What if Africa does need some saving?

Africa doesn’t need your saving. That’s an argument making the rounds of some of the better blogs covering the continent, and perhaps nowhere more so than in one of my favorites: Texas in Africa.

Where did it come from, this idea that we in the privileged West are supposed to “save Africa?

In one sense, the booming interest in Africa and in “doing something” to help people there isn’t new. It’s been there ever since European colonizers, soldiers, and missionaries figured out how to live on the continent without dying of malaria.
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And yet. In recent years, something has without a doubt changed with respect to Western attitudes about Africa, especially from where I sit in the states. When I was a university student in the 1990’s, people didn’t know much about Africa. And, to be honest, most of the people I knew didn’t really care. Africa was far too exotic, unreachable, and of the “other” to be of relevance. When I announced that I was going to study abroad in Nairobi, just about everyone I knew thought I was insane. It took a year to talk my parents into giving the okay.

Fast-forward fifteen years and the picture is quite different. Students flock to the continent for study abroad programs. The declaration that one wants to “save Africa” or “help Africa” is a powerful marketing tool, and there are dozens of organizations dedicated to doing so.

As you can tell from the tone, she doesn’t think this is a good thing. Africa doesn’t need to be saved, she says. It needs to be “empowered.” That is, we shouldn’t be sending in Western rock stars to pose with hungry children, we should be training local health care providers. And enough with the catered conferences. We should be promoting Africans to positions of responsibility, tapping into local skills, and making sure that every project is concieved and cared for by the people whom it will be benefiting.

It’s all good stuff and hard to argue with. But what if there are some areas where Africa really does need saving? Take AIDS medication, for instance. The price of the most basic treatment has dropped dramitically in the past decade, to something like $300 a year. But in a continent when many make less than a dollar a day, that’s still far out of reach of many of the virus’s victim. Nor is epidemic something that the continent’s governments can handle on their own.

There are roughly 22.4 million people living with the virus in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to donor programs, more than 2 million of them are recieving treatment, and that’s just a fraction of those who should be on the life-saving drugs. I’m not saying that local skills and local talent have no roll in this battle. They most certainly do. But one thing is clear: No matter how many local nurses and lab technicians you train, somebody has to pay for the pills. After all, there are lives to be saved.

[update: continued here.]

 Coming soon: A lot of Africa bloggers really don’t like Nick Kristof. I’ll take a stab at defending him.