IMPACT & Poverty Reduction

Why IMPACT is important for East Africa’s sustainable development?

Sub-Saharan Africa, which includes East Africa, remains at the bottom of the “development ladder” (Sachs). One can see here in this chart that while most of the world has “developed”, sub Saharan Africa has been caught in what scholars call a “poverty trap” (Collier).

The reasons for this enduring poverty are complex, involving the colonial legacy of disempowerment, social atomization, and endemic corruption. How might the IMPACT model play a key role here?

The upstream issue in sustainable development: a Problem Solving mentality

In service learning, youth identify real issues in their community, work hard to implement their projects, learn, and grow in the process. But so what? Admittedly, sometimes the community service projects are modest and seem like a mere drop in an ocean of necessary change. Apart from the sometimes-modest service projects, why might this process be important, perhaps even the key, for sustainable development and community health?

First, it is well known that almost all international development strategies are either fundamentally disempowering, or focus on important but untimely or ultimately downstream issues: mosquito nets, wells, laptops, sponsor a child, wood burning stoves, etc.

Even when well targeted, all of these may be very important, but often can create dependencies and will not be truly moving societies towards sustainable development.

The upstream parable can aid reflection on this dilemma.

“A man saw a person drowning in a river and dove in to save him. The next day, another person was swept down the river, and once more, the courageous bystander plunged into the waters to save the struggling victim. The following day, there were three people drowning, and this time the bystanders had to seek help to make the rescues. The day after that, more people needed saving, and many citizens had to join the rescue effort. Soon the river was full of drowning people, and the entire community worked without end to save them. Finally, someone said, “We should go upriver to find out where all these drowning people are coming from.” But others answered, “We can’t, we’re too busy saving lives down here”

What usually follows this parable is the stock “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime”. This sounds wise, but what if there are no or few fish in your area? Or, the fish are poisoned or people just don’t like fish or fishing? Much of international development is providing tools and trainings, fishing poles and fishing lessons for situations where it is not appropriate. However, one development scholar (in an article ironically entitled “The Irrelevance of Development Studies”) got it right: In all sectors of development, the adoption of problem solving approaches is much more important than communicating particular packages of technical information (Edwards). Every development situation is local and incredibly complex; there can be no recipe book solutions especially dictated from abroad—even fishing lessons.

So instead of providing ready-made technical solutions, what is needed is rather the disposition towards being problem solvers, agents of change. Nobel Peace Prize winner and Green Belt founder Dr. Wangari Maathai in her book The Challenge of Africa, echoes exactly this: “I firmly believe that unless Africans from all levels of society recognize and embrace the challenge of leadership, Africa will not move forward.”

Decades of reflection on these matters led me to coin the phrase: We will never solve the problem of development without the development of more problem-solvers. And this “problem-solving” or “burden bearing” (Gal. 6:2) is precisely what IMPACT does in a proven, replicable, way, all around the world.