Ethiopia welcomes Africa!
What a great week to be in Addis Ababa, pretending to be a delegate at this auspicious 50th anniversary of the African Union (AU) currently underway on the theme, “Pan Africanism and African Renaissance.”
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With our hotel awash with visiting AU delegates, our ‘mislabeling’ is anticipated which is why we have copiously accepted an invitation to a welcome reception hosted by the hotel.
This also explains why at the lobby, we are comfortably seated in anticipation of pure breed buna with barley to cement it. This crowns an engaging meeting with officials of the Federal Ministry of Health to discuss matters of shared learning, while exploring opportunities for future collaboration.
Following this, our host, Zenaw, has been gracious enough to take us on a drive through some principal streets to savor the sights and sounds of Addis. Key among these is the imposing new African Union building, a worthy replacement of the fading building that housed the AU’s precursor Organisation of African Unity at its founding in 1963.
It is obvious that something fascinating is happening: the colourful abundance of national flags, the massive hikes in hotel rates, the multiple motorcades, the outpouring of police, the welcome messages decorating the entrance/exit of/ from the Bole International Airport respectively, the extra attention at the hotel including beds bedecked in candies and red flowers with complementary sweet red Ethiopian Axumit wine and Tarara coffee.
The spirit of Pan Africanism, the “belief that African peoples, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny” burns.
It is recalled that the foundations of modern pan Africanism were laid by Dr Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, WEB Du Bois and co in the Manchester conference in 1945 during which a strategy for the political liberation of Africa was outlined, thereby adding significant impetus to the liberation struggle.
The special edition of the AU Echo defines the African Renaissance as “the concept that African people and nations overcome the current challenges confronting the continent and achieve cultural, scientific, economic, etc. renewal” as first articulated by Cheikh Anta Diop in a series of essays beginning in 1946, which are collected in his book “Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in Culture and Development, 1946-1960.” Receiving significant support in later years, South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki will in 1997articulate its critical elements as “social cohesion, democracy, economic rebuilding and growth and the establishment of Africa as a significant player in geo political affairs.”
“In summary, African Renaissance is a philosophical and political movement to end the violence, elitism, corruption and poverty that seem to plague the African continent, and replace them with a more just and equitable order.” Mbeki prioritised education and the reversal of the “brain drain” of African intellectuals as critical interventions.
If both concepts above draw on our sense of collective self- reliance, then this week has been a great example of how three African countries are collaborating constructively in sharing knowledge and experience towards improving health outcomes.
With addressing faulty referral systems as means of improving maternal and newborn health as a focus, projects in Ghana, Nigeria and Ethiopia are finding creative ways to collaborate in a true all teach and all learn environment. Common problems such as building a reliable community based data collection and utilisation system, improving low skilled delivery rates and evolving an effective community based transportation solution were perhaps the best demonstration of what Pan Africanism and African Renaissance represented.
Coupled with this has been the rich insights gleaned into the Ethiopian health system and the promise this holds for the future.
Ethiopia, in more ways than one, is a country on the surge; the massive ongoing construction virtually everywhere, the military precision with which the country has been zoned into manageable units of five households per unit as a means of spurring a fully integrated development agenda and the exceedingly powerful linkages between community volunteers or health development armies and formal sectors such as health, agriculture and education.
I have never seen such an elaborate linkage between community actors and formal health systems. As it turns out, these groups of volunteers are not volunteers in name only.
Seeing their work as purely for purposes of advancing the social good, they neither charge nor are they paid allowances or salaries and yet are so incredibly motivated to impact health outcomes.
Health Development Armies have mapped out in amazing detail areas in their communities where a pregnant woman may be found or which household owns and uses a pit latrine or which household only houses elderly folks.
Can anyone imagine the potential for rapid scale up of high impact interventions? The prospects are truly amazing!
My second positive observation pertained to the commitment of the Ethiopian government to invest in equipment and infrastructure. It was revealing watching the astonishment of the Ghana team on discovering the level of equipment and human resource available to a sub district health centre. Who recalls seeing any Ghanaian health centre with a doctor, three midwives, two public health nurses, one physician assistant etc armed with suction machines, radiant heaters, and oxygen concentrators? To befuddle us further, a district hospital with less capacity than my previous district hospital boasted of 10 general practitioners and three obstetricians compared to the three general practitioners that were available to my 160 bed capacity district hospital.
If more of us shared our experiences with others, if more of us collaborated to address common challenges or frequently used our relative strengths to relative weaknesses of our colleagues, if we departed from expensive and time consuming individual solutions and embraced common approaches to addressing the challenges of our communities, if we challenged ourselves more by linking our interventions to measurable outcomes, we would have played our Pan Africanist part in spurring and birthing the African Renaissance.
Article by Sodzi Sodzi Tettey
