A Review of the Book: Change: A New Development Model for African Countries by Dr. Hugue Nkoutchou
This book titled, “Change: A New Development Model for African Countries” is a must-read for everyone in Africa. If you are interested in trying to make your country a better place or are in the primary position to do so, I would encourage you to read this book.
Why Sub-Saharan Africa remains underdeveloped
The first chapter of the book talks about ‘Why Sub-Saharan Africa remains underdeveloped’. Some of the major causes of this issue are weak private property rights, foreign aid, widespread corruption, and slow technology adoption.
Now one thing that shocked me was the mention of foreign aid as one of the reasons why Sub-Saharan Africa remains underdeveloped. This was a surprise to me as one would assume that foreign aid helps to develop a country. However, the author disagrees with this.
In his opinion
“These foreign aid grants and loans stifle our creativity. It would have been better for us to have had a chance to solve our problems ourselves. Why? Because we would have become more creative, using our ingenuity, in the face of difficulties, to find adequate resources and fix our problems by ourselves, without any direct external assistance.”
How to improve public policy programs and education
The second chapter talks about how we can use education to improve our society public policy and economy. He emphasized the need for a review of our education curriculum to educate students about problems around them and encourage them to explore solutions to these problems while also leaving room for innovative ideas.
He believed that ‘as far as Africa is concerned because industrialization is a key priority, we should concentrate on funding quality research in sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects, without neglecting other disciplines’. In other words, our education in Sub-Saharan Africa should prepare us and better equip us to solve the problems in our economies and societies.
How scientific evidence can be applied by individuals.
The third chapter emphasizes ‘How scientific evidence can be applied by individuals. This was related to networking, career development, and entrepreneurship. This chapter also talked about what he called the General approach, well I have phrased it as the five steps needed for personal or corporate success. They are:
- Problem identified and defined: write it down in a way that can easily be understood.
- Goal (Long Term): define the goals you would like to achieve based on the solution to the problem. It should be reasonable and measurable.
- Objectives (Short term): these objectives when completed lead you to achieve your goal.
- Activities (daily): ensure to simply your objectives to daily tasks.
- Parameters of measurement of activities or indicators (quantitative + qualitative): to measure if each activity was successful.
Evidence-based thinking
In conclusion, as the author said in his book “ is my judgment that Africa should develop its way of thinking about economics that is evidence-informed yet specific to its context and culture”. What is your judgment?
If you got to this point, I am sure you are interested in this book and I stopped here for a purpose. Pick it up and read.