My Beauty Best Teacher

An Adafruit highlight:

If you’re interested in education (which means you’re thinking abou the future), you should watch JSB’s keynote from the DML conference this week. “Entrepreneurial Learning isn’t about creating entrepreneurs. It’s about people having an entrepreneurial way of learning.” “Entrepreneurial Learners are Makers and Tinkerers.” Tinkering is a way of dealing with constant change.

CNN reports:

Residents of Kano in Nigeria are struggling to keep alive their centuries-old tradition of hand-dying delicate cloth a deep indigo blue, with their trade under threat from the realities of modern commerce.Kano's pits are said to date back 500 years and were once the center of a bustling Saharan trade in dyed cloth.There are still over 120 pits in Kano but only 30 of them are functioning. Many of them have been filled in, often because families have moved on to other businesses, but sometimes because they're waiting for their children to grown up, dig out the pit and reclaim their tradition.

From Design Magazine:

Image via interior-zine

Design is all around is. Try and black out everything that has been designed and you will be left with a black hole. It is the building block of our society, culture and even the most humble existence, past and present and will be the pacemaker and indicator of progress and changes to come...Design education should be a catalyst for prosperity for all, not just for a talented or elitist few

Prioritising design education and including design thinking in general and business education will have a far-reaching impact than just addressing challenges and obstacles that the design world is currently facing.

On its criticality:

The advocacy and importance of the creative industry as a vital building block of any society and contributor to the economy should never be underestimated and asks for serious consideration and inclusion. Life skills identified to be lacking in society should be fostered from a young age. As a school subject, Design is not only relevant as a viable career option for talented creative learners, but it is also vital for the development and growth of a new generation who are strategic thinkers, creators and thought leaders in other fields – providing them with a mindset for entrepreneurship and innovation.

More here

In Stealth of Nations:

Kate Meagher, in her 2010 book Identity Economics chronicles the recent history of the informal garment and shoe manufacturing clusters in Nigeria's Igboland. It's a fairly pessimistic look at the possibilities for these merchants.

She writes, "If the travails of Igbo informal producers have revealed anything, it is that even the most dynamic and well established informal enterprise networks lack the ability to assert their productive interests against the distruptive agendas of local officials, let alone to defy national or global economic and political interests." Meagher calls for strengthening the capacity of informal operators while leaning on the government to find ways to work with informal merchants -- thus allowing them an opening to turn the identity economics of tribal social networks into something that can develop across regions and transcend traditional divisions...[continue reading]

Reuben Abraham writing in CNN:

image courtesy of Business Edge

Entrepreneurship and business are rarely accorded a serious place in discussions around drivers of economic development. A cursory look at the numbers makes this seem very surprising. China has pulled approximately 600 million people out of absolute poverty since Deng Xiaoping unleashed market reforms in the late 1970s. Never in human history have so many people been pulled out of grinding poverty is such a short span of time.

Similarly, South Korea has gone from a per-capita income of $291 in 1970 to $20,000 today. Even reform laggards like India have managed to pull a couple of hundred million people out of grinding poverty since economic reforms were initiated. Across the world, we find countries that created an entrepreneurship and business friendly environment were successful in reducing poverty drastically.

Despite the evidence, there are strong lobbies in emerging markets that make the claim that business friendly policies are anti-poor. Personally, I am in favor of redistribution, like these lobbies claim to be. However, what do you redistribute? One cannot, after all, redistribute poverty. One can only redistribute wealth, and to redistribute it, you have to create the wealth first...[continue reading]

Rodney Brooks founder of iRobot writing in Tech Review:

“Making more competitive products relies on a tight intertwining of design and manufacturing. And making it domestically keeps transportation costs low and creates short supply chains that respond quickly to customers.

“More significant, it offers the chance to empower factory workers with information technology, just as the personal IT revolution has empowered office workers. We can create tools for ordinary workers, with intuitive interfaces, extensive use of vision and other sensors, and even the Web-based distribution mechanisms of the IT industry.”

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From Africa Industrialization Day where Thomas Mattig of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in conjunction with the Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria stated:

Nigeria is experiencing solid economic growth for several years now. However, employment remains low and can hardly catch up with population growth. The sectors of the economy that are booming such as the banking, telecommunications and insurance industries, do not create many jobs.

 continuing:

...even a large bank branch will only employ a handful of people, while a factory can give employment to a whole town.

regarding the oil industry:

The prosperous petroleum sector is built virtually on extraction and not value addition as Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt refineries remain comatose.

and the critical informal sector:

It is also widely acknowledged that the informal sector provides over 70 percent of employment in the country, yet many workers daily face harassment and intimidation from Government officials at all level whilethere is no systematic programme of training and re-training in the face ofchanging technologies and market dynamics, credible programmes ofaccess to credits as well as decent workspaces.. This must change, workersin the informal economy need state support in capacity building, finance and patronage and social protection.

More here
via All Africa

In the spirit of various initiatives that focus on indigenous self-sustaining DIY philosophy's.We spotlight The Appropriate Technology Centre (‘the Centre’) a brainchild of Kofi Sam covered earlier. The centre's recently proclaimed manifesto makes a number of observations and contentions:

Uncle Joe's roofing sheet fabrication facility

At first glance,there’s nothing extraordinary about the shed sitting next to Uncle Joe’s mud brick home in the coastal Ghanaian village of Atabadze.Inside there’s a certain familiarity about the clutter – tools propped up against stacks of roofing sheets and machinery – the kind of organized chaos you’d find in tool sheds and workshops anywhere in the world. But the sheer ordinariness of it of all belies the fact that this is the birthplace of a remarkable and important technology.Those roofing sheets – Uncle Joe made them,out of local river sand,using only his own ingenuity and the electric vibrating table in the corner – he made that too.
Uncle Joe is an innovator.He has brought his community something they never had before:a roofing material that is both sturdy and affordable.Before his intervention,his neighbours had a hugely unsatisfactory choice between using expensive,often imported, manufactured materials, or local unprocessed thatch, at a fraction of the price,but at the cost of durability;there was no middle ground.But Uncle Joe was not so sure this was necessarily a matter of ‘either or’; why couldn’t there be an alternative that was both manufactured and local, he wondered.
So he set about answering his own question,experimenting with local environmental inputs and different manufacturing processes.And through his efforts he developed a process to produce roofing sheets from river sand – a sturdy,high quality product The poor need opportunities to generate income and work themselves out of poverty manufactured from a sustainable local resource. To produce these sheets,Uncle Joe even had to build his own electric vibrating table,a vital piece of machinery that blends the sand with a small quantity of cement (added as fixative),enabling the mixture to set.All in all,an unlikely triumph of innovation considering the poor infrastructure and extremely limited availability of capital and manufacturing know-­‐how in his rural locality.
Uncle Joe is a prime example of the creativity and dynamism that are blossoming in Africa; one of the manyindividuals and communities championing innovative technologies that,by mobilising local resources to provide essential goods and services,and create income generation opportunities for the poor,can deliver sustainable and equitable ‘grassroots’development across the continent.And yet his story also illustrates the uphill task they face.
For all the originality of his idea and his dedication to implementing it,Uncle Joe cannot currently make ends meet manufacturing tiles – he simply cannot afford to hire the labour he needs to produce viable volumes.Without capital,his operation will not reach a level at which the technology can really impact the livesof the poor.

In conclusion

For the global development community (donors,NGOs,etc) Uncle Joe’s story is one of opportunity: it highlights an opportunity forthem to create the opportunities the rural poor need to work their way out of poverty.To date the governmental and multilateral institutions with the resources and clout to change the lives of those living in poverty have favoured...To make meaningful inroads into poverty reduction in Africa,the development community must foster the growth of robust local industries that mobilise the continent’s substantial environmental resources to meet local needs and create opportunities.Technologies like Uncle Joe’s manufacturing process are the foundation on which such industries are built,and donors should support their development,whether by investing in the entrepreneurs pushing innovative local solutionsor by providing the tools and training rural communities can use to unlock the developmental potential in their local environment.

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Robert Neuwirth writing in Foreign Policy:

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.

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Today World Maker Faire, New York City opens, in just over two weeks Maker Faire Africa will debut in Cairo Egypt. A year ago Anil Dash wrote a timely and relevant piece about the 'Maker Movement' and its revolutionary attributes:

Image of Alex Odundo's Sisal Decoriticator at Maker Faire Africa 2010

Today, Dale Dougherty and the dozens of others who have led Maker Faire, and the culture of "making", are in front of a movement of millions who are proactive about challenging the constrictions that law and corporations are trying to place on how they communicate, create and live. The lesson that simply making things is a radical political act has enormous precedence in political history; I learned it well as a child when my own family's conversation after a screening of Gandhi turned to the salt protests in India, which were first catalyzed in my family's home state of Orissa, and found out that my great-grandfather had walked alongside Gandhi and others in the salt marches that followed. Today's American Tea Partiers see even the original "tea party" largely as a metaphor, but the salt marches were a declaration of self-determination as expressed through manufacturing that took the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party and made it part of everyday life.
To his last day, my great-grandfather wore khadi, the handspun clothing that didn't just represent independence from the British Raj in an abstract way, but made defiance of onerous British regulation as plain as the clothes on one's back. At Maker Faire this weekend, there were numerous examples of clothing that were made to defy laws about everything from spectrum to encryption law. It would have been only an afternoon's work to construct a t-shirt that broadcast CSS-descrambling code over unauthorized spectrum in defiance of the DMCA.
And if we put the making movement in the context of other social and political movements, it's had amazing success. In city after city, year after year, tens of thousands of people pay money to show up and learn about taking control of their media, learning, consumption and communications. In contrast to groups like the Tea Party, the crowd at Maker Faire is diverse, includes children and adults of all ages, and never finds itself in conflict with other groups based on identity or politics. More importantly, the jobs that many of us have in 2030 will be determined by young people who attended a Maker Faire, in industries that they've created. There is no other political movement in America today with a credible claim at creating the jobs of the future.

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A recent World Bank report 'Industrial Clusters and Micro and Small Enterprises in Africa: From Survival to Growth' states that:

Existing studies on natural industrial clusters in Africa have found that the lack of managerial skills among entrepreneurs running micro and small enterprises is a major constraint for innovation and growth in the clusters. As a part of this study, pilot managerial skills training programs were conducted in two industrial clusters on an experimental basis, where a group of randomly selected entrepreneurs within the clusters were given three-week long crash course of based management such as bookkeeping, marketing, business planning, and production management. The impact evaluation of the experiments showed significant positive impacts of the training programs on value added and gross profits of enterprises.

Continuing:

Raising the current survival-type industrial clusters, which have been formed as a coping mechanism to weak investment climate, into more dynamic innovating clusters will be an important avenue for fostering growth of micro and small enterprises in Africa. While national efforts to improve investment climate and investments in human capital are undoubtedly important, there could be more targeted policies to be formulated, in complementing general policies, to support growth of micro and small domestic enterprises using existing industrial clusters as a natural springboard for their growth. In that context, the study discusses the merit of cluster-based managerial human capital development to build steps toward more innovation-oriented clusters, the importance of sound spatial planning policy, particularly at the local level in the context of urban planning, the need to expand market access and economic linkages for industrial clusters including regional integration and linkages with large enterprises

via TCI

Is Africa listening? Dani Rodrik writing in Al Jazeera:

We may live in a post-industrial age, in which information technologies, biotech, and high-value services have become drivers of economic growth. But countries ignore the health of their manufacturing industries at their peril.High-tech services demand specialised skills and create few jobs, so their contribution to aggregate employment is bound to remain limited. Manufacturing, on the other hand, can absorb large numbers of workers with moderate skills, providing them with stable jobs and good benefits. For most countries, therefore, it remains a potent source of high-wage employment.Indeed, the manufacturing sector is also where the world's middle classes take shape and grow. Without a vibrant manufacturing base, societies tend to divide between rich and poor - those who have access to steady, well-paying jobs, and those whose jobs are less secure and lives more precarious. Manufacturing may ultimately be central to the vigour of a nation's democracy.

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Will Connors writing in the WSJ:

Tiffany Amber design  Jane Hahn/Getty Image for the WSJ

The Nigerian lace industry also opens a window on broader change in Africa as a whole: As the consumer class expands, so, too, has the underground, informal economy...While the informal sector, from street-side welders in Kenya to sign makers in Senegal, has created jobs and lifted incomes, it also has strained urban infrastructure. As many as 90% of African city dwellers work in the informal economy, untaxed and unaccounted for, according to the Geneva-based U.N. International Labour Organization.Economists estimate that Nigeria's informal economy is at least as big as the country's roughly $200 billion formal one.

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Why didnt they diversify? Or did they? The Economist reports:

Botswana is facing change. Its diamond bonanza, which accounts for nearly half the government’s revenue and over a third of its GDP, will not last much longer. Production has peaked and deposits may be exhausted by 2030. Growth has been slowing from an average annual rate of 13% in the first five years after independence to 5% in 2000-05 and 3% since then, including a 5% contraction in 2009-10. Last year it bounced back to 7% and is expected to remain at about that level for the next two years. But the government may not be able to keep spending at its present level of 40% of GDP.
For the first time since independence, the budget is in deficit. The World Bank has urged the government to slash its bloated public workforce by a quarter. But Mr Khama is resisting. With an official jobless rate of 17% (and a real one probably closer to 30%), he says he is loth to turf more people out of jobs. But neither, he insists, can Botswana go on living beyond its means.

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Claire Melamed in the Guardian:

A worker moves brass tubes at a factory in Zhuji, Zhejiang province. In China, it was agricultural growth that started to reduce poverty; manufacturing jobs actually contributed less. Image: AP

There's a not-unreasonable assumption, based mainly on the experience of east Asia, that building up low-skilled manufacturing industries, such as clothing or electronics, would create jobs that reduce poverty. And the creation of export-processing zones have often been recommended by donors to attract investors to these sectors. But, to reduce poverty, jobs in agriculture or services are just as important. In China, it was agricultural growth that really kick-started poverty reduction; manufacturing jobs actually contributed less. In many countries it's the services sector – providing haircuts, selling food, cleaning houses – that is the real growth area for jobs. The potential for expansion in any sector is finite, and too much focus on any one sector is almost certain to reach a dead end before too long. The key is a mix of sectors and the ability to move people and money easily between them.

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In The FT:

“The question for executives at consumer packaged goods companies is no longer whether their firms should enter the region, but where and how,” A.T. Kearney, the management consultancy, wrote in recent research that found west African subsidiaries achieving nearly twice the profit margins of their parent groups. Other research amassing at investment banks and international financial institutions highlights the potential for Africa – or at least parts of it – to become a significant driver of global economic expansion in coming years.
No one sensible believes that the road will be smooth for all of sub-Saharan Africa. But in almost every sector demand outstrips supply. “The reality is Africa is probably 30 years behind China and 20 years behind India on the developmental curve in that regard, so I think the Chinese and Indians will start to look at parts of Africa as potential sites for low-cost manufacturing and outsourcing and things like that,” says Michael Lalor of Ernst & Young.

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Rob Davies, SA Minister for Trade and Industry argues:

...that African economies need to move up the value chain of production and diversify their economies away from extraction, and, in the South African case, the consumption-driven sectors.

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Responding to a report that 1 in 3 Africans are in the middle class Andy Sumner and Nancy Birdsall write in the Guardian:

...is someone living on just over $2 a day "middle class"? Two dollars is the average poverty line for developing countries, meaning you're poor or middle class – but what about in between?

On definitions:

Courtesy of SACCA

There are various definitions of middle class in what is a burgeoning area of interest for poverty reduction research – stimulated perhaps by ideas about the middle classes as change-makers or catalysts.

Or should we be looking at those with a 'A Culture of Production'

Courtesy of travelpod

What about the idea of a catalytic class? This is the idea: the catalytic class is a group, whose expansion triggers internally driven, self-sustaining, political and economic change, a group whose exertion of pressure for better governance and economic reform leads to change when the class hits a certain size (in population or economic or tax revenue size). The interests of this class coincide with the interests of the poor.

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In the WSJ:

Sustained economic growth in Africa has produced for the first time a broad middle class, one that cuts across the continent and is on par with the size of the middle classes in the billion-person emerging markets of China and India.The rise of a middle class in the world's poorest continent is a dramatic marker for the global economy. At a time when the U.S., Europe and Japan are struggling to grow, Africa is beginning to beckon as a consumer of what other nations produce, thanks in part to a young population more upwardly mobile than ever before...[continue reading]