Reflection point: Insight on Africa

It has long been evident to me that there is a huge creativity gap, ingenuity gap, economic gap, etc, between Africa and the West. But to wake up to the fact that the same gap is emerging between Africa and India, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc is shocking. These are countries that had the same level of economic development as Africa just after independence in the 50s and 60s. What went wrong in the past fifty years, why is Africa still lagging behind? What can we do?

After reading a couple of books and carrying our my own findings, I have come to the conclusion that what is needed to jump-start economic growth, innovation, creativity and bridge the many gaps is not aid but education. The aid model, Moyo argues in her book, Dead Aid, has clearly failed. So if the west really wants to solve the problem of AIDS, corruption, bad governance, lack of democracy, it should invest in building schools in Africa. Schools that will educate our own engineers, doctors, scientist, economists, etc. I don't mean here that we have to rely on the West to solve our problems but if they [G8 and other donor organs] cared at all, the rightful thing to do would be to invest in education.

Well, you may argue that we can educate our own professionals abroad in foreign schools. There are only so many students that can study in America, Britain, France, etc at any given time. We are a continent of more than a billion people, we cannot train all the professionals we need abroad. We need home-trained professionals. The people who built the American economy didn't study in Britain or France. They studied at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, etc. The people who developed Britain as we know today didn't study in the US or France, they studied at Oxford, LSE, Cambridge. The same goes for other countries. Take India for example. Since the creation of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1947, the Indian economy has never been the same. In less than 6 decades, the Institute has trained well over 170,000 graduates in various professions. From engineers and business men and women to architects and computer scientists. In fact, the success of its alumni let the US Congress to pass a resolution honoring the contribution of IIT graduates to the American economy. China has also acknowledged the success of the system and wants to copy the model (wiki).

This is what Africans needs, the Indian model. If we must rise up and wean ourselves off aid and develop our continent, we need to heavily invest in education. It will take years of lobbying to convince any donor to invest in educating Africans instead of giving billions of dollars to corrupt governments and bureaucrats that never trickle down to the masses or have any meaningful change society. Meanwhile in reality, education is the panacea to Africa's myriad-fold problems.

Question; If you were a policy maker in one of the donor institutions, or a lawmaker in the US or Britain or France, any donor country, what would you advocate for? More aid to dictators and lazy governments or meaningful investment in the continents future such as education?