Alumni Profiles

The Importance of Being Dispensable Allison Howard '99 believes poor countries need a hand, not a handout By Anne Downey '95G

The foundation started by Allison Howard '99 began as an intellectual exercise. "A friend asked, 'what would you buy with $5,000 seed money?'" Howard recalls. "And the answer was 'nothing disposable.'"

When Howard and her friend Bowen Hsu prepared to leave the Peace Corps in 2005, their desire to leave something behind resulted in the Kgwale le Molle Foundation, which gives educational scholarships to boys and girls from rural villages in the Mpumalonga Province to attend South Africa's most prestigious secondary schools. Thirteen-year-old Lehlogonolo "Joy" Mashego is KLM's 2009 scholarship recipient. Orphaned three years ago, she and her older sister were living in an unfinished home without running water or electricity. Bright, poised and positive, Joy was one of the best students in her village, and her scholarship to Uplands College is helping her achieve her dream of becoming a research scientist. "Joy was ranked number ten in her class after her first quarter," Howard says. "She truly exemplifies our mission."

Howard grew up in Bedford, N.H., and came to UNH having never been out of New England. She majored in political science and English, and was profoundly influenced by professor Janine Clark, who now teaches at the University of Guelph in Canada. "Janine studies women and economic development in the Mideast, and she was so exciting to listen to," Howard remembers. "The whole world came out of her mouth." In return, Clark says that Howard was very bright, mature and articulate, "but I was most impressed with how her understanding of political issues deepened over her four years, and how she focused her commitment to them. That's what made her unusual."

After graduation, Howard backpacked through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. "Seeing a society ravaged by war opened my imagination, and changed my life," she says. "There was so much I didn't understand. Alongside disease and malnutrition were party boats and Coca Cola. How is it that Coca Cola has supply chains to every corner of the planet, but medicine can't get there? Once you start asking those questions, there's no going back. And then I had to figure out how to engage in it professionally."

After working for a London-based non-profit that promoted the arts in healthcare, and IPPNW, a Boston-based NGO whose mission centered on war prevention and public health, Howard joined the Peace Corps in 2003, in the NGO capacity-building program in South Africa. She worked with an organization that trains Limpopo Province communities and villagers to choose, manage and maintain their own water systems, embedding HIV/AIDs education into their existing programs. She learned a lot about the complexities of Africa's problems, and the well-intentioned philanthropic responses to them. "I was profoundly disturbed by the racism I saw," she says. "For example, we couldn't hire a black engineer because there are none. There was 65 percent unemployment, and essentially no middle class. A whole generation of people has no critical thinking skills because they were deliberately under-educated under apartheid. I saw textbooks that had been donated that sat in a corner, were eaten by termites, and eventually used to prop the door open."

Her response was to develop a mechanism that would support the rural population, but is their own endeavor (the name "Kgwale le Mollo" comes from the Sepedi Proverb, "If you have partridge, I have fire"). "Charity doesn't build economies," she says. "I learned that if you're going to engage a vulnerable population, you have a deep responsibility to really listen to what they need, do your best to help them develop it, and then work yourself out of the job. Making yourself indispensable doesn't help them." In the villages, she met gifted children who spoke six languages, who had clear leadership ability and a strong desire to help their people. "South Africa needs leaders now," she says, "so why not build up the entire system by giving exceptional kids access to the best education available?"

With the help of an angel investor, she and Hsu have built KLM by leveraging challenge grants from South African entities, and raising money in the United States. They started the foundation, but it is run by South Africans, and once they raise enough money to reach an endowment level, they will have an even lighter touch. They are currently supporting six children at Uplands, and, looking to their futures, are building a relationship with the University of Capetown in Pretoria.

After leaving the Peace Corps, Howard got a master's in international development from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. She worked with the Clinton Foundation in Ethiopia and is currently a program director for Containers 2 Clinics, a non-profit that improves healthcare in underserved rural communities in Central America by using recycled, retrofitted shipping containers as clinics. While she has respect for what can be achieved with more broad-based initiatives, KLM's mission still rings true. "Ultimately, I don't think there's a downside to investing in one person at a time," Howard says. "Nelson Mandela was a scholarship recipient."