Botswana President, Activist Are Co-Winners : Relief Group Honors Duo in Fight Against Africa Famine

The president of Botswana and a rural-development expert were named co-winners of the Africa Prize for Leadership by an international hunger-relief group last week.

The award, sponsored by the Hunger Project, recognizes those who have worked toward ending famine on the African continent. In its third year, the prize carries a $100,000 stipend.

This year’s honorees are Quett K.J. Masire, president of Botswana, and Bernard Ledea Ouedraogo, founder of the Naam movement, a group that encourages self-reliance among Africa’s poorest farmers.

The New York-based Hunger Project announced the winners during simultaneous ceremonies in Dakar, Senegal, Washington, at the United Nations headquarters and numerous other cities. The different locations were linked together via satellite.

Chief among the Hunger Project’s goals is an end to hunger by the year 2000. Many of the day’s speakers said that the award presentation marks another step in that direction.

The group’s Los Angeles chapter also commemorated the Africa Prize. The event, at the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, featured several film and television celebrities active in the anti-hunger movement.

Those who spoke at the local gathering said that the award demonstrates that Africans are working to solve their “cruel environmental adversaries,” or the twin problems of drought and hunger.

“The Africa Prize will help create an awareness of Africa that didn’t previously exist or in terms that we don’t normally see,” said actress Valerie Harper, who is co-founder of Love Is Feeding Everyone, or LIFE, an area food bank. “The true image of Africa is often submerged except for pestilence and gloom . . . The prize will put the spotlight on those leaders who are helping solve some of these problems.”

Catherine Parrish, managing director of the Hunger Project in the United States, suggested that the award program may also raise this country’s awareness of African issues.

“This is an opportunity to create a relationship between us and the leaders and people of Africa, other than just the image of starving people,” she said.

Masire, 64, was honored for preventing starvation in Botswana during a persistent drought that lasted from 1981 until 1987. His work was a significant achievement considering that suffering and death were common in other African regions during this same period. But while Botswana saw its crop and livestock production devastated by the lack of rain, none of its citizens died from hunger.

The country was lauded for its nutritional surveillance and food distribution programs during the drought. Further, Botswana has sub-Saharan Africa’s lowest infant mortality rate, another indicator that food availability is widespread. In fact, the percentage of underweight children in the country dropped from a high of 25% before the drought to 15%, or less, by 1987.

Masire’s Botswana is a land-locked, arid nation of 1.2 million in the heart of Southern Africa. Its primary source of income is from the sale of minerals, including diamonds.

In noting Masire’s efforts, the Hunger Project commendation stated that he “ . . . was determined that not one person would starve as a result of the drought-induced tragedy.”

Botswana, a democracy with a free press and independent judiciary, may be the first country on the African continent to end hunger as an issue, according to the Hunger Project.

The second honoree, Bernard Ledea Ouedraogo, is a native of Burkina Faso, formerly Upper Volta. The nation is one of the world’s poorest.

Ouedraogo began teaching farmers how to maximize the potential from their traditionally small plots of land. The Naam Movement, which he founded in 1967, instilled self-reliance in farmers and worked at improving their skills. The group also provides training in new agricultural techniques, health care, reforestation and literacy.

The Naam Movement is considered among the first in Africa to instill a spirit of community service among those facing hunger.

Ouedraogo also co-founded another grass-roots development group called the Six-S or “Se servir de la saison seche en Savanne et au Sahel, “ which translates into “using the dry season in the savannah and the Sahel.”

The group donates money to those villages demonstrating the greatest degree of self-reliance. The monies are then used to further strengthen the village organization and, ideally, make the people less “charity” oriented.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spoke at the ceremonies in Washington, lauded the Hunger Project and its Africa Prize.

“Hungry people need the wherewithal to help feed themselves . . . I salute the Hunger Project because you are a positive force to encourage African leaders to end hunger . . . and promote greater self reliance,” he said. “We’ve gathered to celebrate progress and achievements in the effort to end world hunger.”

Even so, Jackson and other speakers repeatedly claimed that more than 35,000 people, mostly children, die each day from hunger or malnutrition.

Yet, there has been some notable success in the battle against famine. The current rate of hunger-related fatalities is down from the 1980 level of more than 40,000 per day.