In Search of a Solution – En Route to East Africa

We’re bound for Kayanga, Tanzania: departing Pittsburgh for Altanta, then Amsterdam, and finally Uganda’s Entebbe airport before 8 hours over road to our rural village destination. As is the case with allAmizade experiences, we go in search of a solution. The solutions we seek are partly informed through service and somewhat illuminated through learning. On this program the service includes working with a sustainable development organization, Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation (FADECO), as well as a women’s rights organization, the Women’s Emancipation and Development Agency(WOMEDA). These local organizations have already created a set of beautiful solutions for the issues they address. We simply work to support their efforts.

In a region where 25% of the local crops were spoiling before reaching the market, FADECO developed a set of value-added post-production processes, drawing on simple and affordable local materials. Regional farmers now also sell dried fruits. Tomatoes are shipped as far away as Sweden, where pizza shops can advertise Tanzania sun-dried tomatoes among their toppings. FADECO was central to educating and empowering farmers about these possibilities, and also central to bringing internet and radio to the region. As FADECO’s Director and co-founder Joseph Sekiku so clearly knows, education and information are central to success.

WOMEDA, simultaneously, has worked to ensure women are afforded the most basic legal protections and rights. Within recent generations, the situation in respect to women’s rights in this region was so poor that effectively one half of the population was not allowed to learn, to grow, or to meet its potential. Still today, women frequently farm, take care of the children, fetch water, harvest the crops, and sell the crops, only to be forced – at the threat or eventuality of abuse – to turn any small proceeds over to their husbands. The husbands frequently use the money to drink, to leave briefly, to do anything but support their families. In this context WOMEDA helps ensure young women have the right to schooling, women have the right to hold property, and – in the case of any disputes – women are permitted legal standing in court. WOMEDA advances basic respect and rights for women.

It is these organizations that create the solutions. We support them by helping a breadth of efforts: English language tutoring, grant-writing, English writing and brochure development, conducting interviews with local women as part of creating a base-line survey, and assisting with the installation of gravity-based water harvesting systems to help ensure more families have water access. We do these things and more, always at the direction of our local partners. Yet we still search.

While in many ways FADECO and WOMEDA help us identify and implement some solutions, the scale of the challenges here is so great and the immediacy of the issues so overwhelming, that our work with them really only catalyzes our efforts to better understand. This program is part of a course offered through West Virginia University. The course focuses on International Development. We therefore read from and review many of the important, frequently oppositional, voices in the field such as Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs andNew York University’s William Easterly. While Sachs writes with contagious optimism and suggests we have the power to end poverty in our time, Easterly heaps a similarly persuasive scathing disdain on people like Sachs. Easterly is appalled anyone might think poverty will be rendered obsolete through careful planning and guidance from above; he insists relief will come only through individual ingenuity and drive, and that there is no reasonable place for Sachs’ initiatives such as the Millennium Villages.

My students and I drop into the thick of this debate, but unlike many students or established economists (Easterly and Sachs both), we will consider these questions in the context of their application. We will dialogue with local people about the solutions they develop, the challenges they see, and the perspective they have. We will, no doubt, see kernels of truth and fallacy in both Sachs’ and Easterly’s approaches, as we cede the easy approach of aligning ourselves with one or another theory in favor of the much more challenging effort to better understand development as it works, in real life, on the ground.

But first – across the Atlantic, into Europe, over the Mediterranean, witnessing the desiccate brown of the Sahara distant below, and flying over increasingly lush and verdant Africa before touching down in what Winston Churchill called the Pearl of Africa - Uganda.