My Beauty Best Teacher

Debbie Arroyo calls for the establishment of an indigenous Venture Capital Industry.
"...In any country seeking to grow, entrepreneurs need good access to the necessary finance to enable good projects get off the ground. The time is therefore ripe for Nigeria to take action by putting in place the conditions necessary for the take off of an efficient venture capital industry. This means putting in place the necessary financial infrastructure, removing the regulations that restrict competition in financial services and encouraging institutional investors like pension funds and insurance funds to take more interest in venture capital investment, via the provision of incentives like tax benefits.Most importantly, enabling the change of culture that would help Nigerian entrepreneurs understand the importance of equity funding and the benefits to the business and the economy in general..."

Why have Sub-Saharan Industrial Clusters exhibited sub-par performance? How can this be mitigated? Why is this important? Kate Meagher analyses(PDF) three Nigerian examples: The Ilorin "traditional weaving cluster" and the Aba "mechanized garment and artisanal shoe clusters" In her summary she states:
"...the processes of economic ungovernance unleashed in all three Nigerian clusters are not a product of cultural failure or of a failure to form global linkages. On the contrary, the three study clusters display a rich tapestry of production and trading networks operating across ethnic and religious divides, overturning local gender-based divisions of labour, and extending across regional and national boundaries into the global trading sphere. These networks have underpinned the development of market-oriented informal institutions such as training and credit systems, a division of labour, subcontracting arrangements, and supply and distribution systems. Although embedded in ties of ethnicity and religion, these African clusters have also provided a framework for change and innovation, for ethnic incorporation and the rationalization of production and labour relations...the failure to pay proper attention to the role of the state is leading to a squandering of the remarkable informal institutional dynamism evident there,and abandoning clustered firms to the immiserizing governance capabilities of clandestine commodity chains. While efficient informal institutions and global linkages constitute valuable resources for cluster development, they cannot ‘substitute for the state’, as so many cluster analysts seem to believe. Efforts to make them do so are destroying and perverting local forms of economic cooperation rather than promoting it..."

Jagdish Bhagwati in a letter to Bono characterises the problem of "absorptive capacity" as it relates to Aid and Africa."...will aid be used productively or will it be wasted?..." He also brings to attention the phenomenon known as the "aid curse""...when aid was provided, the recipients were likely to reduce, rather than increase, their own savings efforts..."
Via Zoo Station

Ashoka Fellow "...Moussa Kane has begun to organize Mali's informal economy into a formal association that compiles data on the informal sector and provides basic services to impoverished entrepreneurs. The association provides startup equipment and in-kind loans to entrepreneurs and offers business and financial training to help small ventures succeed. His organization is the first company of its kind in Mali to be owned by its due-paying members, and it is financed and run entirely by members of the informal sector. Its services will be accessible to the approximately 40 percent of Mali's population involved in the informal sector...Although it provides basic sustenance to many, the informal sector is disorganized and risky. Members of the informal economy, like the street vendors that crowd Bamako's avenues, do not have access to loans, are harassed by the government for their occupation of unregistered public space, and are vulnerable to complete collapse in the event of an illness or accident. Furthermore, most "informal entrepreneurs" do not understand the essentials of bookkeeping, business management, and resource allocation, and are therefore unable to turn a consistent profit..."

Sub-Saharan Africa's unbalanced educational terrain with a lack of emphasis on technical and vocational training has mitigated its ability to industrialize. Adrian Ziderman's working paper (PDF), "Financing Vocational Training in Sub-Saharan Africa" provides a roadmap for the financing options and alternatives.It states that the goals of education are "...facilitating the development of effective, efficient, competitive,flexible, and responsive (demand-driven)training systems to meet national economic and social needs, and the needs of individuals...Traditional informal sector training markets, characterized by non-structured, within-firm skills acquisition,have served the sector well. However the system is too narrow to cope with the increasing challenges emanating from technical change, the need for skills enhancement, and the widening of geographical markets. Public institutional training has not been able to adapt to the skills needs of the informal sector. Thus, an increasingly central role for specialized training providers (external to the firm) is now seen, both for entry training into new skill areas and developing markets, as well as for informal sector workers and proprietors..."

The Centre for Global Development publishes an essay on the paradox of international Aid. "...it is possible that aid could undermine long-term institutional development, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. By reviewing the evidence of the potentially negative effects of aid dependence on state institutions, the authors provide a thorough analysis of the institutional effects of aid. The conclusions are two-fold: countries which receive a substantial portion of their revenues from foreign aid may be less accountable to their citizens, and they may face less domestic pressure to maintain popular legitimacy. The more aid countries receive from abroad, therefore, the less incentive they have to invest in effective public institutions... "
via PSD Blog

James Shikwati highlights the lack of emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa:
"...For Kenya, and by extension Africa, entrepreneurship is understood to mean activities carried out by the illiterate and the uneducated. The ‘Jua Kali’ (open air market) sector predominantly focuses on modifying items for household use. The education system is designed to produce workers and not innovators. Most people follow pre-set manuals to the already existing products that may not necessarily fit the needs of the continent. Very few individuals are willing to risk and venture into the uncharted seas of economic opportunity..."

The Guardian comments on the rising pragmatism of the Communist West Bengal goverment in India,a shift that has relevance for the 'peoples' regime of Ethiopia and other communist/socialist movements elsewhere in the continent:
"...Calcutta, the first capital of the British Raj, is a bastion of Indian communism. The left has run this Indian state for almost three decades, a period which has seen West Bengal become a byword for labour unrest. But in recent years, like its ideological cousin in China, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has been busy rebranding itself - bearhugging foreign investors and Indian businessmen...West Bengal's increasingly warm embrace of foreign capital has paid off. The state has just sold 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of agricultural land to an Indonesian group in a $10bn deal for a software park and industrial zone building motorbikes, across the river from Calcutta. The state says investors from Singapore are keen to fund and build a new airport. Last year West Bengal signed a $235m contract with P&O to build India's first private port..."

Brett D. Schaefer writes that"...To reach upper-middle-income status (gross national income per capita of $3,256 or higher), the average sub-Saharan African with an income of $536 would have to experience real compound growth in per capita income of over 5 percent for over 35 years.[11] To become as wealthy as the United States, the average country in sub-Saharan Africa must grow at 5 percent per year for nearly 90 years. Quite simply, without high, sustained levels of eco­nomic growth, sub-Saharan Africa will not close the gap with the developed countries..."He concludes that "...Foreign assistance alone cannot increase eco­nomic growth and development. Achieving these objectives requires the political will to implement policy change to expand opportunities and remove barriers to growth. Developed countries can assist development by encouraging good policy and opening their markets to developing country products, but success in development ultimately depends on developing countries’ adopting and implementing policies that promote economic freedom, good governance, and the rule of law. Only then will developing countries be on the path to economic development..."

Gumisai Mutume writes about the need to renew emphasis on manufacturing:
"...Building -- or rebuilding -- African industry is a major challenge. Across the developing world, countries that have successfully shifted from producing raw materials into manufacturing have done so in stages. They started by moving into the processing of primary commodities, a process known as vertical diversification. Some African countries, for instance, are now exporting leather instead of just hides, textiles in place of cotton, or paper, plywood or furniture instead of logs. Côte d'Ivoire, now a major fish- and wood- processing country, has managed to do this. So has Senegal, which also shifted from simply selling raw fish into processing and packaging its produce."Our entrepreneurs," says Botswana's President Festus Mogae, "should look for technology from partners to enable them to process their products and sell value-added goods abroad."..."

Franklin Cudjoe writes about development and economic freedom:
"...African leaders need to implement a series of reforms. They need to decentralize the power and ownership of resources, lower taxes, reduce the number of bureaucratic steps for business start ups, and establish an honest means of property acquisition while helping to define, defend and divest such property through the enforcement of contracts...Such an approach would release enormous entrepreneurial energy into wealth creation. The net effect gives power to real people who could then afford efficient and cleaner technologies or save and later reinvest in other sectors of the economy. Generally, the wealthier a country becomes, the more likely it is able to purchase food in the global market and afford more productive technologies that increase crop yields..."

Reviewed by Saha Santosh, Asian Industrialization and Africa is a collection of essays that offer a "directional" approach to achieving industrial growth within the continent. E. Wayne Nafziger's case study states the following:
"...Japan learned a lesson in the 1870's that many contemporary African countries have still not learned or only learned recently:that importing replicas of Western institutions and capital intensive technology may exacerbate unemployment and balance of payments problems if the local country lacks the capital and skills needed...Meiji Japan imitated,borrowed from, and modified techniques and approaches from advanced Western economies. Aquestion today is: Can Sub-Saharan Africa be as successful emulating,borrowing, and adapting innovations and procedures from the West and Japan?If anything, the contemporary Sub-Sahara has to be even more cautious than Meiji Japan in importing foreign capital and technology. Since present-day Sub-Saharan countries are even more technologically backward relative to the most technologically advanced economies than Japan was relative to the West in the late nineteenth century,it is probably more difficult to adapt technology to local conditions and indigenous production.For example some foreign productivity-raising textile technologies available to early developing Japan were labor-using while most technologies for today's latecoming Sub-Saharan African countries are labor-saving..."

William Easterly in the Washington Post writes.
"...Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders…Development everywhere is homegrown..."
via PSDBlog

The BBC reports on Ethiopia's addiction to Aid.
"...For most of the past three decades, it has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash.It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time.Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined.Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive...Why, with so much international support, have things gotten worse and not better?...Woldu Menameno, a farmer in the Tigre region of northern Ethiopia, believes he knows at least part of the answer."For years things were very bad. There was plenty of aid, but people were lazy. They just had the food and sat in their places," he says."They didn't participate in anything, but just counted the days. They sat in their houses, dreaming of how to get more food..."

Thabo Mbeki states that:
"...An African university cannot but be an important and critical part of the African Renaissance. The challenge for an African university should be viewed as a call that insists that all critical and transformative educators in Africa embrace an indigenous African world-view and root their nation's educational paradigms in an indigenous socio-cultural and epistemological framework. This implies that all educational curricula in Africa should have Africa as their focus, and be indigenous-grounded and orientated. Failure to do so may result in education becoming alien and irrelevant..."
Via AfricanExecutive

Festus E. Obiakor writes about the need for what he describes as 'African Centered Education', "...It is becoming increasingly clear that Africa will never get its due respect on the world’s stage unless its nations and peoples begin to see themselves as truly independent and self-reliant. The fact remains that Africans have the natural resources to institute nationalistic, patriotic, and African-centered educational programs...Educational think tanks must be organized to present innovative ideas that meet the cultural, socioeconomic, and political needs of the people. To a large extent, exchange programs must be instituted to revive African-centered, community-based collaboration, consultation, and cooperation..."

Lars Thunell of the IFC comments on a changing approach in development philosophy "...More and more development and aid organizations – multilateral banks, foundations, nonprofits – are looking at an entrepreneurial approach to development. They are asking how they can harness the power of private capital, free enterprise, and social entrepreneurship to bring about needed change,” Thunell said. “This is where IFC, with 50 years of experience in this area, can play an even larger role”..."
Via NextBillion

Wilf Mbanga comments on the dereliction of duty displayed by the African Union "...Africans are angered by the continued unwillingness of African rulers to deal with human rights issues. The fact that they held the latest summit in Sudan in the first place shows their disdain for human rights", said Lovemore Madhuku, chairman of Zimbabwe's National Constitutional Assembly. "The fact that they are passing the African Union chairmanship to a coup leader in Congo makes them laughable. Where do Africans turn now?..."

The Economist writes "...As developing countries and the former Soviet block have embraced market-friendly economic reforms and opened their borders to trade and investment, more countries are industrialising than ever before—and more quickly. During their industrial revolutions America and Britain took 50 years to double their real incomes per head; today China is achieving that in a single decade. In an open world, it is much easier to catch up by adopting advanced countries' technology than it is to be an economic leader that has to invent new technologies in order to keep growing. The shift in economic power towards emerging economies is therefore likely to continue. This is returning the world to the sort of state that endured throughout most of its history. People forget that, until the late 19th century, China and India were the world's two biggest economies and today's “emerging economies” accounted for the bulk of world production..."

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes:
Prof. Ali Mazrui’s address at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Dakar, Senegal-based CODESRIA on the theme “Intellectuals, Nationalism and the Pan-African Ideal” reveals the growing talks, African-wide, about the implications of the African culture and the continent’s development process. The central theme of Mazrui, currently Chancellor of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, address is twofold. Why African intellectuals are mediocre and why this informs their inability to appropriate Pan-Africanism ideals into Africa’s development process. I would prefer why African elites have not being able to appropriate African cultural values into Africa’s development process as other elites in other parts of the world have done in their development process.

Using the East African region as a continental reference, Mazrui, known globally as one of Africa’s leading thinkers, reveals how undemocratic political climates undermined Africa’s intellectual growth, and how, by extension, this impacted on the continent’s development process. Unlike other ex-colonies, such as Japan, of which Mazrui used greatly as an example to show how African elites failed to match their Western education with their African values in both their intellectual development and the continent’s progress, the trouble with African elites and the continent’s development process is that, the elites play with ideas are not informed by Africa’s innate, indigenous values or ideas by rather the Western ideas that they have had in formal schools.

Mazrui himself shows this contradicting and confusing state of the African elites in this statement: “Uganda had for Head of Government a person who had changed his name because of admiration of the author of the great English poem, Paradise Lost. Obote became Milton Obote out of admiration of John Milton.” While in the spirit of universal intellectuality Obote could admire Milton, his admiration for a non-African poet and the fact that he is a Head of State, may have let Ugandan and African youth to admire more non-African elites than indigenous Ugandan and African elites. The central issue here is role model, values, and inspiration in the development process. In this sense, Obote did not deeply help the growth of African values and her progress. If Obote had done so, and by implications of Mazrui’s own account of the mediocrity of African intellectuals, and greatly touted a non-African value not because he was educated in Western paradigms but, like most African elites, because either he did not understand African values deeply enough or was mesmerized by Western values or did not respect African values or was confused about African values in relations to the continent’s progress.

Still, Mazrui’s argument that “The capacity to be curious and fascinated by ideas has to start early in the educational process. The spirit of intellectualism has to be nourished from primary school onwards, but it can die at the university level if mediocrity prevails,” reveals that the problem of Africa’s intellectual growth is not only at the university level but also at the primary school level; where the values, images and examples which are heavily European-centred are formed. So, if the African primary education system is heavily Western structured, it flows and grows to the high school level, and then later to the university level; thus sowing a culture of mediocrity, in terms of African values not predominantly dictating the intellectual life of the African child early enough. It is in this sense, that Ghana’s Dr. Y.K. Amoako, the former UN Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary, has observed that Africa is the only region in the world where foreign development paradigms dominate her development process. Not only does this indicate that Africa’s development process is not “culturally close” to Africans, but also a revelation that African elites are mediocre in both their intellectualizing and their direction of the continent’s progress.

This has made the African elite mediocre in their own innate environment and in their development process struggles. The mediocrity has come about because Africa’s elites do not think deeply from within Africa’s values first and the enabling aspects of their colonial legacies second in the continent’s development process. Mazrui himself testify of the Japanese elites doing so in their country’s development process. “In this connection it is worth bearing in mind important differences between the westernization of Africa and the modernization of Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japan’s original modernization involved considerable selectivity on the part of the Japanese themselves (“Western Technique, Japanese Spirit”). The whole purpose of selective Japanese westernization was to protect Japan against the West, rather than merely to submit to western cultural attractions. The emphasis in Japan was therefore on the technical and technological techniques of the West, rather than on literary and verbal culture. The Japanese slogan of “western technique, Japanese spirit” at the time captured this ambition to borrow technology from the West while deliberately protecting a substantial part of Japanese culture. In a sense, Japan’s technological westernization was designed to reduce the danger of other forms of cultural dependency.”

This process should starts from childhood to adulthood based on a curriculum skillfully cast in African values first and any other borrowed ones second; more especially, in preparing African elites’ minds at an earlier stage: from primary and high schools levels. It is in this process that African elites, from their early formation to their university crystallization, will be “culturally close” to the African society, will be culturally close to the African’s progress in the continent’s development journey. By not being culturally close to the African society, African elites could not undertake the Japanese cultural selectivity in relations to their colonial legacies and the enabling aspects of the global culture, and, have, therefore, become both heavily technologically and culturally dependent upon the Western world despite their superb innate culture having huge technological and cultural values for progress. Writes Mazrui, “The nature of westernization in Africa has been very different. Far from emphasizing western productive technology and reducing western life-styles and verbal culture, Africa has reversed the Japanese order of emphasis. Among the factors which have facilitated this reversal has been the role of the African university as a vehicle of Western influence on African culture.”

The challenge for African elites today is how to overturn the contradiction they have caused in Africa’s progress by thinking first from within African values first, by matching African values with the enabling aspects of their colonial legacies and the global values, and by intellectually linking this “to the wider world of scholarship and science.”

Putting Africa First:The Making of African Innovation Systems "...brings together a selection of original contributions, which analyse African economic issues within the theoretical framework of 'innovation systems'. With its combination of conceptual, policy oriented, empirical, and cross-regional analyses this book appeals to scholars, policy makers, and development practitioners along with other students of African economic affairs..."
via InnovationAfrica