Promoting Sustainable Change in Africa (Part 1 of 3)

When celebrities like Christy Turlington and Chris Rock are featured in ads shot by Annie Leibovitz wearing Gap’s Project RED t-shirts, consumers are invited to make a win-win decision: join the cutting-edge and improve life for millions living in Africa. If you happen to look good in red, what’s not to love?

How money raised from such campaigns is spent, and the impact those funds achieve (or fail to achieve), isn’t part of most people’s purchasing process. Fortunately, a growing cadre of donors is focused squarely on strategies that address the seemingly intractable social ills of this vast continent.

Shared by many is the growing recognition that true change in Africa can’t be imposed by outsiders, no matter how good their intentions. Instead, it must be embraced and advanced by Africans themselves, using tools ranging from community-driven public health initiatives to microfinance to global corporate partnerships for sustainable development.

Here’s a three-part look at how some of these efforts are playing out:

Sometimes Common Sense Makes the Most Sense

HIV/AIDS is one area in which the technological advances of Western medicine would seem ideally suited to supersede African approaches. And yet, according to Edward Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Program at Harvard, “Evidence is mounting that the Western biomedical model of AIDS prevention—condoms, antibiotics for sexually transmitted infections, and testing people for HIV infection—has been largely ineffective in Africa.” This, despite the fact that billions of dollars have been spent on it.

Susan Herr