spread of behavior analysis

Is the way that behavior analysis has been disseminated in recently colonized countries a good thing?

A Smidge of History

So the field of behavior analysis slowly started to emerge from psychology around the early 1900s as a way to study the behavior of basically anything that behaves. Through the years, different branches have formed, one of which was the branch of behavior analysis that focuses on helping people develop socially appropriate skills, AKA: applied behavior analysis. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is a relatively new approach to helping people acquire important skills and stop doing bad things, starting arguably somewhere in the 1950s perhaps. The reason for this history lesson is to explain that ABA is the science behind everything we do here at Encompass.

Since then, applied behavior analysis has mostly been known as a field that works with special needs, mainly autism, although as a science, it can be used anywhere there is behavior of some person or animal. It is quite a new field and along with that, it has started to spread from the US to many different countries around the world.  The numbers go as follows, but for the purposes of this paper, I’ll be focusing on the African continent, not the whole world: 16 master’s level board certified behavior analysts on the continent of Africa and 38,160 doctorate and master’s level board certified behavior analysts in the US.

Obviously the numbers are quite different, especially because the population of Africa is roughly 1.2 billion and the population of the US is approximately 328 million.  Many more practitioners per person in the US than in Africa.

So Why Are You Giving Me a History Lesson? 

When me or any other behavior analyst looks at these numbers, we tend to think, oh man, we need to spread behavior analysis to Africa so that it can benefit all those 1.2 billion people.  We think, the US has tons of resources and Africa doesn’t have any, so it’s only natural that we should be funding programs in Africa.  We think we have all the knowledge, so it’s our duty to go to ‘civilize’ those africans and teach them our science. We think that our model works really well in the US, so we can transfer what we’re doing to Africa. There are a few reasons that these seemingly logical conclusions might not actually be the best thing to do.

Sending money

Long run not sustainable, Doing everything for free, so there’s not buy in on the part of people getting services because it’s just free

Send American bcbas/professionals without training indigenous ones

Not training indigenous people to do help themselves, Not empowering, Lady that comes and consults with a few families that have a bunch of money

Using an American model for training

Training using a western/American system rather than taking the time to learn

Encompass is doing this to combat all of that:

money within kenya

Money is sustainable- creates buy in on family part, never a good idea to do things for free

Training my replacement

Training families which empoers them to work with their own kids instead of sitting back and waiting for some white person to do it

Family Training/community development stuff-people involved in decisions to make it their own

Taken a year to learn Swahili, the culture, and consult with Kenyans and because of that, doing a family model of training