There’s an interesting story about school children in Kenya.

To provide some historical background, Kenya has ethnic settlers from the 2000 BC Cushitic, Nilotic, and Bantu people among others. Arab traders started their colonies during 1 AD, Portuguese explorers stopped by 15th century. The British colonized Kenya 18th century.

British implemented a divide and conquer ruling (also seen in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Nigeria, Cyprus, Ireland as well) . This created ethnic identities, territorial divisions, which lead to unequal treatment and people were pissed.

The Mau Mau movement rose in the ‘50s , gained independence in ‘63 with Jomo Kenyatta as the first PM.

70s and 80’s phase is completely wild all around the world right - same in Kenya - there’s a very interesting book called North of South that covers this era. But in Kenya, given it was the first time they were independent from the start of time, there were a lot of political struggles which led to a 1-party movement. Eventually in the 90’s it moved to a multiparty democracy and in recent times there has been peace and growth.

Back to the school story - now for the longest time a lot of kids were skipping schools and everyone got worried. They started investing a lot of money into boosting the infrastructure, implementing stricter rules etc but nothing changed.

One fine day, a doctor was visiting a school and noticed the kids had parasite problems and gave them deworming pills and ta da! Problem solved. This eventually became a big thing Kenya deworming the kids.

Sometimes we see symptoms of the problem and we immediately react and try to mitigate it. The actual cause of the problem might be completely something else.