Running. The cool dusk of Kampala and Mike Gaffney from Galway on his shoulder. It was only touching seven, but Ray Jordan knew that the November night would be scarce. In a few hours he would be gone, up into the hard bush lands of the northeast.

Before he left, he wanted to stretch out every minute he could find in the capital city.

Running. Down into the valley and through the slum, the one where tens of thousands of people tread the lines of poverty and death. He knew the route now, 15 years after he'd left Limerick for Africa because he wanted to have his eyes opened. The yards were melting into each other.

Running. Up into the vocational training school he'd set up more than a decade ago with GOAL, the one that picked teenage boys up off the streets and gave them a trade. He wanted Mike to see the school, to see where 5000 kids had been taught how to work their way past destitution.

Running. The ruby sunset had gone by the time they met Robert, one of Ray's former students, on their way back through the slum. Robert was kicking up the dirt after a day's work with a satchel of tools over his shoulder when he saw his teacher. Back then he was just a street urchin headed for prison or a grave in some alley or ditch when he learned his craft. It gave him a better way.

If the night's running was meant to show his companion how energy and hope can bring the African people back, Ray had picked the right route. If he could do it – if it would show the world that Africa isn't a continent of despots and beggars beyond saving – he would take us all running through Kampala.

Ray Jordan is CEO of Self Help Africa, a new NGO that came about when he merged Self Help Development International with UK group Harvest Help. Set up in the African awakening that followed Live Aid, Self Help was a group that had spent 20 years helping people graft their way to a better future, not through charity but through education.

But when he joined them a year ago, Ray saw how a small operation with so few resources was working with a hand tied behind its back. So he went for the merger. He says there are so many people doing the same work on the ground in Africa, yet they're all ploughing different troughs and moving in different circles. Locking heads to get things done just makes sense.

"Self Help was doing an awful lot of good work, but it never got off the ground to the scale of Trocaire and GOAL. When I came into the organisation I'd seen the work they'd done in East Africa, and one thing I wanted to bring to it was to see it do more. My idea was to join with Harvest Help and create Self Help Africa. Straight away we've gone from working in five countries to nine."

His drive to help is gritty and real. He knows what works on the ground, because he's been there and built it with his own hands. Sixteen years - not just spent in Africa, but in other places too, like Iraq and Afghanistan - is enough time to twist your head around what's going on out on the fringes of our world.

His first taste of development work came in 1992, when he was a young engineer with McMahon and Hardiman searching for a new vision of life and work. "I was very happy working in Limerick, playing rugby with Garryowen, having great old craic. But I always wanted to give something back. I always thought that if I was going to do that, better to do it while I was young. I went to Uganda with a group called Volunteer Missionary Movement, who were setting up a vocational training centre. I was teaching fellas to be bricklayers and carpenters, like a FAS course really."

He went to Hoima, up near the border with The Congo. He came back for a while to study, to marry Sheila, to raise Adam and Darragh. But those first three years in Africa had given him a new perspective on the lecture hall. The real learning was out there, where life comes to you in syllables - food, water, earth. Best education he ever got.

"There were no phones, no electricity. You'd write a letter home and it would take six weeks to get there. I vividly remember getting the Limerick Leader the time Garryowen won the AIL in 1993. Of course, I didn't get the paper until six weeks later. But there I was in Northern Uganda, jumping around like a lunatic when I read it. News is always news, as long as you don't know it."

In the worst of places, he found the best of people. Two decades of brutal dictatorship had done nothing to dent the gentle spirit of the Ugandan people – it had merely robbed them of the means to mark their own way forward. But in those rural circles, where days and hours taught him new definitions of struggle, he saw the parallels.

"I was in rural, rural Uganda, and some of the stuff I was hearing about this country still young with its freedom was what I'd heard my grandfather saying years before about Ireland. No matter where they are people just want the same things – education for their kids; a roof over their head."

Development work has given him a hard insight into the human condition. His life is a calendar, and the past 16 years are bookmarked by the disasters he's witnessed - Hurricane Mitch, the Rwandan genocide, Kosovo, the Pakistan earthquakes.

"Some of these things are man made, and you learn to see them coming. The current one between Georgia and Russia has been coming for the last four or five months. But people are the same all over the world. If things are badly managed, all communities will react the same – shellshock, then humanitarian supplies, then conflict over the supplies, then the cameras go and people realise how badly off they are and turn to violence. You have to be tolerant enough to know that people have to solve their own problems. We can't rush in and tell people that we know better."

So he turns to Africa, the apex of poverty and war and suffering. Or so we've been told. It's been easy for the West to look at Africa the way it has - as a continent of difference, a place of dark spaces and Conradian fear. The west has to fix those visions, because Africa isn't waiting for approval to change.

"Africa has over 900 million people – an expanding market. The most proactive country working in Africa is China. China has gone in there in the last five years with no strings attached, doing business left right and centre. They're doing it on all levels. They look at Africa as a place to get key natural resources; a place where 900 million people need shoes and candles and matches. The key to Africa's success is going to be trade, not aid, and they're not going to wait around for the West."

It's in that void of understanding that Jordan and Self Help are working. Some think that Africa is too difficult, too bad a a place to offer any more than pity and handouts. That's fine - millions of Africans move from hour to hour in such helplessness, and they need emergency help. But the bigger picture needs fuel as well.

Give a family a bag of rice, and they'll eat for a day. Give a man a bag of cassava, teach him about irrigation and better farm practice, and he'll eat for a year. He'll trade his surplus, invest profit in his farm and the cycle grows.

"It's not about charity. You get nothing for free. We're working with agriculture research, finding better varieties of crop. If we give a farmer a bag of cassava, a better variety of maize, he has to give us back four bags of cassava, which go off to other farmers. We have savings and credit schemes – loans of €50 that have to be paid back with 7 per cent interest. With that €50 a man will make two or three hundred. But he still has to pay it back. It's not about charity. It's about people doing it for themselves."

He's seen it work. Uganda has completely picked itself up from where it was in 1992. But the good stories can't mask the awful, brutally honest stuff. There are still a million people displaced by tribal warfare in Northern Uganda. But there are millions more kids in school today too. Africa will be on its feet in 50 years, he says. No question. But with energy on the ground, it could be there in 20.

In the end, it comes back to how the West is willing to deal with her. Go there, he says. Work in the townships, let its people steal your heart. Then decide how to make things better. Some days, you have to demand honesty at the United Nations. Some days, you just have to lace up your shoes and run through the slum.