Economic Development in Africa

George Metcalfe | Social Entrepreneur 

I’ve engaged in change and development endeavors for some 40 years in some 50 countries and 15 developing nations and economies in Eastern Europe and Africa. I’ve worked on similar projects in the United States, though not as often as overseas.

This topic that I’m dealing with today is important to me because I am a Montanan by birth. My early years as a boy in Montana, in Butte where I was raised, gave me a background and drive to see and understand the world I did not yet know existed.

Thus I am going to approach the topic, “Economic Development in Africa” from a lessons-learned perspective. That perspective is primarily philosophical in scope. In short I will be offering little in the way of toolbox solutions in how you do this or that when involved in change. My key lesson learned is rather unusual: Though I’m trained in economics and have studied a great deal of economic anthropology, history, and political science, I have come to the not so shocking understanding that there is truly no useful model of human behavior to employ in the pursuit of economic development objectives within the scope of a positive change process.

Models fall short; they are inadequate in working with a group of people to create a better life.

Human behavior and reaction to change and development is dependent on the following three things: firstly, as individuals what we know and don’t; secondly what we believe and reject based on who we are or perceive we are; and thirdly what we do with what we know and believe.

I didn’t realize that until I left Montana and started my work in Africa in 1963.

I’ll give you a couple examples of this. I’ve been on both sides of this idea, and it is distorting in my mind and in my heart as to how radically I’ve had to change my views in response to what I’ve seen overseas and now am able to apply to my work in Montana.

First of all I’d like to quote from something I wrote some years ago. Entitled “The Metcalfe Imperative to Drive Change and Development in Response to Perceived Human Need,” this is in a publication of a series of articles called, Refugees South of the Sahara: An African Dilemma. I was invited to write an article on the effects of refugees on the nation state. Refugees however are not the issue when we are dealing with development in Africa. It is rather focusing on what causes the disruption that leads people to be refugees, to forced migrations, to considerable depravation caused environmentally, politically, or out of force and violence that is the real issue. Here is what I said:

“In nearly all of Africa the fundamental imperative to change is economic development. The role of the individual or groups of individuals engaged in this change process is determined largely from central authority, based essentially on a wide variety of methods and procedures about producing and dividing the national pie.”

However the cost of this economic determination approach and the philosophy that high consumption means development, linked with mass market communication, so vividly separates rich from the poor in Africa and even in Montana that it causes what Raúl Prebisch called years ago, “A rising sense of humiliation, a tremendous sense of humiliation of the masses whose participation in the change and nation building process seems at once very limited and very unfulfilling.”

Additionally a friend of mine, Dr. Alfred Jerkney from North Africa, a very sensitive thinker about words and their impact, challenged what I read to you by saying, “In my mind, economic development, contrary to what Mr. Metcalfe said, is but one of the variegated aspects of the problem of change; in fact only one of its constituent parts. I would thus suggest that the fundamental imperative to economic development, without which the viability of most of the African States are doomed, is change and that change no matter how imperative, or because of its imperativeness, is at the basis of African instability of the painful transitional stage it is experiencing.”

There were real lessons I learned. That was 1970 something. It seemed like it was yesterday. Some of the lessons we learned you don’t forget. I can immediately relate to what Alfred had commented as being part and parcel of the constant search and correction one must make in dealing with service as a change agent in communities here or overseas. It wasn’t just economic development. It was definitely a piece, but it wasn’t the whole pie.

Let me give you an example.

Years ago in Northern Rhodesia, which became Zambia, I was teaching economics at a local school. During the off periods I would work with villagers to see if I could help improve their quality of life. I really didn’t know a heck of a lot about what I was doing. But I gave it hell.

I learned however that a dam was being built on the Zambezi River just to the east of where we lived below the Zambezi Escarpment. I knew also that this dam would eventually flood most of the areas where a great number of the people now lived. Regrettably I also learned that they hadn’t been informed about this event by the colonial officers, nor would they necessarily have believed the news if they were told.

In any case, I knew something had to be done.

I encouraged the people to join me in learning how to fish, on a lake, something this agrarian society had never done before. They worked with me. We made dugout boats, we made fishing rods, and we carried this project through all the way until October. We were having fun. They were applying their skills to something new. However in October, suddenly people didn’t show up for our work days. I asked why. They said, “This is the period of our annual celebrations of many aspects of tribal life. This is a time for play, not for work.”

So they stopped. And I saw them using all their remaining grain, and they were a marginal food producing community. I saw them using the last bit of food they had before the rains and subsequent growth of crops to have basically a big party. They made beer, great foods, sang and danced and were having a great time. However I was very frustrated. Here they were celebrating when I knew this dam was going to wipe out their means of production, without reserves to make it through the season. I felt there was no hope.

I expressed my concerns to the Chief to no avail. As I turned and started walking away, I asked the student who was with me who did all of the translating between our groups, “I just wish I knew what the people, what the Chief, wanted me to do.”

He stopped me and ran back to the Chief. He had this quick dialogue and the entire community brought me back to the group. The Chief put his hand on my shoulder and said, “No no, we are not laughing at you. We are joyful. We’ve heard something that we’ve never heard. You said to the student Ronald that you wanted to know what we wanted to work on. We’ve never been asked that by anyone before.”

Even though the project we were working on would provide them with a viable food source, they weren’t a stakeholder. They didn’t feel they were part of the solution. They felt they were being given, or told, what to do. Without being involved in the creation of the solution, being a stakeholder, their community could not be fully invested.

I realized that I needed to change my developmental model.

I must also give you a reference from someone who has influenced me greatly in recent years. His name is Bernard Ladieu Waydrago. He is from Burkina Faso in Africa. He indicates in his thoughts about development, “The real issue is trying to extract and use the ability of peasant organizations,” like community groups here in Montana, “to achieve a better physical and human environment. Indeed, under their program, the principle is to develop without damaging,” something we Americans are not as versed with as we should be, “that process aims at accomplishing economic, social, and cultural change, but within the scope of the community. Damaging without developing has to be accomplished without rejecting local values, perceptions, or what people want to achieve and what they perceive to be development.”

To take another quotation from him, “The danger for many Africans,” think of this in terms of Montana, “is that the erosion of our ways by the aggressive ways of others, our own values by outside or external values, will destroy our sense of responsibility for solving our community problems.”

If we take this understanding and look to Montana, we realize we have to work with each other toward a better state. We all have to be stakeholders. One of the things I don’t see in Montana, which I believe is quite healthy, is that Montanans in general do not pursue maximizing their wealth, materially speaking. They pursue maximizing the value and joy that they can experience in living their lives.

Montanans, like many Africans, are pretty darn good about dealing with the pain they have to deal with at times in their lives that affects every human being. But there is also this notion that there is no need to go elsewhere, no need to change and grow, and no need to abandon some of our fundamental beliefs and values.

This does not make it easy to change; I know that every time I work with farmers in our valley, for example, about how we manage our water.

It may be new, but we have to get to it.