How well-intentioned storytelling about Africa ends up hurting it
The first time many people hear about Africa, it is usually through some pull-on-your-heartstrings advertisement by a non-profit showing poverty and hunger. The goal of such messaging, of course, is to get your attention and motivate you to help. However, the cumulative effect of such messaging is that people that are not familiar with the region end up with wrong impressions about what Africa actually is like. And such storytelling also creates a certain power dynamic which ends up dehumanizing the very people it is trying to help. This is the unintentional negative impact of very effective marketing in the social impact space.
There is a lot of ignorance about Africa. First of all, many people don’t really internalize that Africa is not a single country. Africa is home to 54 different nations, more than 2,000 languages and four of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies. One third of people in African countries are middle-class and it’s not all poverty, disease and war as most people think. The diversity in people, geographies, economies, landscapes and histories is massive.
The following are a few pictures I have taken as I have traveled through a few countries myself.
SunFunder invests in solar energy projects in places beyond the grid. We have an office in Tanzania and we do a lot of work around the region. We made a conscious decision two years ago to update our brand and messaging to help change this image problem. We decided that we were going to stop using pictures of people and children and instead focus on the technology we enable, the gorgeous landscapes of the countries in Africa and the huge economic opportunity that we were unlocking. We also literally changed our story telling perspective by using aerial photography to show what it’s like to use solar energy in places that don’t have access to electricity.
The world, on average, is a lot better off than it used to be 50yrs ago. Most markers of development have improved significantly. Extreme poverty has reduced significantly. It’s time we update our story telling to reflect that. We live in a world today where we are flooded with abundant information. A lack of diversity in the stories people consume is where biases come from. It’s important, as storytellers, to try and communicate a real, balanced truthful picture. And sometimes, it means moving past the temptation to report the extreme, and try and make the mundane interesting.
