July 5, 2026

The more time I spend in Sub-Saharan Africa, the more frustrated I am by some of the misconceptions held in the United States. One that seems to come up frequently is the perception that Africa is "behind" the Global North (or more accurately, the Minority World). I think this masks some very important distinctions. 

In my view, Africa isn't trying to "catch up" with the U.S. or Europe: it is blazing its own trail. If it seems that the path of growth has diverged from the trajectories of other countries or continents, that isn't ironclad evidence to conclude that growth and development are failing here. It is evidence that something different is happening here. Yes, there are places that seem to have stagnated. Yes, there are deep and well-founded concerns about the "stickiness" of poverty in some countries, particularly where complex colonial histories, policy choices, and institutional failings are involved. But I think it's also important to consider that in the big picture, the trajectory may look different because the target is defined differently.

For a long time, the international community largely accepted GDP as the primary measure of growth. There are a lot of problems with this. It's a fine measure for some things, but it's insufficient as a national target because it largely ignores inequality in distribution of benefits. You can (and do) have extremely high GDP in countries with extremely high income inequality, meaning some people get "the good life" while many people barely get by. In fact, the U.S. is #14 on the global list for income inequality and #6 on the global list for wealth inequality — statistics that we should be pretty ashamed of. As a country that, 250 years ago, aspired to be a place where everyone had the opportunity to flourish, it seems cruelly ironic that a few people with power have flourished at the expense of many, many people who do most of the work.

But if not GDP, then what? What becomes the dominant measure of how well a country is doing, how well its citizens are doing? There are a lot of people who are much smarter than me trying to figure this out, but there isn't a strong consensus on what the replacement metric or metrics should be yet. What is gaining support is the conclusion that a GDP-only target will incentivize policies and systems that leave a lot of people behind and increase the wealth gap. I highly recommend this thought-provoking conversation with UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty Olivier De Schutter to really dig into this (available wherever you get your podcasts). I've seen critiques of some of the positions discussed here from people I respect, but you don't have to endorse every point to be challenged by the data-driven arguments that De Schutter makes based on a long career on poverty eradication.

One of the things that comes up in this conversation (and others that have made me think hard recently) is the idea of a "sharing economy." This envisions a societal model where human wellbeing is prioritized and the power to make decisions about things that will affect wellbeing is shared broadly. And here's where my original point about Sub-Saharan Africa doing things differently comes in.

The idea of ubuntu (encapsulated in the saying "I am because we are") predated the concepts of GDP, economic growth, or sustainable development by centuries. Across many African countries, this is a unifying philosophy of life, a way of showing up in the world. It is based on the beliefs that all people are interconnected, that life should be oriented around communities and communal responsibility, and that human life has inherent dignity. It's a vision that some contemporary scholars think offers an alternative framework to mainstream development thinking in the Global South (a.k.a. Majority World). 

This week, during the celebration of Freedom 250 organized by the CLS Program and MS-TCDC, our keynote speaker beautifully contrasted his experiences in the Global North and Global South. In America, where Dr. Harold Sungusiya studied as a Ford Foundation scholar before a distinguished legal career here in Tanzania, he was taught that "time is money." In Tanzania, he explained, they have a different saying: "harakaharaka haina baraka." It translates as "hurry has no blessings," and flows out of the ubuntu philosophy. In many ways, it reflects the way I experience life when I'm here. 

Here, relationships are central to social functioning. Greetings are an extremely important part of the culture, because by pausing in your daily life to greet people — to inquire about their family, their property, their health — you show them respect. In turn, you need those relationships to get things done. If you need a safe, fair taxi driver, you ask the people you trust and get a phone number. If you want to buy your vegetables for a good price at the local market, you build rapport with a family that sells there regularly. In more rural areas, you may not even be able to book a seat on a bus without knowing the conductor, or to purchase uncontaminated petrol without knowing a local importer. You build those relationships by taking the time to exchange greetings before ever beginning a transaction, and by consistently showing respect for these people as members of your community whenever you see them.

This extends to how work gets done. People help each other here, each using the skills they have to meet the needs of others. My host family is not rich, but we have a neighbor who helps with the housecleaning and laundry, and another neighbor who helps with the garden for a couple hours each week. They do work that it might be challenging for my host mom to keep up with as she gets older, and they get paid for that. Instead, she leads hiking tours, sells fabric, and other things that she is uniquely good at. At the community level, wealth doesn't tend to concentrate in one set of hands: it's always flowing through the community as people show up to do their small part.* And while this communal model may seem very foreign to the way of life in America, where the majority of people don't even know all of their neighbors, there's compelling research to suggest these kinds of social bonds are crucial to a long and happy life.

And this is why I think we shouldn't expect the trajectory of development in Africa to look like what we saw in North American or European history. African countries are doing growth and development their own way. Yes, sometimes that way is being shaped by institutional failures, corruption, tyranny, or other very real problems. I'm not trying to gloss over that. But in many cases, I think it is also being shaped by deeply-held values that are leading to a different definition of success. 

If people (and policymakers) believe that human lives are important, relationships are important, slowing down to appreciate life is important, being a contributing member of society is important, and that money can't buy any of those things, they make different choices than they would in a country where every minute a person isn't working is calculated as a potential monetary loss. So rather than thinking of Sub-Saharan Africa as being "behind," I think Americans should be asking what we can learn from a region that has a long track record of valuing things that many countries in the Global North are just now realizing the importance of. As the U.S. marks its 250th anniversary, it seems like a particularly apt time to reflect on the hard work that is still needed to deliver on our aspirations of equal treatment and opportunity for all people at home, and how the lessons of ubuntu could be part of a bigger conversation about replacing GDP with more holistic measures of human thriving.

To join me on this journey, you can follow along with new posts in the Field Notes blog on this website or LinkedIn. I am in Tanzania on a Critical Language Scholarship for Summer 2026. My research is currently supported by the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence, a P.E.O. Scholar Award, and a Center for Collaborative Conservation Fellowship. I am actively fundraising for the next phase of my research, and welcome referrals to funders who are interested in supporting work on global challenges including human-wildlife conflict, poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and the impacts of a changing climate on all of these issues.