By: John Golden Fifteen years ago, the Economist called Africa, “The Hopeless Continent” seeing it as nearly impossible for it to ever develop. Africa In 2014, with the end date of the millennium development approaching and Africa passing all of them, the Economist published “Africa Rising” showing the incredible growth of the African continent. Today, six of the ten fastest growing economists worldwide are in Africa, and Africa as a whole is growing at an astounding rate. Africa is this century’s economic miracle story. What caused this miracle? Technology.
Mobile technology in particular has changed the way Africa does business by eliminating need for people to send messages far and away by hand, taking days or call for hours on busy signal lines. Mobile technology has eliminated countless jobs in the telecom industry in Africa and of people taking the efficient messages upstream, but it has led to amazing growth and development and helped to propel a continent forward by reducing upstart costs for businesses. The only way to develop sustainably in Africa was to cut jobs in favor of technological infrastructure and use an efficient private sector to ensure an efficient Africa. A great exemplar of the power of cutting jobs to boosting growth is Mo Ibrahim. Mo Ibrahim rose up from Sudan and became one of Africa’s first self-made billionaires when he used his technological prowess and engineering capabilities to change the course of a continent when he founded Cetel, a telecom which strived to put phone lines all over Africa and to unleash African development. Ibrahim believes that if he had stayed in Sudan, government would have stifled his innovation. He told Foreign Affairs, “It was a stifling society with government controlling all aspects of life. You could not get funding for any sort of project. There was no infrastructure to support you. And there were a lot of social pressures to just take a government job and have some babies, and that’s it.” See, when government guarantees jobs without attempting to spark real growth, there cannot be any substantial progress and countries are forced to deal with a continuing backwards state. Without a chance of unemployment, there is no major motivation to move beyond mediocrity to the level of success Mo obtained. A guaranteed government safety net of jobs nearly failed Mo in Sudan. Mo dealt with this bias for jobs without progress again when he went into new countries and markets, saying, “In other countries, where telecom was a monopoly of the government when we came in, problems originated from a lack of appreciation for the role of the private sector. You end up with a regulator who comes from the incumbent, and they perceive us as a competitor.” Incumbent institutions guarantee stability to a point but also stop any progress. By attempting to protect jobs for the telecom workers in those countries from loss at the hands of a new efficient disruptor, the telecoms in those countries almost stopped tremendous growth from Mo’s lines. When asked the role entrepreneurship should play in creating jobs, Mo said that it should play the main role and that governments are generally bloated with too many jobs, needing to cut not add as these jobs create inefficiency. While more jobs are always desired, sometimes they get in the way of efficiency for the general economy, especially when considering emerging economies. Read more about Mo Ibrahim and the full Foreign Affairs interview here: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/interviews/2014-12-15/africa-calling Read more about the technological revolution’s aid to Africa’s economy here: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/africas-amazing-rise-and-what-it-can-teach-the-world/253587/
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |