Connie Freeman, IDRC's Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa

This text originally appeared in IDRC's 2006-2007 Annual Report.

Too often, says Connie Freeman, when people in the North attempt to understand Africa, they reach for a tired script with a well-worn plot and a predictable ending. This standard scenario casts Africa as a continent largely beyond hope.

But IDRC’s Nairobi-based Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa has seen subtle shifts that hint at a different story.

Recent solid economic growth rates in many African countries — while far from a guarantee that poverty rates will fall — nonetheless provide a promising platform for social progress and an opportunity for Africa to finally put the effects of the debt crisis behind it.

Another positive sign is the growing public impatience with poor governance that Freeman believes has helped propel several countries toward more open and accountable leadership.

“People are tired of military dictatorships, autocracies, being told what to do, being scared, having war all the time,” she says. So while in the past the standard response to corruption, for example, was that “everybody shrugged their shoulders,” the mood has now changed.

A new set of public expectations, Freeman believes, may well have contributed to the current reality wherein “you have more countries in Africa today with representative government of one sort or another than ever in the history of Africa.”

Erosion of dependency

Another important, hopeful trend is what Freeman calls “the erosion of dependency.” For most of recent memory there was an expectation, she says, that industrialized countries would take the leading role in repairing the damage done to Africa by slavery and other forms of colonial plunder.

Now, however, there is an insistence that, for development to be meaningful and to yield real advances, it must be planned locally and led by Africans.

Freeman sees Africans’ strengthened desire to direct their own futures as reflected in the fact, for example, that Kenya’s national budget has for several years contained no donor funding. South Africa similarly rejected funding from the international financial institutions (directly following the end of the apartheid era), so as not to be bound by the external conditions accompanying such funds.

IDRC is well positioned to contribute to Africa’s development within this new context since many of those emerging conditions have themselves been cornerstones of the Centre’s programming.

“Unlike other donor or assistance agencies, IDRC funds research that is done by Africans, conceived on the continent, and rooted in the local reality,” says Freeman. “What we have always done is provide support and capacity building for Africans to run their own development process.”

She also notes that improving standards of governance has been an important area of concern for IDRC: with the end of autocracy in Kenya, for example, IDRC backed a research program on transitions to democracy that focused in large measure on ethics in government and anti-corruption policy.

Climate change, and a climate for change

This is not to suggest that IDRC’s future role in Africa will simply be a matter of “staying the course.” New or intensifying challenges require new programs and new approaches.

Climate change, for example, is widely seen not as a problem that looms on the horizon, but as one that has an impact today. That’s why the recently launched Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) program — administered, staffed, and partly funded by IDRC, with the collaboration of the UK’s Department for International Development — seeks to understand how people cope with the impacts of climate change.

“People in Africa have already accommodated themselves to climate change over time,” explains Freeman. “They employ all kinds of techniques. Our premise is: let’s find out what those techniques are and help them figure out ways they can improve on them. While we know that people do adapt, we don’t know how they adapt and we don’t have knowledge in a form that’s transferable to other contexts across Africa.”

Another pressing problem is continued, large-scale migration from rural areas to unplanned settlements on the urban fringe, where services are non-existent and living conditions are “egregious.”

Says Freeman: “We need to figure out ways to make urban living more acceptable and less lethal.”

To that end, two Focus Cities projects in different regions of Africa — one in Kampala, Uganda, and another in Dakar, Senegal —are taking a systems approach to overlapping issues such as urban agriculture, environmental management, employment, and public services.

Part of the objective is to find the positive potential in negative circumstances: creating safe ways to use wastewater as fertilizer for urban crops, for instance, would solve two problems and lead to a net social gain.

Connie Freeman is convinced that research is a particularly important commodity at a time when Africans are trying to forge a new future. “There are many different types of transitions underway,” she says. “And people are much more receptive to research during times of transition — you can take new ideas and push them a lot further.”

2007