Bangui—the capital of the Central African Republic has its charms, but they are hard to find. Streets are unpaved, electricity erratic, and government services almost nonexistent. While the government reports its unemployment rate at around 6.6 percent, locals say the real figure is perhaps ten times that amount. Scarcity is an everyday reality. Residents of the capital must import almost all goods from Cameroon, almost 350 miles away across countryside infested with insurgents. Cynicism predominates. Few Central Africans believe that President Faustin-Archange Touadéra has any interest in improving the country; they do not believe his opponents, however, are any better. Transparency International ranks the country among the world’s most corrupt, only marginally better than Iraq. For this reason, much international aid gets is wasted or, even worse, only compounds dysfunction.
Despite this, there is a thirst for change. Many Central Africans
win scholarships or opportunities to study in France, Kenya, or Cameroon. They
speak French, English, and Sango interchangeably and spurn offers for high-paid
jobs in other countries to help rebuild their own.
When I spoke with them about what the United States and other Western governments could do to play the long game in Central Africa, they spoke about the need to jumpstart education. Few Central Africans attend school, and fewer still get any education. The country has among the worst teacher-to-student ratio in the world. Other countries dispatch newly minted teachers to rural schools or provincial towns and then have them work their way back to the major cities. This is not possible in the Central African Republic and countries like it: Salaries are too low to enable a teacher to establish his or her family in a new town, and ethnic divisions compound the problem.
Instead, they suggested Western countries could do much good by
underwriting teacher exchanges across the continent. The Central African
Republic—and, for that matter, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, and Gambia—have
a shortage
of teachers. Senegal, Botswana, and Ghana increasingly have surpluses. To
enable an exchange would kill two birds with one stone—address unemployment in
countries training teachers while addressing shortages in countries that
cannot. As importantly, the move would build linkages across countries upon which
commerce and diplomacy can go.
In effect, subsidizing a continental teacher exchange would complement growing initiatives on military exchanges. Training African officers from low-capacity countries in the staff colleges of other African states builds interoperability while augmenting the capacity of existing institutions in countries like Rwanda and Ghana. Intra-African military education often enables more relevant exchanges of information than are possible when the United States hosts the officers. The education a Somaliland Coast Guard officer could get at the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College would be far more relevant to him than the theory he might learn at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.
Too often, US assistance and aid to Africa misses the mark. The
Biden administration may allocate funds for programs purporting to mitigate
climate change, but these programs seldom achieve measurable results and more
often simply worsen countries’ dysfunctional corruption. A less arrogant, more
effective approach would listen to local needs and enhance self-sufficiency. For
a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars the United States pays in
direct foreign assistance or channels through international organizations—much
of which simply goes to the salaries of those bureaucracies—it could resolve
real problems in a tangible and measurable way. Furthering education would also
deplete the recruitment pool that criminal gangs and regional terror
organizations exploit. That should be a US national security interest.
It is time for a new approach.
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