Please join the Africana Studies Program for Senior Presentations on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 1:00pm in Breidenbaugh Hall - room 205 for Presentations from the Following Seniors:

LAURA M. BLOCK

The successes and implications of development aid from the West to the Great Lakes Region East Africa is a controversial topic subject to much recent academic debate. During my time in Africa, Uganda and Rwanda specifically, I explored people's feelings on Western aid intervention through personal interviews and now I use their thoughts to critique popular literature on the effectiveness of development assistance programs. The critiqued academic works includes Jeffery Sachs The End of Poverty, Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid and many other popular works. Although the paper traces the history of aid in the Great Lakes region through scholarly materials, I attempt to strike a balance between a people's history and academic thought by voicing the opinions of East Africans who are uninvolved in scholarship and politics to unmask evidence of frustrations with Western aid. Ultimately the interviewees suggestions imply top-down approaches to aid are failing Africa and the successful programs in heath, economic development, gender empowerment, and education are a product of collaboration between the East African people and foreign experts who respect culture.

RYAN TRIBUNE

Africa's Uneven Development: Causes and Consequences

My paper uses a variety of development indicators to compare the development profiles of various countries. These countries are selected systematically according to some pre-determined (and definitely subjective) criteria; such as year of independence and/or former colonizers, geography, resource endowment, form of government, population, education, development aid etc. In this comparison, I hope to see the extent of the uneven development for the set of countries chosen. Any uneven development may be the result of many factors but I am interested in the (public) investments or expenditures on the factors from which development indicators are derived. This is how I intend to identify possible sources of this uneven development.

The raw statistics for this study have been collected from the world data bank and the CIA fact book. The Raw information will be analyzed for trends in their relation to the aforementioned criteria. The different trends will then be compared to information about the nation's structure and history gathered from various books and again the CIA fact book. This procedure will exemplify the reasons for the uneven development of Africa.