A statement you have heard a million times is that Africa has immense potential, with rich natural resources like primary commodities, oil, gas, and minerals. Yet, despite billions of dollars spent on interventions over decades, many African countries still struggle with widespread unemployment and weak educational systems, and a heavy reliance on external help. Traditional ways of solving problems, which often focus on fixing one issue at a time, simply haven't worked because our challenges are much more complex and interconnected.
Think about it: problems like unstable economies, a "survivalist" mindset, certain cultural practices, a lack of skills, corruption, and insufficient political will are all linked together. On top of that, historical factors, such as past exploitation by Western powers, unfair market rules, and even our own poor domestic policies and high taxes, have limited our economic freedom and slowed down development. The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) has done a good job of pointing out these common problems, but finding ways to actually fix them has been tough.
This is why at Ubuntu Think we propose Systems Thinking (ST).
What is Systems Thinking and Why is it Essential for Africa?
Imagine trying to fix a complex machine, like an engine, by only looking at one loose screw. You might tighten that screw, but if the problem is actually with the fuel line or the timing belt, the engine still won't work properly. In fact, your isolated fix might even cause new problems elsewhere!
Systems Thinking is like looking at the entire engine, understanding how all its parts work together, how they influence each other, and what happens when you make a change in one area. It helps us see the "big picture" and realize that everything is connected. It’s not just a theory; it’s a practice for addressing social, environmental, and economic challenges.
Here’s why this approach is particularly valuable for African leaders and policymakers:
Anticipating Future Consequences: Our decisions today can have big, unexpected effects tomorrow. Systems thinking helps governments and leaders predict these long-term impacts and avoid problems like "silo mentality"—where different government departments work in isolation—or "organizational myopia," which means having a narrow, short-sighted view. For example, if we're planning an expensive new health policy that affects millions, systems models (like causal loop diagrams) can help us safely measure its potential long-term effects before we spend a lot of money and time.
Fostering Integrated Planning: Instead of departments working separately, systems thinking encourages leaders to think broadly and holistically. It helps us manage complexity by tackling many parts of a system at once, while still focusing on our main goals. This means we can combine programs and policies across different government sectors to create "joined-up interventions," making our efforts more effective.
Promoting Collaboration: True progress happens when everyone works together. Systems thinking encourages wider participation from all interested parties, allowing us to gather diverse ideas and perspectives and get a full view of complex situations that might otherwise seem fragmented. It creates a collaborative mindset, where people can share ideas, give and receive feedback, and build on each other's contributions. This can improve relationships, clarify different viewpoints, and help groups, even those with disagreements, agree on shared goals and actions. Ultimately, it helps achieve shared problem-ownership, agreement on actions, and commitment to the desired results across different organizations and fields. This helps us identify the "leverage points" – those small changes that can lead to big impacts.
Shifting Our Way of Thinking: Systems thinking encourages a fundamental rethinking of how organizations work and how problems are approached, emphasizing understanding the entire system, not just its individual parts. It helps leaders see government as a complex, evolving system and understand that policymaking is a continuous learning process. This can lead to a significant conceptual shift, changing how policymakers think and talk about problems, goals, and solutions.
A Powerful Learning and Decision-Making Tool: Imagine being able to test out different policy ideas and "what-if" scenarios without actually disrupting public services. Systems thinking allows us to do this safely and quickly, helping us understand the potential long-term impacts of policies before they are implemented. This leads to continuous improvement of our knowledge and better ways to manage under uncertain conditions. It's also incredibly useful when there's not enough clear data, as it helps bring together different types of information from various sources and government levels.
Systems Thinking In Action: Understanding the Unintended Effects of Development Aid
To illustrate the power of systems thinking, I’ll use the example of development aid. While aid is often given with good intentions, it can sometimes have unintended and negative consequences for African countries. Systems thinking helps us understand these complex effects:
Economic Pitfalls:
"Dutch Disease": This happens when large amounts of foreign aid (or sudden wealth from natural resources) cause a country’s currency to become too strong. This makes our manufactured goods more expensive for other countries to buy, hurting our manufacturing sector. Aid can also make the public sector grow much larger than the private sector. However, if the recipient country has unused resources, like available labor, and uses the aid to increase the production of goods that are mostly consumed at home (non-tradables), the negative effects can be avoided. Investing in important infrastructure, like rural roads, can also lead to positive, long-term economic benefits by improving market access for locally produced goods.
Aid "Fungibility": Sometimes, money intended for specific development areas, like education or health, might simply replace the funds that governments would have spent there anyway. This frees up the government's own money for other, sometimes less beneficial, purposes, like military spending or even personal gain, undermining the aid's original goal and making it hard to evaluate its effectiveness. This can also discourage governments from collecting taxes from their own citizens, reducing accountability. Aid can also lead to more consumption (like consumer subsidies) instead of investment in productive activities, and its unpredictable nature makes long-term budget planning difficult for governments, leading to aid dependency.
Institutional Weaknesses: Large amounts of foreign aid can weaken government institutions, making them less accountable to their own citizens because they rely more on external donors for revenue. This can unfortunately encourage corruption and rent-seeking, where officials focus more on acquiring funds from donors than on providing essential development services. Aid can also strengthen corrupt regimes, as access to aid revenues brings power.
Social Transformations: Development projects often become "arenas of struggle" where different social groups such as tribes, each with their own goals and interests, compete for benefits. This means the actual results of a project might be very different from what was planned, as local interpretations and existing power dynamics play a huge role. Aid can also reduce a community's flexibility to adapt to new challenges and can unintentionally hinder local democracy and genuine ownership of projects. Sometimes, aid can even introduce money into social relationships, leading to issues like corruption or prostitution (a phenomenon called "venality"), as social goods and services become tradable.
Absorption Capacity: There's a limit to how much aid a country can effectively use before it starts having negative effects on the economy, institutions, and even social structures. Too many donors (donor proliferation) and too many individual projects can overwhelm a country's ability to manage them, leading to a focus on "donor pleasing" rather than actual domestic needs. Donors can also unintentionally harm local capacity by offering higher salaries, drawing skilled professionals away from local public and private sectors.
Putting Systems Thinking into Action
To truly transform Africa and move towards sustainable prosperity, we need to apply systems thinking to our strategies. Our main task at Ubuntu Think Tank is to bring this mindset to the salience frame of various stakeholders, politicians, diplomats. Here are some key points:
Embracing Unity and Inward Investment: African countries must unite and focus on investing our own resources from primary commodities, oil, gas, and minerals back into the continent. Implementing regional free trade across Africa is crucial to drive economic transformation. This approach can make the continent more resilient to changes in agricultural prices and global market shifts, creating significant opportunities for job creation and adding value to our products.
Targeted Investment and Building Local Expertise: Systems models can help us make smart, targeted investments in crucial areas like farmer education, access to quality seeds, and cold storage facilities. It’s also vital to build local capacity and expertise in systems thinking among our civil servants and policymakers. This means providing them with tailored professional development, practical guidance, and technical support. We should encourage different fields to work together in interdisciplinary teams and learn from real-world examples and successes.
Addressing Political and Structural Barriers: To make systems thinking truly effective, we must overcome challenges like organizational inertia (resistance to change), departmentalism (different government parts not working together), and a lack of support from political leaders. This requires strong political endorsement and governmental reforms. We need to establish central government bodies to promote systems thinking and coordinate its use. It's also important to help policymakers work closely with researchers and other stakeholders. We should expand funding for systems thinking initiatives, perhaps by creating new funding categories and offering incentives for its adoption. Finally, we must clearly explain what systems thinking is and its value in policymaking to correct any misunderstandings and encourage its acceptance.
Strengthening Research-Industry Links: Our state research institutions and academia need to be empowered to create new knowledge and technologies (intellectual properties) that can be transferred to businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), for commercialization. Currently, about 90% of African SMEs aren't connected to any research and innovation systems. Strengthening these links will boost trade within Africa and increase our contribution to global innovation. Access to funding is a major challenge for SMEs trying to commercialize these innovations. While policy frameworks often exist, implementation lags, so sustained collaboration at national and political levels is crucial. We also need to foster "co-creation" in innovation, possibly through shared laboratory spaces, to ensure research directly meets industry needs.
Developing Evaluation Strategies: We need better ways to measure the impact of systems thinking in our policies. This means setting clear evaluation criteria and developing strategies from the start to show how it helps achieve project objectives and identify areas for improvement. This evidence will then help us refine our approaches and show the true value of systems thinking to future users.
By embracing systems thinking, promoting unity and self-reliance, and tackling the deep-seated issues that have historically held us back, Africa can truly unlock its potential and become the "Promised Land" that its people seek.