Africa's informal economy can boost innovation

For half a century, science and technology (S&T) have promised to bring prosperity to Sub-Saharan Africa, but little progress has been made. This is in part because the African way of making and trading is largely informal, and Western industrialisation has failed to respect informality.

Western science and economics can drive technological advances in the developing world but work better in a system where processes are formalised. What happens, for example, when governments or multilateral institutions introduce factories and corporate parks?
Not much. A factory might employ a dozen skilled workers, but the investment rarely trickles down to the 'indigenous' economy. And enterprises may only import raw materials and export the resulting goods, creating a closed loop with no links to domestic industry.