C K Prahalad will be in South Africa at the end of March. He is one of the most popular development economists around at the moment having coined the phrase, “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” to explain the financial rewards of investing in products aimed at the world’s poorest.
He would be beaming about a recent technological innovation. Voxiva, a United States company, has built a system that lets health workers send reports by cellphone directly from the field. First deployed five years ago to track disease outbreaks in the Amazon basin, Voxiva’s system is also being used in Indonesia for avian flu reporting and in India in testing of a new drug for leishmaniasis, a disease spread by sand flies.
Up until recently things worked somewhat differently in Rwanda. “Information from clinics is written on a piece of paper that a porter carries by hand to the district before the information can be brought to Kigali,” the country’s capital, says Dr Innocent Nyaruhirira, who holds the cabinet-level post of minister for HIV/AIDS. “We are a country of one thousand hills, so it often takes one month to receive a message from the field about a disease outbreak or drug shortage.”
Operating through servers in Kigali that are owned by the South African telecommunications operator MTN, the Rwanda system gets field clinic reports via text message, a voice-call system or on the Internet using a computer or Internet-enabled cellphone.
Prahalad certainly didn’t originate the idea of letting market conditions take care of poverty. Adam Smith in 1776 coined the phrase, “the invisible hand” to describe the way in which self-interest often results in the most good for the most people. In the “Theory of Moral Sentiments” written earlier in 1759, Smith makes the case for sympathy in business and investments; the idea of a moral compass.
Each generation requires a vision that resonates most closely with the age. Prahalad has stimulated debate and discussion. With clever companies like Voxiva developing clever solutions to communication problems it looks as if people are starting to listen.
Echoing the cry of every volunteer who has ever run away to some disabled and corrupt country, Dr Nicholas Garrigan rages at a British diplomat, “You guys come here and don’t recognise that this is Africa. You have to fight violence with violence, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
The scene is from the film “The Last King of Scotland” in which we view the atrocities of the Ugandan regime led by Idi Amin through the lens of a fictional character. Without that remoteness the film would probably be unwatchable, much as the events of the Rwandan genocide had to be softened through the focus on the experiences of one person in “Hotel Rwanda”.
For generations youngsters have fled the quiet conformity and constraints of their communities and families to come to the distortions, lawlessness and abandon of developing countries. They come without understanding the context in which they find themselves or the events that are happening around them. When their home countries preach against the situation they are experiencing – confusing the chaos with freedom – then they shout back, as Garrigan does, “You can’t hold this country to your standards, it isn’t the same.”
They are perfectly correct, it isn’t the same. But, by denying the local population the opportunity to be treated equally and fairly before a common and clear set of laws, they aid in perpetuating the type of atrocities they frequently accuse their own governments of committing.
In the film, Garrigan maintains the delusion of calm around him until it is far too late to leave. In "Dark Star Safari", Paul Theroux revisits Malawi where he had been a Peace Corp volunteer. He expresses rage and anger at the neglect and destruction of all that he worked for. The seeds for that outcome were present when he was first in Malawi, and he too was unable to do more than hope it would all work out.
Not that the more developed nations have an any more sophisticated approach to dealing with barbarous regimes.
Democracy is not about regular elections and a centralised state. What it is about is the redistribution of power towards the individual. No matter how kind and compassionate a leader is, no matter how tolerant and sophisticated, they can never run your life as well and efficiently as you can. They are not you.
By insisting on negotiating only with a single set of political interests foreign governments make the same mistake as misguided volunteer tourists; they assume that a centralised state will always be benign.
The success of most developed nations is that, a long time ago, their citizens realised that it is best to assume that your leaders will be incompetent, corrupt and dangerous if left to their own devices. A wide range of mechanisms are in place to move power around so that dangerous quantities never collect in any one place. Consider it a bit like uranium 235.
Far from sending money, or demanding a few democratic institutions as sops to “representation” foreign states interested in developing nascent states should act to meet with as many representatives as possible. Encourage a duality of opinion and methods of interaction; law societies, journalists, rate-payers associations, animal welfare groups, child welfare, tourism societies, NGOs, charities … anyone or anything that acts to create work opportunities and promote different aspects of the whole of society.
No one group can represent an entire nation’s multitude of interests, no matter how well meaning. And, if that one group is led by someone entirely incapable of caring at all, then you have the final agonised lines of Garrigan as he is tortured by Amin, “You’re a child, that’s what makes you so fucking scary.”
The Whythawk team is going through an exciting period of growth; rolling out enterprise development ratings in Gauteng, and developing a new model for rating HIV/AIDS organisations, is pushing us hard.
We have also been on an informal road-show introducing our concept to various organisations. A presentation yesterday amongst a wide range of interest groups was a welcome reminder of how far we have come. The team is so immersed in our work that we take a lot of the information for granted. It is only once we come to explain it to others that we are reminded again of how much we have learned and the differences between the development and commercial sectors.
No matter what you buy for yourself there are always choices and options. Analysts, journalists, and bloggers vie for your attention to communicate their opinions on everything from watches, to doctors, to movies and microwave ovens. You can get contrarian opinions on health food versus junk food.
The development sector is a massive no-go area.
Who says that the products and services offered by NGOs and charities are any good? You can give anything away, but that doesn’t make it useful. Charities themselves experience this when they go on donation drives. Old clothes are donated that are so far beyond use that the charities are left worse off, since they have to now have the added expense of carting the stuff to the dump. If well-meaning individuals can be so short-sighted that they don’t realise that their “gifts” are of no use, why should we take it for granted that the organisations themselves are any better?
As in everything in life, we would expect a diversity of approaches and results; some outstanding and innovative, some depressing and destructive, and everything in-between.
Outside measurement allows a harmonisation and collected endeavour. Sprinters are timed over the same course to see whose ideas of training and strategy are best; computers are measured against each other running benchmark software to see which delivers best results; consultants compare return-on-equity measures to see who delivers better profits. The purpose is not to compare approaches, or define the mechanisms by which these results are delivered, but to analyse the final results achieved in an objective and uniform way.
Poverty only becomes entrenched when you genuinely don’t care what you give away to those less well-off than yourself. That is what entrenches poverty.
If you consider the poor a market worthy of competitive services then we can find the most effective and efficient way of bridging that divide.
Learn about the Spyder Curve
