I used to think that Africa was rather homogeneous and that all of its nations faced similar problems. As a result of this misconception, I was willing to contemplate the one-size-fits-all "solutions" to Africa's problems that I often heard in debates about global poverty. But a trip to East Africa last summer proved that I could not have been more wrong.
I experienced one of the biggest shocks of my life when I walked a mere 200 yards across the border from Gisenyi, in western Rwanda, to Goma, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most of what I saw in Rwanda was relatively encouraging it wasn't much worse than what I had seen when visiting rural Mexico and things seemed to be improving. When my mother was hospitalized in Rwanda, she received better care at a lower cost than we were used to in Canada. Goma, on the other hand, was simply depressing. One of the health clinics that I visited in Goma was probably less sanitary than my family's cattle barn and had less medicine in stock than we do for our cattle. There was only one doctor, a relatively young Congolese man, working at this clinic. He had earned his medical degree from a school in Russia and spoke five languages fluently, yet only earned an average US$30 a month. My father asked why he chose to remain in Goma when he could easily get a job as a doctor in Canada. His reply was simple: "If I don't help these people, who will?"
But these health care anecdotes are only the tip of the iceberg. I felt relatively safe in Rwanda and did not have any problems with corruption there. In the DRC, a customs officer wasted over an hour of my time by trying to get a bribe, despite the fact that I was with a Congolese member of parliament at the time. The NGO with which I was travelling would not permit me to leave the city of Goma out of concern for my own safety. The government or, more correctly, the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world only has control over the major cities. There are still regular skirmishes between the army and various rebel groups in the countryside for control of rare earth elements that are needed to make our cellphones, iPods and laptops.
These experiences forced me to reconsider what I had read about Africa, including bestsellers such as "The End of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs and "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo. While writers like Sachs and Moyo make many important points, they usually end up proposing one-size-fits-all solutions more aid in Sachs' case and less in Moyo's. Given the vast diversity of problems that I saw in Africa, these solutions now seem far too simple to me.
And then I read "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier. This book completely changed the way I view the tragedy of global poverty in an increasingly affluent world. It is very telling that, while the reactions to Sachs and Moyo's books were pretty clearly delineated along predictable ideological lines, "The Bottom Billion" was praised by Niall Ferguson, Martin Wolf and Nicholas Kristof, as well as The Economist and The Guardian. Collier argues that most African nations are stuck in poverty due to one or more of four "development traps": violence (civil wars and coups), abundant natural resources, bad governance and being landlocked with bad neighbors. He then proposes four broad policy instruments available to first-world governments looking to encourage development in Africa: foreign aid, military interventions, preferential trade deals and international charters. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The instruments that will be effective in any given country depends on the trap(s) into which that country has fallen. For instance, foreign aid will be effective in landlocked countries with bad neighbors (like Rwanda), but not in countries with abundant natural resources (such as Nigeria).
Why should we care? Most of us will probably never work as a doctor in Goma. But we are already voters, and many of us will become successful businesspeople or government officials. As such, we all have a moral responsibility to at least attempt to understand the problems facing the world's most unfortunate citizens. After all, given the breadth of the resources and knowledge that Dartmouth makes available to its students, we should all be able to do better than passively accept convenient stereotypes and one-size-fits-all solutions.
