This subject is not one always considered in terms of affecting Africa’s development. However, this issue is one that has had, and still has, hugely adverse affects on the potential for development within developing countries.

If you have ever run a small company in the UK, or have known anyone who has, you will probably be aware that the issues over Intellectual Property (IP) protection are of particular concern to small businesses. They often cannot afford the £1000-£2000 price tag of trade marking a company name, let alone the price of patenting an idea, which ‘starts’ from £1000.

So imagine how these kinds of prices affect a small business in sub-Saharan Africa.

But this problem actually has had more of an effect that of simply blocking potential innovators from creating wealth for their economies (please see my article on Capitalism for issues regarding innovation and wealth).

It almost goes without saying that whilst the small business struggles to protect its IP, the big businesses flourish, with the costs involved being insignificant in terms of the multi-billion pound enterprises.

‘Under the global patent system, intellectual property can only be produced by people in white lab coats employed by companies with huge amounts of capital at their disposal’ (McLeod 2007:53)

However, this also means that these large businesses can afford to buy out the smaller companies, or buy their ideas. Or, they can just steal them, as they are not protected. This is exactly what happens to knowledge and innovation within developing countries. Giant multi-national corporations have the ability to take those ideas and use them to profit themselves and subsequently the economies they represent, often the West, but recently also Asia.

So in developing countries, these MNC’s (multi-national corporations) have access to ideas and innovatio that are not protected, and in many cases, especially in the past, are held by people who either are not covered by the IP system (which will be discussed shortly) or do not have access to the IP protection system due to lack of money or knowledge.

A good example of this is giant pharmaceutical companies and the use they have made of tribal communities in rain-forest countries. The knowledge held by the people in these communities has been collected and refined over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and the culmination is that the scientists from MNC’s can reduce their workload by an astonishing amount, changing success rates it is estimated, from one in ten thousand, to one in two.

‘Using the knowledge developed by indigenous people in developing countries increases by 400-fold a scientist’s ability to locate the plants that have specific medicinal uses… by consulting with local communities, bioprospectors can increase their success ratio from one in ten thousand to one in two in their quest to find active ingredients that can be used in medicines.’ (McLeod 2007:52)

Busy Lizzie plant - example of ‘biopiracy’ claim campaigners

However, one of the problems with protecting this knowledge passed down through communities from generation to generation is the practicality. In the society of the West the issues would be along the lines of: who actually owns the patent or who thought of the idea or made the discovery. The idea of community knowledge, or knowledge gained collectively over extensive periods of time is not one that fits into the Western system, and is therefore conveniently ignored.

‘[The system] ignores the collective nature of knowledge and denies communities patent protection… It would be as if someone came along and copyrighted the stories in the Bible…The written version of the testament could not exist without the effort of communities… The same is true of useful plants in Third World countries… Unfortunately, this is not an argument that makes sense in most established theories of economics – so, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie, the poor people lose again.’ (McLeod 2007:54)

In 2006, The Observer carried out some research, and discovered that the UK had allowed at least seven patents to be placed by companies on products that were found naturally in indigenous African plants. (Barnett 2006)

Another major issue, and one that has been particularly prominent in the last decade is that of AIDS and HIV drugs. The major pharmaceutical companies in the West have been providing drugs to places such as Africa, but have also been holding out on the patents they own on the drugs, trying to stop other companies or non-profit organisations making the drugs more affordable. Although in recent times there has been progress in this area, largely due to publicity, public outrage and a fear of profit loss by the companies, the damage that these companies have caused through these patent restrictions is huge.

‘…A price-cutting war …appears to have broken out among drug manufacturers, embarrassed by the outcry in recent weeks over the preventable deaths of millions and afraid of losing the potentially huge African market to copycat generics manufacturers.’ (Boseley 2001)

Zerit - Patented AIDS/HIV drug

Once the problem of lack of access to IP protection in developing countries and the power of MNC’s with access to IP has been considered, there is still another issue regarding this topic that hinders developing countries from developing. It is actually the reverse - that of IP laws being put in place within these countries. Whilst this on the surface may seem to possibly counteract the previously discussed problems, the reality of the situation has actually worsened the problems.

The IP laws that have been placed on these countries under a standard named ‘TRIPS’ (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), have been forced on the countries by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). TRIPS was not written, or even influenced, by any members of the public within the countries to be placed under the standard, and the consequences of the countries not agreeing were severe.

‘TRIPS forces developing countries to adopt intellectual-property laws that often run counter to their national interest, and if they don’t comply, they’re threatened with economic blackmail in the form of trade retaliations.’ (McLeod 2007:57)

The consequences of these IP laws are that it actually decreases people’s ability to innovate, as their markets are flooded with imported goods to which their local industries cannot compete. This is due to a lack access to inventions and knowledge, which would allow the countries to build up their resources, which would allow for a catch-up on other countries such as those in the West.

‘Strengthened intellectual-property laws in developing countries decreases the ability of local communities to gain access to technological information… As poor nations strengthen their intellectual-property regimes, their markets increasingly are dominated by imported goods, because their local industries can’t compete.’ (McLeod 2007:57)

It is important to consider than when countries in the past were developing, including western countries and particularly the US, their IP laws were extremely lax. The process that the West is blocking from developing countries is exactly the one that the West used to build its own economy. Unfortunately, it appears that the West is now stopping the developing world from innovating by manipulation of IP for their own gain.

‘…All developing countries had very weak patent and copyright laws. The United States in particular had extremely lax IP laws at the turn of the twentieth century, which allowed it to freely build up its cultural and scientific resources… Now the United States and other rich countries want strict enforcements of IP laws that ensure developing countries will remain uncompetitive within the globalized economy.’ (McLeod 2007: 60-61)

References

McLeod, K. (2007) Freedom of Expression: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property (2005 – Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity) USA: University of Minnesota Press

Barnett, A (2006) The Observer ‘The New Piracy: How West ‘steals’ Africa’s Plants’ [online] Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/aug/27/plants.theobserversuknewspages [date accessed: 24 February 2008]

No Author (no date) Taking the poisoned pill - how should the drugs companies play their part in combating the AIDS catastrophe in Africa? [online] Available: http://www.mallenbaker.net/csr/CSRfiles/aids.html [date accessed: 24 February 2008]

Boseley, S (2001) Embarrassed firms slash Aids drug prices [online] Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4150318,00.html [date accessed: 24 February 2008]

Following on from my recent post titled ‘What is appropriate development?’ I decided as promised, that I would take a broader look at the issues surrounding appropriate development, specifically the environment for which, or within which, they are being developed. As I discussed in the aforementioned post, one of the issues is whether the development is profit-led or not. Now, whilst this blog is all about whether development is needs-led - specifically how the concepts of user experience design apply, nothing works in isolation in reality, and I think it is equally important to know your subject area, and to know of the interlinking issues that surround it, to allow for more balanced assessment and opinions.

The issues I am going to cover are:

Education and Training
Research & Development and Data Collection
Slavery, Pre-Colonial Trade and Colonisation
Internal Infrastructure Investment
Lack of Communication Infrastructure
Power of IGO’s in global economy
Foreign investment
Patent protection
Debt burden

However, as there is quite a lot of detail required simply to overview these issues, I thought it better to start a mini-series of posts, under the title ‘An Enabling Environment’, where each separate post will look at one issue. So, for this first post, I am going to look at education and training issues.

Education and training

To begin, education in general should be defined as having two benefits in respect of creating an enabling environment. The first is that people need education to be able to invent or innovate. Secondly, people need an education to be able to make use of those inventions or innovations.

In regards to this, Africa certainly falls down. The lack of primary, secondary and tertiary education systems, or the poor quality that are provided, is a widely acknowledged problem. I am not going to delve here into the issues of why this is, suffice to say in general it is not happening.

The subsequent issue with relation to education is consideration of what happens to the people who do get educated successfully.

Two problems prevail here. The first is that they leave to work abroad, where they aspire to a better lifestyle. Ironically, it has been demonstrated that often these people end up working in jobs which are not equivalent to their professional qualifications, but their standard of living is still improved on if they stayed in Africa working in higher level positions.

The second point, which was something I was unaware of, and I have to say took me by surprise, is the issue of AIDS in respect of African educated males employed in high level positions within Africa. This information was provided to me by a retired Managing Director of CDC, who informed me that when he worked within Africa, approximately 25% of CDC’s African managers in countries such as Zambia died every year from AIDS. Whilst evidently it comes as no shock that AIDS is prevalent in Africa. What does however make the issue even more concerning in terms of development, is that the percentage of educated men dying of AIDS is much higher than uneducated due to the conceived status symbol of having lots of girlfriends, which is enabled through having money, which is enabled through training and employment.

In reference to this, I just read an interesting article on mthandenisoracle’s blog, entitled ‘Aids rises among SA’s rich!!!’, which reports on a study undertaken within South Africa which has shown that AIDS amongst the employed/educated people is growing. A spokesperson for the survey said:

‘If we thought the AIDS epidemic was having bad economic effects already, this could take us to the crisis point.’

It is clearly a good thing that this issue is being recognised, however, I would say that considering the retired Managing Director I spoke to knew about this issue from over 15 years ago, it seems that perhaps the ‘crisis point’ has been happening for years, and we should be asking why it was not recognised or acknowledged earlier and what effect this problem has had on development already, as well as looking at how to tackle the issue now. Maybe by analysing past mistakes, we can learn how to avoid them in the future?

Next section coming soon…