Giving support at the micro level offers the best hope for Africa, where corruption is rife at upper echelons, argues John Waters
In Nakabago, in the Mukanon district of eastern Uganda, a cow is a technology for converting grass into gas. Jackson and Mary Sezibwa sit in their living room, a basic space with bare walls and a few chairs, proudly showing off their gas lamp.
To the western eye, their circumstances seem challenging and frugal, but compared to most of their neighbours they are prosperous. The lamp, which splutters a bit but gives off an impressive light, is a powerful symbol of this prosperity.
The gas firing both the lamp and the two cooking hobs in the kitchen next door comes from the cow byre in the yard, from the cow dung and urine produced by their one cow and one heifer.
The biogas unit, installed in their yard by Bóthar Ireland in partnership with Heifer Project International (HPI), means they no longer use firewood and also lights their living room so they can stay up after dark.
The change began with the first Friesian heifer, received in 2000 as part of the Bóthar/HPI initiative. Before, the Sezibwas had no income and could not afford to send their malnourished children to school. Now they sell their milk and vegetables grown with the help of the manure from the cow byre. Their children eat well, go to school every day and do their homework by the light of the gas lamp.
Under the Bóthar/HPI scheme, a family receives a heifer and is required to pass on the first-born female calf to another family.
Other offspring are theirs to keep. The Sezibwas have passed on one heifer and sold two bulls. The income from one of these sales has paid for the biogas unit, which costs about $1,000 to fit. The other funds have been used to build their house and buy poultry.
Since its inception in 1991, Bóthar Ireland has been working to help people in the most impoverished circumstances imaginable to help themselves.
The process starts with a one-off gift, a heifer (Bóthar also supplies goats, pigs, chickens, bees and even camels), perhaps donated by an Irish farmer, school or workplace, and culminates in the transformation of a family's way of life. Families are trained and provided with the basic tools to enable them care for the animal and maximise its usefulness in the family economy.
In the Maddo Project dairy in Masaka district, local farmers have come together in a co-operative which has enabled them vastly to improve their skills base and even build a small dairy which produces quality milk and yogurt for sale. Farmers who once scratched a living out of a barren acre or two now pool and pass on their skills and knowledge of crop rotation, tree-planting and zero-grazing. Maddo has received 125 animals, including pass-ons, from Bóthar.
To encounter such efforts to grapple with the reality of life in Africa is to be assaulted by two conflicting emotions. On the one hand is the sense of how straightforward it is to intervene positively in the lives of the world's poorest people, to achieve real, dramatic change at the local level. The other, opposing, thought is that the overall problem is so vast as to be hopeless.
It is not hopeless. Much of our collective thinking about Africa is hopelessly ill-formed and out-of-date. Still more of it is hog-tied by ideological positioning, creating a divisive debate about the efficacy of different approaches.
There are no absolute, objective reasons why a country such as Uganda should have poverty or inequality on the scale that exists. The land is fertile, the rainfall regular.
The main problem is an impoverished culture, to which many basic skills have been lost. The key resources required are know-how and a jump-start. After that, the people are capable of taking charge of their lives with passion and energy.
Those responsible for dispensing official western government aid say that such initiatives can only scratch the surface unless accompanied by systemic, infrastructural development, which can only come about through partnerships between western donor states and African governments. The problem with this, as John O'Shea and others have been pointing out for aeons, is that Africa is rendered developmentally incontinent by corruption.
From the traffic cop who invites the defaulting motorist to "share" the fine (pay half and he'll tear up the ticket) to the kleptocrat at the cabinet table, the ubiquity of graft and theft render much of the continent unamenable to systemic intervention.
Projects such as that operated by Bóthar Ireland are, generally speaking, utterly successful at the level on which they operate.
Intervening at the lowest level of necessity, they move people off the subsistence line and, over time, create functioning micro-economies which allow communities to become self-sufficient and optimistic. It is difficult to resist the idea that, coupled with a multiplier of some kind, such thinking might be the key to a more equal and functional Africa.