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Praise for APPP Learning Week Event, Accra, 26 to 30 April 2010
"Public actions and institutions should reflect local realities", APPP researchers
Participants attending the APPP’s Learning Week in Accra have called on policy makers and development partners to find better ways of organizing development in Africa. They proposed that development in Africa should draw on shared values and best practices from Africa’s own experience, rather than on standard models from the West, which tend to be incompatible with the living realities in Africa.
Recounting experiences from their various countries, the participants, made up of researchers and communicators from Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana and Senegal, agreed with the proposition that part of the reason why Africa’s development may be lagging behind is because public action and institutions of governance are not usually rooted in local realities.
Contributing to the Learning Week Programme in Accra, Mr. Kojo Asante, Head of Programs at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), observed that Africa’s experience in delivering developmental outcomes is deeper and richer than most Political Science theories tend to suggest. “Such limited understanding of local realities tends to ignore African experiences in the developmental paradigm, and this has affected local content development over the years,” he observed.
Recounting his experience from Rwanda, Mr Edward Munyaburanga noted that development programmes are dumped on Africans without recourse to what works or does not work in the African context. He said Rwanda’s experience with group action for development has shown that long-held traditional values and beliefs work better than Western-styled alternatives. He said the tradition of swearing to one’s superior each year, for example, is a kind of social performance contract that helps local people to achieve set goals and targets. “This system has endured the test of time and has contributed to various developmental outcomes in Rwanda”, he said.
In his contribution, Prof David Booth, Director of the APPP, said that one view within the programme is that there are important long-term continuities in African social and political life, and the priority is to harness these for development. Others tend to view failures of public policy as the result of challenging collective action problems, and pragmatic solutions are what is needed. “This issue needs to be settled with rich empirical material, carefully integrated to generate grounded theory of relevance to Africa’s development. This is what the APPP research is seeking to achieve,” he said.
By Theodore Dzebble
Dates/Times: 26 to 30 April 2010
Venue: Accra, Ghana at CDD offices
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APPP Working Paper 13, Towards a theory of local governance and public goods' provision in sub-Saharan Africa, David Booth, Aug 2010 Eng More Info |
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