providers are dying, paralyzing already overwhelmed healthcare systems. When people are sick, they can’t produce food or cash crops that governments depend on for revenue and foreign exchange. Militaries are impacted, which has dire implications for political stability and security issues. Millions of AIDS orphans are left to fend for themselves, abandoning their educations to earn a living, but then lacking the skills to compete. As a result, boys may engage in criminal behavior and the girls turn to commercial sex work—the cycle continues.
African countries also face immense debt, which Grier says emerged in the 1970s during the oil price hikes. While industrialized countries like the United States had the means to pay more and make adjustments in energy consumption, third world countries could not absorb the hit. They had to pay more for imported goods. Then their exports were in less demand because the world’s economy went into a recession.
Many African countries relied on the revenues raised from exporting raw materials to pay for imports and all the social infrastructures that they were building. When they started borrowing to pay for these social programs, the debt began to mount, which impacted future prospects for development. “So much of the revenue that Africa brings in goes to pay just the interest on these loans. They’re shackled by that,” says Grier.
Structural adjustment programs mandated by lenders like the World Bank and IMF bury African countries deeper in the hole. When they borrow from these institutions or renegotiate loans, they’re expected to meet certain conditions like reducing government spending or introducing fees for services. The first cuts sever health and education programs.
Grier says civil unrest and political instability also hamper Africa’s development efforts. When at war, people can’t farm, which means governments can’t tap into the revenue of export crops, cities can’t be fed and infrastructure cannot be built.
Grier is quick to note that the civil unrest often stems from development failures or economic grievances—giving many examples of cases where a particular ethnic, religious or regional group rises up because it’s not reaping the benefits of existing development or resources.
“In terms of globalization, Africa is being left behind and it’s all related,” says Grier. “It’s a continent where really no one is investing; it’s not safe, it’s not profitable.” And yet there are some success stories: Uganda, Botswana and Ghana have growing economies.
“Unless Africa starts to tackle its development issues, and this has to come from within, they’re not going to survive because AIDS will plow them under. It’s those very same economic development issues that made them so vulnerable to this pandemic.”
Creating innovative healthcare strategies
In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS isn’t the only story, says cultural anthropologist Ellen Foley, whose research focuses primarily on health issues. In most West African countries more people are dying from malaria than HIV/AIDS.
“A lot of African countries are simultaneously dealing with what we think of as diseases of poverty—chronic malnutrition, malaria, cholera and TB—as well as diseases that we tend to think of as First World diseases, like cancer and diabetes,” explains Foley. African governments must address both sets of diseases, which require very different kinds of public-health strategies. “When you throw something as explosive as HIV/AIDS into this fragile context—and add economic crisis—you get this perfect storm.”
Foley’s research in Senegal, where there is only a 1.7 percent rate of HIV/AIDS, allows her to examine other kinds of processes that have been hidden in the shadow of the AIDS crisis.
As governments are forced to limit spending on healthcare, Foley says, many community groups are trying to fill the gaps. Community insurance strategies, where people invest together to increase their buying power for medical services and to cover more out-of-pocket expenses, are becoming increasingly popular in countries like Senegal and Rwanda. That’s assuming people have the money to buy into a future-oriented strategy that will only benefit them if they get sick. As many Africans are eking out livelihoods at the very margins of survival, one major medical episode could launch an entire family into a dire economic situation.
As Africans leave for better economic opportunities around the world, they are forming networks to help their home communities. Foley is currently examining one such network based in Europe and the United States, where members paid dues and raised funds for the first-ever privately funded hospital by a Muslim organization which was built in Tubaa, Senegal.
Foley says innovative private businesses, governments and foundations are also partnering to find solutions for these crises. For example, the Gates Foundation and Merck Pharmaceuticals are working with the government to roll out universal access to AIDS drugs in Botswana. And Paul Farmer’s group (read In Closing)—Partners in Health—is applying a cutting-edge delivery of AIDS treatment and care, which worked in Haiti, to Rwanda.
Although all hopeful examples, Foley says nothing can replace an effective government-funded and -coordinated healthcare system to achieve long-term sustainability and change.
“There are all sorts of possibilities for great things to happen, but they need this combination of debt relief, transparent governments with a genuine desire to serve their populations and international assistance on major crises, like HIV/AIDS,” says Foley.
One of the messages Foley tries to get to Clark students is that there are many ways to make a difference, as well as different capacities of change and definitions for success.
“It’s inaccurate to think the kinds of problems that Africa is facing are uniquely Africa’s. There are pockets of our own population that are struggling with the same issues…HIV/AIDS, limited access to medical care, and no hope for education and employment,” says Foley. She challenges students to think deeply about geographical separations of wealth and power and how they can be engaged citizens in their own countries, as well as around the world.
Education on Africa’s terms
IDCE professor David Bell says most African countries are suffering from similar issues in education. Many, like South Africa, are haunted by histories grounded in racism and exploitation. Widespread illiteracy, a gross shortage of qualified teachers, inadequate government funding, and decaying or absent infrastructures exacerbate the education crisis in Africa to almost infinite proportions.
According to Bell, when apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994 and the African National Congress emerged as the first democratically elected, legitimate government, it inherited a virtually unsolvable legacy. During apartheid, the student-teacher ratio in privileged White schools (about 10 percent of the population) was 20-25 to one; in disenfranchised Black schools (80 percent of the population), it was 60-120 to one. And because less professional training was required of teachers in Black schools, large numbers of teachers were underqualified.
To put this in perspective, after apartheid, had South Africa sought even a 40 to one student-teacher ratio, there was a gap of over 20,000 teachers, explains Bell. Today the crisis grows as teachers die of HIV/AIDS (one of the highest prevalence groups in the country) and the number of child-headed households rises (in some regions, one in five is headed by children under the age of 19).
Quality education for all is critical to Africa’s future, says Bell, but a distant goal. The prevailing First World logic is to impose a system that will bring Africa in line with First World economic systems. He argues that this will make Africa more vulnerable to economic exploitation and global dependence.
NEPAD, an African development organization initiated by the G8 countries, is advocating e-schools, claiming that all schools in Africa will be connected to the Internet by the year 2015. While “modernizing” African educational systems may seem reasonable, Bell notes that many Africans are illiterate and illiteracy rates are rising.
“NEPAD is a huge leap over this canyon,” explains Bell. “When you consider the issues that Africa faces—regional conflicts, HIV/AIDS, poverty, debt—it’s an inappropriate goal, which will surely divert scarce resources from where they are most needed.”
The World Bank’s Education for All (EFA) policy holds countries accountable to meeting generic global educational targets. Along with this goes other World Bank policies of privatizing education and paying tuition for primary education, says Bell. On a continent where many families are too poor to adequately feed and clothe their children, even $1 a day is too costly. Families must decide if it’s worth risking their livelihoods to educate their children when it’s unlikely that a schooled child will secure a job in an uncertain economic and political climate. As a result, many children are denied an education.
Bell’s work focuses on South African educational systems, predominantly in the nonformal sector. Nonformal education is primarily delivered through nongovernmental organizations. Many African nations use such systems to address areas of educational inequity that conventional government efforts cannot. In South Africa, Bell worked with Black teachers as both professional and political agents of social change, focusing on the empowerment, cognition and development of critical thinking, fair-minded, socially just learners. To avoid infusing their personal biases into the children they educate, teachers were challenged to become conscious of their own gender, race, and class issues.
Bell criticizes international agencies for setting impossible targets for Africa, which must first redress the inequities before attempting to meet globally imposed criteria. He’s quick to point out that most industrialized countries didn’t start with the legacy of inequity and exploitation that most African countries did. This legacy continues to frame education in Africa today. Nevertheless, he says African countries are doing an incredible job trying to meet EFA standards.
“The world misperceives Africa as one—one continent and one nation with one identity,” says Bell, when in fact, Africa is comprised of 54 very different countries, all of which have very different colonial experiences, recent histories, and many, many diverse ethnic groups. “As Africa reinvents itself, it needs to decide what success looks like—on its own terms.”
“It’s not up to the world to define Africa; it’s really up to her own people.”
Alternative possibilities
"When we look at business and industry in Africa, we see it as not yet ready for prime time,” says economic geographer James Murphy. “The problem is we’re looking to place Africa within a First World model, so we don’t look at alternative possibilities for development.”
Murphy, who teaches Africa’s Development in Global Context and Africa Today: Challenges and Opportunities, says we need to look closer at what is actually going on in African industry and business. Despite Africa’s growing significance in and influence on world politics and the global economy, he says financial institutions and development organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and USAID tend to look at Africa through a very rigid lens.
“There are places where development and financial-aid programs are essential, but often too little effort goes into understanding the landscape and context of African livelihoods, communities and cultures,” he says. “The sophisticated understandings that we’ve developed in geography, anthropology, and development studies about Africa are often not being translated into meaningful policy mechanisms.”
“What’s really heroic is how somebody can make a profit in a place where there are so many structural and material obstacles,” says Murphy, who researches the processes of innovation and invention in Africa to learn how to best facilitate industrial development and economic growth on Africa’s terms. He’s most interested in small-scale business people, who come from meager means.
African businesses and industries face many challenges. National and municipal governments, as anywhere, have tremendous power in shaping communities and businesses, but often limit the options available to the many innovative individuals and firms in Africa that are striving to build ties to international markets. Low-cost consumer goods from other countries crowd out the need for local industry. African governments forego revenues by awarding low tax rates so companies will hire people at decent wages—but as certain manufacturing industries shift around the planet, there’s now a race to the bottom. Furthermore, breaking out of localized markets and into global value chains is extremely difficult because of poor infrastructure and the perception that Africa is a risky place to conduct business.
“A lot of policy makers are focusing on the magic bullet—the idea that if you create the right national scale institutions to facilitate private property rights and promote trade that this alone will create new opportunities—this just hasn’t been the case,” explains Murphy.
Technology is another “magic bullet.” Murphy says it’s naïve to believe that a laptop will solve development issues. When you plop a technology down in Africa, the common misassumption is that Africans will intuitively and rapidly use it efficiently and there are adequate infrastructure and supporting institutions to facilitate its productive integration into the economy.
Another example is microfinance—using groups of individuals to share the risks and burdens of repaying small loans given out to enable the growth of small businesses—a concept that worked well in Bangladesh and India; however, not as well in Africa.
Referring to his work with furniture makers and metal workers in Tanzania, Murphy notes that microcredit doesn’t enable entrepreneurs to invest in the kinds of machinery and infrastructure that’s needed to jump-start their businesses. Nonetheless, it’s often assumed that it can address the financial needs of small business while promoting industrial development. Foreign-aid institutions often adopt programs like microfinance as cost-effective approaches to development, he says, but innovation and large-scale industrial change is not something “you can do on the cheap.”
“I think hope lies in humility. It’s about recognizing Africans as agents of change, not passive victims of some historical, global hegemonic process. They’re not simply passive recipients of ideas and technologies. They’re capable of incredible things despite all the structural, political and financial obstacles.”
Murphy predicts social movements in Africa will be essential to driving positive economic and political change and in determining how Africa will change its own future.
“There is a tremendous amount of hope, and it’s embodied within the African people.”
Making a Difference in Africa
Thousands of Clark alumni are making a difference in the world and often that passion is sparked while students at Clark. Sara E. Brown '05, Will Holbrook í99, M.A. '06 and IDCE graduate student Darah Tappitake, all working in Africa, are just three examples of Clarkies who are striving to make our world a better place.
Giving children the "right to play" Sara E. Brown '05 believes all children should have the opportunity to play. She is currently in Kibondo, Tanzania, working as a volunteer project coordinator with Right to Play, a Canadian-based humanitarian organization in 23 countries that uses sport and play as tools for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world.
Brown teaches important development tools to children in four camps within the Kibondo region—Mkugwa, Mtendeli, Nduta, and Kanembwa—where residents from Burundi and Democratic Republic of the Congo are placed for fear of persecution within other camps and their home countries. Brown and others recruit local coach-volunteers and then teach the core module of Right to Play, such as child development, sport rules, coaching techniques, and games that target a childís body, mind and spirit. The goal of the program, she explains, "is to let the kids be kids."
Brown's work in Africa started when she was a Clark student. In the summer of 2004, she did a seven-week internship with the Alternatives to Violence Project in Rwanda, a position she created with support from professors in Clark's Holocaust and Genocide Studies program.
Creating positive change in Uganda When IDCE graduate student Darah Tappitake was awarded a U.S. National Security Education Program Boren Fellowship to conduct research in Africa, her boyfriend Will Holbrook "99, M.A. í06 decided to leave his job at the Boys & Girls Club and go with her. Together, they are working to bring positive change to vulnerable communities in Uganda's war-torn northern region.
According to Tappitake, there are currently 1 million internally displaced people in Uganda, and while there are plans for peace in the near future, obstacles to ensuring that people receive the basic means to survive in camps remain. Tappitake is researching the impact of school feeding programs on primary education within internally displaced communities in Uganda. These programs are supported by the U.N.'s World Food Program and other organizations dedicated to improving the health and education of Uganda's vulnerable childrenóthis school meal is often the only healthy meal children get each day. Tappitake hopes her research will eventually improve the way school feeding programs are operated.
Holbrook is volunteering with the Kids League, a nongovernmental organization promoting health, life skills and fun for Ugandan children through sport. He is leading the research and design of a community sports-based education program for youth in conflicted areas in the city of Kampala. Holbrook says there are currently over 200,000 children between the ages of 10-14 and only a handful of after-school programs available to them; it's just not a priority there. He's hoping his work will change that. "I believe that sports can be used as a positive tool for the social development of both youth and their communities," he says.
To read more about Tappitakeís and Holbrookís experiences in Uganda or for a link to Holbrook's blog, visit www.dwafrica.blog.com.
Lost Boy finds his way; leads others
Nhial Nhial, a student in Clark's College of Professional and Continuing Education (COPACE), was only 8 years old when a sinister twist of fate left him without a family, without a home, and fleeing for his life.
Nhial, now known as Dan William, remembers the ill-fated day in 1987 as if it were yesterday. He was playing outside with friends when the Sudanese government attacked his village. "The fighting came so abruptly," explains William quietly. "People were running away in different directions, and some were killed. I just ran into the bush."
Alone and undoubtedly terrified and confused, William hid in the bush until nightfall before he and others ventured out.
"When we came out of the bush, no one was there. Our village was completely burned to the ground," he recalls. His entire family-mother, father, four brothers and two sisters-were gone. William says the survivors, mostly children, wandered around in the aftermath not really sure what to do.
They could not stay put. The civil war in Sudan was escalating as the militia continued its attack on neighboring villages. The survivors headed back into the woods, says William, and eventually broke into groups led by older children and adults. They traveled mostly at night through the bush to avoid military ambushes and the searing African sun. Water and food were often nonexistent. Starvation, dehydration, exhaustion and disease became as dangerous and deadly as the militia, not to mention the threat of wild animals. After three-and-a-half months and thousands of treacherous miles, William, along with thousands of other displaced Sudanese, took refuge in U.N. camps in Ethiopia.
But even there, William says, people succumbed to death from lack of food, water and medicines.
"It was a very, very bad situation and a lot of kids died," he says, explaining how the lack of family and family support systems was also a factor. It was not unusual for one adult caretaker to be assigned to 1,000 children.
After four years in Ethiopia, he was forced to run again. According to William, rebels armed and trained by the Sudanese government overthrew the Ethiopian government and attacked their refugee camp. Heading back to Sudan during the rainy season, he says many of them, if not shot, were captured or drowned in rising flood waters from the Gilo River. Once in Sudan, and no longer under U.N. protection, the survivors tried to set up camp in May 1991, only to find themselves under the relentless bombardment of Sudanese forces. Not even a year later, they fled once again.
A two-month journey—this time severe drought plagued their trip—took William to Kenya, where he would spend the next nine years in a refugee camp before coming to the United States as a young man. One might wonder how William dodged all these bulletsóif not the lead from a militant's pistol, then malaria, dysentery, starvation, dehydration, worm infections from tainted water, nature's wrath or trauma-induced suicide.
"You know, sometime, it's your time. But if it didn't come, you have to survive."
His childhood forever lost, now William at age 25 (or perhaps 26, he's lost track of his actual birth date) is living safe and secure on American soil and with definite purpose. In 2001, William was one of more than 3,600 Sudanese orphans invited to take refuge in the United States. There were seven in his group sponsored by the International Rescue Center, who resettled in the Worcester area.
Since coming to the United States, William has taken ESL classes and learned English. He works at a local printing company, which he balances with going to school part time. With flexible work hours from a supportive employer, William attended Quinsigamond Community College before enrolling at COPACE this fall, where he is taking courses in human resources. His dream, however, is to earn a degree in international relations. William hopes to work for the U.N. and return to Africa to help others who are experiencing similar atrocities.
"Because I've been through it, I know what to do. I can help," William says with unassuming strength and conviction.
At this point, securing financial assistance may be the only obstacle keeping him from achieving a degree from Clark. But William is already making a difference.
For the last three years, William has served on the board of directors for the national organization Sudanese Lost Boys and Lost Girls. Through the organization, he has presented at conferences in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Phoenix, Ariz., about issues that the lost boys and girls of Sudan are facing here in the United States.
William is also president of SEED (Sudanese Education Enhancement for Development), a grassroots nonprofit organization that he founded here in Worcester. He established SEED in 2006, with the help of IDCE professor Dick Ford, to provide Worcester's Sudanese community with temporary loans to cover unforeseen emergency living expenses.
"I wanted to do something to unify the lost boys and girls in Worcester," explained William. "We have a lot of problems, so this would help."
SEED is administered by William and two other lost boys who resettled in Worcester, as well as a small group of American volunteers including Ford, who serve on SEED's board of trustees. The organization funds small, low-interest loans to Sudanese who need assistance paying rent until they secure a job or money to fix a broken vehicle so they can get to work. The money for the loans comes from SEED's fundraising efforts.
"EED is still very young, but we are hoping one day it will grow up and help us to address all our needs," he explains.
As its funds grow, William says long-term goals for SEED include providing financial assistance to Sudanese lost boys and girls who want to continue their education. "Some of us didn't even attempt to go to school because we were struggling with life and working," says William. "Someday they might go."
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