The media seems to be waking up and taking notice of the positive trends happening across Africa. Suddenly we are seeing articles with titles like “African Successes”, “Africa Rising”, and “10 Biggest Positive Africa Stories of 2011”. While journalists like Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Rosalind Kilkenny-McLymont have been talking about the trends for years, most of the mainstream media has only recently started a move away from the Deepest Darkest Africa journalism to which the Western world has become accustomed.

This trend is interesting, not just because it is refreshing to see a more realistic depiction of Africa (and it is very refreshing), but because a focus on the positive and away from the negative may have a massive impact on development and social and economic change on the continent.

Just one of the positive trends in Africa

We recently read a disturbing article revealing that one source of the negative picture we often see of Africa is actually NGO’s themselves—those very organizations on the front lines of helping people across the world. Apparently, they try to paint as desperate a picture as possible in order to get donations, which they need in order to get the funding to help people. The problem then becomes that it is the business of NGO’s to keep things bad, since the worse things are (or look), the more people will be compelled to donate, so the thinking goes. There is an incentive for things to be bad and a disincentive for things to improve.

What if instead our business model were based on improvements? What if our business model were based on the positive trends? What if it were based on riding the wave of positive change happening across Africa? What if the better things were, the more funding NGO’s would receive?

When all we know about are stories of hopelessness, the international community naturally assumes that Africa cannot help itself and must be saved. And treating Africa as if it must be saved contributes to relationships of dependence that stymie Africa’s potential. We all know that handouts do not create foundational change, that in the long term they are infantilizing and disempowering, so why would it be any different for development in Africa? (To be clear, Africa’s dependence on outside powers has a long and complex history, too long and complex for the scope of this post. Our aim here is not to neatly explain Africa’s dependence on the West in six short paragraphs, but instead to open a door to a fresh perspective.)

What might be possible if our energy were focused on all the positive movement and possibilities across Africa—the economic growth, demographic dividends, democratization, and NGO successes? Might there be more foreign investment? Might African governments depend less on aid? Might home-grown development efforts become stronger and more effective? There is no way to know until we try.