When you have travelled to two countries in
quick succession, it’s difficult to resist comparing them, even though those comparisons
are invidious or unfair. Also Gambia is
a country I know pretty well, as we’ve delivered our Masters in Public Health –
Health Promotion there for the last seven years, whereas Uganda is a country I had
never before visited. These two African
countries are far apart in distance, one the most western, sitting astride the
Gambian river, a strange shape created by the colonial powers in 1884-5 and the
other, nestled in the cluster of countries making up ‘East Africa’. Given that
this was a new country to me, I found myself comparing it not only with Gambia
but also with many of the other sub-Saharan countries I’ve worked in. I have to say I was very impressed with what
I saw. There is a real buzz of energy in Uganda; although it’s obviously
‘poor’, there’s also a great deal of activity and a sense that things are
happening.
For me, having worked on projects designed
to manage solid waste and enable cleaner environments, I can’t help noticing
the amount of rubbish around, what is being collected, and how clean the
streets are. As soon as we landed at
Entebbe, it was significant that the city streets were swept, and this impression
continued. Certainly there were areas with rubbish scattered around, but
overall, public spaces were swept and tidy. On the other hand, my impression of
Gambia a couple of weeks previously was that there was more rubbish than ever,
piling up uncollected and spoiling the look of the place. I have often argued
away the failure to keep places clean and rubbish-free by saying that when
people are living at the margins, they have other more important things to
think about. If you are intent on feeding your family, you don’t expend energy
on sweeping your yard or complaining about stepping over litter on your way to
the market. Moreover, there are often no effective municipal systems for
collecting either household or commercial waste, leaving people with little
choice but to dispose of rubbish in whatever way they can. However, whilst
Uganda and Gambia appear similar on many statistical measures and could be
described as equally poor, there is a striking difference on this ‘marker’
issue of rubbish collection. Given that
Gambia relies heavily on the tourist trade for its foreign exchange, (which makes
up 18% of GDP), it’s surprising perhaps that more effort is not made to ensure
cleaner beaches or to clear the main roads of the accumulated solid waste.
Some might argue that the tourist industry has contributed to this
accumulation, but once away from the coastal areas where tourists congregate,
there are still high levels of rubbish – and I have been twice now to the far
end of the country, visiting Fatoto and Passamass, which is as far as you can
go and where there is no sign of tourism. I don’t believe that people – even
very poor people - want to live in this type of environment, or that it’s
something that is of higher concern to Westerners. Rather, it seems one of
those markers that signify feelings of self-esteem, confidence, pride,
belonging, and community.
Uganda did have rubbish in places but there
were clearly efforts to collect it and whole swathes of the countryside in our
travels from Kampala to Mbarara were free of it. Christine Majale Liyala’s PhD
has looked in depth at how solid waste management (SWM) at the municipal level
in urban centres in East Africa can be modernized and Judith Tumusiime
Tukahirwa’s PhD has considered the role of NGOs and CBOs and civil society
generally, in SWM in the same region. They both show clearly that SWM is taken seriously
and that there are systems in place to tackle it. In Gambia however, there
appeared to me at least to be some kind of correlation between the increased
rubbish and the increasing sense of a country adrift, a lowering of morale and
increasing concern over the direction of political leaders.
One Internet site giving basic facts about
Gambia –
paints this picture:
“Economic development is very reliant on
continued multilateral and bilateral aid and on prudent economic management by
the government as espoused by the International Monetary Fund's fiscal help and
advice.
The Gambia is among the poorest countries of the world, ranking
155th out of 177 countries in the 2007/2008 UNDP Human Development Index rankings (HDI).
According to the UNDP's Human Poverty Index
(HPI-1) of 2004 poverty is was at 40.9 percent, with rural poverty slightly exceeding
urban poverty rates, except in Banjul where the
rate is much lower. The Gambia’s per capita GDP measured at PPP is higher than
Benin, Senegal or Togo, but literacy is low by regional standards.
Services account for over 50 percent of GDP, reflecting the
importance of re-export trade and tourism. Agriculture
accounts for about a third of GDP but more than 70 percent of employment. The manufacturing
sector is undeveloped even by West African standards, providing only 5 percent
of GDP and displaying little dynamism.”
An update to this view from 2014 doesn’t
indicate that much has changed -http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/gambia_the/gambia_the_economy.html
The professional classes seem demoralized
by the withdrawal of Gambia from the Commonwealth, which led to a flurry of
media reports about the political situation on the country, such as this in The
Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/gambia/10352211/As-Gambia-leaves-Commonwealth-its-people-live-under-a-cult-of-witchcraft-and-execution.html
Uganda’s equivalent ‘chattering classes’
and professionals in contrast seemed to bubble; I have never had such
interesting discussions about people’s aspirations, ideas about current
affairs, ideas for research, or visions of how things could develop. It comes
as no surprise to me that when the death of Duncan Dallas, founder of the Café
Scientifique and resident of Leeds, was announced this week that one of the
major projects that he really wanted to see continue was the Café-Sci Network
in Uganda. Although the café scientifique idea has taken off in lots of
countries – that is, the concept of gathering to share debate and to
communicate scientific ideas – it has really flown in Uganda. See:
The latest website feature is on young
people developing challenging ideas, a piece about spreading the word on
cervical cancer and one on low income women and finance. One of the striking features
of Uganda was how it responded to the HIV crisis in the 1980s – it was the
first country to grasp the enormity of the threat and to act positively to
counteract it. This meant overturning cultural norms of not talking about
sexual matters. Moreover the President and First Lady began to talk openly
about HIV from 1986, taking a personal and outspoken approach ever since. This
contrasts with the much-publicized approach of the Gambian President, which has
been to claim that he can cure those with AIDS when they present themselves to
him. In contrast, Uganda has found many imaginative ways to tackle HIV and
although there are still problems, there has been a dramatic downturn in
numbers infected. See: http://www.developmenteducation.ie/blog/2012/12/tackling-hiv-and-aids-through-taxation-in-uganda/
Infection rates among those aged 15-49 fell
from 14% in 1990 to around 5.4% now and Uganda is seen as unique in its HIV
history, the first country to be turned to when looking for success stories.
There are still large billboards giving health education messages and although
some complacency inevitably creeps in around enduring health problems, there is
no sign that campaigning against HIV is waning. Nor, though, are there signs
that the HIV clinics are emptying. However, people do seem to be using the services
provided, coming forward for testing and being aware of the issues. The clinic
we were shown in a small town outside Mbarara was heaving with people; in
contrast the clinics we saw in remote areas of Gambia were empty. One
interpretation might be that people in Gambia are healthy and don’t need to
attend clinics whereas in Uganda they are so sick that the clinics are full. On
the other hand, it might be that in Gambia people see nothing to attend a
clinic for – maybe there are no doctors present, the facilities are poor and
there are no medicines – whereas in Uganda there is a service provided, even if
rudimentary, so people make the effort to attend and to sit through the long
waits. Uganda spends 9.9% of its GDP on health (and $128 per capita), Gambia
4.4% (and $94 per capita). Uganda has 13.1 nurses/midwives per 10,000
population, Gambia 5.7.
Another striking feature of Uganda is the
number of good quality educational facilities; again this view is
impressionistic but first impressions do matter, and certainly we passed many
schools and colleges that looks spruce, well-kept and well resourced. It appears
that Uganda has always valued education and moreover has a legacy of good
educational institutions going back decades. Makerere University is one of the
oldest in Africa and it shows – it’s still a flourishing institution. The plans
for the education system don’t just exist on paper – they are also there on the
ground. See: http://www.education.go.ug/
The literacy rate (%) among 15-24 year olds
is now 89.6 for boys and 85.5 for girls, (compared with 72.6 for boys and 63.6
for girls in Gambia). The educational standards of our Ugandan students and
graduates have always been apparent and it was great to see so many of our
alumni doing well, populating academic posts in Universities, filling important
roles in the Ministry of Health and in front line services. A major concern of
many African countries is how to absorb graduates when industry is lacking, but
another feature of Uganda is the small but growing manufacturing sector and the
development of a range of service industries - and these should provide the jobs of the
future.
Although Uganda has had the same President
since 1986, and some are saying that this is too long, it does seem that
Museveni has been a force for good and has brought stability. One of the issues
that came up in conversation in Uganda was obviously the recently passed
anti-gay laws. Whereas western countries are moving in the opposite direction,
many African countries are clamping down severely on gay rights. Some of those
we discussed this with were embarrassed by the new laws and expressed concern
at how they were seen by the West. They also expressed the sentiment that ‘what
people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is up to them’, whilst others
felt that the laws were an attempt by Museveni to adopt populist measures to
stay in power. There was also discussion of how the laws would affect flows of
aid and this was a point I raised in two public lectures I gave, one at Mbarara
University and the other at Victoria University in Kampala. Aid is often given
conditionally and its withdrawal is used as a threat. When President Jammeh
executed a number of prisoners in 2013, several Gambian opposition politicians
called for aid to be tied to its human rights record, and in Uganda, British
aid was questioned in the wake of the anti-gay laws. Ugandans seem sanguine
about this move, and in my lecture I raised the question of whether aid was the
solution to ‘development’ anyway – something that Africans are increasingly
talking about too. The Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo in one of her Ted Talks
explores the different way that China has of providing aid (you can search for this on youtube) and I have discussed
her ideas in the book ‘Dead Aid’ in a previous blog post. It is not surprising
to me that Ugandans are increasingly saying that they can be more self-reliant
and that aid saps local initiative. President Jammeh is perhaps making the same
sort of statement in leaving the Commonwealth. I talked in my lectures of the need for
Africans themselves to decide what direction they wanted ‘development’ to take
and look forward to the day when ‘aid’ is no longer necessary.
References:
Liyala, C.M. (2011) Modernising Solid Waste
management at municipal level: Institutional arrangements in urban centres of
East Africa. PhD Thesis, University of Wageningen, Netherlands.
Tukahirwa, J.T. (2011) Civil Society in
Urban Sanitation and Solid Waste Management: The role of NGOs and CBOs in
metropolises of East Africa. PhD Thesis, University of Wageningen, Netherlands.
