Opinion poll:

Africa beyond clichés, conflicts, crises, and catastrophes: Illusion or reality? Why do promising ideas and projects receive so little attention in German media?

There are a number of reasons why promising ideas and projects have trouble getting coverage in the German media.

First of all, there’s the old journalistic principle that puts it in a nutshell: Bad news is good news. Essentially nothing about that has changed. On the contrary, to get the attention of editors and then the public with a story from, say, the Congo, you would need an especially large number of people to have been driven from their homes, murdered, or raped. Journalists and the public are both subject to the same process of habituation or desensitization, whatever you want to call it.

Another reason is that when you line them up against the projects that are ill conceived from the start, fail outright, or are well meant but unfortunately poorly executed, the successful ideas and projects are clearly in the minority. And that’s not going to change all that fast.

That brings me to my third point, and in my view the crux of the matter: Of course there are successful initiatives and projects. The micro-finance projects in West Africa, flower and vegetable farming in Kenya, food production in Malawi – but a few projects that work and succeed are not going to solve the basic problem of the continent and most of its countries. It’s hard to understand from an outside perspective in Europe, but as soon as you spend some time in an African country and try to deal with organizing daily life there, you’ll hit so many pitfalls, shortcomings, and annoyances that, for one, you’ll stop wondering why the gap to the developed world keeps growing, and for two, you’ll be persuaded that most of these countries – in contrast to Asian societies – are not going to make up the difference any time in the next 20 years.

It starts with the reliability of mutual agreements and goes from there to the quality of work and the desire to create long-term solutions instead of just putting out fires until tomorrow or the day after. It has to do with the bafflement when poor quality work is rejected, with the lack of time management – punctuality – and the idea of customer service. The list goes on and on, and every day will provide you with dozens of new examples.

Obviously, it’s difficult in cultures that don’t stockpile food, where it’s today that counts and not tomorrow, to reorient people to think in terms of sustainability, long-term planning, or environmentally sound economic practices. There is no reason why a country like Kenya, Ethiopia, or Uganda should be regularly requesting food aid from overseas. It shouldn’t be necessary – not even when a harvest fails.

Then there are the manifest deficits in good government. When journalists in Kenya ask why representatives don’t pay taxes or why there have been dramatic curtailments in press freedom, they get arrested. Politicians who divert tens of thousands of Euros into their own pockets – and there are plenty of them in Kenya – never see a jail cell from the inside. And if they do get indicted, there’s a soft landing.

Blatant corruption aside, everybody in Kenya has his hand out, from clerks to teachers to leading politicians. Very few processes function without bribes. Hardly anyone takes into consideration that the extra income, small or large, may help the individual but damages the country as a whole. Why else would so few foreign companies invest in a country with wages that low?

I don’t want to sit in judgment. Differences in historical experience, culture, and education surely play a role. But it is a fact that achievement and quality are valued differently in sub-Saharan Africa, that optimizing solutions and complying with contractual obligations have a very different status than in Europe, North America, or Asia.

Aid workers, but journalists as well, are confronted with all these things every day. Over the months and years it sharpens their critical faculties and costs them a great deal of energy, but above all it undermines their belief and trust that even singularly good ideas and projects can move African societies forward at the speed it would take for them to catch up. That’s why it can be so difficult sometimes to see even the most promising concepts as worthy of recognition.

Horand Knaup is a staff writer at DER SPIEGEL and is currently the magazine’s correspondent in Nairobi.