An Enabling Environment for Development :: Part 1, Education and Training
Following on from my recent post titled ‘What is appropriate development?’ I decided as promised, that I would take a broader look at the issues surrounding appropriate development, specifically the environment for which, or within which, they are being developed. As I discussed in the aforementioned post, one of the issues is whether the development is profit-led or not. Now, whilst this blog is all about whether development is needs-led - specifically how the concepts of user experience design apply, nothing works in isolation in reality, and I think it is equally important to know your subject area, and to know of the interlinking issues that surround it, to allow for more balanced assessment and opinions.
The issues I am going to cover are:
Education and Training
Research & Development and Data Collection
Slavery, Pre-Colonial Trade and Colonisation
Internal Infrastructure Investment
Lack of Communication Infrastructure
Power of IGO’s in global economy
Foreign investment
Patent protection
Debt burden
However, as there is quite a lot of detail required simply to overview these issues, I thought it better to start a mini-series of posts, under the title ‘An Enabling Environment’, where each separate post will look at one issue. So, for this first post, I am going to look at education and training issues.
Education and training
To begin, education in general should be defined as having two benefits in respect of creating an enabling environment. The first is that people need education to be able to invent or innovate. Secondly, people need an education to be able to make use of those inventions or innovations.
In regards to this, Africa certainly falls down. The lack of primary, secondary and tertiary education systems, or the poor quality that are provided, is a widely acknowledged problem. I am not going to delve here into the issues of why this is, suffice to say in general it is not happening.
The subsequent issue with relation to education is consideration of what happens to the people who do get educated successfully.
Two problems prevail here. The first is that they leave to work abroad, where they aspire to a better lifestyle. Ironically, it has been demonstrated that often these people end up working in jobs which are not equivalent to their professional qualifications, but their standard of living is still improved on if they stayed in Africa working in higher level positions.
The second point, which was something I was unaware of, and I have to say took me by surprise, is the issue of AIDS in respect of African educated males employed in high level positions within Africa. This information was provided to me by a retired Managing Director of CDC, who informed me that when he worked within Africa, approximately 25% of CDC’s African managers in countries such as Zambia died every year from AIDS. Whilst evidently it comes as no shock that AIDS is prevalent in Africa. What does however make the issue even more concerning in terms of development, is that the percentage of educated men dying of AIDS is much higher than uneducated due to the conceived status symbol of having lots of girlfriends, which is enabled through having money, which is enabled through training and employment.
In reference to this, I just read an interesting article on mthandenisoracle’s blog, entitled ‘Aids rises among SA’s rich!!!’, which reports on a study undertaken within South Africa which has shown that AIDS amongst the employed/educated people is growing. A spokesperson for the survey said:
‘If we thought the AIDS epidemic was having bad economic effects already, this could take us to the crisis point.’
It is clearly a good thing that this issue is being recognised, however, I would say that considering the retired Managing Director I spoke to knew about this issue from over 15 years ago, it seems that perhaps the ‘crisis point’ has been happening for years, and we should be asking why it was not recognised or acknowledged earlier and what effect this problem has had on development already, as well as looking at how to tackle the issue now. Maybe by analysing past mistakes, we can learn how to avoid them in the future?
Next section coming soon…
