Towards alternative strategies for sustainable development in Africa

Abstract

African dynasties and empires enjoyed sustainable development prior to Western contact and conquest. This is fast eroding since the colonial era of rooting out all what is African by 'modernizing'Africa through the inculcation of Western ideologies and technologies. Bilateral and multilateral development cooperation for Africa has strongly favoured flawed strategies that put classical economic models at the forefront ofAfrica's development. This model favours the West's wasteful and highly polluting attitudes of overproduction and overconsumption. This paper exposes the unsustainability of this model and provides attributes for an alternative sustainable development strategy for Africa, which must win support and understanding amongst African leaders. A schematic at the end of this paper represents this gateway to Africa's ecological, economic and social resilience. A robust research agenda for regional case studies will generate data to ensure the revitalization of traditional coping strategies for In this paper, we provide alternative strategies for sustainable development in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Focus is on countries located south of the Sahara and apart from West Sahara, 48 of the 53 independent states in Africa, including Sudan, belong to this region. In SSA, human development actually regressed in more than 50% of the countries between 1990 and 2000, and the lives of its very poor people are getting worse. It is reported that the human development index of the region, by 2002, stood at 0.465 ((1), p. 142). The percentage of people living on less than $1 a day was about the same at the end of the 1990s (47%) as at the start (2, 3). The number of poor people in the region increased with population growth, and in 2003, over 81% of the countries in the low human development rank was from SSA ((4), p. 240). The sub region is blessed with enormous cultural, mineral and natural resources, but largely depends on foreign companies for their exploitation and transformation. Despite this richness, Africa has faced problems due to its inability to embark on a meaningful path to a level of well being deemed satisfactory for a sizable proportion of its population. Given the interconnectedness of the world, thanks to the fast evolving nature of science and technology, Western societies are increasingly flooded by Africans fleeing the sub region in an illusive search for a better life. The problems that plague Africa are an ongoing process, a social history of which each and every African is a part and parcel. By implication, African scholars need to focus their attention on strategies to 'study up' their societies and find sustainable solutions to contemporary problems of this continent. Lack of data or a distorted presentation of data on the sub region is a serious impediment, but not a reason for inaction. As academics from the sub region, we feel an urgent duty and call to incorporate all the ecological, socio-economic and political problems into an academic mainstream with a view to look for workable sustainable development strategies. This safely falls within the ambits of the call by post-modern anthropologists for a shift from the 'exotic other' to the anthropology of 'ourselves' or the call to 'anthropologize' ourselves (5). For decades, the development strategies for Africa were founded upon literature gathered and put together by 'prejudiced' anthropologists, who were never free from the influence of colonial