“The Power of Africa – Africa as a Stronger Actor on the international Stage” is a conference organised by the International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy in May 2012. It focused on the possibilities and barriers that the African countries are facing in terms of economic and political bargaining power as well as the prospect of speaking with one voice on the international stage.
Eugen Brand, Director General of ATD Fourth World International, together with several ambassadors of African countries to France, was a speaker at the conference. Below is his contribution.

Eugen Brand, Director General, ATD Fourth World International Contribution to the Conference “The Power of Africa” – Paris – 2 May 2012

How ATD Fourth World sees the contributions of Africa to shaping a world freed of the injustice of extreme poverty, a world at peace

Good afternoon. I wish to contribute to this important conference from the point of view of people in extreme poverty in Africa who are already contributing to shaping a world at peace, a world that will not know peace, that cannot know peace, until people everywhere are freed from the injustice of extreme poverty.

Introducing a Missing Partner

I represent ATD Fourth World – ATD stands for All Together in Dignity. ATD Fourth World was founded here in France in 1957 by Fr. Joseph Wresinski.

Although Europe is a place of wealth and power, there have always been Europeans who were completely left out of this privilege, as was Wresinski’s family. Because his parents were immigrants, he was born in a wartime internment camp where his sister died of hunger. His father, unable to make a living in France, ended up traveling farther and farther in search of work, and leaving Wresinski’s mother to struggle to feed her children.

From the age of four, Wresinski found ways to earn a few coins to help his family. During his childhood, he was also deeply struck by the way some people who offered his mother charity also humiliated her by crossing the street to avoid greeting her or by telling her to send her children away.

This influenced the way he founded ATD Fourth World, rooted in the knowledge that, as is said in Africa, “the hand that gives is above the hand that receives” and that this is both wrong and fruitless.

ATD Fourth World’s approach is instead to introduce people living in extreme poverty as the missing partner, whose contribution we need in developing all our countries, as well as at the United Nations and among the international community as a whole.

Here in France in the 1960s, Wresinski was living in an emergency housing camp where 250 families were struggling to survive the cold winters with only four water pumps for the entire camp. At the same time, he was aware that in every part of the world there were not only people struggling against extreme poverty, but also others living in solidarity with them. Little by little, he began a network of correspondence and exchanges with these people in different parts of the world, based on a new ethic of development.

This ethic is based not on exporting a one-size-fits-all approach, but instead on making a fresh beginning at the heart of each country in order to learn from and build on each country’s strengths.

Building too on the sometimes hidden solidarities that people show with those who have ended up outside the community, whether children living in the streets, or people shunned because of contagious illness.

Harnessing “the efforts of all people”

Wresinski also founded an international full-time Volunteer Corps, of which I am a member. ATD Fourth World is not run by a paid staff. Instead, as full-time volunteers, we receive the same minimal stipend regardless of our responsibilities or seniority, and are available to be part of teams in different parts of the world.

In this way, each of us can share and learn from the different knowledge and experiences of solidarity found in communities around the world.

Today, some members of our Volunteer Corps from Africa are living in low-income neighborhoods here in Europe and in the United States, just as our teams in Africa include some volunteers from Europe and elsewhere.

The very first African to join our Volunteer Corps was Jean Yanogo of Burkina Faso. Last year his government honored his memory by renaming a street in Ouagadougou for him, alongside another named for Joseph Wresinski. As part of ATD Fourth World’s team in Ouagadougou, Jean Yanogo developed friendships with many children living in the streets.

He taught other members of our Volunteer Corps how to respect these children, who have no privacy. When he was going to visit them, he would find an excuse to stop while he still remained at a small distance from the children, so that they could choose between hiding or going to meet him.

Jean Yanogo learned from these children how much they long to be useful and to feel like citizens of their own country, with no reason to hide from the view of foreign visitors.

The ATD Fourth World courtyard became a place where craftsmen, whose own lives were not easy, chose to invest their time and talent in teaching these children their skills. About the time he took to get to know these craftsmen, Jean would say,

“In the struggle against poverty, we must not restrict people to carrying out a single task. There is much to do, but we must offer freedom to each friend, taking the time to listen to them and understand them. This time is essential because the misery of poverty will be ended only with the efforts of all people.”

An African Perspective on the Development of Europe

In 1981, a new step was possible because of ATD Fourth World’s investments in communities struggling with extreme poverty in both Europe and Africa, and also because of our consultative status with the United Nations.

In order for UN institutions and the OECD to learn from the small-scale but innovative efforts to fight poverty in Africa and elsewhere, we organized a seminar at UNESCO.

One of the invited speakers, Father Tenywa from Uganda, was very surprised to be asked to share his expertise from a lifelong grassroots commitment.

“Our work is too small to be seen,” he said. And yet once his work was seen, UNICEF saw new ways to reach the poorest people, following his approach to building relationships with people who struggle day after day.

In addition to the international community learning from people who had been forgotten and unseen, this 1981 seminar and similar ones that followed created opportunities for Africans to meet people living in extreme poverty in Europe and to discover the realities of their lives.

Josephine Alumanah of Nigeria, for example, was shocked to discover the living conditions here in the Paris regions of families in trailers, some whose families’ history in France goes back many generations, who must survive without reliable access neither to clean water nor to heat, and who are looked down on by others.

The child foster care system in Europe is also something that many of our African friends look at with shock and deep disappointment.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the mere fact of having grown up far from one’s own parents can be considered a risk factor for not being able to become a good parent. Mothers in this situation can be taken from the maternity ward of a hospital directly to an observation center where their behavior with their baby will be watched by a camera 24 hours a day to determine whether they are fit to be parents.

Social services that have increasing financial constraints imposed on them may not have the funds to conduct an up-to-date evaluation of a family, and are now removing children from their parents’ custody based on evaluations that may be up to five years out of date.

Once children are removed from their parents’ custody, the letters the parents are allowed to write to them are censored by social services. They may write only once a year, and they may not say that they miss the child or that they are fighting to regain custody of them.

Just two years ago, Mr. Matthieu, a father from Burkina Faso who worked hard to make a place for his child to return to their rural village after having lived in the streets of the capital, was shaken by the contrasts in Europe: the impressive architecture and engineering that goes into the great train stations and airports here…but the complete abandonment of certain families who have been left behind by economic development to struggle with homelessness or condemned to separation from their children.

Mr. Matthieu and other Africans challenge the model of western development where the economic progress of some leaves others further and further behind.

They ask, “How can we believe in European words of solidarity with Africa when we see that in fact Europeans have already abandoned some of their own sisters and brothers?”

At the same time, our members in Africa are aware that, despite their continent’s tradition of solidarity among communities and extended families, in Africa too, the most exhausted people can sometimes be left behind to struggle alone. The models of development often imposed by outsiders can only worsen this.

Even when care is taken for the ownership of a project to be “local,” this tends to mean that it is thought out only with the most influential and powerful people in a given community, not with people whose own experience has taught them what it means to be left out and how they might rebuild links with others.

Working and Living Together Differently

Today our members in many African countries have made commitments to continue and to go further in these efforts, knowing that true development, on every continent, depends on all of us finding new ways to work and live together.

For instance, in Madagascar, our team designed a project for young people who had been living at a rubbish dump risking their health and safety by picking through the rubbish to pay for computer studies together.

In a world where we are often told that it is competition that can breed excellence, these young people achieved excellence in a completely different way: by making the commitment to leave no one behind, despite each of them having very little schooling to build on.

As their classes advanced, they all took time to ensure that everyone understood each point, or to visit whoever had missed a class because of family responsibilities in order to share what they had learned.

Today these young women and men have been hired by a telecommunications company. This was not a simple job training and hiring program, but an opportunity for the other employees in the telecommunications company to discover a new community of connection in the workplace. They have told us how struck they are by discovering the resiliency and perseverance of the young people and how it creates a better and more collaborative work environment for everyone.

When we look today at the economic crisis in the world, we think it is important to innovate new approaches based on the one in Madagascar where creating decent work opportunities together with those who have been struggling the hardest can also become an opportunity to build a stronger sense of community with colleagues and employers.

Climate change is another crisis our world faces, and it is in Senegal that members of ATD Fourth World have developed a collaborative approach to facing this crisis. Flooding has increased in recent years. On the outskirts of Dakar, those people who are able to do so improvise dams to protect their homes. However having more and more small private dams means that the flooding worsens in the streets and also in the homes of those unable to make their own dams.

This is why the young people of the district volunteered to dig collective canals on the roadsides. But for the project to work, those who were used to making their own dams had to agree to dismantle them, making their own homes a little more vulnerable so that the district as a whole could finally evacuate the stagnant waters.

These young people show us another strong example of how global issues are best tackled when everyone agrees to work together, starting from the situation of those facing the most difficulties.

Merging Our Knowledge, and Pathways Toward Peace

In Tanzania, our members wondered how to support the children and young people living in the streets and doing odd jobs at the fish market of Dar-es-Salaam.

Adults asked, “How can these children learn if our doors are not open to them? To learn, children need to be made welcome and to be in link with others.” This led to the creation of what they called a “Tower of Learning” in our team’s simple courtyard.

Both young people from the fish market, and adults who were well-established in the neighborhood, would climb the stairs to this wooden classroom on stilts. It became a place where all of them discovered new ways to learn from one another and to build community together.

This approach became one of the seeds of our international “merging of knowledge” approach where people with very little schooling can engage in research side by side with academics.

Instead of putting some people under a microscope to be studied by others, a collective approach enables each person to contribute to developing the research questions, to analyzing her or his own experience, and then to formulating proposals for social change.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is the challenge of how to find pathways to peace that is being addressed by young people who are members of our Movement in Bukavu. They make great efforts to earn a living to support their families but they also volunteer their time and energy to run cultural activities for children, reading books together and joining in our international Tapori Movement which links children of all backgrounds around the world.
Over the years, even though others have not always understood why these young people volunteer their time, they have remained steadfast. They have made efforts to build friendships with former child soldiers, and also with the children of soldiers who can be shunned by other children. Together these children took the initiative to beautify their neighborhood and inspired adults to join in.

In a world where peace too often remains a distant aspiration, these children and young people are showing us new ways for people to live together differently.

Together with others, they helped to inspire a three-year international research project on “Poverty Is Violence – Breaking the Silence – Searching for Peace,” a project involving 500 people in 26 countries, and which we recently concluded at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

Africa’s contributions to shaping a world freed of the injustice of extreme poverty

We often hear voices from the industrialized world instructing Africa about how to reduce poverty.

The advice given or imposed is often about good governance as a basis for human rights. Of course good governance is a crucial tool for all countries and peoples.

But the European Union is in no position to preach because there are currently 80 million people in the European Union living in poverty. Europe’s economic development has had losers as well as winners, with a widening gap leaving some families further and further behind.

The approach of the European Union, as well as of the Millennium Development Goals, is to target only certain percentages of a population for “poverty reduction.” But this approach is based on an unstable foundation.

Deciding from the outset to target only certain people means reinforcing the conviction of our world’s least privileged citizens that development will never be meant for them. It means being resigned to not reaching everyone, an approach that sets the stage for competition and conflict.

To shape a world that will one day be freed of the injustice of extreme poverty, we need instead to follow in the footsteps of the young people in Madagascar who refused to continue to the next lesson without taking time to help those who had missed the last one.

We need to follow in the footsteps of the young people in Senegal who know that the solution to floods is possible only when everyone agrees to work together.

We need to follow in the footsteps of the Tanzanians and of the Congolese who know that what is needed most by children in the streets and by former child soldiers is to be part of a community that connects everyone.

When we follow in their footsteps, we learn the true meaning of human rights: an approach that begins with people who have been left out before, an approach rooted in the ambition of reaching everyone.

When we follow in their footsteps, we overturn the age-old approach of assistance, where the hand that is giving is above that hand that is receiving, and neither hand is joined with the other in a true partnership.

When we follow in their footsteps, we discover the one natural resource that our planet has never yet exploited but so desperately needs: the intelligence and the ingenuity of people living in extreme poverty.

The Sacred African Stone of the Fourth World

In 1996, the President of Burkina Faso, Mr. Blaise Compaoré, together with ATD Fourth World, inaugurated a “Sacred African Stone of the Fourth World”.

Engraved on this stone is Joseph Wresinski’s message:

Wherever men and women are condemned to live in extreme poverty, human rights are violated. To come together to ensure that these rights be respected is our solemn duty.

This stone, 1000 square meters in the shape of the African continent, is located in rural Manega, 50 kilometers to the north of the capital. Manega is a village with a long history of traditionally sacred sanctuaries.

The Stone of the Fourth World is also considered sacred. Very diverse people including official delegations of foreign governments have traveled to this Stone from other parts of Africa and the world.
These visitors have brought earth which is laid around the Stone’s foundation. Today, there is earth from hundreds of places of human suffering and of hope: for example from Rwanda, Haiti, the Philippines, Switzerland, Bolivia, France, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

When a ceremony takes place at the Stone, all the villagers join in with those visiting from afar. The procession extends far into the bush, and advances slowly so that all can take part equally, regardless of their status.

One person living in extreme poverty said of this Stone,

“What happens around this Stone helped me to see the importance of each human being. Thanks to this Stone, I discovered others living in the same conditions as me, and I was able to build links with some people even worse off than myself.”

A person who lives in the street said,

“Here I was accepted alongside important people, all here for the same cause, to say no to poverty. Here, we were listened to with attention and consideration. Here, importance was given to everything we do.”

This Stone has become a place where these people and those committed alongside them can renew their courage for their daily struggle.

The same is true for leaders like the director of one of Burkina’s financial partners who decided after visiting this Stone that he would support Burkina in its efforts to fight poverty. The Stone was a place where he found strength and courage together with others.

We invite each of you to visit this Stone as our world prepares for 2015 when the Millennium Development Goals reach their term.

We see 2015 as an opportunity to go further than the Millennium Development Goals, with their targets for reducing poverty, and instead to innovate ways to eradicate extreme poverty.

When we follow in their footsteps, we overturn the age-old approach of assistance, where the hand that is giving is above that hand that is receiving, and neither hand is joined with the other in a true partnership. We see 2015 as an opportunity for the United Nations to face the current crises by benefiting from that new resource, the untapped intelligence of people living in extreme poverty.

We see 2015 as an opportunity for universities to face the current crises by merging their knowledge with that of people who have learned from daily suffering and struggle.

We see 2015 as an opportunity for the world to take to heart the wisdom of the Central African Republic where people say “Zo Kwe Zo”: every person is a person, every person has a stake in the responsibility for herself, for his people, for her country, for the whole international community. Every person has an active role to play in building communities of connection wherever they live and in shaping new directions for a world free of the injustice of extreme poverty.

Because of its history, its history of suffering from injustice, with its history of hope, of courage and of innovation, and its sense of responsibility, Africa has the legitimacy, and the power, to invite all of us to revisit the ideals that guide the future of humanity.

Africa reminds us that the intelligence of all people is needed for our common future.

And Africa remains a source, and a compass, in guiding our efforts, and nourishing our minds and spirits, as we try to build a human community that finds meaning, beginning with those living in extreme poverty.