When I lived and worked in Malawi in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I realised that a good strategy would be to help out the country by doing things like swamping it with Lego sets and Meccano sets and so on. I suggested that because I was finding that even some of my smartest students have visual and spatial awareness problems. I concluded that if they had been encouraged to think in the abstract from an early age, it would help.
The idea is a big one: swamp the entire country with these resources. Firstly, that would mean that they would have no resale value. I was well aware that the recipients of aid sometimes sold what they were given either because they needed the money for something else or they didn’t want what was being given to them. So, by swamping the market, the resale value would be very low. Secondly, I didn’t think that any one group should be privileged when another one wasn’t, so no favouritism or attempts at setting up a hierarchy of needs.
That never happened, of course, because the aid agencies weren’t smart enough to think like that.
On another topic but still in Malawi, I also once suggested to a chap from the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations that they set up a training scheme whereby they train local people to use ploughs to help them with their maize and other plots. Immediately, this goon came back with the problem of financing and maintaining the Oxen they would need. I have to say I couldn’t make him see that they didn’t need Oxen to drive the simple plough that I was talking about and that Piers the Ploughman had used in Medieval England! I walked away from him in the end as I couldn’t stand to think that this oaf was responsible for so much misery with his ridiculous ideas. It’s still the case that the FAO gives away mountains of food aid when what people need as much as anything is the wherewithal to feed themselves. Of course, I realise that there are problems with teaching a man to fish ...
Now, what got me on to all of this? Well, I talked about this sort of thing to one of my neighbours the other week and today he brought me an article from The Halifax Evening Courier of 5th December 2007 in which it says that Bart Spicer of Sowerby Bridge is trying to convince all 17,500 primary schools in the UK will buy and use a product from Holland called Brickadoo ... which is a building toy comprising bricks and so on similar to Lego but with significant differences ...
Yet again, you heard it here first! Well Done Bart, of course.
DW
