This is not a Travel Report!
An attempt to reconstruct goals and evaluate action of Go Africa - Go Germany
By Josef Hien, Germany. Scholarship holder 2007
19.8.2010
Sure, we all share some kind of common notion that the program was set into place in order to promote a partnership between Germany and Africa, by bringing together young scholars from both continents. But what does this notion actually mean, where does it come from, and how did it develop over the past three years?
To analyze the goals of the project means also to analyze the identity of Go Africa – Go Germany. This identity is not static but instead evolved over time. To assume that goals and identity would be today the same as they had been three years ago, would not only be naive but even worse: it would be evidence that Go Africa – Go Germany had fallen into a zombie-like sclerosis. Luckily this is not the case. The program is vital and alive. Nevertheless, any "true" evaluation of Go Africa – Go Germany has to take these dynamic developments into account. This entails also that the identity of the project is not only constructed through the perceptions of the participants alone, but also reflects the combined ideas and actions of the program directors and sponsors on the official side. Not only for us, the participants, have the goals evolved over time, but also for the official program promoters. Was the main objective at the beginning still the rather malleable goal of diminishing prejudices, so has it now after three years evolved into the clear cut aim of institutionalizing a German – African Foundation for Youth Education. To explain how it came to this will be one of the tasks of this contribution. This will be done by tracing back in time the evolution of the three main components of the Go Germany – Go Africa program. First, I will give an account of how the program goals on the official side developed, then how those of the program participants changed over time, and in the end I will evaluate how this is all reflected in the different communication tools that developed over the past three years.
What follows will be an attempt to come closer to a proper evaluation. Nevertheless, I hope to provide an account of "where we stand now" and "how we got there". I will mainly rely on the available official documentation of the program, on interviews and informal talks with the Go Africa – Go Germany officials, and on my own experiences gathered through three years in the network. I will close with an analysis of how much has so far been achieved and what remains still to be done.
Shifting Goals
On the official level of the program promoters one has to recall that the project first had been launched to fight the high level of prejudices that earlier projects of the Bundeszentrale had detected between Africans and Germans. Go Africa – Go Germany was designed to diminish these prejudices by bringing together people from both continents. This initial program goal was immediately upgraded after the experiences with the first group. Now, it was not the diminishing of prejudices that was the main goal, but rather the creation of an enduring network between the scholarship holders that should persist long beyond the formal point of program determination. The network evolved surprisingly quick and has become ever more institutionalized over the past years. An indicator for this is the strongly increasing number of network tools that this process spilled off. These are the components of the program that developed openly and visible for everybody.
What I turn now to is the part of the program that was promoted "behind the scenes". So far these program goals remained rather invisible as they are hardly mentioned in the official program documentation and it seems that only very few insiders were updated on their development during the past three years. In fact, the first detailed official statement about them was released only recently by printing a speech in the Joint Mag that Katja Böhler (project manager) delivered to the Federal President Horst Köhler during a workshop in Bellevue in November 2009. Even though I am a member of the first generation Go Africa – Go Germany and therefore part of the program since three years I was not entirely aware that the major institutional push was aiming in the direction that Katja envisaged in her speech. One could now accuse our project managers of intransparancy, but that would go beyond the point. Keeping the development of aims and goals opaque was the result of strategic reasoning on behalf of the program managers rather then due to an intransparency fetish. It simply would not have been clever to announce clear-cut institutional goals before the political partners were convinced and on board.
