Introducing African Immigrants Social and Cultural Services: their success and relevance to the debate on planners vs searchers

Introducing African Immigrants Social and Cultural Services

I would like to introduce one organization I worked with over the summer: African Immigrants Social and Cultural Services (AISCS). Moreover, I would like to discuss the issue of planners and searchers, a topic that Ben brought it up in his recent blog post.

            In 2002, Mrs. Christine Chacha founded AISCS in order to assist African immigrants in the Bay Area. She, however, passed away in 2012 from cancer. Ever since then, Ms. Laura Mason, Mrs. Hattie Smith and Mr. Ezra Chacha have continued to grow AISCS. Currently, AISCS primarily works in running a primary school in a little village called, “Nyamagongo” in Tanzania. I learned about AISCS when I received an email from Berkeley Rural Energy Group that said AISCS was looking for volunteers to participate in its solar energy construction program.

           So I went to stay at Shirati, Tanzania for about 5 weeks this summer. Every day we walked a few miles to the neighbor village, Nyamagongo, to set up solar energy system at a primary school that AISCS has built. I am not here to bore people with my detailed saga of wiring or setting up the solar panels on the roof or even the lessons we took in the morning about backgrounds of solar energy. I want to talk about what really allowed AISCS to make a huge difference in the impoverished village of Nyamagongo.

           To start with, as background information, AISCS constructed a primary school and currently runs an education program for over 200 kids in the village; the number of students is growing every year. A number of them are receiving donor contributions to fund their education. Moreover, they are in the process of finally being recognized as a government-authorized school, which would mean that the students that graduate from here can move onto secondary education.

           One factor I noticed that allowed AISCS to achieve such things was trust among the people involved. The big liaison at Shirati, Tanzania that connected and organized the funds and efforts from AISCS was Fred, a relative of Christine Chacha. Chacha family was deeply involved in running this school and from this the organization was able to station this close, highly trustful organization member stationed in a village and build a network with the village people. The ultimate achievement was trust, a sense which allowed members from the US to send money to fund the school. Even other executive members of the organization had such close relation with Fred and people living in Shirati. I think this element is crucial because a lot of the times when an NGO from the first world sends funds to the third world, people generally do not have a solid idea of how the money is going to be used. This is a major reason that a lot of people become skeptical about NGO’s work because their donations may just help fund the NGO not the people that NGO is trying to help. Back to the main point, I saw the differences AISCS was making in the village; it was gradual but it wasn’t anything deceiving. The changes were profound and actual and I think a sense of strong trust among members built on family ties.

To the discussion that Ben brought up in his recent post. There are planners and searchers from the eyes of Bill Easterly. Planners are the top-down policy makers that implement programs without much knowledge on the adaptability or appropriateness or the program while searchers are the people that work on the ground, capable of seeing where the difference needs to come about. I am very skeptical of this dichotomy but I think there is a need for both; there are certain things that searchers such as AISCS cannot do. For example, in Shirati, the Shirati hospital served thousands and thousands of people who lived miles away because of a lack of medical care infrastructure. Worse yet, the road condition was so terrible that sometimes people passed away on the way to the hospital. Some patients had to be carried on motorcycles, not cars because the road was too narrow or bumpy. Can AISCS pave wider and safer roads? I am not sure because it is a massive project. But the Tanzanian government can. The World Bank or IMF can. This is where planners must come in and help the searchers. But how do we make sure that planners get to learn about these projects? How do we make sure planners’ large resources are put in appropriate places? I think the searchers can help them learn about these things. This is how much I learned from my experience at AISCS. The next question I ask to myself is how do we build this link, this trust between planners and searchers? Is the model AISCS has taught me, the trust built of family relation, the only way?

I would love to share more about the works that AISCS is doing. But the website www.AISCS.org will provide a better understanding. So I recommend anyone intending on doing volunteer work in Africa to check out this organization and also think about how we can better manage NGO work.