The African View of Sustainable Development

With creative ambiguity, Gro Brundtland’s, Norway’s Prime Minister, defined Sustainable Development as:

    “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This loose definition fostered an array of programs which, while purporting to be sustainable, reflect the wide variety of interests of the sponsors. It is easy to claim programmes as ‘sustainable’ using the current vague definitions but there is a lack of meaningful targets and accountability.

Brundtland foresaw some of these problems and added the caveat that, using the term ‘environment’ in isolation is seen as naïve by policy makers and that the definition of ‘development’ has been narrowed to mean “what the poor nations should do to become richer”.

The African perspective of sustainable development is more pragmatic, for instance it may simply ask Sudanese citizens whether or not their lives have progressed or deteriorated. The answers reveal that in the 1960’s the overall environment was richer and healthier and sustained them for a better quality of life.
In Africa, complex issues such as international trade, macro-economics, the role of multi-national corporations and climate change are beyond the grasp of the common man and indeed even the policy makers fail to understand problems such as poverty, food insecurity, strife and environmental decay. It is no surprise then that the Developing World has seen an overall deterioration in sustainability when measured in terms of food security, health, education, shelter, the environment and climate change. In fact, African policy makers relate sustainable development to economic performance indicators alone, and hence environmental sustainability isn’t even considered.

Belghis Badri, an African intellectual, uses food security yields to highlight the inter-connectedness of the sustainability factors. Food security sustains a healthy population, a thriving market economy, improved technology, better transport, labour mobility, environmental conservation, and climate change alleviation. It requires clean water, available land, equitable laws, secure national borders, technology, preservation of forest and prevention of desertification, food storage and processing systems, education, population control and peace. For instance, forests of Africa should not be viewed, primarily as a carbon sinks for the North, but rather as a source of food security for the local community and should be afforded equal importance to the rain forests of South America.