In Conversation With Richard Cambridge, Head of African Diaspora Program, The World Bank (Part I)

By envisionGood | August 5 2010 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

We had the very good fortune last week in Washington, DC to meet up with Richard Cambridge, Head of the African Diaspora Program (ADP) at The World Bank.

Richard kindly joined us to talk about the Bank’s development priorities in Africa, as well as its strategy for engaging the African diaspora to help achieve development goals on the African continent. Check out the video above to learn about the African Diaspora Program at the Bank. Have questions or comments? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

Thank you, Richard, for your time and for sharing background and insights on how the African diaspora plays a role in the Bank’s development priorities on the continent.

Part I: In Conversation With Richard Cambridge, African Diaspora Program, The World Bank

Richard Cambridge: My name is Richard Cambridge. I’m from Guyana in South America. I’ve been with The World Bank over three decades. I’ve been here for a while and have worked in most regions of the world, but have concentrated my efforts and my passion with Africa. My mother was born in Ghana, previously called The Gold Coast. And, growing up in Guyana, we had a lot of images and ideas about the continent which I then took further in my studies. I did my doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, and subsequently taught at Harvard University and did some post-graduate work at Stanford. And a lot of this had to do with Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, in particular.

When I came to the Bank I worked as a young professional first in the Africa region and then in other parts – Asia, Europe, Middle East. And now I’ve been asked to head a program dealing with the African Diaspora. It’s an honor and a privilege to do that. But the real leadership comes from my immediate supervisor who is the regional vice president for the Africa region at The World Bank. Her name is Obi Ezekwesili. She was the former minister of education in Nigeria. And when she came to the Bank, she was the one who said, “You are missing a large group of Africans who live outside of the continent but can make contributions to the development of the continent.

So along with another colleague who is now the governor of the Central Bank of Tanzania, we were asked to think about how we could put in place a program to engage the Diaspora in the development of the continent.

To do that we started first to work with the Africa Union. The Africa Union has a definition of the diaspora which we adopted. It says that Africa has a fifth region – and that is the diaspora. Any African who lives outside of the continent and is as interested in the development of the continent are defined as the diaspora. We know in North America there are 39, 40 million African Americans, African descended people, there are about 115 million Africans in South America, primarily in Brazil, Colombia, Peru. There are another 5 or 6 million African descended people in the Caribbean. I consider myself from South America but a part of the Caribbean. And so on. In Europe there’s another 4 or 5 million African descended people. These form the part of the diaspora.

What is common is that this group, this fifth region, has the skills, talent, and resources to contribute to the continent. Skills, talent, financial resources. As a bank, we of course initially focused on finance. The estimates are that sub-saharan Africans who live abroad send home between 10 and 40 billion dollars per year back to their families on the continent. And those resources, of course, can be leveraged for development in many different ways.

So as an area for the Bank’s involvement, this whole question of finance and working with the banking sector and looking at the cost of transferring money became a big priority. But we did not stop there. What we said was, “the refrain that you hear consistently about Africa is, “you know, we would like to do something on our continent but there’s just no capacity.” So there’s always this question that Africa does not have the capacity to implement development projects.

I think the evidence says the contrary. There’s not only a lot of talent in those countries that we have to identify and work with that talent, but the development business for many decades has been based on this notion of funding consultants from abroad to come and do the job. I think under the leadership of my vice president and the Bank in general has moved away from that. We know that development does not work unless there is ownership – and certainly, local solutions to local problems become very important.

So in the capacity area we first looked at what is available domestically at home. But we know that the diaspora also contains huge numbers of very skilled people. One of the numbers that i like to use and talk about is the number of Ethiopian doctors who reside in the United States of America, and in Chicago, are larger than all of the doctors in Ethiopia. The same in Mali – a large number of Malian doctors and other professionals are in Paris rather than in the country.

And you can do the same in many, many countries. So the question is, how do you get this talent, this skill to contribute to their home countries? We know that some governments simply do not have in place policies or programs to attract back the diaspora.

I’m a diaspora. I haven’t gone back to my country. I have been educated and I love my country, but I also have a family. I know I can be employed in any part of the world. And so in a global economy, highly skilled people, whether it be African, European – people go where the jobs are. So you find in North America large numbers of Africans working in highly skilled positions. The same is true in Europe, increasingly in the Gulf area. And I’m told, though I have no direct experience, even in Australia and in the Pacific, in those areas, large numbers of Africans are living and working in those parts of the world.

A couple of months ago we had a dialogue with the Chinese because there has been a lot of discussion about Chinese in Africa. And we were told that there is a place called Africa Town in Guangzhou Province where over 100,000 Africans live and do business with the Chinese. They’re not there to work in factories as low paid workers. They are there because they are the intermediaries between China and Chinese businesses that want to sell their goods and services in the African continent – and also from Africans who want to do trade and work with Chinese by selling their goods to China. So it’s a very interesting use of brain power.

There have been a lot of discussions about brain drain – Africans leaving the continent. There’s also a discussion about brain waste – that you get in a taxi in Washington, DC or New York City, and you talk and here’s a young African with a degree but he or she is driving a taxi or working in some service industry. That’s brain waste. But brain gain is when they decide to use those skills to help back home.

The example we like to use is the tertiary education. Higher education at the university level, where professors using the media can, in fact, contribute – they can teach, they can mentor virtually. They can also go back home for short breaks or vacation. But they have careers here, they have families abroad. The notion that everybody will pack up and go back home is unrealistic. They are going to stay. They are international people, they will go where the opportunities are. They are trained to work in certain conditions. Those conditions may not exist immediately at home. But over time it does.

We look at India – India is beginning to attract back some of their diaspora. China has done it. We see in Latin America some of the countries are attracting back home their diaspora. But by and large, once the diaspora leaves, and the second and third generation, the heart is still with the home and you still want to contribute, but they’ve made lives of their own.

My example is perhaps not unique. I came to the United States, met my wife in college. She’s from Minnesota, my children were born in the United States, and we’ve made our life in the United States. We think about the Caribbean, we think about Guyana. My son went back to Guyana for the first time last year and loved it – and said to me, “Dad, I didn’t know really who you were until I visited Guyana.” This is not a unique experience, I think many people have this same experience – we think about our country.

So the bottom line here, I said all this to say: what is The World Bank doing with this diaspora agenda? Three main things: First, we work with governments to ensure that governments have in place policies and programs for an enabling environment that will encourage the diaspora to return home – or encourage them to invest and to think about their countries.

This is very important. We don’t think about it often, but there are little things that make a difference i nhow somebody feels welcome. I use India as an example. They have a ministry that deals with the diaspora, and when you arrive in the airport in New Delhi or other places, as a diaspora you are treated separately. There’s a special line for the diaspora so people feel like they’re welcome. So policy is the first area we work on.

The second areas, as I said, are remittances and financing. And even now, we are thinking about ways and means in which we can collaborate with the diaspora so that they can invest this 30 or 40 billion a year for development of the sub-continent. And there are many ideas out there. The Bank, with our partners in the international finance corporation, we’re looking at how we can do this. So, many minds are working on channeling these resources for development.

And the third and main area is the skills, the brain gain area. How can we find mechanisms, work with the diaspora so that they can contribute knowledge, their skills, their education to the development of their countries?

So that’s the program, that’s where the Bank has been. I know for a long time, in parts of Africa, the view of the Bank has been one that’s been negative. Every time I meet a young African, they say, “but you guys are about structural adjustment”. That’s the term that’s always used. But the Bank has not been in the structural adjustment business in Africa for more than a couple of decades.

There’s been a lot of review, we’ve thought about it, we’ve said “mia culpa”, we’ve made mistakes. And now we’re moving ahead in a much more positive manner because we know, and the world knows, that for development to be effective there has to be ownership. The Bank cannot prescribe anything to a country. It wouldn’t work unless that country owns it and has country ownership.

The second thing that’s equally important is country leadership. Countries have solutions and ideas that they know will work in their circumstance. We can bring our global expertise, and we can share with them that yes, you believe that this solution is the right solution but we’re here to tell you that in some other circumstance in other parts of the world, maybe this solution needs some nuancing and doesn’t quite work that way.

But country ownership, country leadership, mutual respect are very much a part of the development agenda, the Bank embraces that. That’s what we do. And the programs for the diaspora are based on that.

It’s their money, it’s their decisions. They are going to determine what to do. And the Bank is not going to be the one saying “you must do this or you must do that”. And the diaspora are not governments. These are independent people doing what they want to do to support their families. And we support that.

Thank you again Richard for sharing background, thoughts, and insights on The World Bank and on international development in Africa. And thank you, as well, for your time to join us for this conversation.

Stay tuned for Part II of our chat with Richard Cambridge which will be published tomorrow. To learn more about the African Diaspora Program at The World Bank, be sure to check out their site and visit the Africa Region team on Twitter @WorldBankAfrica.