Blog Post | ABE in Action: How do Positionality and National Strategy Impact ABE Outcomes in Kenya and Rwanda?

Drawing on the diverse professional experience of its researchers, the JICA Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development (JICA Ogata Research Institute) shares insights and lessons from its research activities through this blog series. In this post, Research Fellow Kaizuka James examines the impacts of the ABE Initiative, formally known as the Master's Degree and Internship Program of the African Business Education Initiative for Youth, exploring how ABE alumni have translated their experiences in Japan into innovation and social impact, with a focus on the roles of positionality and national strategic alignment in Kenya and Rwanda.

Author: Kaizuka James, Research Fellow, JICA Ogata Research Institute

In February, I had the privilege of conducting in-person fieldwork in Kenya and Rwanda. JICA fieldwork is something of a whirlwind tour – the next few weeks would see me conduct more than 20 interviews with ABE Initiative ex-participants and other stakeholders in both countries. The research this time focused on the topics of positionality and national strategic alignment – I will explain these in detail in a moment, but these themes came about as a result of the analysis of the previous year’s interviews: in short, this research sought to examine how ABE ex-participants’ impacts had been enabled or hindered by these two factors. In this blog, I would like to share some of my findings, fresh from the field, still hot and ready.

I should begin by explaining what I mean by “national strategic alignment” and “positionality”. Now, those may sound like highly conceptual academic terms, but please forgive me for a moment while I elaborate. They are more straightforward than they sound.

For “national strategic alignment”, Kenya and Rwanda are both major beneficiaries of the ABE Initiative, having had around 200 and around 60 participants, respectively. Nonetheless, their strategies could be characterized as opposite approaches. Kenya’s strategy has favored diversity, with fields of study among participants encompassing engineering, law, medicine, IT, and agriculture among many others. Conversely, Rwanda’s approach to ABE has been tightly focused around IT and agriculture, producing two very different scholar profiles. Both are well aligned with their individual national strategies; Kenya’s large economy is itself highly diversified, while Rwanda has defined itself by its ambitions in the IT sector and made IT a core component of its national identity and future vision of itself. “National strategic alignment” refers to how this has affected ABE’s outcomes in each country.

“Positionality” is a bit different. “Positionality” refers to how the individual’s position within their workplaces and wider society has affected their ability to make impacts. To give an example, if you’re a trained engineer working in an engineering company as a manager, you’re more likely to be taken seriously and have your ideas listened to than if, say, you’re a trained engineer who works as a junior-level regular employee in the marketing division of a cosmetics company, due to the better hierarchical position and the better skills match.

The question, then, is the degree and extent to which these factors make a difference among ABE alumni. Let’s look at what ABE alumni have been up to and the factors in their success.

Let me lay out a familiar example to showcase what positionality is. Maybe you want to have spaghetti for dinner, and your partner wants to have curry. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you won’t, but it’s basically an equal choice. Of course, for lunch at work, it might be a different discussion – if your boss is a ramen mega-fan, there’s a good chance you’re just going to have to get used to eating a lot of it! The difference is where the decision-making power rests, and this is something that can be applied across the whole of society. In Kenyan and Rwandan workplaces, this decision-making power was the key point of interest.

Kenyan and Rwandan ABE scholars with better positionality can be directly correlated with those who have been able to make the greatest impacts. Positionality can refer to status within an organizational hierarchy (i.e. whether a person is a regular employee, a supervisor, a manager or a director), it can refer to how well-matched their skillset is with a person’s job, and it can refer to how well the individual is able to utilize their personal networks and assets. In all of these circumstances, the correlation was striking.

The most common form of impact in both Kenya and Rwanda was the use of skills and knowledge from Japan to conduct training and mentorship for other employees, especially subordinates, mentees, and supervisees. I interviewed numerous ABE scholars who had implemented such programs, some of whom had significantly improved workplace productivity. One ABE scholar – an engineer leading a team of about ten people – had used his position to share his engineering knowledge and experience from Japan, and had even implemented some new managerial practices such as encouraging group reflections and a “within our means” approach to problem-solving not dissimilar to how issues are approached in lean manufacturing, with the focus being on solutions which are as low-cost and high-impact as possible.

Moreover, the better the positionality, the higher the impact. The ABE scholars who graduated further in the past, due to their career progression and higher likelihood of promotion and seniority, were frequently able to affect changes on the national level. Reflecting the diversity of the Kenyan approach to ABE, one scholar in the field of security had been involved with counter-terrorism efforts in a senior capacity, making use of the research he did in Japan to make Kenya’s border safer through the use of drones. Another person, from Rwanda, developed expertise in robotics in Japan, and now his educational robotics curriculum has attracted national-level interest and is being piloted across 26 schools (please look forward to a feature-length piece on him coming soon!).

As for national strategy, the findings indicated that it acted as a kind of force multiplier - due to the natural opportunities afforded by strong strategic focus, such as more open positions, more money and investment, and more prestige, scholars are able to advance their positionality at an accelerated rate. In Rwanda’s IT sector, this was quite visible with cases such as the educational robotics example, and also with the example of Mr. Mugarura Amiri, who I talked about in a previous post. Conversely, in Kenya, there is significant growth potential across many sectors – with ABE scholars spread across the entire economy, they have the opportunity to make many contributions as their careers progress. In fact, at least a few noted their desire to rise to the very top, with one, a civil servant, saying he’d like to be the Permanent Secretary! National strategy empowers positionality by providing more opportunities to showcase skills meaningfully and by providing the capital, both physical and intangible, to allow ideas to be pursued.

Really, this mission’s findings can be summarized as an old-fashioned story of how good human resource management by organizations can produce significant results. This is positionality in action. By matching skills with appropriate opportunities, by formulating mechanisms to incorporate ideas, and by rewarding with promotions and greater responsibility – as any healthy and well-functioning organization should do – ABE scholars can generate major and impressive impacts. These have come in numerous forms – both systemic and day-to-day.

There are many more things I’d like to dive into in this blog going beyond only the core research findings. Kenya and Rwanda are wonderful countries, and I felt warmly welcomed by the ex-participants in both, to whom I wish to express my gratitude for their kind participation. I wish that I had the space to even consider some of the more interesting cultural similarities to Japan – for example the rivalry between Chicken Inn and KFC, which rather mirrors the famous Kinoko-no-Yama/Takenoko-no-Sato rivalry. But those are stories for another time and place, and I can already feel the grimacing disapproval from my colleagues, so let’s get back to the main point.

So what results were observed? It was very clear that individual capacity is not always a sole determining factor in outcomes, and that positionality and national strategic alignment can enable or hinder depending on the circumstances that ex-participants find themselves in. In human security terms, it shows how empowering even a single talented individual can empower others as well. ABE scholars and their experiences exemplify this, because those who have reached the highest positions have had the greatest impacts, and they are often helped along by the opportunities that arise through alignment with national strategy. For businesses and employing organizations, the upshot of this is that “good human resource management pays off” – by promoting ABE ex-participants up the hierarchy, and by taking advantage of their unique skills and aligning them with national objectives, their talents can be utilized with greater efficiency and spread within organizations.

From a JICA perspective, promoting the spreading of best practices of ABE alumni in human resource management and emphasizing the importance of giving decision-making power to returnees is therefore paramount for the program’s long-term success. Indeed, the intersection of positionality and national strategic alignment has created results in both Kenya and Rwanda which, in some cases, surpass all expectations. ABE scholars have made both high-level and deeply impactful contributions in fields such as counterterrorism and IT, and also day to day, bread-and-butter impacts such mentorship and skills sharing. These are only possible with good positionality.

Let me sign off, then, by repeating this message; individual capability is only part of the ABE story, and organizational and strategic factors are also key determinants of outcomes. Employers of ABE graduates can lean into these factors by integrating them into their human resource strategies and overall business planning. In doing so, the findings of this research strongly indicate that ABE graduates’ impacts will spread to the benefit of employing organizations. The seeds of ABE are in place, now it is up to employers to provide the environment for them to grow.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s and do not reflect opinions of JICA or the JICA Ogata Research Institute.