MUCH has been written about Africa’s past, a story that describes how a continent of diverse peoples, places and opportunities has been cowed by the common ills of colonialism, poverty, disease and malnutrition. Now, we are told, it is time to write the blueprint for Africa’s future.
This weekend’s Live 8 rock concerts will give a voice to the public’s desire for the rich to help Africa’s poor. Next week at the G8 summit, the leaders of the world’s most prosperous nations are expected to sign a huge cheque that will cancel much of the continent’s debts, and offer a new and more substantial aid package.
But behind the rock star rhetoric and political action, something is missing: the pages of text that will detail how Africa will reinvent itself as a developed continent. Western authors are scribbling the chapter headings “eradicating corruption”, “international trade”, and “good governance”. But the chapter that matters most will be headed “Africa’s Enlightenment”. And it will be written by the people of Africa themselves.
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“African leaders are starting to see the light, that there’s no way out unless they embrace science and technology,” says Mohamed Hassan, president of the African Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS). Calestous Juma, a pioneer of development in Africa, now at Harvard University and author of an influential report charting Africa’s path towards ending poverty, agrees. “We’re at a critical turning point. I don’t know of any other period where there’s been such awareness in Africa itself of technological development,” he told 91av.
“We’re at a critical point. At no other time has there been such awareness in Africa itself of technological development”
Juma’s vision of a continent governed by heads of state committed to enlarging Africa’s knowledge economy is outlined in Innovation: Applying knowledge in development, a report compiled this year at the request of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. It is a vision now accepted by many African and western leaders alike. “Africa is ready,” declares Turner Isoun, minister of science and technology in Nigeria and one of the prime movers of Africa’s dash for modernisation. “We are past the stage of just being passengers.”
Four years ago, the countries that form the African Union set up the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which aims to reshape Africa’s destiny at every level. Next week in Gleneagles, UK, NEPAD will deliver its final recommendations to the G8 leaders on how Africa can be transformed – and a key request will be more cash for science, technology and education. Support will come from the influential Commission for Africa, an organisation led by 17 mainly African commissioners, set up in 2004 by UK prime minister Tony Blair after prompting by pop star and anti-poverty campaigner Bob Geldof. The commission is asking for $500 million per year for 10 years to revitalise Africa’s universities, plus another $3 billion over 10 years to develop top-flight centres of excellence and institutes of technology inside African countries.
It is an enormous challenge. Data published last year by the late Sanjaya Lall of the University of Oxford showed that in 1995 just 0.28 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans enrolled in tertiary education, compared with 4.06 per cent in rich countries. Using the latest data available, Lall reported that sub-Saharan Africa has 83 scientists and engineers working in research and development per million people, compared to 1102 in industrialised nations.
But growing a rich knowledge economy will have huge pay-offs. Today’s African universities are factories that churn out civil servants, while most cities are little more than administrative centres, says Juma. By turning them into science and technology powerhouses, universities can instead produce entrepreneurs and innovators, while businesses can be encouraged to develop the innovative and cutting-edge technologies that form the foundations of industrialisation. If they succeed, African cities could experience a transformation like those in Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, and cities across south-east Asia, where computer and telecoms industries have reinvigorated local economies.
There is evidence that these tactics work. Nigeria, one of Africa’s more developed countries, once relied on oil wealth to drive its economy. But progress has been swift since the nation launched its first science-based economic policy four years ago, which had at its heart a commitment to building Nigeria’s IT infrastructure. In that time, cellphone ownership has risen from 1 to 14 million, while 8 million people have internet access – eight times as many as in 2001. “If you want your economic vehicle to move, you must put science and technology in the engine,” science minister Isoun told 91av.
Nigeria is also embracing biotechnology, collaborating with internationally renowned institutions such as Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. And Nigeria has already joined forces with the UK and launched a remote-sensing satellite. Next year it plans to launch its first communications satellite in a joint venture with China.
“A rich knowledge economy has huge pay-offs. Cities could experience a transformation like the one in Bangalore”
Much of this progress stems from a new, more mature approach to international aid money fostered by a fledgling democratic process. Instead of the cash lining the pockets of dictators, “we in parliament are demanding that the government comes before us and explains how it intends to spend the money”, says Usman Bugaje, chair of Nigeria’s House of Representatives foreign affairs committee.
Isoun believes other African nations can imitate Nigeria’s progress. “Because of the leadership we are seeing, there’s an urgent drive to be part of the knowledge economy,” he says. “Ghana has a tradition of good scholars, and is in a powerful position. Senegal is ready. Kenya and Uganda are also making good progress, as is Tanzania, and Ethiopia also has good people.”
And that is a big part of the problem. Africa has the talent, but highly qualified scientists and technologists quit the continent in droves for a better life overseas. More than two out of every three medical officers trained by Ghana in the 1990s work abroad, while more African scientists and engineers work in the US than in the whole of Africa. “There are 33,000 Nigerian doctors in the US,” Isoun says. “There’s lots of talk of tapping into the diaspora, but I’ve not seen any substantial programmes,” says Hassan.
Bringing talent back home
But Juma says that modern communication technologies such as teleconferences, email and the internet, could turn these disenfranchised expatriates into a valuable resource – and many are desperate to help. “The development of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan relied on Taiwanese expats in the US,” he says. “We hope we can bring many of our best scholars home, and part of it is that they see good governance, better security, and so on,” agrees Isoun.
This new generation of African experts will have their work cut out. As in Europe before it, Africa’s enlightenment project must focus on establishing food security, eradicating disease, developing a reliable energy infrastructure and generating new technology-based manufacturing industries.
Directly or indirectly, agriculture provides income for 70 per cent of all Africans. Between 1984 and 2002, 16 per cent more land in sub-Saharan Africa was turned over to agriculture, while crop yields increased. Yet every night, 33 million African children still go to bed hungry.
“Africa has the talent, but scientists and technologists quit the continent in droves for a better life overseas”
Africa can feed itself, given a little help. One of NEPAD’s priorities is to help Africans escape the triple bind of falling incomes, food insecurity and degrading natural resources, and in 2003 the African Union endorsed its recommendation for all national governments on the continent to commit 10 per cent of their overall budgets to agriculture.
The buzzword is participation, getting African farmers directly involved in farming innovations, a message echoed in a report last year by a panel appointed by the InterAcademy Council, an alliance of 90 scientific academies. There is no single cure for Africa’s agricultural woes, no equivalent to the green revolution that filled Asian stomachs. What Africa needs, said the report, are discrete “rainbow revolutions” that can improve the multitude of diverse farming systems on the continent.
New conventional and genetically modified crop varieties that produce higher yields, new and more profitable agricultural systems that mix cereal and root crops, and a greater planting of cash crops by smallholders, will all improve food security. But for it to work, African farmers and agricultural experts should play a big part in deciding which pilot projects to pursue.
The same is true for Africa’s desperately needed blue revolution. Some 300 million people, or 42 per cent of Africa’s population, currently go without clean water. “Sixty per cent of aid money goes to overseas consultants with no experience of conditions here,” says Nuhu Hatibu of Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania. Hatibu is head of the Tanzanian Rainwater Harvesting Project, sponsored by the UK Department for International Development, which has helped encourage farmers in 10 countries to harvest rainwater to irrigate their fields. Other schemes, such as gravity-powered water supply systems, are now improving water quality and sanitation in countries around Africa. They are successful because they are set up with the help of, and maintained by, local communities.
Grass-roots expertise
Participation is also a watchword in the treatment of debilitating illness. Malaria kills 900,000 people a year in Africa, while 25.4 million sub-Saharan Africans carry HIV – 60 per cent of the world total. Africa also accounts for 31 per cent of all tuberculosis-related deaths, with the disease killing 1500 Africans a day. While aid money is helping to pay for drugs to treat these conditions, the most modern therapies are useless without the expertise to administer them.
The World Health Organization is now trying to tap into a relatively untried pool of experts – the patients themselves, who are hugely knowledgeable about how to administer drugs, why they are given, and how to tackle any side effects. The WHO has 130 expert HIV patient-trainers working in seven African countries. “People who have got the disease can become part of the solution, and an inspiration for new patients,” says Jack Chow, the WHO’s assistant director-general for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria.
“There is an untapped pool of health experts – the patients themselves, who are hugely knowledgeable”
Startling results are coming in from a pilot project in Malawi in which lay volunteers, 30 per cent of them HIV-positive, helped to treat new patients. In the patients who didn’t receive care from volunteers, deaths were five times as high. “It’s all about empowerment,” says Rony Zachariah of Médecins Sans Frontières in Belgium, who heads the project. He thinks the main difference is that side effects were treated before they could kill people. “If diarrhoea’s not handled quickly, you’re gone in two days,” he told 91av.
“People who have got HIV can become part of the solution, and an inspiration for new patients”
Antiretroviral therapies now reach 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, double the number six months ago, the WHO reported this week. TB detection rates are climbing, too. Half of all cases in Africa are now identified, against a WHO target of 70 per cent, and 73 per cent of these people are cured – 12 per cent short of WHO targets.
Africa is also making its own drugs, among them anti-malarials called artemisinins, extracted from the shrub Artemisia annua. Native to China, the shrub is being grown in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda in a bid to provide a local supply. Although artemisinins are expensive, they can cure malaria within four days in combination with other drugs. Fifteen countries have ordered the new anti-malarials as a replacement for chloroquine, to which the malaria parasite is becoming resistant.
But a big injection of cash is a must, as Africa’s healthcare systems are still too weak, under-funded and fragmented to cope, says Eric Buch of the University of Pretoria and author of NEPAD’s health plan. “Africa is short of $22 billion per annum for basic healthcare for all its citizens, short of 1 million health workers, and spends $4 billion on medicines, a tenth of what’s needed,” he says. But with health so high on the international agenda, the opportunity is there for change. “It’s a critical juncture,” says Buch. “While Africa’s in the spotlight, seize the moment.”
Electrifying a continent
And that is what many African nations plan to do, by marrying external financial and expert knowledge with home-grown enthusiasm to create the continent’s own enlightenment project. But without light there will be no enlightenment, so Africa first has to bridge the energy divide between the rich and poor.
Electricity is the technology that most defines the modern world. But the majority of Africans don’t have it, with only a fifth of households hooked up to a mains supply. Most African cities have ramshackle electricity systems, and in some, the majority of connections are illegal. Blackouts are the norm as infrastructure often built in the 1950s and 1960s starts to degrade. Outside cities, most people get more energy from burning wood and dung than electricity, or they light up with kerosene lamps and power TVs and equipment with car batteries.
Getting electricity to the bush should be a top priority, says the head of the UN Environment Programme Klaus Toepfer, or the villages will empty. “If the electricity doesn’t go to the people, the people will go to the electricity,” he says.
To do this, Africa faces a choice between developing megaprojects, such as a handful of huge dams connected by a supergrid, or a more diverse infrastructure, based for example on solar panels on millions of roofs.
NEPAD has presented international donors with a shopping list of megaprojects. Biggest of all are plans for a $50 billion hydropower plant on the Congo river which South African power company Eskom announced in February. The plant would have twice the capacity of the world’s largest hydro-project, China’s Three Gorges dam, and would increase Africa’s electricity-generating capacity by a staggering 40 per cent.
With similarly grandiose plans to tap geothermal energy in the Rift valley of East Africa, the Congo project could supply the whole continent via a mega power grid. “Africa urgently needs energy to lift its people out of poverty,” says Reuel Khoza, chairman of Eskom. But is this the way forward?
Many doubt it. They say distributing power to Africa’s rural majority will cost even more than generating the power in the first place. Even relatively advanced countries like Kenya cannot extend their power grids much beyond major cities.
Critics of this approach propose a very different model for bringing power to the people. The idea is to do away with costly distribution systems and generate power locally instead. Micro-hydro plants on thousands of streams would replace the Congo megaproject. Wind turbines and solar panels could sprout in every town and village; composters that produce biogas could sit in every backyard.
Such plans to bolster Africa’s energy and agricultural infrastructures, eliminate the burden of disease, and provide clean water, form part of the blueprint for modernising the continent. The financial package announced at the G8 summit will barely pay for it to get started, and the whole enlightenment project is likely to take decades. But Africa has no choice but to put its knowledge economy at the heart of its development plans. “I’m absolutely sure it’s the only escape route,” says Hassan. “What Africa needs is one or two countries to do it, to break this cycle of poverty, and others will follow.”
The spectre of global warming may cast a shadow over these hopes. No one knows what effect it will have on the continent, but the signs aren’t good. This week, David Thomas at the University of Oxford and colleagues published research showing that, even using conservative estimates, the climate change triggered by global carbon emissions will radically alter Africa’s deserts. By 2099, dune fields across the Kalahari basin, from northern South Africa to Angola and Zambia, will become “highly dynamic”, perhaps spreading into, and devastating, agricultural regions (Nature, vol 435, p 1218). “The environmental and social consequences of these changes will be drastic,” they say.
“Without light, there will be no enlightenment, so Africa has to bridge the energy gap between rich and poor”
But for many Africans trying to live with abject poverty that is tomorrow’s concern. Today, “we’re on the verge of a sea change in the way we think about Africa”, says Juma. “The problem might be one of managing expectations.”
“The changes needed in agriculture should echo those made in developed countries after the second World war”
Family values
Is Africa’s high birth rate jeopardising its future? No, say many of Africa’s leaders and the continent’s powerful churches and mosques. Yes, chimes the community of rich nations, and the UN.
The role and status of the next generation sharply divides the nations of Africa from the richer countries. A low birth rate coupled with a high life expectancy is seen as one of the foundation stones of modern developed societies. But on average, African mothers each have more than five children during a relatively short life. The chances of development in Africa without more mothers living longer and having fewer children seem very slim indeed.
What can be done? Development agencies have discovered that one solution is to take a softly-softly approach to direct birth control, while focusing more on a shopping list of related measures. These include helping to make childbirth safer for mothers and babies by providing better antenatal care; ensuring skilled experts are present at childbirth; and making sure mothers have good access to emergency obstetricians. More women (1 in 16) in African countries are at risk of dying during pregnancy than in most other parts of the world.
In addition, more emphasis is being placed on compulsory education for girls in the knowledge that better-educated girls will want to marry later and have fewer children. Education, moreover, can give women the confidence to confront men who refuse to wear condoms, or who regard wives and partners essentially as reproductive machines.
At the same time, development agencies such as the UN Fund for Population and Development (UNFPA) have begun to meet regularly with leaders of Africa’s religious groups in an effort to convince them that safer pregnancies and fewer children needn’t mean that God will love you any less. But they have a tough task ahead of them.
According to the world view of traditional Christianity and Islam, Africa’s two biggest religions, children are regarded as a blessing from God, and God will reward families who have large numbers of children in the afterlife. In return for being cared for by their mothers, children are expected to hand over certain rights to their mothers when they are older – such as the right to marry the person of their choice.
For some traditional religious leaders, if better reproductive health leads to more assertive women and children, it is little more than a smokescreen for western values, and should be opposed.
Eliminating hunger
People who are hungry cannot work or go to school; they fall ill; they begin to withdraw from society; and in extreme situations, they die much too young. This is why the race is now on to get Africa to feed itself.
A raft of measures are being put in place to end what Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo calls “a pain in the belly of Africa that will just not go away”. These include programmes to fortify food with vital micronutrients such as iodine, iron, vitamin A and selenium, as well as promoting breastfeeding, and developing new higher-yielding crop varieties. And just as in reproductive healthcare, governments, economists, scientists and development agencies have learned that “joined-up-thinking” is more effective than isolated, one-off interventions. Joined-up thinking means attacking hunger head-on: it means feeding hungry people, and at the same time removing the reasons why they are hungry in the first place.
The most influential assessment of Africa’s hunger is a report published in January called Halving Hunger: It can be done. Commissioned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the report was compiled by some of the world’s leading experts on hunger led by M. S. Swaminathan, one of the pioneers of the original green revolution, and Pedro Sanchez of Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York City. The report says people go hungry in Africa mainly because the continent is not producing enough food. It says that those most in need of food are small farming families, victims of conflict and other disasters, women and the young.
To readers in developed countries, the report’s recommendations will come as common sense, because many echo the farming policy changes that took place after the second world war. These include a network of good roads to and from farms; access for farmers to sources of credit; better irrigation systems; more nutritious soils and reliable data on market trends. Africa’s agriculture is mostly fed by rain and the soils are desperately short of nutrients. Halving Hunger says that the road density in some African states is five times lower than that in India during the 1950s.
Most of Africa’s farmers are subsistence farmers: they grow food to feed their families, which means that in a bad harvest, they risk starvation. This is why governments and aid agencies are now helping such farmers across the continent to diversify their produce, and are encouraging them to start thinking of farming as a business as well as a means of feeding themselves. As farmers begin to think smarter, more of them are demanding the paraphernalia of modern commerce.
Annan has said that while all are burdened by hunger, it is children and women who are on the front line. The continent is home to a quarter of the world’s underweight pre-school children (some 32 million). One of the most effective ways of turning this around is to provide free school meals, but as in India, many countries in Africa are only now starting to offer this common-sense option.
Free school meals have an added benefit: they lead to a rise in school enrolment. In north-eastern Uganda, for example, primary school attendance increased by up to 40 per cent between 1999 and 2005 when school meals were introduced. In Ghana, school meals had an even more marked effect: many more girls began to attend and by 2002 their numbers equalled those of boys.
Why is this so significant? In many African countries, women lose out when it comes to food. As in most countries of the world, women are expected to do the cooking; but unlike other countries, women and girls in many African societies tend to eat last, often finishing up what the boys and the men have left on their plates. If going to school means that fewer girls will marry early, school meals ensure that when they do, they are more likely to be well nourished and have healthy children.
