Accountability
Going with the grain in African development?
Family, ethnicity and religion as forces of accountability in Africa
Authors:
T. Kelsall; Power and Politics in Africa (APPP)
Publisher:
Research4Development, 2008
Following the disappointing results of the Good Governance agenda, this paper explores the idea of working "with the grain" of African societies. It identifies a core set of beliefs and values – concerning power, accountability and social morality – that are widely observed across sub-Saharan Africa, have proven extremely durable and remain powerful drivers of behaviour.
The key features of the social grain in Africa today flow from a history, rooted in an economy, that is thousands of years old.This pre-colonial past provided the foundation for ideas about power, accountability, morality, and society that remain terrifically powerful in Africa today. The most robust forms of accountability and public goods provision in present day Africa can be found at the local level. The locus for these activities is often the extended African family. Beyond the family, the most effective development institutions tend to have a religious foundation churches, mosques, Muslim brotherhoods and secret societies.
The author concludes that institutions that work well in solving collective action problems and providing public goods are those that harness the motivating forces of family, ethnicity or religion. This confirms the elevance of the question: how might development efforts be redirected so that they stop working against, and start to build upon, the extant notions of moral obligation and interpersonal accountability in the region?
