Localizing Global Anti-Poverty Initiatives

Poverty is the most important challenge of this century and hits Africa the hardest. Through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the international community committed to reduce the proportion of people worldwide between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than a $1 per day by one-half. While progress has been made in several countries, it is slow and appears largely reversible. For example, there are general fears that due to the recent global food crisis, increased cost of energy, severe drought and floods, at least 100 million more people will soon fall into the poverty bracket. Another challenge is the high disease burden which is leading to increased productivity loses and labor diversion in Africa. These will combine to eat away gains made in the past several decades. To this end, Africa needs to renew approaches to poverty eradication and particularly prioritize issues that increase the continent’s vulnerability such as relevant education and improving health outcomes.

Education for what..?

Africa’s educational system is at cross-roads. There is debate whether the current structure of education can produce cadres that the continent needs to adapt and become more competitive. While literature points to tremendous gains in enrolment through national and international efforts, the general gross enrolment ratio (GER) across Africa remains the lowest in the world. In many countries, the education system struggles with irrelevant curriculum, access equity, poor learning outcomes, weak link with world of work and inadequate financing . Relevance of education is viewed as one of the key factors behind high dropout rates at all levels in Africa.

Alongside fundamental reforms of formal educational systems, Africa needs to popularize functional adult literacy and technical vocational training. Models such as community colleges in Canada and Barefoot College in India might provide a new channel to engage rural women and men to learn practical skills that reduce their vulnerability to poverty. Essentially, it will produce a pool of expertly trained middle-level specialists that are equipped to support smallholder farmers in coping with increasing drought, loss of soil fertility and managing huge on-farm post harvest loses.

One centre, in Africa shows that indeed vocational education can be transformative in the battle against poverty. For more than 20 years, Centre Songhai in Benin has demonstrated how learner-centred vocational training can transform communities from threshold of food crisis to self sustenance. Songhai is a lot similar to Uganda’s Namutamba experimental project on education for rural development that was established in the 70s. Unfortunately, Namutamba never survived its pilot phase despite numerous positive reviews. The Songhai Centre has combined applied research and bio technology, efficient use of local resource with training to create probably the most exciting ecologically balanced and resourceful farm in Africa. The prospects for poverty eradication would be a lot better if Africa could replicate similar vocational education programs that empower vulnerable communities.

Poor health, low productivity

Poor health constrains productivity, undermines food security and poverty eradication initiatives. And because smallholder farmers produce the bulk of agricultural output in Africa, poor health to family members is a major diversion of labor and productivity whose shock is quickly felt across communities. African’s women are the most vulnerable to poor health impacts yet they contribute most of the labor used to produce food both for household consumption and for sale. The scale of Africa’s health challenges can be summarized as follows: with only 11% of the world’s population, the continent has the highest burden of disease, seven times higher than high income countries. South-East Asia and Africa bore 54% of the global burden of disease in 2004 . HIV/AIDS, diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection are the core causes of the burden of disease. Even worse, climate change is now complicating efforts to control known diseases while aiding emergence of new vectors, some which had been controlled in the past.

Poverty eradication has got a lot to do with improving health outcomes in Africa. If unleashing the full potential of women is critical anti-poverty programming, health conditions that affect women need to be prioritized. It is possible to leverage new technologies in a wide range of eHealth applications that increase efficiency and effectiveness of the health services. Additionally, the continent needs to strengthen climate change adaptation capacities at community and national levels.

Africa can pull itself out of poverty. It is a statement millions of people in rural communities across the continent would like to hear more often. And the development community can provide credible hope by re-aligning approaches in a way that prioritize the most vulnerable people. This is possible by helping communities to adapt, cope and become more resilient to new global challenges faster and efficiently.