young, educated, energetic, and frustratingly under-utilized

There are two images of Africans: we are either filthy rich elites who have gotten fat off corruption and assorted other evils, or we are starving masses of children covered in flies.

Nobody is seeing the young, well educated, ambitious, dedicated Africans who are coming up across the continent; Me, Betty, Wangui, Mueni and Laila…. A few who happen to be on the Akili Dada board.

I’m watching a televised report of a conversation held at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Don’t ask. Voice of America carries C-Span. Who knew C-Span was so globally ubiquitous that I can watch it sitting in my Nairobi apartment at almost midnight…..

Anyway, there are a bunch of folk from around the world (including Bill Gates, Bono, Mbeki, and my personal hero, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia) sitting around a table discussing the challenges facing Africa.
I can’t help but wonder, in all these conversations, so earnest and keen on improving Africa’s lot, are these people aware of people like my friends and I? Why are they not tapping into us and the limitless energy that we have?

I mean, here I am, I’ve got a really good education, incredible energy to burn, and am willing and ready to work to change the continent. Yet even as hard as I am trying, I cannot find anybody to pay me what I’m worth to work in Kenya. Mind you, not that they are not willing to pay obscene amounts of money to Americans and Brits to do the same kind of work! (I’m working hard not to digress into so many topics including how little sense it makes to hire foreigners to do work that I can do just as well, if not better because of my knowledge of the Kenyan social and cultural context. And how if I applied for a job from Kenya I’d get paid a fraction of what a foreigner would get paid for the same job. Seriously, lets talk about brain drain and how I’m not going to come back home and tolerate getting paid a tenth of what my less educated and lower ranked foreign colleague is getting paid simply because of my nationality!)

There is a huge and horrible double standard out there among external organizations working to solve African problems that African’s are unable to do development work. There is such blindness to the amazing numbers of young people like myself who are actually locked out of opportunities to work towards the continent’s betterment. And I do feel locked out. Excluded from something that I very much want to be part of.

I mean, honestly, I’m busting my hump with very few resources to accomplish the work of Akili Dada yet with the proper kind of investments, a project like Akili Dada could reach so many young women in Kenya and across the region! But the sad reality is that even the moderate amount of success we have had, is directly attributable to the fact that I live in the U.S. and I’m able to meet people and make connections there. If I lived in Kenya, Akili Dada would not exist. And how incredibly sad is that!!!

To me its incredibly frustrating to watch a group of world movers and shakers sit around a table and rue Africa’s lot while I, a young, highly educated young African woman sit at home bubbling with ideas and energy while my resources go untapped. That, I think, is truly Africa’s greatest tragedy.

There is a generation of us dying for space at the policy-making table, ready and willing to do what it takes to turn the continent around, but we have no idea how to get heard. And those at the table are too busy talking to see or even listen to us. Its frustrating. If only they knew the young people I know. If only they were friends with my friends…..I’d like to think that their conversations would sound different.