Reigning developmental dogmas in Africa need to be questioned

by Chido Makunike

So much has been written about agricultural productivity in Africa from so many angles sometimes it seems there is nothing new that can be said. The business of playing “expert” to the problems continues to be lucrative, even as the problem of how to feed growing populations on a declining resource base gets more severe.

And so the projects, studies and reports just keep on coming. Many of them simply mix and match old knowledge, repackage and present it as new insights that can make important and dramatic differences to Africa’s agricultural productivity, if only the recommendations within them are followed to the letter. Studying and advising Africa is seemingly a great business opportunity, although few have figured out how to translate all the free-floating expertise into significant changes on the ground.

As I read and hear the escalating crescendo of sometimes conflicting voices confidently holding forth on what Africa needs to do to quickly overcome its agricultural productivity problems, my mind often goes back to a group tour I had an opportunity to be a part of a little more than a year ago. It was to a remote area of a country in the Sahel, to look at the interventions of a well known international NGO in addressing productivity issues.

It was mid-year, just weeks before the start of the region’s normal rain season, a good time to gain an appreciation of the difficulties of farming in a farming-unfriendly region.

The hours of driving to the area from the nearest town on dirt roads in hot, dusty, sweltering conditions gives you an indication of the remoteness of your destination long before you get there. You realise that getting inputs out there or getting produce from there to market is a Herculean task, on top of the significant agronomic issues.You only have to look at the texture of the soil all around you to see how hard it is to grow anything in it. And driving for miles with no sign of water anywhere makes you appreciate this basic, precious resource in a way one rarely thinks about.

We finally got to the first stop of our tour. It was a cooperative garden around a well dug and furnished by the NGO. We were told it was provided for a group of about twenty women and their families to grow various vegetables for home consumption and the sale of any excess. The area was fenced and gated, with a prominent sign near the entrance highlighting the NGO’s generosity. I recall one or two simple buildings, and the well had been nicely built with concrete. The NGO also provided inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides, as well as the services of an extension worker. On the face of it, it seemed like not only a project with good intentions, but one whose needs for achieving a good impact had been fairly carefully thought about.

The cooperative garden did stand out from the surrounding Sahel dryness, but it was hardly the oasis one would have expected given the background information we were given about the “project.” All of us who had travelled for a couple of hours to get to this place, not sure exactly what was in store for us, would have wanted to have been confronted with an example of a lush, vibrant, productive project transforming lives.

I increasingly cringe at the use of this much-abused, nebulous word, but all of us on that tour were somehow in the “development” business. We would therefore have been quite aware that there are no projects that work flawlessly and of the many complex factors, known and unknown, that come into play in implementing them. We would have all tended to have been supportive and forgiving in our evaluations of what we saw, being aware of the many factors the people in this remote area were working against.

With all this in mind, I think the most diplomatic way I can summarise the group’s overall reaction to what they saw was a sense of being under whelmed at what had been achieved. Many were surprised at the small size of the garden, considering that it was said to be run by 20 families and had water, inputs and extension services provided. One colleague mentioned how elsewhere he had seen larger size pieces of land well tended by one serious farmer without external support. The vegetables were sparse in the beds, the variety limited to about three or four types, the quality poor. In an area where the main soil type is fine sand, there was no sign of any soil fertility management practice.

There certainly didn’t seem to be any prospect of producing enough for whole families to subsist on for any length of time, let alone enough to have leftovers to sell. One did not want to seem rude and judgmental, but it was awkward to observe these results, given the various inputs being freely provided, and given the small size of the land for the relatively large number of people working it.

Although the results were clearly poor, it was not possible to make any definitive judgments on why that was. There were too many things about the background and other relevant parts of the project we did not know, and the tour was not in an environment where it was easy to ask all the questions one would have wished to ask. Was the project primarily agricultural, or was it perhaps secondary to social, gender or other aims? What was the farming background of the participants? What proportion of the participants’ working time was spent on the garden? Was it seen as a part-time hobby, or were considerable amounts of time spent on it? How significant were its contribution to household food supply and/or income?

If this was their first experience of settled cultivation, for instance, that would have a heavy bearing on the evaluation of how well it was going. In that case, perhaps the results that did not seem so impressive to the outsider may nevertheless have been an improvement on where the participants were coming from before. And so on.

But even with the many unknowns, it was not possible to consider the project a roaring success in agricultural terms. The visiting group which would have so wanted to witness a thriving, community-changing project found it hard to know what to say. It simply wasn’t possible to credibly gush about how wonderfully successful and inspirational it was, and yet there was recognition of the great need for successful examples in this isolated, arid, hot and severely desertified landscape. The sponsoring NGO was obviously well-meaning, and one would have also wanted to see the funds it put into the project achieve the aim of giving whoever the donors were the satisfaction of the money having made a real change in the fortunes of the intended beneficiaries.

As we quietly trooped back into the tour bus, the big sign at the entrance advertising the magnanimity of the implementing NGO now seemed more like a mockery than a credit to their well-intentioned efforts.

Our next scheduled stop was one family’s smallholding. The long drive through the vast stretches of emptiness in the sparsely populated area was a reminder of just how difficult it is to build infrastructure in such small, scattered rural settlements.

The somewhat sombre mood of the group resulting from the heat, the denuded landscape, the desolation and the lacklustre-seeming project we had visited was lifted considerably by our experiences at the second stop. The family’s plot was perhaps a third the size of the cooperative project we had just visited, and was worked by a middle aged couple, their son and a young assistant. Their plot had a thatching-grass fence, and the simple well did not have the neat concrete finishing of the one at the donor-funded project we had visited. The family relied on their own resources and the plot was their livelihood; the source of their food as well as of cash.

The results were amazing. The plot was quite literally a tiny oasis in the desert. The area was brimming with a variety of lush vegetables. Healthy fruit-laden trees added to the diversity, contributing colour, shade, biomass and beauty. With no benefactor to provide expensive inputs, the family collected animal droppings in one corner for use as manure and a compost was maintained nearby.

It was a joy to behold. But what I remember even more than sheer productivity of the plot were the pride and dignity of the family. Theirs was not only a labour of necessity, but of love. They had to work hard to get by in their harsh environment, but their hard work showed in the results. Despite their modesty, their whole attitude showed they knew they were doing well. There was an atmosphere of industry and a relaxed seriousness of purpose that simply wasn’t in evidence at the earlier “project.”

This visit lifted everybody’s spirits. Whereas we eagerly, heavily, tiredly trudged back into the bus after the earlier stop, we had to be pulled away from this family enterprise because it was so inspiring.

As I said earlier, I am reluctant to draw any sweeping sort of conclusions based on a one-day visit, and with so much key background information missing. There have been too many examples of “experts” briefly swooping into one or another part of Africa, sniffing around briefly and somehow being able to produce authoritative studies, reports and funded projects!

But as I read and hear more about all the continuing such studies and projects targeted towards African agriculture, my mind often goes back to that visit, which was seminal for me in many ways, including in influencing which route I took at a major fork in my career path. That visit also indirectly played a role in the eventual launch of this website. It confirmed for me a long-held hunch that there was an unfilled need for an independent, no-sacred-cows platform where all the conflicting dogma about “development” in particular regards to agriculture in Africa can be freely featured and hopefully robustly interrogated.

Obviously the reasons why so many well-meaning “development projects” have little meaningful or long-term impacts are complicated. But it seems to me that naiveté about the sources of human motivation, to me sharply exemplified by the differences in the differing outcomes of the examples above, is an astonishingly frequent component of many do-gooder efforts. That the casual, communal, externally-driven, well-meaning donor-funded project was far less productive than that of the family-driven and owned, “selfishly”-motivated plot was totally in keeping with human nature for me.

But it is largely politically incorrect to think and say so, according to much of the current “developmental” dogma. I have often wondered if the community were even asked what they wanted before the well meaning project was conceived, funded and implemented. No matter the purity of the motivation, if the project is not in keeping with the cultural, social and other environmental realities, it really doesn’t matter how good an idea it is in theory. A needy community will not reject it, but neither will they enthusiastically embrace it.

I have also often wondered how much more that single family could be lightly enabled to be an example to others who are needy but perhaps not as innovative and self-driven. But then again, for a “project” to be funded and reported to the donor as having “ameliorated poverty,” it must at least on paper be shown to have a large-numbers catchment area, even if the actual result contradicts the often simplistically, naively ambitious project goals and the sometimes dishonestly glowing progress reports.

For most of the last 50 years of conventional developmental dogma in Africa, the attitude has more or less been “any well-intentioned scheme is better than doing nothing; let us not be too harsh in our reviews of do-gooder projects that may be naïve, simplistic and unsuccessful.” But as the business of studies and projects keeps growing and the problems they claim to want to address get worse, perhaps it is time to use a higher, tougher evaluation standard. Being well-meaning is clearly not enough, and when accompanied by funded naiveté; lack of understanding of the larger social, cultural and economic milieu and by an unfortunately rather common I-know-what-is best for you/the world chauvinism in the development sector, it can actually be quite harmful.

The questions are many, the answers and solutions elusive and complicated. There are many nobly motivated efforts taking place. But as the problems seem to continue and grow in proportion to the money, studies and projects hurled at them, perhaps it is also time to go back to basics and question every dogma about what works and doesn’t, and why. Perhaps “development” has become such a self-perpetuating industry that sight of many basic truths about what makes us tick, thrive and want to achieve as humans have been lost.

The African Agriculture site is a work in progress and still in its very early stages. But it hopes to develop to a stage where such fundamental questions are posed, debated and various fresh answers proposed by all those involved in African agricultural development. Clearly the various reigning dogmas have not served Africa very well.

African Agriculture