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Women have always labored twice as hard as men in Africa, tending house, raising children, harvesting their husbands' fields. When we met Awa Kone, she was watering, bucketful by bucketful, young banana and mango trees and small plots of onions, tomatoes and eggplants. This garden in the tiny 10-family settlement of Tenemakana is a cooperative moneymaker for the village wives. The women pool the profits and then loan out the money to each other at 9% interest. No woman has ever defaulted. When they have earned enough, Kone and her friends plan to build a clinic.
These credit schemes are giving village women their first independent source of cash. That is changing the societies they live in, turning tiny profits into wells, protective fences and, most important, schools. Since 1992, villagers have built and staffed 128 primary schools; with U.S. grants, an additional 447 local schools were opened. Today 46.5% of Mali's children attend primary school, and the literacy rate, 19% seven years ago, is now 32%. "I've never seen such effective community systems," says the U.S. Agency for International Development's Timm Harris.
Awa Kone is not surprised. "If you are educated," she says, "you can solve problems." For the first time in her life, such ideas are shared by the nation's leaders. A.T.T. has started a private foundation dedicated to the education and health of Mali's children. "Here in this country," he says, "everyone works for the community."
GHANA
The rise and slump and rise again of Ashanti Goldfields, the only black-African-operated mining company on the New York and London stock exchanges, mimics the fortunes of Ghana itself. The British outpost in French-dominated West Africa lived well on its gold and cocoa exports until the production of both plummeted during the first two decades after Ghana's independence in 1957, under Kwame Nkrumah, one of the founding fathers of modern Africa. As Ashanti's output tumbled, the first sub-Saharan colony liberated from colonialism never did live up to Nkrumah's promise that "all else" would follow the act of uhuru, freedom.
The junior air-force flight lieutenant named Jerry Rawlings who seized power firmly in 1981 spouting Marxist rhetoric hardly seemed the man to turn things around. Yet within two years of his coup, Rawlings pirouetted to the right and embraced Adam Smith capitalism. It was the practical move of a military man wise to who had the money to help dig Ghana (pop. 18 million) out of its sinkhole. For the sake of foreign investment and IMF loans, he swallowed one of Africa's harshest doses of free-market medicine. The result: one of the most diversified economies in Africa and a more than embryonic middle class.
Rawlings also brought Sam Jonah into the boardroom. Jonah was the seventh child of 10; he grew up in Obuasi, site of Ashanti's richest gold mine. Jonah went down into the mine while awaiting a promised scholarship from Ashanti. "It was character forging," he says. "I know about teamwork, and I can still speak the mining slang." After study at University of Exeter's Camborne School of Mines, he returned to Obuasi, starting as a shift boss deep in the pits and working his way up--and out--the first black man to climb the ranks.