Global Voices Online (Cambridge)
Ethan Zuckerman
12 July 2007
guest column
Arusha — TED Africa - introducing Africa 2
Christmas at TED?
TED and the sponsors behind the conference made an amazing commitment to including innovative young African leaders, thinkers and entrepreneurs into the TED Global conference. Of the 450 attendees at the conference, 100 are “fellows”, here through the generosity of GE, Google and AMD. That generosity took an unexpected extra step this morning, when TED staffer Tom Rielly announced to the assembled fellows that Google and AMD would be donating a new Mac or PC laptop to all fellows, and that Noah Samara from Worldspace would be giving each fellow a satellite radio and an annual subscription.
This isn’t the only generous effort coming out of the TED Global conference. William Kamkwamba, the amazing young Malawian engineer who built his first windmill at age 14, has captured the imagination of many of the people in the crowd. A number of TED attendees have banded together to support him fiscally to complete his high school education and go onto university. A TED staffer is travelling to Malawi next week to start working on finding tutors for William to help prepare him to attend a top high school in Malawi.
Some members of my blogging community, including Ndesanjo Macha, have committed to coaching William… and critically, in coaching TED on how to provide William with help and support without overwhelming him or uprooting him from his family or community. Friends like Ndesanjo have had the experience of growing up in rural communities and moving to huge cities to pursue their education - I hope that he can help TED support William in a way that’s as constructive as possible.
While today has felt a bit like Christmas, especially for everyone who’s currently dreaming of their new radios and laptops, it’s important to remember that the real value of this conference has been bringing everyone together here in Arusha. It’s rare that we get a chance to hear from this many amazing African voices at any one event. It’s even more rare that these voices get heard by an audience of global decisionmakers, people with the power to help bring some of the amazing ideas shared here to scale. Thanks to everyone who’s made it possible for TED to be in Africa and for a hundred amazing fellows to be here.
Salim Amin, fulfilling his father’s dream
Salim Amin begins his talk with a video of refugees and starving children in Ethiopia, very much the sorts of images that have been the subject of critique this week at the conference. In the background of many of the shots is a photographer - Salim’s father, photojournalist Mohamed Amin.
Salim tells us that those images saved the lives of three million people by calling attention to the famine. Salim tells us that his father had to work tremendously hard to get American media to use these images - they were refused at first, before being adopted and amplified in the media.
Mohamed Amin died a decade ago while negotiating on a hijacked Ethiopian airlines plane. These were not images of the Africa he loved, but they were tremendously important. They became tangible proof of the trouble and suffering in Africa, helping create responsibility for African problems around the globe.
Salim Amin wants to take on a different challenge - making African voices telling African news available to the world. His new project is A24 - a 24-hour news channel about Africa, covered by Africans. This is a lesson Salim took for his father - Africa must be covered by Africans.
Salim is concerned about the damaging impact of the stereotypical portrayal of Africa - in a very real sense, his father’s twenty year old images are still many people’s images of Africa. We need a project like A24 to build contemporary images of the real Africa, “to shape our own vision of ourselves.” Why do we need another news channel? Because we have none for Africa - SABC is compromised by South African government influence, he argues, and CNBC is a business news channel.
The station will be supported by 46 “low-cost, high-tech” bureaus around the continent. They’ll cover breaking news as well as longer feature stories - including some of the ideas put on the stage at TED. It will broadcast around the world and into rural Africa, using the Internet, radio, satellite TV, “and most importantly cellphones.” It will be offered to all national networks free to air, “in part because it’s hard to get them to pay”, and will be supported by advertising, international content syndication and satellite subscriptions.
“Democracy is not possible without a strong, independent media,” Amin tells us. If A24 is a success, his work will do more than improve broadcast journalist - it will help create transparency and democracy across the continent.
James Shikwati, and crisis as opportunity
Economist James Shikwati is introduced a one-man Libertarian think-tank. Chris Anderson references his now-legendary interview in Spiegel, reported under the title, “For god’s sake, please stop the aid“. He is “shockingly misguided, amazingly wrong,” according to Jeffrey Sachs… which makes him very popular already with some of our audience.
Shikwati believes that Africa’s economic weakness comes from a failure to commercialize the resources and inventions of the continent. He urges us to “stop addressing African problems and start addressing African opportunities.” Famine, he tells us, is a business challenge: 200 million people are facing food shortage, and they’re a market. Malaria, with 300-500 million cases a year and $12 billion in economic loss, is an economic opportunity.
“How can you say you don’t have a job in Africa when there are all these opporunities?” Shikwati points to a new Kenyan business focused on indoor insecticide spraying, protecting houses from roaches and mosquitoes for six months. The cost is afforable - from 100 to 400 Kenyan shillings - and providing this service is an entreprenurial opportunity for otherwise unemployed Kenyans.
The challenge for Africa is for businesses to move beyond their home countries and spread throughout the continent. “What’s missing is not money, but confidence.” Shikwati suggests that use culture to introduce people to business and build their confidence. He wants to “create passion amongst the youth” through business competitions and awards.
He fears there’s a “constrained vision” that Africans suffer from, a need to release the African mind. “If I eat yams, people say I’m poor - I should eat bread. That’s nonsense.” It’s the result of cultural preconception, he believes. “People are looking at African entrepeneurs as corrupt and untrustworthy
- a leader may be corrupt, but Africans are not corrupt.” To succeed, Africans need to challenge these stereotypes, internally and externally.
From the outside, Shikwati tells us, “Aid looks quite sexy. If we see a beggar on the street, we feel we should help him.” But this might not be the right decision. “If you’ve been giving us aid and have made us lose confidence in ourselves… I think you are not helping Africa.” Instead, he asks Shikwati to invest in Africa, or to allow the Africans to sell their products globally. But African companies have to step up as well. “How many indigenous African businesses are ready to tap into COMESA, a market of 400 million people? Or ECA, a market of 100 million people.”
Shikwati warns us that “countries bring not just aid, but their companies.” If we’re not careful, we end up putting ourselves in a situation where we’re waiting for aid instead of innovating - “we need to be competing with international business” across the African market.
“My dream is for my daugher to find her future in Africa”
Ory Okolloh asks, “what’s image got to do with it?” She tells us that our images of Africa focus on the negative stuff - the poverty, the corruption and the disease. People assume that as a Harvard-educated African, these aren’t issues that are personal for her. But she tells us, “I know what it is to grow up without money. The bellweather for whether our family was broke or not - when things were good, we had eggs and sausages, when they were bad, we had porridge.” It was difficult for the family to save, because her parents supported an extended family. But they made a decision to enroll her in a school they could barely afford, a private Catholic school. “I got kicked out pretty much every term,” when the family ran out of money. “Why don’t these guys just take me to a cheap school - it’s embarrasing.”
Her dream high school was the Kenya school, a national school, but she missed the cut by a single point on the national exam. Her father suggested they go speak to the headmistress to see if they’d made an exception. “Because we were nobodies, because my father didn’t have the right last name, we were treated like dirt. And
there’s nothing worse than seeing your parent being humiliated in front of you.” Dozens of girls with the right connections were let in - one of the most frustrating forms of corruption. Ory decided, “I’m never going to beg for anything in my life” - when the school relented in a few weeks and admitted her, she refused.
Ory’s father died of AIDS in 1999. He never told anyone about the disease - he was worried about the stigma of the disease. “I figured it out because I was a geek.” As she began researching the infection he was suffering from, a form of meningitis, she realized it was an opportunistic infection associated with AIDS. To treat the condition, he required Diflucan, a medicine used to treat yeast infections in the US - it’s expensive, $30 a pill. He got generic medication from a friend who travelled to India. But when the money ran out, he got sick again. He died over a weekend, when the family couldn’t get money from an ATM to pay for additional treatment.
“Imagine this is all you know about me? How would you look at me? With pity, sadness? This is how we look at Africa. You don’t look at the other side of me: the blogger, the Harvard-educated lawyer. It’s damaging.”
“Africans, we need to get better at telling our stories.” One of these tools is blogging - she points to Afrigator, an African tool to find African voices. She notes the Swahili Wikipedia, pointing out that it’s been written by five contributors - “four while males and Ndesanjo Macha”. With 50 million Swahili speakers, where are the African contributors? “Why are we not generating our own content?”
We take a quick tour of images of African aid. She dimisses an ad of Gwenneth Paltrow with makeup on her cheek and the caption, “I am African” with the flat statement, “No, you’re not.” But it’s not enough for us to criticize, she tells us. We all need to think about what actions we’re willing to take.
Playing the Mission:Impossible theme, she tells us about deciding to come back from the US and to “take action, saving Africa,” her tongue firmly in cheek. She asks Africans in a similar situation to make the same jump, coming home and putting their talents to work. Her work is now as a corporate lawyer for Enablis, a business incubator in South Africa, as well as an activist in Kenya. She and her Kenyan partner are running Mzalendo, a site increasing transparency of the Kenyan Parliament, for little more than $20 a month plus creativity and sweat. It’s evidence of “the power of ideas, the power of sharing knowledge.”
Ory closes with a second “gratuitous photo of her daughter”, the beautiful Gabrielle, and tells us that her dream is for her daughter to find her future in Africa. “Right now, the circumstances under which you are born determine your life - I want to see that change. As Africans, we need to take responsibility for the future of the continent.”
President Kikwete at TED Global 2007
Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete takes the stage and immediately removes his jacket, recognizing the informality of the affair. (His uniformed military aide instantly strides over to him and takes it.) The president starts by documenting his common ground with other TED speakers: “Talking to Bono, he speaks about the loneliness of sitting around a table where everyone works for you, travelling around in a private plane. I guess there’s some common ground between rock stars and presidents.”
President Kikwete lists some of the challenges and priorites in a country where “most of our people live under conditions of great poverty.” They include maternal health, addressing HIV, reducing unemployment from 12%, providing medical care in a nation where there is currently 1 doctor to 20,000 patients, “connecting the country through reliable roads” and lending startup funds to entrepreneurs.
The country is still changing away from its history of command economy. “Twenty years ago, the decision was made to take up the politics of choice. It goes hand and hand with the market, and it was a tremendously difficult decision.” When asked about how the reforms are going and what’s the time scale, he responds, “There is no time plan. We will continue on the political and economic reform path.” He urges the audience - especially venture capitalists, philanthopists, and NGOs - to support this process. And he thanks TED for putting inspiring and radical ideas on the table for African audiences.
Chris Anderson takes the opportunity to ask the President some pointed questions about the nature of African leadership. President Kikwete is much more revealing in this forum than in his formal speech.
“In the past, leaders would march in, declare themselves President, dismiss the parliament. They’d declare a ‘revolutionary council’, but there’s no revolution there. This used to be the way the continent worked.” We’re moving beyond this, and beyond the leaders who led us out of colonialism.
Asked what went wrong with those anti-colonial leaders, the President suggests that the problem wasn’t the men, but foolish policies. “And the longer they stayed, the more autocratic they got.” Tanzania, under a multi-party government, is quite different: “If I do something wrong, someone will say so. There’s greater oversight and power in parliament than there used to be. And it’s more difficult for leaders to be as reckless as they used to be in the past.”
Addressing the emergent theme of the conference - African critiques of aid - he argues that the problems occur “when African countries do not take ownership of their problems.” But this is often due to the nature of Northern intervention. He tells a story about working with international consultants when he was the Minister of Water. “A consultant came in with instructions to do irrigation dams, improve the water supply. If you’d asked me, the Minister, I’d suggest where to go - but he had instructions from Rome. He’s already decided on what to assist us and where.” Without listening to African voices and African leaders, aid is bound to fail.
What would he hope for as a legacy, at the end of one or two five-year terms? “That I joined them here and left them here,” moving his hands low to high.
Believe, Begin, Become
Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete took the stage with Dr. Larry Brilliant of Google.org and Bruce McNeighbor of Technoserve. Dr. Brilliant announces his support for “Believe, Begin, Become,” a national business plan competition, modeled on the successful experiment Google and Technoserve operated this past year in Ghana. He emphasizes the importance of job creation and business development as critical parts of economic development. Brilliant describes the program as “tried and tested” in Africa and Latin America, where it accompanies investment with intensive entrepreneurship training. He notes that Databank, a Ghanaian investment fund, has launched a $2 million “3B” venture fund to invest in these businesses over five years, investing between $50,000 and $150,000 in businesses that are recognized in the contest.
Bruce McNeighbor outlines a timeframe for the project - it formally launces next week in Dar es Salaam and will start training entrepeneurs and helping them craft concepts into business plans over the next five months. At the graduation ceremony, 10 will be awarded capital, and 20 will be awarded certificates to allow entrepeneurs to purchase business services in Tanzania.
President Kikwete acknowledges a sense of accomplishment at having an idea develop from a conversation in Davos and moving quickly to a rollout. There was some anxiety about launching an idea in January and bringing it to life in June - “I get the sense that you mean business.” “There are many people in Tanzania with entrepreneurial skills,” the President tells us. “They have some constraints. One of the major constraints is the access to capital, to technology and to skills.” The program provides opportunities to overcome all these constraints and create new and expanded enterprises. He promises that the government will do whatever it takes to make the program succeed and to allow for the growth of the Tanzanian economy.
Dele Olejede and the stories we choose to tell
Pulitzer-prize winning Nigerian journalist Dele Olejede tells us he’s glad there was a break between the conversations about aid and his talk because it’s given him a chance to calm down. “It’s too simplistic to dismiss aid as unneccesary,” he begins. “Removing a murderous dictator, Idi Amin, was foreign aid from the country next door.” When the Ford Foundation “spirited me out of my country and gave me an education” in the US, that was foreign aid.
This foreign aid helped put Olejede in “the best job in the world” in April 1994. He was reporting for New York Newsday, and covering the “inexorable march towards freedom,” in South Africa. “I was doing what I’d always dreamed of doing, with a large expense account to boot.” As the story of Rwandan violence started to appear, he was the only Newsday reporter on the continent, and he had a decision to male. “Do I see through this extraordinary and transcendental story in South Africa”, or travel to Rwanda to cover this new story. He decided that he’d give anything to see Mandela see his dream through, and he missed the Rwanda story.
“It became clear this was not an ordinary Central African horror story,” Olejede tells us, “and perhaps my decision was not correct.” Out of a sense of penance, he became “obsessed with the idea of Rwanda, with understanding it,” and has been travelling there ever since. In early 2004, he reported a series on “what it meant to be a Rwandan during this period, and on some level, what it meant to be human.” He observes how odd it is that Kigali is one of the safest places in the world - “it’s very safe for most people now because of determination of the people to go a different way.”
He tells us a story from covering the Presidential elections in South Africa - watching a huge queue of voters, he spoke to an elderly woman, waiting to vote while sitting in a yellow plastic chair. He asked her, “Who are you voting for?” She answered, “I’m voting for my grandson.” He wasn’t a candidate - he was a Soweto activist who fled in 1976. She was voting for the ANC, but she was really voting on behalf of her grandson.
Olejede grew un in a university town, surrounded by information. He tells us about reading three daily newspapers and periodically going out to buy more. The news vendors were rarely taking care of their wares - they were off working other jobs - so they left their papers and a pile of money. People would pay for the papers on the honor system. “If it didn’t work, they would stop doing it.” He tells the story because, “these are the same people who came to symbolize all that was wrong with Africa.” Addressing corruption, he says, “This is not genetic - this can be corrected,” because this is the same continent that can support such an honor system.
He remembers a horrific moment in Nigerian history, the bombing of an independent newspaper office. One of his colleagues was killed in the resulting fire - Olejede’s memory is that the only thing left of him was “the skin preserved by his Omega watch.” He authored the statement condemning the Babangida government, which led to a threat on his life. A friend came to him with enough money to leave the country, a ticket on Lufthansa and an invitation to a new life.
And now Olejede is back on the continent. His fream now is a continent-wide daily newspaper, allowing people to have a conversation about where the continent is going. Here’s hoping he’s able to achieve it.
Noah Samara and the power of information
I’ve followed the work of Noah Samara with Worldspace satellite radio for almost a decade. I’d heard he was a passionate man, but I hadn’t realized how passionate until I had long discussion with him two nights ago - he got down on his knees to make a point to me, a point I’d already happily conceded. He’s one of the most charming and inspiring men I’ve met in recent years.
Samara tells us that he was “born in Africa to African parents in the mid-50s, amidst the decolonization” of the continent. He was six when leaders like
Nyerere, Kaunda, Nkrumah would come to Addis Ababa “to inaugurate a new age for Africa.” There was a palpable hope to the moment - “I was six, I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew it was happening.” Quoting Thabo Mbeki, he says, “It was a good day to be an African.”
This hope, over the past decades, has been “battered by wars, genocides, pandemics.” But there’s a “resiliency of hope” that survives and provides for a better possible future. Samara’s life was changed by reading an article about the impact of AIDS on Africa. He saw the way in which information - simple information about HIV - could play a role in slowing the disease. He was amazed, “how so many people could die from the want of information, information that was so easily accessible,” and wondered why the World Bank and other development agencies.
And so he decided to do it himself, building a network that could broadcast radio to the entire African continent. It was a major technical issue - it required 100 countries to allocate radio frequencies, and to build a geostationary satellite that could talk to radio receivers. “I needed a little bit of cash - hundreds of millions of dollars - and was short a little - hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Remarkably, he was able to raise the funds, and launch the first satellite dedicated specifically to Africa. He notes that it was the first time a new technology debuted in Africa before making it to the US. Worldspace now covers five billion people with two satellites, broadcasting exclusively to the developing world.
In founding the company, he also established a foundation, “First Voice International”, which focuses on creating programming that uses information for social change. This includes early-warning weather systems, information on HIV, soap operas on reproductive health and child trafficking in indigenous languages. This programming is rebroadcast by community radio stations, reaching a much wider audience. Remarkably, 90% of the information comes out of Africa. “It’s locked in citadels of learning” - First Voice tries to take this information and spread it around.
15 million teachers in Africa require remedial training to meet basic international standards, and 45 million students don’t see school at all. Can we do something about it? All William from Malawi needed to build a windmill was a book to show him how. We can put information, language libraries, remedial information into schools today, providing area-specific information. Samara sees his work as an infrastructure that allows us to continue spreading information that’s worth spreading, that can transform countries and lives.
Patrick Awuah’s pre-midlife crisis
Patrick Awuah, founder of Ashesi University, tells us, “Like many of you here, I am trying to contribute to a renaissance in Africa.” He believes that, “Africa can only be transformed by enlightened leaders.” And his project is to help train those leaders to transform the continent.
He talks about an American nurse who’s worked in Ghana. She told Awuah about two operations where a patient on the operating table suffered in darkness because the power went out. The hospital could have purchased flashlights, but didn’t. Another patient died on the table for lack of oxygen, which was available but unused. When she left the hospital, she recommended that everyone be fired and that the hospital start over.
The people working in the hospital were the elite, the top 5% of society. But their leadership skills had failed. Lessons in leadership failure, and leadership success were both in ample supply in his youth. At age 16, there was a military coup, and suddenly there was a “pervasive presence of military in society.” He went to meet his father at the airport and was stopped by two soliders with AK47s. They told him he’d stepped out of bounds of an invisible, unmarked path, and was to be punished by having to run up and down a hill. Before Awuah began running, a Ghana Airways pilot was stopped in the same way. He refused to run, seized the soldier’s radio and got everyone released. Awuah learned that leadership matters - the soldiers were following orders, and they were stupid orders. And he learned about courage - the importance of not thinking about those guns.
Awuah’s personal transformation had a great deal to do with his time at Swathmore. “The teachers didn’t want repetition - they wanted creative thinking.” And as he studied economics, he “learned that Ghana’s leaders were making breathtakingly bad economic decisions.” In other words, they had failed. As he went on to work with Microsoft, the discovered he’d learned to create solutions and confront complex problems. “The ability to create is the most empowering thing.” But he noted with some dismay that the annual revenues of Microsoft grew larger than the GDP of Ghana. That gap has widened since he left the company.
When he became a parent, he discovered that, “Africa mattered to me as never before, because the state of the world depends on what’s happening to Africa.” In his “pre-midlife crisis”, he returned to Ghana and started asking people what problems needed to be solved. The problems everyone identified: corruption, weak institutions, leadership challenges.
To address these problems, Awuah founded Ashesi, a liberal arts university dedicated to “training ethical leaders.” He says he “wishes there was a liberal arts college in each country of Africa” even though it sometimes seems like “mission impossible”.
As the university has launched, one major reward was an email from a student who ended his note saying, “I am thinking now. Thank you.” This past year, the school has challenged students to craft an honor code. This process has led to passionate debates. One woman, debating the topic, asked a question that warmed Awuah’s heart: “Can we create a perfect society?” It’s a great question to ask, even if we have no good answers. He notes that Ashesi just elected a woman as the head of student government. It’s the first time it’s happened at a Ghanaian university, and he sees this as a major tribute to the young woman in question, and to the student body as a whole.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala with the last word on aid
Former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the sort of visionary African leader everyone on stage and in the crowd would wish for Africa. She’s challenged with summing up four days of discussions on “Africa, the next chapter”.
She tells us we’re seeing changes in Africa that we never thought would happen. We’ve seen annual growth of 5%, in some cases 6-7%, up from 2%. External debt has been massively reduced. Countries are building up foreign exchange reserves, shoring up their currencies. Private investment flows are increasing, remittances to Nigeria are skyrocketing, and there’s a net inflow of capital.
But Africa needs jobs. 62% of Africa’s population is under 24. We have to figure out how to make these people productive. Nigeria is now building an opinion research organization, a way of listening to citizen voices, which she notes is a rare thing on the continent. The top issue in every survey? Jobs.
Just a few years ago, she tells us, we couldn’t even talk about “the next chapter” for Africa. There was negative economic growth. There’s been an amazing transformation, and this is something that’s allowed us to have our debate about aid versus the private sector. “It has been a simplistic debate.” It needs to be about “a partnership that involves governments, donors, private sector, and ordinary Africans.” It’s not trade or aid - “what is the combination of all these factors is going to yield results?”
African entrepeneur Mo Ibrahim dreams of the moment when Africa is giving aid. “But we’re already doing it - the UK and the US could not have been built without African aid. The resources - including human resources - have made those countries what they are today.” So when those countries are willing to give something back, we need to take it, but we need to use it effectively.
Okonjo-Iweala tells a story about growing up during the Nigeria-Biafra war. Her father was a brigadeer on the Biafran side, and her family was doing very badly, eating a single meal a day. When she was 15, her mother was ill, and her three-year old sister was deathly ill from malaria. She put her sister on her back and walked 10 kilometers to a clinic, where she’d heard there was a good doctor. When she arrived, there were a thousand people outside, trying to break down the door. She went to the side and climbed in through the window. The doctor told her she’d barely saved her sister - she gave the girl a shot of chloroquine, put her onto rehydration and within hours, she was back to health. “The ten kilometers home with her on my back, that was the shortest walk of my life.” The point of the story: “When someone is saving a life, you don’t care that it’s aid - you want the person to be alive.”
Okonjo-Iweala tells us she doesn’t believe aid, even aid to save lives, in the sole answer. We have to use it well. Why has southern Spain developed? On the back of aid which was provided to build road and infrastructure. Ireland is one of the fastest growing economies in the world - they used aid to build infrastructure to build an information society. “They didn’t say no to aid - but if they can build infrastructure in Spain, why do they refuse to build the same infrastructure in our countries?”
She asks, “Are we calling the NGOs together and telling them what we want, asking them to coordinate? No. We haven’t taken charge and sat these people down to hear about our priorities.” [Having sat in endless donor coordination meetings, I’d ask whether this is really true.] “Aid can be a faciliator, a catalyst. If we fail to use it as a catalyst, we have failed our people.”
The Chinese are so popular in Africa, she tells us, because they don’t shy away from infrastructure. She talked with the Chinese ambassador, who told her that to develop, “You need infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline.” Okonjo-Iweala wants this infrastructure and discipline to create jobs, especially for women, who will use this support to support their families and their societies.
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