New York — Since its founding in 1953, the Africa-America Institute (formerly the African-American Institute) has developed and administered programs to educate and train Africans and to promote dialogue and understanding between the United States and Africa. In this first of a two-part discussion, AAI's president, Mora McLean, talked to AllAfrica's Tami Hultman about her organization's purpose, its past and its future.
AAI is now the oldest Africa-oriented private institution in the United States. We both know that perpetuating Africa-related work is a constant struggle. Why have you survived for more than half a century?
I suspect that our longevity is directly connected to what has been for 50 years the focus of our mission - the recognition that human capacity building is at the root of anything you want to achieve on the continent. Whether you are talking about development or increasing trade or peace and security, people have to have the knowledge and the skills and the wherewithal to get the job done. We've never lost our focus on that. One manifestation of our impact has been the thousands and thousands of people, mainly in Africa, but also in the United States, who have benefited directly from our capacity-building programs.
More than 20,000 Africans holding advanced degrees obtained through AAI programs is a pretty large constituency.
One of the ironies, especially for a U.S.-based organization that has to generate the lion's share of its resources from U.S. sources, is that we're better known on the African continent than anywhere else. When you meet someone who is in any kind of significant decision-making capacity, they will either themselves have benefited from an AAI education program or know someone who did. So I suppose that if I had to capture the reason for our endurance in one word, I'd say "relevance."
What we do is concrete. It's not always regarded as sexy, although I happen to think that it is extraordinarily exciting to harness the talents of individuals and to see them flower and to actually achieve things. These are the people that justify our existence. And although we've had to weather storms - and although the interests and concerns of policy makers and donors change - what remains a constant is that if you don't have the people to do whatever you're trying to do, you can't do it. Our emphasis is on people.
Could you just summarize how that emphasis is translated into programs?
Our actual mission statement, I think, is a superb summary - it's to promote enlightened U.S.-Africa engagement through education, training and dialogue. That's our mission and we do that - have always done that - by focusing on higher education and advanced skills. The reality is that it is only people who have advanced education and training - and the exposure and the experience to use it effectively - who are going to be in a position to think creatively and to implement the policies and programs necessary to have a strong basic education system. The emphasis is Africa, but the corollary to that has always been educating Americans, and American decision makers specifically, about Africa and its importance to the United States and our interests. So education is the focal point - education of Africans and of Americans about Africa.
What are your major challenges?
They're probably the same challenges of other organizations that have made Africa the focal point of their mission and work. Although Africa does have geopolitical importance, the interest in Africa on the part of the rest of the world remains peripheral. Therefore, focusing on Africa - especially on something like human capacity building that requires significant and long-term investment - while you don't have any difficulty explaining to people why it's important, getting them to invest is something else all together.
This year's report of the Blair Commission, sponsored by the British Prime Minister, recognizes the central role of higher education and specialized training. Whether that yields greater resources for Africa on a global level remains to be seen. And I would add, from our vantage point, that Africans themselves need to recognize the need to make investing in higher education a priority. There is an appreciation of the need, but when you have to rank priorities, and when there are limited resources, the temptation to focus on more near-term concerns is great. Getting that long-term sustained investment, that's a challenge.
Is your Namibia scholarship program an instance of the commitment you were saying is needed from Africans themselves? Could you talk about that project?
I love to talk about Namibia - a country that on its own decided to take advantage of the resource that AAI is and asked us in 1999 to begin to administer a Namibian training scholarship program. This is a program that is fully underwritten by the Namibian government, and you can see how historical experience makes the connection. The person who made the approach is Nahas Angula, who is the current prime minister but who at that time was the minister of higher education - and who had himself benefited from an AAI education program. He earned two masters - one from Teachers College at Columbia University. He had directly benefited and knew the quality of the program that AAI administers - that it is not just the scholarships, that it is a broader experience. The program connects students to peers in their fields or in related fields; it keeps them connected to institutions both where they study and at home, so that even during the course of their study, on-going relationships for the future are being built.
The aim of this particular scholarship is to strengthen the public sector by focusing on mid-level professionals in the Namibian civil service - an area of capacity, by the way, that is essential if you're going to create the kind of enabling environment for private sector development. There have got to be people in the public sector who appreciate the necessity for doing that and who will be enablers rather than creating the barriers and the stumbling blocks that exist in so many countries where entrepreneurship is chomping at the bit to get off and going. This program is now at a $2.5 million dollar level. This is all Namibia's money. We would love to leverage it with other resources, it deserves to be leveraged and multiplied. People talk about African not investing in themselves. Well here's an example that belies that notion. We're beginning to see the first cohort graduate and go back home and make a difference. We're very, very proud of the program.
Has the kind of education AAI encourages changed in the last five decades?
AAI's founders were primarily people who were educators. So they were very concerned to insure that the emerging independent African states had sufficient numbers of qualified people to teach in universities and to staff the civil service. Our emphasis today is on African global competitiveness - the core skills required in order to make that happen. Although we would like to do it all, our priority emphasis is on science and technology and management skills. We do that in a variety of ways, from opportunities for Africans to get advanced degrees in the material sciences, so that, for example, African countries that rely heavily on extractive minerals and oil can engage in the value-added process, to people who are going to be math and science teachers, as well as people who are going to be scientists and doctors themselves - people who are going to be needed to solve Africa's problems, whether it be the consequence of global warming or the Aids pandemic.
You know how precious these human resources are. How do you address the erosion of educated, skilled talent - like the teachers and civil servants and health professionals and technologists that you educate - caused by the growing incidence of HIV/Aids?
With great difficulty. There are so many elements to the problem. There are the sheer numbers of people who are being cut down in the prime of life - or who never have an opportunity to get there, in the case of pediatric Aids. There is the development industry, the donor countries and well-intentioned agencies who are now deploying high amounts of resource towards a single disease at the expense of the capacities of countries to deliver primary health care or prevention.
Our focus on African global competitiveness is related to this to the extent that if African economies are viable and growing and people are earning income, they're less likely to get sick, and they're more likely to be able to afford good health care - and systems are more likely to have the personal and infrastructure to deliver care and services. The link between Aids and education is very real - HIV is having an adverse impact on the education sector and the sector is critical to the solution.
Our approach has been to recognize that Aids is an important problem and that we have to address it. We are not a health organization, however, so we've been very selective. In our programs, there are people who are getting medical degrees and training. But one program that is focused on Aids per se is the training of health systems managers - people who have the responsibility for delivering scarce resources efficiently and effectively. The beleaguered nurse or doctor who has no project management training, but who by default has a responsibility of not just delivering medical care but also managing those resources - those are the people we've targeted for health-care management training.
A project we're developing and very much hoping to get funded is an examination of what Africans think about healthcare spending. Resources from industrialized nations, from multilateral and bilateral institutions, are being allocated, and Africans are seldom asked what they think about the way that money is being spent. In fact, it's a revolutionary notion to ask Africans what they think about anything! My observation is the people from my side of the Atlantic tend to think that they're instant experts on Africa and perhaps are less inhibited about expressing those opinions than they might be about most areas of the world.
One of the reasons we've been able to stay around for so long, I think, is that we have appreciated that Africans are expert at assessing their own situations - or that they need to be - in order to address their problems. So we'd like to find out more about what they think about how resources are being deployed in this area of health - in which everybody acknowledges Africans have experienced disproportionate harm.
How does gender factor into your program design?
Overall we have a very good track record, even though if you're talking about higher education, where you've got to depend on the pipeline. The people who go to undergraduate or graduate schools are people who had an opportunity to go to school period. Girls don't have sufficient access. We've managed, nevertheless, to have female participation rates of between 35 and 40%.
In all of our programs, gender equity has always an emphasis. An example is Dr. Wangaari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel laureate from Kenya. She secured her degree in the mid-1960s in biology through an AAI program.
One of the ways we help women succeed is to focus on them as a cohort within our programs and to take special care to connect them to alumni who've become accomplished in related fields and to give them an opportunity to engage with each other about common challenges they face. The health issue is one that is crucial to the potential of women. Their reproductive health, and the health of their children, is affected by Aids and other diseases. So the capacity to address health issues is going to benefit women.
Parenthetically, I should note that there are some significant things happening on the continent, for a whole host of reasons, that affect women's prospects. The majority of Rwanda's parliament consists of women members, for example. In Nigeria, three significant cabinet posts are held by women, and they are being taken seriously. So there's change afoot in some places.
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Where do you see resources for the future coming from?
Oh that I knew! Our approach - and whether or not it works remains to be seen - is increasingly on the private sector to underwrite programs and to do it in such a way that it is related not just to corporate responsibility and philanthropy, but also to their profitability. I think corporations are recognizing what C.K. Prahalad calls the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid [The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Wharton School Publishing, 2005]. They're beginning to see that excluding from their corporate marketing strategies most of the world - poor people - as potential consumers is a very shortsighted approach. More and more companies are recognizing that education and skills building is connected to their bottom line. It means that they're less likely to have to hire expatriates and transport them and pay them at a higher scale. I want to hasten to say that people who are locals need to be paid a competitive rate, as well, but it costs you a great deal more if you're importing somebody from wherever it might be to work in an African country than if you were able to identify people with the requisite skills in-country. Hiring locally also creates good will in the community and the country's interest in seeing your enterprise flourish over the long term. It's a win-win strategy.
African governments themselves are increasingly going to be a source of support for our programs. Namibia, we think, is in the vanguard of a trend where more African countries are going to invest in education and skills training and will recognizing the resource that AAI represents.
We would genuinely like to see ourselves go out of business - not because the resources are no longer available but because the need for what we do no longer exists. That, over the long term, will be the measure of our success.
Have you given up on the public sector?
No, we can't give up on that, particularly since the U.S. public sector represents such a large percentage of the all too few resources being focused on capacity building. We can't afford to ignore that, if for no other reason than that we want to influence the direction. Even if they're not coming to us, we think we have something useful to say about how those resources are being spent.
But we think that working directly with the ultimate beneficiaries of education and skills programs is more sensible and more cost effective, because getting down to what people need and want and what can actually be done is so much easier when you don't have to negotiate a huge bureaucracy.
