7-8 July

The world of development is witnessing a growing tendency among all the actors involved - from NGOs to large international institutions - to focus on local initiative and associated concepts such as empowerment, co-development, social capital and participative strategies. In Africa, the combination of the repeated failures of development models and the recovery of macro-indicators since the mid-1990s has exacerbated this trend, and the hopes that it carries with it. Numerous projects are being promoted - even in countries such as ours, with little tradition in this field - and in between the habitual doom-laden news items, the newspapers are showing the occasional glimmer of optimism, deriving partly from a new political correctness (which obliges us to view Africa in a positive light) and a sincere trust in the direction of the changes taking place south of the Sahara. Nevertheless, observers continue to be plagued by perplexity, particularly those responsible for deploying any kind of expertise in African countries.

The African voices that the current climate of sensitivity is making audible spring from a surprising plurality. As our attention fluctuates between the official proclamations (which fit in perfectly with the international accord) and the recently revealed opinions of the "voiceless", ideas such as democracy, participation, sustainability and competitiveness are shown beneath a light that is so different from the one by which they tend to be illuminated in our countries, that all the patterns and recipes for new development are left unresolved. The song the Africans sing to us is not in any way produced by a choir of equals, and their courses of progress are more unpredictable given that the experts cannot guarantee the conditions of their evolution. The world of African development is a veritable source of lessons, and on this course we aim to offer a wide-ranging view of all the new, more-or-less explicit discourses, as an indispensable introduction to examine the different ways of approaching the continent's economic and political future.

Director: Albert Roca, Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lleida.

Registration and enrolment: CUIMPB – Centre Ernest Lluch , Secretaría de Alumnos. C/ Montalegre, 5. 08001 Barcelona. Tel.: 93 301 75 55 Fax: 93 302 13 47. e-mail: info@cuimpb.cat

Enrolment period: 4 to 15 June.

Payment should be made by bank transfer or cash deposit at the following branch of “La Caixa”
Account number: 2100-3272-94-2200087659.

For free enrolment onto the course, send your CV to Enric Royo , Coordinator of the Development Programme of the CIDOB Foundation.