After reading a blog post on crisscrossed.net a few months ago, entitled ‘Mobile Phones for Development’, I began thinking about the concept of appropriate development in more depth.

The writer of the crisscrossed post appears to have the same outlook as myself on the issues of development with his comment:

‘…It seems clear that technology itself is not the driver for change, instead, it is what the people make out of it, and the approaches which are ideally developed or adapted to the local context.’

However, it would perhaps be relevant to take this comment a step further and consider the necessity for these development projects to be developed for profit rather than for charity. Whilst charity work is not to be considered anything less than vital by the author in many contexts such as war zones, famine and other crisis in need of short-term solutions, the long-term solutions, as is generally accepted, require more than charity to allow true progress in terms of socio-economic development.

As is discussed in the book ‘Socio-Economic Challenges: The African Context’ by Henry Kyambalesa (see Resources for info), profit-led development leads to much more than is perhaps visible on the surface. I should mention here that profit-led development and the benefits I am about to discuss require a nation that has a free-market economy. Without this, in a market controlled by government, the idea of ‘profit-led’ does not apply, and therefore neither do its benefits. (However, this issue and others surrounding enabling environments for development are not something I am going to cover here, although expect a post or two on this soon…) What I do consider crucial is that where there is potential for a profit-led economy, key benefits can be gained from profit-led development compared to charity-led development.
The key benefit of a profit-led industry, as Kyambalesa explains, is competition. Competition leads to

‘Lower-prices, high-quality products, and greater variety and abundance of products.’

It seems that without this competition element, a product will likely stagnate, as there will be no incentive to improve it. Without this incentive and subsequent development, there will be no long-term development. This is explained by Kyambalesa:

‘We know too well that the affluence being enjoyed today in such countries as Canada, Japan and the United States today is the direct outcome of a relentless quest for innovation and more advanced forms of technology…by individuals and institutions in such countries.’

This seems to support the conclusion that without competition spurred by profit-led development, there will be no innovation, and without innovation, there will be no long-term development or subsequent affluence.

This concept can probably be demonstrated more clearly by this diagram:

Therefore, when considering appropriate development of technologies for Africa in future posts, I will be considering whether the projects are profit-led or not, as well as whether they are needs-led or not. This is not to say that charity-led projects cannot have a positive effect, but in terms of long-term development they do not benefit from competition, and therefore are probably less likely to be sustainable. They can however clearly help a short-term immediate issue, and can also likely give good ideas for profit-led development, if a business strategy for its development can be applied.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under development, economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.