Cultural Forms of Organization: Importance of Learning Process and Human Empowerment for Sustainable Development in Modern Africa

Abstract

The African continent's population basically still relies on agriculture. Twothirds of the African population rely their employment and food on family farms, defined as farms that rely on family labour, which works on 62% of the land. Recent trends in African development are placing family farming at the centre of the international agenda so as to achieve positive change throughout global food systems. The Africanist anthropology both worldwide and in Japan, reflecting the fact that African societies are basically established on family farming, the discipline has maintained focusing on the relationship between humans and environment from perspectives of cultural context in the fields. Therefore, future of family farming has huge importance both in practice and theory of African development. Based on these trends of African studies and development, the author, focusing on the field of African family farming, will try to explain rural development in three African countries-Niger, Kenya, and Malawi—based on his own research. The author attempts to clarify that, notwithstanding the global trend of worldwide sustainable development, rural development in Africa has several potentially important characteristic dispositions, based on family farming: culturally embedded dynamics of learning, cultural forms of organization, and culturally tractable ways of empowerment.