Special Report on East Africa

This 1997 special report highlights the Foundation's work in East Africa and its contribution to social development in the region.

Tanzania - This Zanzibari fisherman doesn't want a handout, but a chance to improve life in his community. Click to enlarge. (Photo: Jean-Luc Ray/AKF) Introduction Historical Perspective Early Years School Improvement Health Systems Rural Development NGO Enhancement Regionalisation and Partnership

The Aga Khan Foundation has been active in East Africa since its establishment in Kenya in 1974. Twenty-three years of experience in the region have contributed to the shaping of the Foundation's international strategy. In the last five years, offices have been established in Dar-es-Salaam (1993), Zanzibar (1993) and Kampala (1994). This expanded presence has facilitated greater local input in the conceptualisation and development of programmes, enhancing their diversity, scope and richness.

Historical Perspective

Aga Khan Institutions have a long history of social development in East Africa. Community-based health and education initiatives were launched to support successive waves of Ismaili Muslim immigration to East Africa since the early 19th century. The first Aga Khan school to be documented was on the Island of Zanzibar in 1905. These voluntary organisations grew into strong institutions -- the Aga Khan Education Services and the Aga Khan Health Services -- that opened their doors to all East Africans many years ago. Today they have 11,250 children in their schools and serve 442,000 patients every year in medical institutions throughout the region.

Given the existence of these able partners, it was natural that the Aga Khan Foundation should start its work in East Africa by forging relationships with them to help launch pioneering primary health care and basic education programmes.

The Foundation was clear, however, that to maximise its impact in the region, it would work with a diverse set of grantees or partners as different as the Kenya Headmistresses' Association, the Kenya Medical Research Institute, the African Medical and research Foundation (AMREF) and the Ministry of Education in Zanzibar. The Foundation sought partners for experimentation along thematic lines.

A milestone in the work of the Foundation in East Africa was the Enabling Environment Conference in Nairobi in 1986. This Conference was in many ways a watershed in donor/government relationships in Africa. It highlighted the crucial and complex relationships between civil society and development, between effective legislation and individual enterprise and between macro-economic policies and growth. It came at a time when structural adjustment programmes were calling for somewhat simplistic macro-economic measures and helped to highlight the complexities of development issues in Africa.

The conference also provided impetus to a shift in the Foundation's strategy for East Africa. By the early 1990s, a marked emphasis on strengthening civil society began to emerge. Much of AKF's early work in East Africa was characterised by a focus on technical issues (e.g., what makes for effective teaching in poorly resourced classrooms? Can low-cost teaching aids be created from local materials? Can communities look after their own health needs?). These were, and remain, important questions.

It became increasingly urgent, however, to create strong institutions at various levels capable in themselves of determining new directions of development. New programmes increasingly stressed the creation, strengthening, and sustainability of local institutions.

Thus in Education, new initiatives focused on building capacity of pre-school committees, Teachers' Resource Centres and Madrasa Resource Centres. Their strengths will become increasingly important as the search for sustainability heightens. In Health, the focus is on strengthening health systems as well as supporting the Aga Khan Health Services' efforts to enhance capability for community health work. In Rural Development, the Kwale project is working to establish strong village-level institutions. It is also examining realistic exit strategies that involve leaving strong "successor" institutions behind. In NGO Enhancement, the Foundation is promoting institutional development at the national level through the Kenya Community Development Foundation, the Zanzibar NGO Resource Centre and the Madrasa Resource Centres. The underlying philosophy is that community participation at different levels extends community ownership and management, thereby providing a fresh impetus to development processes.

Early Years

The Foundation's concern for the quality of early childhood experience, first manifested in grants to pre-school teacher training projects in Kenya and mainland Tanzania in the 1980s, has culminated in a major regional programme to help under-privileged communities operate pre-schools. The Madrasa Pre-school Programme puts parents and community leaders firmly in charge, but provides them with knowledge, management skills and mechanisms for long-term financing that can help sustain their efforts.

Madrasa Resource Centres in Mombasa, Zanzibar and Kampala provide the curriculum, design materials and train young women selected by participating communities to be teachers. Nearly five thousand children have benefited from the programme to date, and it has drawn visitors from many countries who are interested in its culturally sensitive curriculum and approach. Funding partners include The World Bank, the European Commission, the Governments of Canada and Kenya, and four private foundations or trusts.

The Madrasa Programme is only one early childhood education programme that is receiving funding from the World Bank Early Childhood Education loan to the Government of Kenya. With the money entrusted to it by the Government, and with its own and matching funds from the Bernard van Leer Foundation, the Foundation will support other NGOs looking to establish sustainable early childhood programmes in the coastal districts of Taita Taveta and Tana River. The World Bank is also championing a Nutrition and Early Childhood Development programme in Uganda and a similar effort in Tanzania. The Foundation's regional experience is being called upon in the planning process.

School Improvement

Since the 1980s, there has been a continuous exchange of experience and mutual learning between school improvement projects in East Africa and parallel experimentation and research carried out by the Aga Khan Education Services in India and Pakistan as well as by the Teachers' Resource Centre and the Aga Khan University's Institute for Educational Development in Karachi. Aga Khan schools in mainland Tanzania and Kenya were the first laboratories for Foundation experiments with different mixes of interventions to encourage schools to become first rate educational establishments. Projects began in individual schools, where staff training took place alongside a combination of elements that included curriculum development, textbook production by teachers, management reform, physical refurbishment, introduction of sports and extra-curricular activities as well as the creation of resource centres for teachers. Over a dozen pre-primary, primary and secondary schools became bases for outreach activities to other schools, both public and private. In Tanzania, the Mzizima school project influenced the way English is now taught in all the secondary schools in Zanzibar and inspired much of the work on school management that is currently transforming the learning environment in some fifteen Government primary schools in Dar-es-Salaam.

In Kenya, lessons from a Computers in Education and a Mathematics and Science Improvement project in Nairobi were fed into a project in Kisumu. An Aga Khan Primary School there hosted a Project Office that served over 50 primary schools in the municipality. It demonstrated the importance of tackling governance and school management issues in a holistic approach to school improvement.

Officials came from Mombasa to Kisumu to develop a similar, but lower cost initiative for the coastal city, which builds on existing teacher advisory centres. A team from Kampala also received help from Kenyan colleagues to develop a project based in a school newly returned to Aga Khan management. The Kampala project, which created the first teacher resource centre in Uganda, now involves a number of government schools where similar centres are providing teachers with materials and ideas for more active learning techniques.

These school improvement projects have thus been catalysts for development within district school systems. They have brought together private providers, such as the Aga Khan Education Service, with government and other academic partners. Independent evaluators have consistently given these investments in educational quality high marks, noting that they were made at a time of dwindling government resources and foreign assistance for the social sector. The success of these dozen projects may well have contributed to the new willingness of public entities to work with private partners to establish more pluralistic provision of services.

Health Systems

Government openness to reform is evident in the health sector as well. Fifteen years of experimentation with helping communities organise primary health care activities taught the Foundation and other donors that sustainable, good quality and equitable basic health services had to be based on active partnership between communities and Government health services. The difficulty encountered by Ministries of Health in carrying out the duties that revolved to them under a number of project agreements over the years were partly financial, partly administrative and partly attitudinal. All pointed to the need for reform, which all three East African governments have since recognized as desirable.

The Foundation has responded by making several recent grants to support government services in Kenya and Zanzibar, mainly at the district level, as they struggle to establish more effective health systems. There is much greater interest today in promoting pluralistic approaches. The Aga Khan Health Service and AMREF were welcomed to train district level health teams in Kenya, and the former is in the process of creating a Community Health Unit to assist community-based organisations and NGOs to work more effectively with government and with private health service providers across the region. The unit will also be linked to a proposed new Centre for Advanced Nursing Studies, a regional project led by the Aga Khan University.

Rural Development

The decision to introduce to Africa the rural support approach to income enhancement that has proved successful in Asia was driven, in fact, by the failure of an AKF-sponsored health project to meet all its objectives. Communities in the ecologically challenging district of Kwale on the Kenyan coast had struggled for six years to overcome high morbidity and mortality rates, especially among women and children. Aided by a skilled Aga Khan Health Service team, some of whom had learned successful techniques of community mobilisation and training in Kisumu, community groups provided better immunisation, growth-monitoring and pre-natal care. However, it gradually became clear that they were making little progress on malnutrition and deaths from water-borne diseases.

The Foundation recognised that these communities needed more help than health professionals alone could give them if they were to address the underlying issues of lack of water, inadequate food and low incomes. It therefore mobilised international and local resources to launch a full-scale parallel rural development project.

The Kwale Rural Support Programme opened offices in Mariakani in early 1997. By May, it was fully staffed with Kenyan specialists, several of whom had already been to study the two "sister" projects in India and Pakistan as well as BRAC's Rural Development Programme in Bangladesh.

The Kwale project aims to contribute to sustainable and equitable improvements in the livelihoods of target communities. The plan is to double the income level of the poorest 60% of the 58,000 people living in the project area by 2006. In autumn 1997, just as a number of communities had formed savings groups and were ready to begin community projects with the potential to increase incomes, El Niņo rains washed away roads, bridges and crops. The temporary setback reminded everyone that weather is an important variable in rural development that no amount of social organisation can overcome. However, the project team has continued its dialogues with forty-eight villages. It expects to be working on productive activities with at least twenty of them before the end of 1998. Colleagues from all over East Africa will be watching to see how the Asian approach takes hold in coastal East Africa.

NGO Enhancement

Another bold experiment that is being watched by development professionals with keen interest is the launch of the Kenya Community Development Foundation. The project is a three-year pilot project - undertaken with Ford Foundation, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Aga Khan Foundation Canada assistance - to establish a local philanthropic foundation that will make capacity-building grants to small NGOs and citizen action groups. It will also attempt to enlist local corporations as partners in funding these private social sector initiatives. The challenge for the new community foundation is to sell the attractiveness of local corporate philanthropy to businesses and individuals which have the means to finance responsible community action in the interest of the nation as a whole. If it is successful, it could mark the beginning of serious national philanthropy in Kenya.

The Aga Khan Foundation believes that there is considerable potential. In the last ten years, its Kenyan branch managed to raise the equivalent of $2.8 million in local endowment funds, mainly as donations from the private for-profit sector. A large fund-raising event - Partnership Day - held in Nairobi in 1995 raised over $200,000 for water-related projects.

Proponents of national philanthropy are aware of the need to strengthen the capacity of grass-roots organisations to manage money responsibly and to use it to obtain socially useful results. The Foundation's first experiment with creating a local organisation to help smaller groups improve their effectiveness is the Zanzibar NGO Resource Centre. Only two years old, this fledgling mentor of other citizen groups is beginning to be a focal point for NGO activity on the islands, providing space for meetings, and information about legislation and NGO tactics elsewhere. It is currently developing its own management and training capacity so that it can become an effective motivator of change agents in the communities it serves.

Regionalisation and Partnership

As the Foundation's programme in East Africa grew, there was a need to capture the synergies that became apparent within the individual country programmes in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The subsequent decision to regionalise allowed higher calibre staff to be recruited locally - to manage and grow with the programmes. There is now a Regional Chief Executive Officer, one Regional Programme professional in each of the three offices providing expertise on a regional basis and three Country Managers. The CEO reports to a Regional Committee of 15 Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians. The structure is proving effective so far, and is in harmony with the mood in East Africa that is prompting governments themselves to form an economic union.

In East Africa, as elsewhere, sharing lessons learned is an integral part of the Foundation's mandate. Its local volunteer leadership and its symbiotic relationship with other Aga Khan Development Network entities - many of them older and even more knowledgeable about the region's history, people and potential - means that it can call on intellectual and material resources far greater than a small staff might otherwise provide. The Foundation thus welcomes opportunities to debate issues about which it is knowledgeable. It is eager to forge new partnerships across sectoral, national, ethnic, religious or other boundaries that will release the energies and potential of the African people.

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