One can seek short-cuts on long-term problems. But for all the excitement about innovation in Africa, one simply cannot 'leapfrog' all problems.
There is much enthusiasm about the scope for technological innovations and related information-sharing platforms to unlock Africa's growth, development and even democratic potential.
Much of this enthusiasm is justified and good. A hot-off-the-press example of this is a recent post by Michael Hastings on why technology-based 'solutions' for health, education, financial services and other issues provide major reasons for optimism about Africa.
That post relates to this week's World Economic Forum (Africa) in Abuja, Nigeria (7-9 May).
This event also reveals, and champions, considerable business and social innovation in contemporary Africa in order to resolve / avoid infrastructural and developmental bottlenecks, scale-up markets, reach new consumers, provide new services, and so on. Some of the innovation is in terms of new forms of relationships (principally between business and government) for achieving inclusive, sustained and sustainable growth in Africa. Some of these are innovative relationships around innovative technologies, such as increasing government transparency through making more public documents available online.
As said, this is very well and good: may a thousand million centers of energy and daring send ripples of hope and waves of green, inclusive growth through the continent. I do not say this sarcastically. For example, one solution to Africa's energy poverty (and one with considerable other benefits, including in carbon footprint terms) is the growth in off-grid localised generation and distribution networks.
Yet the mini-grid trend is itself indicative of an issue that all the WEF-style discussion of innovation, entrepreneurship, and leapfrogging cannot and should not obscure.
This is that businesses and enterprises of all sizes in Africa are, like its individuals and families, typically compelled to be innovative in many respects because of poor state capacity to provide basic public goods and services. My former Oxford Analytica colleague Hannah Waddilove remarked this week that what can be seen positively as 'entrepreneurship' for example in providing bottled water for retail is also indicative of the failure of state service-provision.
Previous posts have noted that the scope for public-private cooperation in meeting the development agenda is unrealised, as is the untapped potential for private provision of public goods in Africa. However, a theme of these posts has also been that the state still very much matters for long-term sustainable development in Africa, perhaps more than ever.
In this sense, innovation that by-passes state incapacity may be imperative, welcome, or inevitable. Yet it creates a risk that short-cuts and leapfrogs -- valorised as 'innovation' -- might have a long-term negative effect. They might result in undermining the capacity or incentive for the state to respond to, and provide for, its citizens. If we tie progress to innovation that has a primarily commercial orientation but do not 'innovate' to link this in to building more capable, responsive states, many people might be left behind (even more) when the leaping begins.
Jo
See this previous post on 'corruption as innovation' in the context of state incapacity and bottlenecks.
See these pieces on inclusive growth (here), and a post-WEF Davos one on inequality and risk in Africa's growth path (here).
See too a WEF-related post I wrote this week on the 'African Arguments' platform (Royal Africa Society), here.
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