conference

Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E29-04. To panel E29.

Title of paper:

Authors:

Bertus Haverkort (Compas);

David Millar (Millar Institute For Transdisciplinary And Development Studies).

Long abstract paper:
The authors have had the privilege to work together for about 40 years.

The cooperation between the two authors started in the 1970-ies with a World Bank sponsored agricultural development programme. Since then cooperation went through different phases. It experienced failures, adjudgments, and innovations during which the attention gradually moved away from agricultural production based on western knowledge to ecology to sustainability, indigenous knowledge and endogenous education and research and cumulated in a programme for transdisciplinary sciences and co-creation of sciences.

This conference paper gives a summary of the learning experiences and the main conclusions, with specific reference to Ghana.

The experiences with The Green Revolution, driven by western technologies and neo liberal business model and implemented with its top down method of communication, failed for a number of reasons: It erroneously assumed that western technology was applicable in an environment that deviates from the situation where it emerged. In most cases, the ecology, the economic and social conditions as well as the worldviews and values of the people where so different that in most African countries and rain fed areas on the globe, these programmes failed. The authors were part of this failure and decided to follow a different approach: agro-ecology with a focus on the optimal use of local resources and local knowledge of the people. This approach gave promising results, but again it was learned that the worldviews, values and the way people come to knowledge was not sufficiently taken into account. And, this learning lesson was also drawn in other African as well as in Asian and Latin American countries.

Therefore the authors made in depth studies of the worldviews, values and the knowledge system in communities in 16 countries in three continents. This allowed to make generalizations on the role and relevance of local peoples knowledge and the way this can be enhanced by internal learning, and by exchange between knowledge communities in other cultures. It had led to an approach of endogenous development and co-evolution of, education and research.

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