TRABRADIA

The project “Translating Brazilian Development Ideas in Africa” (TRABRADIA) is funded by the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” (EXC 2052) from October 2026 to September 2030.

Brazilian Development Ideas and South-South Cooperation

Brazil has long exported development models to Africa — from Paulo Freire’s literacy pedagogy in the 1970s to its national school feeding program since the 2000s. Such models rarely arrive intact. Ministries, advisers, donor agencies and civil-society organizations rework them to fit domestic political interests, administrative realities and budgets, so that what is eventually implemented can differ considerably from what was originally promoted. This project traces these processes of adaptation across three cases, asking who drove them, why, and with what consequences. In doing so, it puts a common claim about South–South cooperation to the test: that it is more horizontal, and more responsive to local needs, than development cooperation with the Global North.

Three cases are studied, each from a different disciplinary perspective: Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in post-independence Angola (history); Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in Kenya and Uganda since the 1970s (drama and theatre studies); and Brazil’s National School Feeding Program in Kenya and Malawi since the 2000s (political science). Across all three, we ask who the translators of Brazilian ideas have actually been, how and why those ideas were reworked for African contexts, and where the results have lived up to the ideals of South–South cooperation.

TRABRADIA is co-directed at the University of Bayreuth and Moi University (Kenya), with further team members at the Federal University of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro State University (Brazil). It belongs to the Cluster’s Research Section “Translating”.

Translating Brazil’s School Feeding Model in Kenya and Malawi

Brazil's National School Feeding Program (PNAE) is among the most widely emulated social policy models of the Global South, combining universal free school meals with mandatory purchasing from local family farms. Kenya and Malawi have both received sustained Brazilian technical assistance on school feeding since the 2000s, yet have taken markedly different paths in designing and financing their national programs.

Our analysis at the University of Bayreuth centres on the concept of policy translation, which holds that policy models do not travel as fixed blueprints but are actively rebuilt by the actors who receive them. We therefore ask which elements of the Brazilian model were taken up in Kenya and Malawi, which were quietly dropped, and who did the translating: Brazilian advisers, Kenyan and Malawian officials, or intermediaries based in the Global North. We are particularly interested in how domestic political interests, administrative capacities and agricultural structures shaped what the model became. The component combines expert interviews, archival and documentary research and comparative case study analysis.