Building a Mindset of Resilience to withstand adversity Under Climate Change

“It is better to walk than to curse the road” this African proverb sends a direct message – no matter how tough the road gets, please keep moving forward, even if it means crawling. No matter how hard you think your life has become, please do not give up. This is the essential message of resilience.???

When I take a casual look at headline news nowadays, I cannot help but think of the predicament of people and families caught up in wars and other climate-related emergencies. Wars are being fought from right here in Africa to the rest of the globe. Conflict and violence cost the globe over $14 trillion every year. This is equivalent to $5 a day for every person on the planet. Africa is estimated to have lost up to 3 million infants and 5 million children in conflicts in the past 20 years. Economies on the continent lose between $18 billion - $80 billion yearly to armed conflict and terrorism. This is only in the present age. But if we look back at history, from the world wars where Africans were dragged in to fight on behalf of the colonialists to the lives lost during the colonial era and fight for independence, the continent has borne a significant brunt of conflict. But beyond the lives lost, what is not highlighted as much, is the trauma of those who live through these conflicts – where social infrastructure vital for human life – be it hospitals, schools, places of worship, or people’s homes – are totally decimated. You can imagine the lives of patients and their loved ones when they can no longer access hospitals. You can imagine the lives of children whose schooling years are stolen because of war. You can imagine the spiritual emptiness suffered when places of worship become inaccessible. You can imagine the lives of young people whose hopes & dreams are shuttered by war. You can imagine the anguish of people rebuilding their lives despite the physical, financial, & emotional wounds suffered because of lost loved ones, physical injuries, material loss & damage – inflicted in such conflicts. Yet despite all these difficulties, humanity has continued to survive. This is a hallmark of resilience.

By ethnicity, I originate from the community of Kom. And just as an insightful Kom proverb reminds us that “when you harvest a garden egg, know the branch”, there is a hallmark in our history that stands out as a lesson of resilience that was displayed by every African country that had to endure and unshackle themselves from colonial rule. Back in 1904-1905, Kom were a people under siege from some marauding invaders, out to overrun their village in their quest to conquer and colonize Cameroon. This history-defying event, where a global superpower of the time suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a small community in a country they were trying to conquer, demanded that the best of resilience among the Kom people be manifested. What remains relevant to this today, of these heroic events that occurred over a century ago, are the attributes of resilience that the kom people displayed. From the clarity of vision to boldness, leveraging on strengths at hand, to selflessness, to fidelity to a course – all these attributes are the building blocks of resilience.

Today, this resilience is urgently needed to combat food insecurity, unemployment, poverty, and climate vulnerability, among key socioeconomic risks that have gripped the world. These risks leave an indelible scar in our conscience, and the only way to delete them is if we dedicate ourselves to solving them. This kind of dedication calls for a mindset of resilience.

But why is a resilient mindset necessary in driving Africa’s growth?

The straightforward answer is that progress is never insulated from adversity. In our lives, the journey of progress almost always occurs amidst setbacks that are a part of life. But life processes do not stop when we face such adversities. Competition does not become less fierce in sympathy for us when we are down and out. Our ability to quickly collect ourselves and recover from such setbacks determines whether progress will be achieved. This reality at a personal level reflects across families, societies, countries, and continents because individuals are the building blocks.

Effecting mindset of resilience – , the following elements are the fabric, the structure upon which Africa’s resilient mindset will need to be built:

i) Diversification is the Biggest Security of a system. Up to 50% of all jobs in Africa were at risk of being lost at the height of the COVID-19 emergency. This kind of trend is likely to be repeated in future emergencies. It is a very dire situation considering the significant job creation gap that existed before the pandemic. To build resilience, ordinary citizens need to take the need to diversify income sources seriously. And this is based on an approach of diversifying the solutions areas one target to engage in. Through a mindset change solutions incubation approach called Innovative Volunteerism, young people of diverse backgrounds are being structurally guided to leverage the climate action lens to deliver integrated solutions that cover different areas of need in day-to-day activities, especially of Africa’s informal sector. For example, they are fabricating affordable solar dryers and working with agro-value chain actors to decentralize these dryers to them.

The application of these dryers for value addition has been shown to cut postharvest losses and increase revenues by up to 150%. These youth are also targeting the area of clean cooking by providing sustainable alternatives to charcoal use. Africa’s charcoal use is estimated at 2.5 times more than the global average and is used by up to 80% of households, contributing $6 – 24 billion in economic opportunities. Through climate action solutions of waste recovery to fuel briquettes, they have developed fuel briquettes that are up to 2 times cheaper than charcoal, are smokeless, and better burners. The market growth rate for these briquettes is rising steadily and hitting a high of 20% conversion in one month. These Innovative Volunteerism actors are an example of diversifying solutions delivery areas to shore up income sources and build resilience, and this is urgently needed in Africa.??

ii) Skills Retooling is irreplaceable. To become versatile in providing solutions presupposes continuous re-skilling. All citizens, regardless of area or level of training, have some skill and capacity to gain a skill. To remain relevant in today’s dynamic economies, continuous learning must be part and parcel of what we all do. This will ensure that foundational skills and knowledge are complemented with new knowledge and skills that will move citizens to the next level of being competitive solutions providers and build collective resilience. The Innovative Volunteerism actors who are diversifying their income sources by providing solutions in different areas first retooled their skills. Consequently, taking the personal initiative to buy books, read journals, to research and undertake online courses that will complement existing skills set is critical to becoming competitive solutions providers that are versatile and can make Africa’s diverse challenges and a source of diverse income streams that will collectively build a resilient Arica.

iii) Developing an Unborrowed Vision tied to a clear purpose. Everyone must be triggered to devise a solution to solve an ongoing problem in their community or society. While this trigger, which is the first inspiration, can be anything – e.g., a desire to emulate a role model, build something, lead in an area, or solve a particular problem, this inspiration must be grounded for the long run by a mission to ensure what is done directly touches many lives. Not self-serving. This is how we craft our purpose. The purpose of life is to be useful, and our usefulness must be expressed through solutions that solve community problems. A clear purpose inspires purposeful passion, which becomes the fuel to drive solutions towards an unborrowed vision. Every citizen in the continent must look themselves in the mirror, reflect deeply and answer these two questions – “what do I have to offer in solving the known challenges of the continent?” and “what can I do with what is accessible to me, to make lives of fellow citizens better?”. The time has come for everyone to develop an unborrowed vision tied to a very clear purpose of solutions fuelled with a purposeful passion that ties in their skills, talents, and interests to come up with solutions to turn challenges into opportunities that benefit communities and

iv) reconcile “top-down” approaches with “bottom-up”. Across Africa, we urgently need to take our eyes off governments alone as a “panacea” for implementing known solutions and instead focus on strengthening the informal sector. One phenomenon to appreciate is that Africa performs quite well on the policy provisioning front – which is the “top-down”, but dismally in implementation – which is the “bottom-up”. For example, in the climate change arena where progress is measured globally, 52 out of 54 countries have ratified their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), making Africa the region with the highest compliance rate globally. However, when it comes to implementation, an estimated over 70% of countries have not translated their NDCs into ready implementation investments. This missing link is because of a lack of dynamism amongst those who would need to leverage these policy provisions and implement them in such a way that they unlock income opportunities for them. And if we appreciate a famous English saying that it is “a shoe wearer who knows where the shoe pinches most”, a contextual implementation of policy in a manner that delivers impact among the population will need to be driven through and by the communities on the ground that are the supposed beneficiaries. And in Africa, this community is the informal sector. Over 80% of employment in Africa is driven through the informal sector. Currently, up to 80% of young workers in nearly all school-to-work transition surveys fall into the category of informal employment, and this sector has been described as the present and future of work in Africa.

The role of this critical group in driving optimal policy implementation centres on one word – data. When a policy is promulgated, its progressive implementation to the point that it achieves optimal impact is highly dependent on an effective feedback loop. Where implementation among critical target groups generates empirical data and knowledge on what practically works, and this information then gets feedback to recalibrate the policy provisions and make them even more suitable to incentivize further implementation by these informal sector actors. This iterative process of policy refinement informed by data of what works drawn from informal sector enterprise actions is an urgent need to bridge the implementation divide and is how Africa will reconcile the “top-down” with “bottom-up” to achieve impact and build resilient economies. To set the ball rolling, the informal sector – which is the individual citizens across Africa who run small enterprises to make ends meet, needs to take the personal initiative of establishing the kind of policy provisions that have been put in place by the government, and start to implement them using what they already have but with the aim of delivering competitive solutions to community and unlocking income opportunities from such implementation.????

v) take personal responsibility. It is said that “when it matters, it becomes personal”. If Africa’s lack of resilience means anything to us, then we must make the remedy a personal responsibility. The time of passing the buck is long overdue. Individual citizens must stop abdicating the responsibility for development to the government alone. While the government of the day is responsible for creating a secure, predictable enabling regulatory & institutional environment for development, it is individual citizens whose responsibility is to leverage whatever little or much there is of this enabling environment to create lasting enterprise solutions that benefit communities. Ordinary citizens are the custodians and executors of development policy. It is from success stories of heroic ordinary citizen solutions that government policy and regulation can be adequately informed and recalibrated to enable acceleration & escalation of the practical, proven citizen-driven solutions. Economies are built by the productivity of people, not elusive material and natural resources, and the decision to be a productive human being is personal. Embrace it.?

Conclusion

“Do not call the forest that shelters you a jungle”. In context, Africa is a continent synonymous with adversity. This seeming jungle is what provides us with the shelter of nationhood. Rather than criticize, blame, and complain, it is high time we embrace the fact that these adversities are glaring opportunities to demonstrate much-needed resilience of the mind by becoming selfless solutions providers. This is the only way for Africa to achieve its potential and dignity among the global community of nations.