Pia K. Hansen: Oprah’s $40 million could stretch further in Africa

On Monday, allAfrica.com reported that Oprah Winfrey was cutting the ribbon at another school in South Africa. The Seven Fountains Primary School in Kokstad, KwaZulu-Natal, is a public school with about 1,000 students that Winfrey visited in 2003.

At that time, reports allAfrica.com, the school was completely dilapidated, but Oprah’s Angel Network returned to train local people to make bricks for construction and then complete the renovation of the school.

Oprah’s Angel Network – which according to Winfrey’s Web site is a nonprofit organization that awards grants to community projects in underserved communities – spent about $1.6 million upgrading the school’s 25 classrooms, one library, a computer center and sports fields.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Oprah’s Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. She spent approximately $40 million building a boarding school on a 52-acre campus in Henley-on-Klip, in the Guateng Province of South Africa.

Winfrey has taken some heat for spending so much money on a school in a developing part of the world. She has been criticized for providing rooms and amenities that are too luxurious.

Winfrey’s boarding school will accept 152 seventh- and eighth-grade girls in 2007 – picked from more than 3,500 applicants. When all grades from seventh through 12 are full, 450 girls will attend the school. That’s a construction cost of more than $80,000 per student, if you count only that first group. The total project cost for the new Lincoln Heights Elementary school on South Ray Street is $10.5 million. It’s built to hold a maximum of 550 students – that pencils out to a little more than $19,000 per student.

Of course, the two numbers can’t be directly compared, but there is no question that Winfrey built a state-of-the-art facility in a part of the world where drinkable running water is a luxury.

Last fall, I spent a month in Lesotho, a tiny, very poor kingdom completely surrounded by South Africa. The poverty I saw was extreme. Villages headed by children, where all adults have died from AIDS, are not uncommon in rural areas. Children work from when they are 7 or 8 years old, often dropping out of school or never enrolling.

I should have been excited that Winfrey was building a school in a part of the world that has come to mean so much to me. But I wasn’t. I found the project opulent and elitist. I kept thinking of how many people could get clean running water for $40 million.

Oprah’s Leadership Academy for Girls struck me as a typical American undertaking: a lot of movie-star-induced hype, a lot of footage of smiling black girls, singing and clapping, all for the benefit of Winfrey’s weekly ratings. Yes, that really is how cynical I am.

It was when people began asking me why Winfrey wasn’t building a school for underprivileged children in the United States that my thinking began to change.

I believe that without indigenous leaders, millions of dollars in foreign aid won’t make a dent in the challenges Africa faces today.

So was my problem really that – just like some people who ask why Winfrey isn’t building schools in her own country – I felt these girls didn’t deserve a $40 million school?

No, that’s not it – but if that $40 million was mine to spend on schools in the South African region, I would have gone for two $20 million schools – or even four $10 million schools.

I would have chosen to give an average education to many, instead of a stellar education to a few.

Winfrey seems to be approaching education from the opposite side of the spectrum, focusing on the few who have outstanding potential to become strong leaders.

And there’s no getting around the fact that the initial expense is paid for by Winfrey’s money. She made it herself and it seems like she has plenty more. She can do with it what she wants. Let’s just hope the girls stay on the continent where they are so desperately needed.