by Alex Perry
Basu reckoned elimination would take three to four rounds of nets and spraying, rising to six or seven—a generation—in the most malarious places. What would happen when the world found another cause? The normal modus operandi of foreign aid—short-term, large-scale interventions followed by an equally rapid tailing off—suggested foreigners would not stay the course. Could that be changed? Would Africa take over? Or would malaria rebound once again?
Of all the problems his campaign faced as it entered its final year in 2010, the question of sustainability preoccupied Chambers. The problem was twofold. There was the pace of the campaign. “We’ve run this like a political campaign,” said Basu. “But you can’t operate like that forever.”3 And while their spectacular successes suggested they were the right people to run the initial campaign, durable accomplishment would require Africans to take over. Sachs had shown achievements in health and economics reinforce each other. The most developed countries, and those growing fastest, should also be most capable of fighting malaria. “Ultimately, this is about economic development,” said Basu.
“To truly end malaria, you grow out of it. That’s the only way it’s sustainable. Africa can’t stay on the donor dole forever.” So had Africa been given enough of a kick start to be able to start fighting malaria by itself? Could it finally begin climbing its own virtuous circle of development?
The surprising answer to these questions was: possibly. And once again, the hope derived from business. Today Africa is more a destination for business than for aid. War and dictatorships are down. Democracy and economic growth are up. Inflation and interest rates are in single digits. From 1980 to 1994, Africa’s economy shrank by an average 0.2 percent. Since then, annual economic growth has averaged 2.3 percent and is rising steadily. African growth was projected to be 5 percent in 2010 and 5.5 percent in 2011.4
In 2006, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign investment into Africa reached $48 billion, overtaking foreign aid for the first time and reflecting a quadrupling of foreign investment in Africa since 2000.5 That gap has only widened since: in 2010 business investment into Africa more than doubled aid.
Sub-Saharan Africa today resembles Asia in the 1980s. In an article for the online journal allAfrica.com in February 2009, Oxford University economist Paul Collier and US presidential advisor on Africa Witney Schneidman noted that the continent now offers the world’s highest rate of return on investment. “Africa, usually the poorest performing region in the world economy, is now likely to be among the best-performing,” they wrote.6 Stephen Hayes, president and CEO of the Corporate Council on Africa, told me, “Africa offers more opportunity than any place in the world.”7
Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Africa is now open for business is China’s new love of it. China doesn’t do aid; it does business. While the old superpowers still agonize over Africa’s poverty, the new one is captivated by its riches. Trade between Africa and China has grown by an annual average of 30 percent in the last decade and topped $108 billion in 2008. Today the Chinese are pumping oil from Sudan to Angola, logging from Liberia to Gabon, mining from Zambia to Ghana, and farming from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Chinese contractors are building roads from Equatorial Guinea to Ethiopia, dams from the Congo to the Nile, and hospitals and schools, sports stadiums and presidential palaces across the continent. Where they are not digging or building or farming, the Chinese are buying: acquisitions range from a $5.5 billion stake in Africa’s largest bank, Standard Bank in South Africa, to a $14 million investment in a mobile phone company in Somalia. China is becoming part of the African fabric. Chinese knickknacks dominate street markets from Mauritius to Mauritania, Asian fusion is the fashion in restaurants from Antananarivo to Abuja, and airports across the continent sell China Daily and cheap Chinese cigarettes. Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, says anyone who needs convincing on Africa should ask themselves if they are convinced by China. “Because if you back China, you’re backing Africa.”8
The growth is heralding a new mood of self-sufficiency. The African Union, formerly little more than a talk shop for dictators, is now vocal about how Africans should take care of African problems. And it is backing that sentiment with action. Rather than rely on the UN or other foreigners, AU mediators took the lead in messy African crises the rest of the world preferred not to touch: in Kenya during the postelection violence of 2007; in Sudan, which split into north and south in 2011; in Somalia, where an AU force in Mogadishu was also protecting the government against an Islamist insurgency; and in Côte d’Ivoire, where a president defeated in an election in late 2010 refused to step down.
Aid was also attracting ever more criticism from within Africa for, as the critics saw it, unnecessarily supplanting governments. Rwandan president Kagame was the most prominent of aid’s detractors but far from the only one. His views were widely shared by a new generation of antiaid Africans who had had enough of foreigners telling them what to do. When those outsiders were Western celebrities, distaste became detestation.
In Ethiopia in 2007, I met Mulugeta Aserate Kassa, who was organizing that country’s millennium celebrations in 2007. (Ethiopia uses a modified version of the Julian calendar, which is almost seven years later than that used by the rest of the world.) He had asked the Black Eyed Peas to headline a celebration concert. I asked whether he had invited Bob Geldof. Mulugeta, a distinguished looking fifty-six-year-old with an exemplary Oxford English accent to match his pinstripe suit, exploded. He was incandescent about criticism Geldof had made of Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, telling Zenawi to “grow up” and “behave” when Ethiopian police shot dead hundreds of opposition protesters in 2005. “People like me are still absolutely furious about what he said,” said Mulugeta. “What right has he got to be so paternalistic as to tell African leaders how to behave? My God, if he wants to ever come back here, he’ll have to apologize. Nobody denies we have had famines and drought. We have been through that. We feel it in our bones. But we have picked up the pieces.”9
Similarly, in 2009, I interviewed Andrew Rugasira, the CEO of Good African Coffee, a Ugandan coffee company he set up in 2004 to supply British supermarkets from Kampala under the motto “Trade, Not Aid.” For Rugasira, aid not only “undermines the creativity to lift yourself out of poverty” but is also humiliating, even racist. “Aid undermines the integrity and dignity of the people. It says, ‘These are people who cannot figure out how to develop.’” Like many of his peers, Rugasira was especially infuriated by Western celebrities championing aid. “African governments become accountable to Western donors, which is bad enough,” he said. “But Africa also finds itself represented not by Africans, but by Bono and Geldof. I mean, how would America react if Amy Winehouse dropped in to advise them on the credit crunch?”10
And if some Africans did not want aid, others were demonstrating why they didn’t need it. In Kenya, Michael Joseph’s Safaricom had given tens of millions of subscribers access to bank accounts, money-transfer loans, and credit cards by linking up with a bank and allowing subscribers to send each other money by text message. At a stroke, Safaricom not only created the world’s first mass mobile banking service but gave economic growth the kind of boost development specialists can only dream of.11
In 2009, I came across a manifestation of African self-sufficiency that had the potential to change the entire continent. The consensus among climatologists and development specialists was that climate change was the biggest challenge facing Africa. It was pushing the Sahara south, ruining farmland, raising hunger, and likely, so they said, sparking famine, war, and the migration of tens of millions of refugees. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that on the Sahara’s southern edge, an area the size of Somalia has become desert in the last fifty years. The UN Environment Program reports that fourteen African countries currently experience water scarcity or stress and that number will rise to twenty-five by 2025. In a September 2008 report, the UN Convention to Combat Desertif
ication (UNCCD) reported 46 percent of Africa was threatened by land degradation.
The coming crisis is predicted to have a massive human cost. As the number of farms shrink, the number of mouths to feed will grow—the Sahel (the transition zone between the Sahara and the lush farmland to its south) has some of the highest population growth rates in the world. Food prices are also likely to rise, and with them poverty and disease; mosquitoes and locusts both thrive as temperatures go up. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2020 climate change will put at risk of hunger eighty million to a hundred twenty million people, of whom 70–80 percent would be Africans. In a May 2005 study, Oxford and Duke University environmentalist Norman Myers calculated sixteen million “environmental refugees” in Africa in 1995 and predicted that number would double by 2010. In April 2007, the UN Security Council held a debate on how climate change, by exacerbating poverty and friction between rival tribal groups or even countries, can start wars. UNCCD executive secretary Luc Gnacadja concludes climate change is making desertification “the greatest environmental challenge of our times” and calls the effort to reverse it an attempt to “help ensure humanity’s survival.”12
By now I was familiar with aid world hyperbole. I expected the reality was less sensational. What I did not anticipate was that it would be the exact opposite. Flying into Niger in late 2009, I’d noticed strange shapes appearing on the desert floor below. They stretched in ordered rows to the horizon. At a few hundred feet, they revealed themselves as the shadows of millions of trees.
Further investigation revealed farmers were digging holes and ditches shaped in moon crescents and square brackets and erecting low fences out of stones, deadwood, and brush to catch drifting soil. These obstructions were keeping the dirt stationary long enough for it to catch water and insects, germinate seeds, catch more soil, allow the farmer to add manure—and gradually become small, narrow fields.
Since work began in the 1970s, the fields have grown. Some have become woods. Instead of being sucked downward into the spiral of desertification, they have kick-started a new virtuous cycle of life. Grassland and trees trap the desert. Fruits and vegetables grown in their shadow provide food for people and animals. Animals produce manure for the soil, creating bigger, healthier fields. Rainfall has increased. Hunger has fallen.
On a trip to Niger in 2004, Chris Reij, an environmental scientist with the University of Amsterdam, found the new green cover had lowered the average daytime temperature from 113 degrees Fahrenheit to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Reij asked the US Geological Survey to take some satellite images of Niger, and he then compared them to ones from 1975. A data-driven scientist, Reij cautioned himself not to get carried away. “I thought maybe they had re-greened a few hundred, perhaps 1,000 hectares,” he says. When the results came back, he found “they’d re-greened 5 million hectares. That’s 200 million new trees—20 times the number that had been there before.” In the wood they produced, the food and animals they allowed to grow, the lives they saved, Reij estimated the economic value of the trees at €200 million. That was enough to feed 2.5 million people. What’s more, in Niger, the Sahara was no longer spreading south. “It’s the biggest environmental transformation in Africa,” Reij said.13
What had driven the change? Tens of thousands of small farming businesses. Niger suffered a drought from 1968 to 1974 in which more than a hundred thousand people died. After initially trying to decree environmentalism by law—renaming Independence Day, August 3, “Arbor Day” and ordering every citizen of Niger to plant a tree on the anniversary—the government tried green economics. In 1993, the state allowed farmers to own, buy, and sell their own land for the first time. This initially caused some violent disputes. But it also created opportunity. Farmers could now plan on long-term returns. Years of labor on a ditch, known in Niger as zai, became not just socially worthwhile but personally profitable. Returns were good. Reij says each hectare of rescued land brought in an extra $70 per head in a country where, according to the IMF, average per capita income was $185 in 2010. Farmers who previously harvested one crop from every four sowings were now reaping each time they planted. Collecting firewood would take minutes instead of hours, and there was often a surplus to sell. Farmers even began buying new patches of desert to rehabilitate and expand their fields. Trees, soil, and water became capital. Fighting climate change became development. “What’s more,” says Reij, “most of it didn’t cost anything.”
The implications for desertification, and global warming, are immense. So are the lessons for Africa. With no assistance at all, hundreds of thousands of Africans living on the edge of the Sahara are turning back the desert. Niger’s success is now being replicated in Mali, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere. In the northern Ethiopian district of Tigray, farmers have regreened a million hectares. An eighteen-year project in Tanzania’s Shinyanga region, just south of Lake Victoria—a place nicknamed the Desert of Tanzania until recently—has seen three hundred fifty thousand hectares replanted, making 2.8 million people around $170 a year better off, according to a study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Ever on the lookout for opportunities to use leverage, Chambers decided to capitalize on Africa’s new mood of self-determination. He involved African celebrities, such as Youssou N’Dour and the South African singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka. He championed the Tanzanian bed-net manufacturer A to Z and sent consultants to assist Quality Chemical Industries to become operational in Uganda. And he drew in Africa’s governments by creating the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA). John Bridgeland first raised the idea with Kagame during his trip there in 2009. By the end of 2010, ALMA was up and running, with Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete as its first chair, former World Bank vice president for human development Joy Phumaphi as its executive secretary, its own offices across the continent, and thirty-five African heads of states as members. “We’re trying to hand more and more of what we’re doing off to ALMA,” said Basu in late 2010.
Africa would still rely on outsiders to fund the fight against malaria and even, at least initially, to implement it. But under ALMA, it would increasingly direct it. Basu said ALMA was already proving itself more effective at influencing African governments than any foreigner in a suit. “Leverage works well for us in terms of fund-raising and advocacy,” he said, “but we have significantly less impact at the country level. That’s where ALMA comes in. The battle against malaria must be led by African heads of state. Inside ALMA, they exercise peer-to-peer leverage. If we can get this right and have ALMA function as a true collective, it will be a total shift in how we do development and could be one of the greatest legacies that Ray could leave.” Chambers said he was now telling every African president he met: “We’ve given you a turbo boost. And you’re all adamant about self-determination. Well, what greater example of where you can take that than by saying ‘This is our fight. Here is our path out of aid’? Go for it!’”14
Chambers was under no illusion that handing off the campaign to ALMA would be easy. “It’s perhaps the most ambitious thing we have to do, and we expect a lot of skepticism,” said Basu. The resistance from the aid community, used to being in charge, would be particularly firm. But Chambers was resolute: “I don’t have a career in development ahead of me. I can say things others do not want to hear.”
There were also doubts about how well ALMA would function. Africa was increasingly ruled by a higher caliber of leader, such as Jakaya Kikwete in Tanzania or Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia. Above all, Ethiopia proved that good African leadership was the key to killing malaria. The Ethiopian health minister, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—who replaced Rajat Gupta as chair of the Global Fund in July 2009—delighted Chambers on a visit to Addis Ababa by telling him, “My government has prioritized malaria. Even if the donors leave tomorrow, we will pay for this.”15
But Chambers’s time in Kenya, Uganda, and the DRC had shown the new standard of African governance was far from universal. �
�ALMA is critical, and we’re putting a lot of faith in it, but it also makes me nervous,” said Basu. “I worry about those countries that still look at malaria programs as a handout, because the moment you go away, those programs will fall apart. And Africa’s record of making each other accountable is spotty. But I have no other answer to the sustainability question. I can’t think of any alternative. It’s the only way forward.”
CHAPTER 14
Countless
The final year of the campaign—2010—should have been great. Africa was being covered by what was, in effect, one vast bed net. The malaria map was shrinking. In the past few years, malaria had been halved in ten African countries: Botswana, Cape Verde, Eritrea, Madagascar, Namibia, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zambia.1 Outside Africa, thirty-two out of fifty-six countries had done the same. Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkmenistan declared they were malaria free. Zanzibar announced it had all but eliminated the disease for the third time.2 Hundreds of thousands of Africans were no longer dying. Millions were not getting sick. Billions of dollars were being better spent. After millennia of suffering and death, humankind was finally overcoming Original Disease.
The success of the campaign reflected well on Chambers’s methods. He made aid an integral concern of business and, in Nigeria, religion, and a priority for Western government and African governments. He achieved that not just by playing on good intentions but by relying on self-interest, something that also answered the perennial aid question of sustainability. Chambers had made aid efficient and results-oriented by importing business tools. One of those—his specialty, leverage—had allowed him to create one of the largest campaigns the world had ever seen.
