What would you do to provide for your family? Travel thousands of miles? Risk your life navigating terrorist-occupied forests or the bone dry Sahara Desert? Spend three months in prison? Go years without seeing them? Abdoulai (below,left) and Kaladou (below, right) not only would… they have.

In one of the most heartbreaking and vulnerable exchanges of my life, I spent two hours listening to the stories of these two 28 year old Senegalese men who have risked their health and safety again and again for the sake of their loved ones back home… with no end in sight. When I dropped by the cornerstore down the street Saturday afternoon to say goodbye to Abdoulai, they gave me a free bottle of Coca Cola and allowed me to step into their shoes and see life from their perspective, and their stories rocked me to my core…

He finally decided to take the risk , so he picked up his things and left. After two weeks spent trekking through the Sahara desert and watching those around him die of thirst and exhaustion, Abdoulai peered over the bow of the boat full of migrants traversing the Mediterranean and saw the blurry lights of Italy on the horizon. They were distant, but for a second, they shone with bright potential of a new life, a life that promised economic stability. But it only lasted for a second, because soon after that, the Abdoulai’s boat was caught by the Italian Coastguard and was sent back to Libya. Upon being offloaded in Tripoli, Abdoulai and his fellow migrants spent three months in a Libyan prison, being beaten by the security guards, and being given minimal food and water before ultimately being let loose in the desert and told to go home. After returning to Cameroon for a short time and saving up his money, Abdoulai made a second attempt to make it to Italy, traveling to Lake Chad in the Extreme North of Cameroon and paying smugglers to help him reach Libya. That time, his boat successfully made it to shore in Italy, only to have the migrants apprehended by local authorities and sent back to Libya. Since then, Abdoulai has searched unsuccessfully for full-time work in Senegal, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon that can support his parents and elder brothers back in Senegal, but all he has managed to find is his work at the cornerstore that barely pays enough to send anything back at all. Ultimately, he finds it better to save up his money to try and make it to Italy a third time. He understands the risks, but the reward is too much to turn down: “You see two boats leave, one capsizes and everyone in it dies, but you keep going, that’s how it is… When you go live in Europe and have your papers in order, you can come back and visit your friends, but when you only spend your life in Africa its not good, you won’t have anything, just difficulties.”

For Kaladou, his journey started in 2001 at the age of 15, when he left to find work in Morocco for 5 years to provide for his widowed mother. When he returned with approximately $1300 , his uncle took it all and sent him to the Congo where he found work as a dishwasher for 6 months and did odd jobs for another 2 ½ years before returning to Senegal. Once back, he married and had three children (“their names are Tijang, Saidou, and Fatima”, he tells me), and he worked for 4 years to provide for his growing family with limited success. Since 2013 he has been steadily making his way down the African coast seeking opportunities that earn enough money to send back to his family. Recently, a smuggler that promised to take him from Senegal to Yaounde left him stranded in Nigeria, and when he called his uncle asking him to pay back some of the money he had earned, he refused. After three months working odd jobs in Nigeria, he managed to scrape together enough money to join a group trekking across the Nigerian border. On their journey through the forest, he told me they came across corpses, victims of Boko Haram, laying strewn on the ground. They lived in fear for several days, afraid that they would be next. Luckily, he made it safely to Yaounde, and how he is working as a shoe repairman and sending back what he can each month (he showed me the remittance transfer for November: 20,000 CFA, about $32). His ultimate goal is to save up and reach Equatorial Guinea. “They treat people very poorly over there” he tells me, “but we’re obligated to go. If that’s where I can earn a living. When your kids call you and say “we need money for food”, and when your wife and your mother say the same thing… it’s a big problem… I leave for work at 6 am and get back at 6 pm, but you know when your kids are back there, your wife is back there, you can’t just shrug your shoulders, what are they going to eat? You have to fight, and if you find a little bit, you send it back.”

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I was shell-shocked walking away from our discussion… these two friendly guys who I’d been saying hi to at the corner store for the past month were two of the most courageous, hardworking people I’d ever met, and both of their lives could very well serve as the basis for Hollywood movies. But the thing that struck me most about Abdoulai and Kaladou’s stories was that they highlight the imperative that exists for developed countries to acknowledge that the Mediterranean migrant crisis is not going away, and if anything, is only going to get worse. Both of these men have literally risked life and limb in pursuit of economic opportunity for themselves and their families, because they realize they no scenario exists where they and their children have a bright future when they are forced to migrate to merely scrape by. With the best population estimates expecting Africa’s population to make up 1/4^th of the world population by 2050, its imperative to ensure Abdoulai and Kaladou’s children’s generation feels like they have a future in Africa… or else the entire world will suffer the consequences.

So what would that require? Well, given the fact that record numbers of refugees and economic migrants from Africa like Abdoulai are landing on the beaches of Europe seeking a better life, we need to examine what is forcing them to risk their lives in the first place. On the surface, the answer is easy: there is a lack of jobs in Africa, so people go elsewhere looking for work. Digging a layer deeper however, we find the root problem: Africa’s economy is based on the export of raw materials, such as timber, oil, rare earth materials (which power the technology industry), aluminum, and plantation grown fruits and vegetables,as opposed to the model the industrial world is built on, which is the transformation of raw materials (creating rubber, steel and concrete and producing computer chips and building airplanes). This phenomenon is clearly visible in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN’s 2014 “State of the World’s Forests” report, which shows that Africa is the only continent where primary materials make up the bulk of the economic value added by forests. Every other continent derives most of their forests’ economic value from processing industries… and the contrast is stark:

Source: Les Communautes de Pratique Forets Modelles: Pour un Basculement du Paradigme Participatif dans L’economie Sociale et la Transformation Structurelle,  by Diaw MC, Nguiebouri J., Gagoe Tchoko J., NgoBaneg MF., Vambi B., Nlend E. and Keugni MC.

In more concrete terms, this means that, while a tree that is cut down in Cameroon creates a job for man or woman selling charcoal, or the person exporting the tree out of the country, a tree that is cut down in the US creates a job for the logger, the truck driver that transports the tree to the processing plant, the workers at the lumber plant that transforms the tree into two by fours, another truck driver who delivers the lumber to Home Depot, the guy at Home Depot in charge of the lumber department, and the construction worker who buys the wood and uses it to build a house… not to mention a job at the EPA to ensure the logging company replants trees after logging!

This layered transformation of raw materials is called a value chain, and the lack of value chains in Africa extends to most raw material industries here in Cameroon and in other sub-Saharan African countries, which makes stories like Abdoulai’s and Kaladou’s all too common. In a way, its kind of our fault… Under the current global economic system, its implicitly understood that stories like Abdoulai and Kaladou’s are “collateral damage” in the process of ensuring that the US and European countries can exert their control over African raw materials and transform them themselves, rather than allowing local African industries to develop and buying finished products from Cameroon, Namibia, or Tanzania.

If we are serious about ending the migrant crisis and reducing the number of human tragedies like the ones witnessed off the coast of Italy over the last several years, we need to realize that true African development can only happen when local value chains and industries develop that transform raw materials and create employment and wealth in sustainable ways that stay in Africa. Even if a multinational company like Firestone comes to a country like Liberia and employs some local people to work on a rubber plantation, or an international logging company employs some Cameroonians, the economic value of those resources is still being drained out of the African context… which contributes to the cycle of poverty and underdevelopment. As Dr. Mariteuw Chimere Diaw, a Senegalese PhD holder running a social enterprise called Africa Model Forest Network here in Yaounde explained to me several weeks ago:

“The mining industry, the forest industry, they are totally oriented toward exporting raw material. When you look at it, people [are] investing a lot [of energy] into issues of rights and deliberative democracy, formal democracy, all kinds of democratic things, but the economy is too weak, so people jump into the sea to cross the ocean, so what is your democracy bringing to them?”

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So what concretely can be done to resolve this problem, to restore Africa’s future? One thing is for sure: the solution is not more development aid from the US and other developed countries. Aid money does not address the root cause of the economic problems Africa faces. Development aid is the token solution that conveniently produces some feel good stories and impacts a few people, but it distracts from the root of the problem, which is the global economic system that is skewed by political maneuvering to favor the most powerful countries in the world. Its why populist leaders like Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Roldos in Ecuador, Torrijos in Panama, and Lumumba in the Congo, who refused to cede to Western interests, met with untimely fates. Whenever a new government takes power in a country rich with raw materials, they know they must tread a fine line between appeasing the powers that be by granting them access to raw materials and looking out for the best interests of their people… and development aid projects often serve as a nice compromise.

But there is some good news: See, since the issue is economic at its core, that means it is a system driven by the everyday purchases we make as consumers. As such, we can consciously choose to fight against the systemic violence and exploitation that currently ravage the African continent and produce stories like Abdoulai’s and Kaladou’s. We have the power to contribute our voice to the chorus calling for an economic system that provides opportunities for people like Abdoulai and Kaladou. One of the best ways to do so is by buying products made by local cooperatives and social enterprises in developing countries, rather than the big companies that don’t invest in jobs and production facilities in these communities. Here are a few examples (perfect for you last minute Christmas shoppers!):

Want some bath or beauty products that support local economies in Africa? Check out Rain Africa, a South African organization with a commitment to “provide jobs, skills and hope to people living in desperate poverty, particularly women and the disabled. Our production cycle is deliberately low-tech and labour intensive. Our products and packaging are hand-made by trained crafters. We support small local suppliers and producers. Our wild ingredients are hand-harvested by women living in remote areas of Southern Africa where economic opportunities are almost non-existent. We are the only Southern African beauty and body product company which is accredited by both Fair Trade in Africa and the international Fair Trade body in Europe.”

http://www.rainafrica.com

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Another organization, “Proudly Made in Africa“, identifies and exports high quality finished African products to European markets, but many of the products they promote (from coffee, footwear, and jams to garments and beauty products) can be searched and bought online via this page on their website. You can also check out a short animation below produced by a Kenyan production company detailing their business model!

http://www.proudlymadeinafrica.org

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And finally, for an even greater selection of products from cooperatives and local communities around the world, check out Serrv, a nonprofit fair trade organization that proudly believes that “disadvantaged artisans and farmers around the world should have the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty and support their families through fair payments and respectful relationships. Every basket, every tablecloth, every necklace we offer has a story behind it–of an empowered artisan or farmer who works in a safe environment, can send his or her children to school, and can save for the future with the reliable income he or she earns through fair trade.”

http://www.serrv.org

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While those actions support the initiatives that have already started, lots of work needs to be done on the legislative side to incentivize large companies to invest in local production facilities rather than simply exporting raw materials to be transformed in China or the US. Maybe one day you’ll order a smartphone by the Kenyan version of Apple, or the “Dell” of Cameroon… but that may be too optimistic given the number of international institutional reforms that would need to take place to provide space for such organizations. Whatever the case, it’s only a matter of time before the current (dare I say neocolonial?) economic system is forced to undergo some massive readjustments, as Dr. Chimere expressed to me in our meeting:

“There is a struggle between the old ways of producing wealth and [the] need to do it differently. And that is going to be discussed a little bit in Paris, at COP 21, and we’ll see what comes out of it, but fundamentally, to me, the discussion and the stakes that are behind it are the stakes about the new economy… it’s not conceivable that Africans will just remain poor, they’re too wealthy, you know, with their environment, all the natural resources, all the untapped wealth that exists for this to continue forever. But whether it’s going to be slow, whether we’re going to control it or whether some other entity is going to control most of it, that has yet to be decided… I do believe that there is room for a collaborative economy that isn’t going to be one dimensional,[but] it’s going to have very different ways of existing, of emerging. It has already started, but a lot will be decided by the way Africa is going to catch up.”

Hopefully that economy will develop in time for Kaladou’s children, Tijang, Saidou, and Fatima, to know they have a future in Africa.

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This past weekend I bought a ceramic art piece made my some students in Cameroon’s only professional arts school, located in a city outside of Yaounde called Mbalmayo. Take a look at it below (It’s about 10 inches wide and 6 inches tall). The artist uses toned dust and locally sourced Cameroonian clay to depict three Cameroonian children admiring a sunset, as a flock of birds fly towards the mountains in the distance

Take a second to look at it… What do you see?

When I first came across it in the studio, I saw three Cameroonian youth envying the birds. Unlike the children, the birds were able to easily escape their environment and find greener pastures beyond the horizon.

I circled back to this piece three times to admire it, each time spending a few minutes analyzing the composition and the meaning of the piece. The third time around, SIT Cameroon’s program director, Christiane, came over beside me and remarked how much she liked the piece. I asked her what she saw. As soon as I heard her reply, I immediately took it off the wall and rushed over to the counter to buy it.

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One of the major themes we’ve been discussing in class is the idea that there is not a “one size fits all” path to development. The path to wealth in the US and Europe isn’t necessarily the path to wealth for Africa and Latin America. Successful development is more than economic growth at all costs; it’s culturally appropriate economic growth. Successful development doesn’t mean creating copies of “America” around the world and helping countries “westernize” by adopting American values. It involves helping countries create jobs and transform natural resources while respecting cultural differences and preserving local values, beliefs, and traditions that provide people a sense of identity and community.

Successful Development = Culturally Appropriate Economic Growth

Let me give you an example: In the US, one of our core societal values is the idea that “I am my own person”, that our identity is individualized and self-made. In contrast, Fr. Patrick Baraza (a Kenyan professor at Gonzaga) teaches his students that one of the bedrock values of African traditional communities is community identity, the belief that “I am because we are”. This is the clash between American individualism and African traditional communalism. The key thing to recognize is that, objectively, neither of these values is inherently “better” than the other. They both have their merits: individualism encourages personal achievement and innovation, while communalism stresses strong relationships and cooperation. However, people are hardwired to believe that their culture is better or more correct than other cultures, and as such they seek to replace alternative ideologies with their own, a phenomenon referred to as ethnocentrism.

International development experts from developed countries often inadvertently make the mistake of not recognizing their ethnocentrism when they work in different cultural contexts. In doing so, they place too much emphasis on the economic growth portion of “successful development”, at the expense of the “culturally appropriate” portion. It’s the reason why the period of “structural adjustment loans” undertaken by the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980’s proved so disastrous. According to the program, countries that applied for development aid from these organizations had to meet certain benchmarks of economic reform, specifically privatizing state-held assets, cutting government spending, decreasing taxes, and increasing access to foreign capital, all things that were “working” in the developed North and which were thought to be the key to developing the global South. Ultimately, the program failed because it was not culturally appropriate in the countries it was working in. Politically centralized leaders sold state assets to cronies and political allies, the cuts in public spending led to an explosion of NGO activity to fill in the gaps, and local industries that relied on government assistance such as national banks went out of business, allowing multinational companies to enter the market and further create dependency on the developed American and European countries.

The key takeaway from the failure of the structural adjustment plan is that successful development is very difficult for outsiders to direct, since it requires more than just economic knowledge. If development is ever going to succeed, there needs to be a marriage between economic policy and cultural knowledge. Development leaders must have a deep, personal understanding of their society’s hopes for the future, valued traditions, worries about development, and deeply held beliefs. Yes, international economists and development experts have a role to play in development, but they must realize that oftentimes that role is to recognize their ethnocentrism and allow local ownership of development to take hold. If they truly care about development, once they’ve acknowledged their cultural bias, well intentioned foreign experts will adopt a servant leader approach and choose to limit their involvement, allowing young, passionate local leaders to craft culturally-appropriate development goals for their countries.

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Flash back to the scene where I’m standing in the art exhibition showroom, admiring the ceramic painting of the three children watching birds fly towards the mountains into the sunset. What did Christiane say that pushed me to to buy the piece? Rather than seeing the children as helpless prisoners of circumstance as I had, she saw them as empowered future leaders of Africa, coming together as a community to enjoy the beauty of their homeland. Christiane’s response showed me my ethnocentrism, and reminded me of how important it is to acknowledge my cultural bias before pursuing culturally appropriate international development:

“I see three intelligent children who, at the end of a long day, have come together to admire the natural beauty of their country. I think it’s the best piece in the shop, good choice.”

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Greetings from Yaounde, Cameroon! I haven’t had a good internet connection in about a week, but I’ve been kept busy by the SIT Cameroon program orientation and starting classes on Monday, so this is my first real opportunity to check in and offer my initial insights from over here in Africa.

One of the biggest themes I notice looking back on my first couple weeks here is that I’ve had a really difficult time separating my experience in Haiti from this one here in Cameroon. Its tempting to compare the two countries and lump them under the term “developing” or “third world”, but upon closer inspection they really are quite different. When our group went downtown to explore the city of Yaounde during orientation last week, I immediately felt at ease, connecting with the routine I had established over the summer in Haiti. My friends and I were the only white people around, the chaotic traffic and the street venders felt familiar, and the red soil beneath my feet looked similar to that I had encountered in the hills above Port-au-Prince. All the differences between the two countries seemed to favor Cameroon in my opinion: there wasn’t as much trash littering the streets, the electricity stayed on all the time, and the weather was a pleasant 75 degrees with occasional rain showers, rather than the persistent 100 degree heat and humidity I grew accustomed to in Port-au-Prince. In addition, it’s nice being around other college students who understand why you decided to study abroad in Africa. Ever since I choose to spend this semester in Cameroon, people have constantly asked me why. Why go to Sub-Saharan Africa? Why go to a country with terrorist attacks happening in the north? Why not go someplace “fun” like Paris or London? The six other students on the program all share a common understanding that studying in Cameroon was something we had to do.

The past several days I have begun to understand that living and learning here in Sub-Saharan Africa is inherently complex. The physical considerations of living here don’t bother me as much as they did in Chennai or Port-au-Prince (I’ve become quite good at brushing my teeth using bottled water and identifying when it’s ok to eat raw fruits and vegetables), but the mental realities are far more challenging. Yes, its only been a week and a half, and yes, I still have lots of time left here, but I’m already scared about what it will be like going back home. I’m scared at the prospect of returning to an environment where not everyone agrees about the importance of international development. I’m terrified of becoming good friends with the other students on the program and then being flung back across the country and feeling alone when we return to “normalcy”. And I’m worried about being able to describe the imbalance of power that exists between the global North and South to anyone who hasn’t walking past tin shacks and begging children every morning. In short, I’m afraid of facing the reality of “life as usual” in the US, and knowing in my heart that the wealth and prosperity I am used to in the US is a result of extractive foreign policy decisions that have impoverished millions of men, women and children around the world, from the DRC to Cambodia, Ecuador to Afghanistan.

It’s funny, I now understand why its so appealing for Americans to create a bubble and focus solely on domestic issues. It distracts us from dealing with the negative impact we have on much of the rest of the world. Looking outward requires you to be willing to acknowledge that our nation’s success is not as glorious as we like to imagine. Ever since the end of World War II, we have made it a point to control our interests overseas by calling anyone who disagrees with privatization and westernization a “communist”, and as a result we have enriched American companies, and secured access to foreign oil, and tricked ourselves into believing that we are doing these countries a favor by helping them “develop” to become just like us.

I wouldn’t have agreed with that last statement if you had told me that 4 months ago, but now I have met and spoken with men and women in the global South who have lived their lives with the consequences of western “development”, and it has changed my perspective. Meet several of them below:

It’s the young farmer I met in the hills outside Port-au-Prince who can’t afford to feed his mother and younger siblings because subsidized American imports undercut the price of the vegetables he grows.

It’s the elderly Dalit “untouchables” I spoke with who have spent decades cleaning human waste from the sewers and streets of Chennai with their bare hands, and who live under tarps and in decrepit apartments on the outskirts of the city.

And it’s the twenty four year old here in Cameroon earning a masters degree in physics who, when asked what his dream is, answered “to get a job… any job”, because his country suffers from high youth unemployment and hasn’t been allowed to develop domestic industries to transform its natural resources into goods to sell in the rest of the world.

This is the legacy of neo-colonialism, and the reason why the US has lost much of its respect in the developing world. It’s because we have tricked ourselves into believing that it’s possible to advance our national interests and at the same time “develop” other countries to become richer and self-sufficient. It’s a conflict of interests: The US has benefited immensely from taking advantage of countries like Cameroon, and as long as US businesses and politicians benefit from this current system, they won’t want to “develop” the countries or help them become “self sufficient”. If left unchecked, US companies will continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor by earning favorable contracts with foreign governments (See Frontline’s episode on Firestone in Liberia), the US government will remain unwilling to allow democratically elected officials represent the voices of their citizens if those views contradict US interests (read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins), and the global North will continue to pressure Southern countries to export raw materials at discounted prices in exchange for increased loans from the World Bank and the IMF that cripple their economic future. All of these things carry forward the legacy of European colonialism, and together these things are referred to as neocolonialism: forcing independent developing countries to be economically dependent on developed countries.

Now that I understand this phenomenon better, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it, but one thing is for certain: I know I need to do something. Some may say “This is all well and good Aaron, but there’s no better alternative! It’s unfortunate that capitalism doesn’t help everyone, but that’s just the way the world works.” I say to these people, we can’t afford to think that way. If this system of neocolonialism is allowed to continue, we will see an increase in violence, war, famine, and unrest the world over. Lack of opportunity and high rates of poverty lead to terrorism and extremism (Iraq, Afghanistan), political instability (Syria, Libya, Egypt), and increased incentive to migrate to developed countries, either legally or illegally (Latin America, European migrant crisis). The more I travel, the more I realize how important it is for leaders in the developed world to recognize they have a responsibility to represent not just their nation’s interests, but rather the interests of the global poor. In our increasingly globalized and connected world, we must recognize that the wellbeing of those in the developed countries can only be ensured by ensuring the wellbeing of those in the developing world. Only by working to achieve mutually beneficial, equal national and international relationships will we create a more stable, secure, and prosperous world. We often worry about dictators and oppressive rulers taking advantage of those they govern, but history has shown us that those who seek after their own interests will not survive. Dictators, kings, emperors, and Fuhrers have been swept away by the sands of time, overthrown by popular uprising and the power of the popular majority. In the end, the surest way to create prosperity and stability for oneself is to look out for the interests of others.

Today, the biggest obstacle keeping us from pursuing true international development through international cooperation and is a decentralized, almost invisible enemy: neo-colonialism. The idea that we must protect our interests at all costs, and the notion that we can’t afford to trust anyone but ourselves results in a global economic system that works to enrich and empower those who already control the wealth and the power. OXFAM recently reported that by 2016, the richest 1% of the world population will be wealthier than the bottom 99%. Another report says that last year there were more refugees fleeing violence and war than ever before. Still other statistics indicate that youth unemployment in many areas of the world is over 40%. All of these things point to one simple fact: The system is broken… and the rich and powerful countries are beginning to experience the negative consequences of creating such an unequal global system.

If we in the developed world truly believe in the values we claim to uphold: freedom, democracy, and opportunity for all, then we must examine the structures of which we are a part and be unafraid of asking ourselves that most powerful of questions: “What if?” What if there’s a better way forward? What if we recognized its in the best interest of rich countries to allow poor countries to develop on their own, not according to our goals and objectives? The world needs men and women who recognize that apathy and resignation are the most dangerous phenomena of our day and age. The time has come for the developed world to acknowledge that our system is broken, and that only by uniting, cooperating and trusting one another can we ensure that we live in a world with freedom and opportunity for all.

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Thanks for visiting aarondanowski.com! Leave you comments below, and be sure to stay up to date on my travels by clicking on the “Following” button on the right hand side of your page!

If you would like to contact me directly, please do so via email: adanowski@zagmail.gonzaga.edu