06 August 2010
Peace Corps Shares Ideas with Young Africans on Spurring Change
Washington — The Peace Corps, the flagship of U.S. overseas volunteer organizations, has shared with 115 activists from 45 African countries its thinking about increasing the power of volunteerism.
In a gathering at the corps headquarters in Washington August 4, Director Aaron Williams repeated words that President Obama spoke in an address in Ghana in July 2009: “You can serve in your communities and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease and end conflicts and make change from the bottom up.”
The director distributed a publication, Volunteerism Action Guide. The guide teaches activists how to be effective advocates for their causes. Williams said the key to long-term change is creating “sustainable public engagement.”
The activists came to Washington on invitation from the U.S. government to participate in the President’s Forum with Young African Leaders August 3–5. The president called the forum to mark a half-century of independence that 17 African countries achieved in 1960. For Africa to overcome the poor governance that has plagued its politics during the past half-century, President Obama has reached out to a younger generation of motivated idealists to bring about the needed change.
The Peace Corps arranged for Ghanaian-born, U.S.-educated Fred Swaniker to talk of his work of developing a new generation of African leaders capable of ruling effectively and ethically. He said he is developing future leaders at the African Leadership Academy, located in South Africa. He founded the academy in 2008.
“Leadership is the missing link in Africa for the past 50 years,” Swaniker said. He said that he had stopped “hoping” that good leaders would emerge and decided to develop them. The academy teaches leadership, entrepreneurship and African studies, shorn of colonial vestiges. When Africans study literature, they need to read the works of Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, and when they study history, they need to study Africa’s past, not Europe’s, he said. Swaniker brings in speakers, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu and Graça Machel, wife of South Africa’s former president, Nelson Mandela, and an advocate of women’s and children’s rights.
Swaniker said his goal is to train 6,000 future leaders at the academy during the next 50 years. The boys who attend the academy, who are between the ages of 15 and 18, are drawn from 54 countries in Africa and admitted regardless of their financial resources. The academy will establish a network of its graduates and keep them in touch with each other and with the academy during their careers to identify areas where they can be of greatest service, he said. Swaniker plans to spread his teaching methodology and build similar academies in other parts of Africa.
The Peace Corps also brought in Virginia Emmons McNaught, a returned volunteer from Niger, to relate her experiences. McNaught was sent to Niger in 2000 to work in reforestation, but she did not stay in that work long. “I realized that if we were going to create long-term, sustainable changes, we were going to have to do more than plant trees,” she said. “We were going to have to change how people think about themselves. The only real way to do this is through education,” she said.
McNaught started a school in an isolated village in Niger. The villagers did not want to be taught in French, the lingua franca of the country, and were unwilling to interact with people outside their village because of ethnic prejudice. “We started a school in the local language. It was one of the first schools to teach in the local vernacular in Niger,” McNaught said.
After her return to the United States, McNaught used her Peace Corps experience to establish a service organization, Educate Tomorrow, which aims to provide education to teenage orphans and foster youths to enable them to lead independent lives. “The United States has 500,000 orphans and foster youths. We needed to figure a way to get these kids who are 16 to 18 years old to graduate from high school and into college. There was nobody there to guide them. We want to enable them to become a new generation of leaders as well,” she said. Recruiting mentors for the orphans has been the key to her success, she said.
Abdoul Karim Sango, a professor of law in Burkina Faso, commented that Africans do not have confidence in themselves. “Africans are afraid to assume responsibility for their own history. How can Africans develop self-confidence?” he asked. Sango is a human rights advocate with a particular interest in assuring fair elections and citizens’ right to information.
“Education is the key,” said Swaniker. “When you change education, you change how people see themselves.”
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
Podcast: Young African Leaders on Entrepreneurship