African Leaders and Advocates

Social Protection Policies in Africa

Social Protection report in Botswana

The Social Protection Assessment presented by The World Bank (2013) reports that Botswana has emerged from one of the poorest countries in the world to an "upper middle income country with a per capita GDP of $8,533 in 2011" (World Bank). Extreme poverty is down to 6.4% (from 23.4% in 2003). Still, there remain big problems: 31.4% of children under the age of 5 suffer malnutrition; unemployment is 17.8%; the rate of HIV / AIDS was estimated at 23.4% in 2011 -- the second highest rate in the world (World Bank). Botswana has many social protection programs, but many are small and ineffective; an example is the "Destitute Persons" program, in which "only a small fraction" of the very poor receive assistance, and a "large share of the budget goes to administration" (World Bank). That said, The World Bank says 84,000 families can be lifted out of "absolute poverty" by 2016.

That seems a lofty goal given that many families "…in absolute poverty are left out" of social protection programs; those programs are only designed to help "some families" (World Bank)

Social Justice / Human Rights / Marginalization in Africa

African intellectual Claude Ake writes that when you focus on literacy levels and school enrollment, Africa as a whole still has "…extremely low levels of human-capital formation" (Ake, 2001). Indeed, Africa is being "…marginalized by developments in science, technology, and production"; in the past, African leaders went to great lengths to reach out internationally, hoping to get resources from the industrialized nations (Ake). But while hoping to diversify their economies to become independent through this outreach, it "accomplished nothing"; in fact, African countries, including Botswana, reached independence with "…no agenda" for the realization of development, Ake writes, which partially explains the marginalization of many of its countries.

Toyin Falola asserts that the U.S. has exploited Africa (in a "scramble for oil" and other resources) and in fact in terms of marginalization of Africa, the U.S. relationship with Africa's sugar plantations led to plantations being established in the U.S. "Eventually," Falola said in a speech at the University of Delaware, "coffee, sugar and tobacco became major consumer products in the 17th century and spurred the Atlantic economy," which desperately needed labor to harvest those products. "This led to the African diaspora as a result of slavery," and 13 million African slaves were brought to America (Falola, 2006).

Wangari Maathai is noted for winning the Nobel Peace Prize -- for her environmental "Green Belt Movement," which planted more than 30 million trees -- and yet she was a victim of human rights violations in Kenya. She was "beaten unconscious by the police" for protesting a skyscraper in a Nairobi park; she was also jailed for her activism (Gettleman, 2011). She was a human rights and social protection advocate whose human rights were violated. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza decries the "imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism" still ongoing in certain ways today that is being ignored by the writers of African history (Tiyambe). Historians and scholars are "sick and tired of being marginalized" in the so-called scholarly knowledge about Africa and its social protection policies, Zeleza writes. Even the distortions of African "development policies" that are "perpetrated by the institutional and ideological gendarmes of global capitalism" are an affront to the dignity that Africa should be enjoying, Zeleza explains.