|
Editorial, volume 3, number 2, 1993
In April this year, Oxfam (UK and Ireland) launched a campaign entitled 'Africa: Make or Break'. While Africa has not disappeared from the development agenda, it has of late been pushed to the side lines in the public's media-led appreciation of global issues. The objective of Oxfam's initiative is to restore the needs of developing Africa to the forefront of international public awareness.
While Africa's needs have not significantly changed in recent years, this is an opportune time to reassert its claims on the development resources of governments and agencies. Recent political and economic changes in the global, regional, and national contexts have together created space for a new impetus. The ending of the Cold War and resulting reductions in government spending on defence, together with changes in government philosophy, have presented an opportunity to redefine development priorities. Some cynics claim that these changes in official thinking have been enforced by economic necessity, and that no new resources have actually been released. Nevertheless, it is true that the advent of new leaders has resulted in a significant change in government policy. The desire to reallocate resources, as yet to be realised, is particularly apparent in the United States of America and Western Europe.
Environmental issues and social justice are now starting to take precedence in policy documents and international debates. New administrations are searching for the means to convert the 'peace dividend' into tangible benefits; perhaps it is not too much to hope that the day has finally arrived for converting swords into ploughshares, at home and abroad. This has a particular significance for war-ravaged Africa. The African continent is no longer being seen as a theatre for proxy wars conducted by clients of the superpowers; at the same time, governments, non-government organisations (NGOs), and multilateral agencies are looking more favourably at democratically-based development programmes. Africa itself has never been without its own proponents of such a development path described decades ago by an exiled Mozambican in Tanzania, looking forward to a time when `bullets [will] turn to flowers'.
If we, the readers of and contributors to Development in Practice, are to play a positive (if modest) role in the achievement of participatory, sustainable development, based on social justice, then it will be by the route of improving and building on the interchange of practical information. We can also contribute by refocusing public attention on Africa which is the objective of the current campaign and this issue of Development in Practice.
In this issue, Olivia Graham recounts the experiences of the Arid Lands Information Network, based in Senegal, whose role is to facilitate information-sharing among grassroots development workers and enable them to learn about and benefit from each other's experience. Caroline Ashley's project note from west Kenya describes the part played by networking in the introduction and marketing of a practical innovation to a specific group of women. Claire Gordon, writing about the Sahel, emphasises the technical benefits to be gained from the exchange of localised forms of information. (Development in Practice would welcome more such practical contributions of this nature and length.)
Pastoral communities are the subject of the article by Patrick Kilby. These communities have been frequently marginalised and treated with suspicion by their host governments. As a consequence, the subject itself has been marginalised in development literature. It is a topic that needs to be treated with sensitivity, as is apparent in Kilby's article, which focuses specifically on emergency interventions. Continuing the theme of emergencies, James Darcy reports on a conference held last November in London, entitled Refugees and Migration, which questioned the adequacy of existing definitions and international conventions on migration, and examined efforts to harmonise immigration procedures in the European Community.
The article by Eric Hyman, Robert Strauss, and Richard Crayne, concerning development strategies for small and micro enterprises in Zambia, was written in the context of the current political and economic upheaval in that country. The authors' objective, in part, is to describe and critically discuss a policy option now being enacted at a time of increasing shortages, growing inflation, and the dismantling of State enterprises. Some of the difficulties they describe will be familiar to those involved in implementing similar policies elsewhere in the world.
June Stephen (Guest Editor)
Oxfam (United Kingdom and Ireland)
April 1993
 Previous |
Next Abstract 
|
