Africa’s multiple and multi-level challenges require homegrown expertise and solutions and not struggles to force ideas and processes from the Western world and elsewhere, that do not fit.
Speaking to PMParrot in an exclusive interview recently while visiting East Africa, the Founder and President of the newly created African Homegrown Development Initiative (AHDI), Professor Sheriff Folarin disclosed that the organization would make a big impact in solving many Africa’s local problems and give the continent a new reputation. He said “the AHDI is committed to fostering sustainable development within African states, cities and communities by leveraging local resources, talents, and cultural values to drive growth and unity”.
Professor Folarin, who was the first full Professor of International Relations at Covenant University, where he worked for almost 19 years before moving to the United States, posited that Africa’s problems were multidimensional but conscious efforts to address them locally have been lame and short-circuited by leaders who preferred to outsource the solutions and use strange foreign strategies and theories to solve African issues, forcing them into a context that never fits.
Folarin, who now teaches at Texas State University and serves as a top resource person in several African universities, identifies the critical areas of the continent requesting sustained and homegrown solutions as conflicts and insecurity, refugee and IDP crises, migration and the brain drain problem, poverty and hunger, and keeping the African child at school.
He said: “AHDI will be seeking Africans at home and in the diaspora toward finding practical and lasting solutions to the continent’s governance and development challenges.
“To achieve this, we will look inwards within Africa and engage the diaspora and true allies of the continent in devising sustainable measures and strategies to put Africa on the course of good governance and sustainable development”.
AHDI operates from three places, namely, Ogun (Nigeria) and Kigali (Rwanda), and Texas (USA), and has eminent Africans at home and in the diaspora as team members and board of governors.
Packaged by Alice Egbedele
