“People are not primarily divided over abstract issues like personal freedom or the general good. What concerns people first and foremost is how to maintain or increase their material standard of living.”
Karl Marx
Hardly a day goes by without a reminder of the huge differences which beset the free world — let alone Russia, of which we wrote on 26th June. So many tragic migrant journeys — including the horrendous tale of sixty people losing their lives after a month at sea, attempting to cross from Senegal to Cape Verde, a distance of over 400 miles across the Atlantic Ocean — speak volumes of the sheer desperation causing them to leave their home countries.
Our time zone is not alone in experiencing mass migration, as shown by the United States’ attempts to halt the flow across the Rio Grande; but conditions in Africa are by far the greatest challenge. Throughout that great continent we see conflict, tensions and corruption — but still there are grounds for hope.
So this week we take inspiration from one of the most encouraging routes towards a more egalitarian form of capitalism — incentivised learning — and we suggest a way to lift conditions to such a degree that young people in Africa would see the opportunities to change things for the better, and prefer to stay in their own countries.
The Share Foundation has been operating its ‘Stepladder Plus’ incentivised learning for young people in care for a number of years, but 2023 has seen a major expansion of the programme. In January the Charity received a donation of over £400,000 from the British Bankers' Association to underpin its expansion for young people from all local authorities across the United Kingdom, and since then over six hundred young people have registered in order to earn money for their starter savings accounts: Junior ISAs and Child Trust Funds.
This connection between life skills education and building financial resource is a world apart from welfare benefits: it achieves an attitudinal transformation in teaching a young person how to grow for the future. Encouraged by the Stepladder Plus take-up, The Share Foundation has commissioned a major business case with which it hopes to persuade Government and others to provide long-term funding for Stepladder Plus continuation across the United Kingdom.
The high incidence of NEET status (‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’: experienced by 41% of adult care leavers compared to the national average of 12%) and their reliance on food banks (16% for care leavers compared to the national average of 3%) shows the need for a break-through, and Stepladder Plus is demonstrating its ability to deliver real change for the better, including a reduction in the cost of welfare benefit provision.
There are good reasons to look seriously at incentivised learning in other areas of the United Kingdom: last week's ‘A’ level results saw grade gaps widening between north and south, showing the need for a thorough review of the way we undertake education: and the prospect of a millstone of student debt at graduation hardly provides encouragement towards higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
But how might all this relate to our opening comments about desperation in Africa?
The answer is, quite substantially.
Thus far it has been a combination of international aid and commercial investment which has flowed into that continent. There are some great charities operating in various countries, such as Five Talents, and other enterprises such as All Across Africa show how to produce social change for the better through equitable marketplace innovation.
So let's say that a major media organisation with a real focus on improving conditions in Africa — such as CNN — was to embrace incentivised learning, inviting its audience in the developed world to provide the funding for incentives which would power life skills learning programmes for young people throughout Africa. This could be supplemented by a portion of inheritance levies from European and American ‘first world’ countries, and by voluntary provision from the wills of philanthropists. It would therefore be a global lead for inter-generational rebalancing, which is a key part of working towards a more egalitarian form of capitalism, and it would build on groundwork on inheritance levies already undertaken by the OECD.
It's a straightforward-enough concept, but there would be significant logistics to put in place. However, CNN has partners such as Afrexim Bank who could help set these in place. Such a substantial programme would offer real hope for young people instead of the despair which drives them into the hands of people smugglers.
But lest you think that such a plan is simply unrealistic, let's consider the numbers. There are about 12 million young people in each annual cohort throughout Africa. Let's say that the maximum incentivisation payments were set at £5,000 (the average earned would be in order of £3,000) and that the programme was offered to the most disadvantaged 50% of the population. The annual cost of the programme, once fully extended across Africa, could be in the order of £18 billion — but in practice the numbers would be much lower because it would take several years to implement. In other words, it would cost significantly less than the total of foreign aid flowing into Africa each year, which was over $58 billion in 2021.
Incentivised learning is not a one-off phenomenon for young people in care in the United Kingdom: it could contribute towards a massive improvement in global stability, as new generations grow up inspired by their acquisition of life skills and starter savings resources.
It's for this reason that this aspect of the SHARE research programme in Cambridge is so important, and we look forward to the progress it makes over the coming year.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio