Deliberative Democracy Lab Case Study - Africa

Case Study - Africa

Abstract

Despite prevalent stereotypes about literacy and inexperience with deliberation in Africa, projects have been successfully conducted, particularly highlighted by an initiative in Tamale, Ghana. This project focused on addressing sanitary issues related to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Utilizing local partners and educational videos, participants engaged in discussions that led to a reevaluation of existing practices, such as the problematic proximity of vegetable gardens to bathrooms. The deliberative process proved more effective than surveys or reading materials alone, demonstrating its potential to foster understanding and drive community improvements in African settings.

Transcript

First and foremost, when I talk about Africa with other people, especially scholars and researchers, the first question that comes to mind for them is, how are you able to do these projects in African countries?

Because the stereotype is that many people in the African continent are low in literacy and don’t have much practice in deliberation at all. And our response is, we’ve been able to do it in a number of these countries extremely successfully.

And it takes work, of course. But we’ve been able to train local partners and also we’ve made videos of our briefings to help people understand the policies that we are talking about at the time.

We were in the metropolitan area of Tamale in Ghana and in this particular area, there were a number of sanitary issues that we wanted to deal with. They call it WASH. WASH is water, and also sanitation and hygiene. It’s very popular topic in African countries that a lot of aid and development organizations have to tackle.

And in Tamale there was a particular issue with sanitary conditions in planting vegetables and also bathrooms. And surrounding that, just the hygiene of surrounding areas in the country and not having sewage treatment and various issues like that. When we were doing research for the project, we found an extremely interesting map.

The map of Tamale mapped out the areas where there were gardens, where they planted vegetables, let’s say those were circles. And then there was an overlaying map of where the bathrooms were, the public bathrooms, let’s say their triangles. And for every place there was a garden, the bathroom was right next to it. So you can imagine that there were some sanitary issues.

So when we asked about why there was this pattern of a bathroom and garden across the city, they said that, well, it was easier to have the garden next to where the water supply was. But unfortunately, as time passed and the deterioration of the bathrooms occurred in the city, it just grew more and more unsanitary.

But the vegetable gardens continue to exist and people continue planting using the sewage water that was there perpetuating a lot of issues that we probably don’t wanna get into right now.

But the point is, when we had this deliberation, a lot of scholars took out this map and the participants actually began to understand and study it, you know, from like a third party point of view and started looking at it and said, wow, this doesn’t make sense at all.

And when we’re in our daily lives, and when they were in their daily lives, they kind of didn’t, they didn’t, it didn’t register to them, it just seemed extremely convenient. But after discussion and learning about the problems, they began to understand that, wow, this is not something we should be doing and we need to change that.

That was a huge win for the deliberations in Tamale. In the national project, we had an experiment done where one group was deliberating, another group just did some surveys, and a third group just read the materials, thinking about what differences would happen, would a deliberation group with materials do better than just a surveyed group and just a group that read the materials. And we found that the group that deliberated actually did better than the two other groups.

We’re very hopeful that we can do more projects in the African continent because the projects we’ve done so far in Africa have been extremely impactful. And we only hope that being able to impart more of these deliberative values that we can help improve the societies there.


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