Yesterday morning, after last night’s trying seven hour drive, we met with Fred, the founder of the African Leadership Academy, whose inaugural class will be beginning this September. His own personal life story was inspiring in itself, but the meeting also revealed certain aspects of strong leadership and the non-profit sector. The African Leadership Academy is a school that is taking one hundred African students and six others that have been deemed the strongest in leadership, entrepreneurship, and the ability to create change in Africa. They will be put through a curriculum in which every subject is focused around how to impact Africa. Fred was born in Ghana but moved around from country to country with his mother. It ends up that he became the headmaster of an impromptu school for poor children at the age of 18. The school is now considered one of the best models in Africa. He didn’t stop with the school, however. He attended a college in Minnesota and then Stanford for his MBA. When, while writing a college paper, he identified the root issue in Africa, lack of strong leadership, he decided to create an African Leadership Academy.

His story was a major motivator for me—I’m now itching to accomplish something, no joke—but I took away some valuable and useful information from that meeting as well.

1. Relationships and social connections are not only useful, they are crucial. Major funding for non-profits usually comes through connections made, like friends, family, and acquaintances. Multiply that by the people they know, and you have a network. (Six degrees of separation, anyone?) Not only does this apply to donations for non-profits, but to everything in life, like job opportunities. It’s all about the people you know. And besides, as he said, “Having relationships is one of the most exciting things about being human.”

2. “You don’t go for something big unless you believe it’s going to work,” Fred told us. I think that’s very helpful to consider, especially for me. If I’m going to do something difficult, I will have to be willing to take (calculated) risks, and go the entire way because I have faith that it will pull through. It’s not a question of blind faith, but coming to terms with the situation, looking at it objectively, and seeing whether it will work. If it will, then that is the time to go for it.

3. Fix the roots, not just the symptoms. This applies to everything from economics to medicine. While treating the symptoms will provide temporary relief, they’ll just keep popping up until the root cause is addressed. In terms of Africa, the symptoms are high unemployment, poverty, HIv/AIDS levels, malaria levels, violence, and so forth. Fred chalked up the root cause to be lack of leadership, and his mission is to address that issue.

4. Make a problem a challenge, not something impossible to solve. Fred asked us to guess the rate of HIV positive people in Africa. I won’t finish this story quite yet, since this will be a chance for readers to guess. (The rest of the story will be finished at the end of the entry.)* But I learned from this that the trick is to show people that this is actually a manageable problem rather than a monolith, and then things will actually get done.

5. “Do what you do best, but partner with people who know what they do,” said Jenny. To me, this means teamwork. Learn to be a team, because a team should be able to support each other in the fields in which the others are weak.

6. “Think about impact 50 years down the line.” – Fred. This is the most daunting one for me. What could I do that will have a positive impact down the line? I haven’t the slightest idea yet, but I do know that I should keep it in mind when thinking about life.

*Continuing the story, our group guessed around 10%-20%. I settled on a 13%,, though I had a nagging feeling that we were shooting high. Surely enough, we were. Embarrassingly, it ended up to be 2.5%, half the lowest guess, which was Jenny’s 1 out of 20. I guess it goes to show our misconceptions of Africa are out of hand.

(See Ryan's Africa Trip Blog for more entries.)

So far our trip to Africa has been amazing. We have spent the past week in Zambia, where we have had a plethora of meetings with social workers, visits to schools and villages, and interactions with locals. One such activity, which I found to be one of the most interesting parts of our trip so far, was our visit to a rural school two days ago.

On our way to Victoria Falls, we stopped at a village to deliver 50 mosquito nets. These are given out for free to Zambians to prevent them from getting Malaria while they sleep. The thought is that in the day time, you can brush off mosquitoes, but you cannot prevent mosquitoes from biting you in the night. Hence, a group that is devoted to fighting malaria delivers these nets. I was shocked to learn that 65% of Zambians suffer from malaria in their lifetimes. We chose a school to deliver these nets to with the thought that it was important to give these nets to children, who are unable to fight the disease.

The school was amazing. We attended an assembly, where the kids all sang for us and a few got on stage and gave performances. We all got a ton of pictures, which will be fun to see after our trip. The coolest part of our visit was seeing how intense the music that the kids were singing. Imagine going to any elementary school that has 150 kids and asking them to sing. Chances are that, regardless of how many times these kids practiced, their performance would be weakened by stage fright, a lack of enthusiasm, and a failure to sing on one beat. These children were on a perfect beat and sang so loudly and with so much enthusiasm that my ears hurt when I went into the room. The dance and poetry performances of these kids would have been impressive even by the highest standards of a high school drama program. The last thing that struck me was that these kids interacted with us and each other in basically the same way that I would expect an American kid to act.

After we dropped off the nets we went to go see a village where the kids form the school lived. This was interesting because this village was unlike the other villages that we have been to, which were at least partially accustomed to foreigners. The houses were made of mud and straw and the toilets were holes that were dug into the ground. We got to see where one of the kids from the school slept, which was literally a walls constructed around solid ground with a few blankets inside. However, the most vivid memory I have of this room was the smell inside. It was not a smell created by a human. Instead, it was the type of smell that is found in crammed spaces of thousand year old ruins. Overall, I thought that this was one of the coolest and most interesting parts of our vacation so far. Right now we are waiting the airport for our flight to Cape Town for the last leg our trip.

John

Lusaka is a pretty nice, lush place. It’s really spread out and there aren’t that many buildings over one story tall. So the next thing on the agenda is the play pumps. The play pumps are a great innovation in which kids operate a water pump simply by spinning around on one of those circular discs with places around for the kids to sit, push, and spin around. We arrived at the school in which it was located (there are only two others in the entire city of Lusaka-it costs around seven thousand all pipes and structures included.

So we got there and of course it’s the hot topic around the school. Visitors! Visitors! Most of the kids were in class but that didn’t stop them from pressing their faces up against the windows and watching us watch their school administrators tell us how the pump works. There was a small group of kids that were outside playing on it already, so we first saw it in action.

Here’s how it works: The kids spin the large disc and get on and ride. The movement pumps water up a huge tower next to the disc which holds a storage tower at the top. When the storage tank is full, another pipe catches the overflow and sends back down to the water source under the ground. The actual pump is about five yards away and it pumps clean water as long as the storage tank is full or the disc is spinning. The school uses the water for toilets and other water needs, including drinking water.

They showed us pictures of almost exactly a year before when First Lady Laura Bush came to visit their school. They were really excited about that one.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how well developed the concept of microfinance is already in Africa. I assumed because I had not heard about it until my involvement in this trip, that there would be no way it would be any more developed in Africa. But I was wrong. Umsubomvu and the signs on the street and the projects we’ve visited and the institutions already set up and the emphasis on the importance of such a concept is definitely prevalent in society. It is strange to think about that Africa seems so much more developed than America when it comes to this. You think of America trumping all other countries in all societal aspects, but this one Africa has over us by leaps and bounds.

Now it is also true that Africa needs concepts like microfinance more than America, and therefore such an industry was created, but you don’t think about those things up front when traveling to a different country. At least I didn’t, and it caught me off guard. I guess that is just another lesson to be learned: keep an open mind and, if you judge or build structures and positions at all, do so based on your own experiences.

Matt

It's been a crazy last week, yet I mean that in the best way possible. We have done sooo much, it feels like its been more like 2 weeks than one. We arrived in the country of Zambia on Monday, and went directly to our hotel in the country's capital called Lusaka. The first full day we had in the capital, we visited a non-profit organization called All Kids Can Learn Zambia (AKCLZ). The non-profit had two main areas of focus: a micro-finance project where they trained young people to run their own businesses, one of which was a roadside produce market, held inside of a large barn. When we toured the site, two girls probably in their late teenage years were demonstrating how they were learning to use computer and accounting skills to run the business, and keep track of what they sell. It was interesting to see how, in the middle of a small rural area in Zambia, there was an existing project that already had people my own age learning business skills, while I come from a more privileged life with access to so many technological skills, and still have no idea how to run my business. After visiting the produce farm, we went to the second project of AKCLZ, which is an orphanage, also known as a "children's village", which is a better description of it. There were several "houses", with about 12 kids living in each one, and one "parent" looking after each household. They were very nice houses (each bed was equipped with a bed net!), and seemed like an excellent environment, one of the best establishments for orphans I have ever seen. There was one house in particular that stuck out to me, where the woman looking after the children was from Detroit, and had moved with her husband and two young kids a few years ago in order to live and work in the children's village. I admired her family very much, to have the courage to suddenly leave everything familiar and move to a rural community in Zambia, and sacrifice a lot in order to make someone else's life better.
A few days later, we had a "fishbowl activity," where we gathered in our hotel conference room and met about 15 Zambian youth (from age 18 to 22) to discuss, compare, and contrast our lives with theirs. When we first arrived in the room, there was an awkward silence, accompanied by a few nervous smiles. Though, after a few ice-breaker games, we were animatedly talking and laughing amongst each other. The highlight of the discussion, I thought, was when we went around and listed out some common stereotypes and misconceptions we had or used to have about each other's countries. It was pretty interesting (and funny) to hear what each person's take was on the other country. My brother Satchel mentioned that he used to think Africa was all desert, with a few buildings, a lot of huts, and a sparse landscape. Someone else from our youth delegation said that they used to think that most people in Africa had AIDS and was dying, but was surprised to learn that only a little below 3% of population was infected with HIV/AIDS. The Zambian youth said they heard that the US wasn't street-safe, parents were less strict, there were no rules within school systems, and there was more opportunities for entrepreneurship. Overall, the experience was very eye-opening, because we never really get the chance to lay our stereotypes out on the table in front of people different from ourselves.

So we're in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and I have to admit that this is more what I imagined when I thought of Africa. South Africa in general is so much like being in England or the US, so it is really great to get a real feel for the city. Everyone is so friendly here and they really make you feel welcome. They're always smiling!

Wednesday we got to go to a Women in Microfinance Fair in a village outside Lusaka called Chongwe. The United Nations Development Program and the Grameen Trust sponsored a pilot in this part of Zambia where they gave loans of about $200 to $500 to women who wanted to start their own businesses. Most banks refuse to give credit to disadvantaged individuals because they see it as too much of a risk, but within this group of women not one defaulted on her loan. Because this program was so successful, the Grameen Trust is planning on becoming a permanent microfinance lending institution in Zambia.

It was really inspiring to walk around the little market that they set up and listen to the stories of the women who, because of their loans, were able to send their children to school, provide three meals a day for their families, and above all have a purpose in life. You could see it in their faces, how proud they were of their accomplishments, and that in itself was the most incredible part of the experience.