African indigenous commerce is more about skills than academic degrees

By Charles Dhewa

As farmers continue to plunder their soils, water, and other natural resources in order to send their children to school, academic degrees are not being translated into tangible skills that can make a difference to the lives of farmers and ordinary people across Africa. As if that is not enough, university graduates are finding it difficult to participate in African indigenous commerce ecosystems like food markets which prioritize skills more than academic certificates.

Addressing structural exclusion

For vendors, traders, and other participants in African indigenous commerce, following the academic route leads to structural exclusion where young people who are not academically gifted are excluded from participating in socio-economic activities.  By using academic achievements to create social classes, the academic system has continued to stigmatize the young generation and destroy the social fabric.

African indigenous commerce is demonstrating why African governments should not have adopted the western knowledge systems without recognizing that western countries tailor-made their curricula to suit their industrial development pathways. For example, attachment and apprenticeship are borrowed models from the West. In the African knowledge tradition, the transfer of knowledge and skills was part and parcel of everyday life. Mass food markets are reproducing and sustaining this tradition through on-the-job training and generational skills transfer.

Emphasis on academic classroom education reduces skills acquisition to memorization, mainly for the purposes of passing examinations. That is why most graduates are failing to apply what they learn in college or university. The formal education system has been designed in such a way that graduates can only manage the already established entities but cannot use new knowledge to build something from scratch. It does not give graduates the passion, skills, and other unteachable traits that are required to start and run a business. These are the dominant qualifications in African indigenous commerce like mass food markets where key characteristics include inborn traits, skills acquired on the job, passion, and, more importantly, creatively responding to lack of options.

Who is benefitting from academic education?

Indigenous commerce is awakening African governments to the fact that they cannot hope to develop their economies by continuously using their natural resources to educate their children for other countries which are now reaping the rewards through the brain drain. African countries are not only losing through exporting raw commodities.  How many investments are African countries losing through educating their children for other countries?  Surprisingly, in terms of investment priorities, the past decade has seen the number of universities increasing more than 20-fold in Africa but no investment has gone to indigenous commerce institutions like mass food markets and SMEs. By pouring more resources into academic institutions, the message from African governments is that academic gifts are more important than passion and inborn traits possessed by young people who are building home-grown economies through indigenous commerce.

African mass markets emphasize skills more than academic degrees in ways that make them more inclusive.  There are two different worlds between the formal financial sector (for the academically educated) and the informal sector which has its own financial models that have continued to sustain African food systems and indigenous commerce.

It remains a sad fact that the application and value of academic knowledge and achievements remain minimal across Africa. In the business sector, very few people resign to start their own businesses using academic knowledge. They wait to be pensioned and use their experience to start a business not academic knowledge. On the other hand, some elders and traders in African mass markets are more knowledgeable about food systems than academics but such knowledge is not recognized as shown by how national awards are given to actors in the formal industry only.  Running an economy using reward systems that are foreign to the majority of economic actors makes the whole formal economy exclusive for the benefit of few people who are literate about foreign systems.