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No short cuts
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve run a couple of stories on the great progress being made with the growing penetration of smartphones across Africa as the 4G networks expand and more Africans come online. It’s led to several very positive developments, best known of which is the rapid expansion of mobile money services from East Africa and increasingly into West Africa. Thanks to M-Pesa in particular, Africa is a world leader in mobile money.
These successes inevitably lead to talk about how “Africa is leapfrogging” more advanced economies.
Well, Harvard’s professor Calestous Juma tells us we’d be wrong to think that way. In a paper titled, Leapfrogging Progress, The Misplaced Promise of Africa’s Mobile Revolution, Juma points out that no advanced economy got where it is today by cutting corners and sidestepping (or leapfrogging) industrialization. And he reminds us industrialization requires infrastructure.
Infrastructure is both the backbone of the economy and the motherboard of technological innovation. African countries need adequate infrastructure to realize their full potential.
Juma, who is a well respected advocate for the positive impact of entrepreneurship and technological innovation on Africa’s development, says while those two inputs are still essential they won’t work without African policymakers revisiting their industry policy.
In his view, the failure of the mobile revolution is that while it has worked in opening up communications for tens of millions of ordinary African consumers it hasn’t established an infrastructural base for economic development. African policymakers need to learn this lesson if they really want to promote innovation in their countries.
The argument about industrialization tackles the current received wisdom for African countries to make their shift from being raw material exporters to developing “value added” products. The oft-cited example is becoming a chocolate maker rather than a cocoa exporter as seen here in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. But again, Juma argues we should think about this in different way.
There is little evidence to suggest that countries industrialize by adding value to their raw materials. Rather, the causality runs the other way—countries add value to raw materials because they already have local industries with the capacity to turn raw materials into products. Initial industrial development thus becomes the driver of demand for raw material and value addition rather than the other way around.
Leapfrogging Progress makes many vital points on the importance of industrialization over some 3,500 words. You could say the key takeaway from professor Juma’s paper could be: “Africa, there really are no short cuts.”
Yinka Adegoke, Quartz Africa editor
Stories from this week
An African writer’s path to dropping her “colonized” name. When author Ciku Kimeria moved from Kenya to study in the United States, she was surprised to meet Africans who didn’t have Christian or European names like herself. Reflecting on her journey of self-awareness from “Carrie” to “Ciku”, Kimeria discusses the influence of Kenyan heroes and thinkers like Wangari Maathai and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
China’s Didi is set to take on Uber in Africa and Europe. The Chinese ride-hailing app Didi invested in Estonian ridesharing company, Taxify, in order to expand across Europe and Africa. The move challenges Uber, which was effectively pushed out of China by Didi a year ago.
An ad-supported internet isn’t going to be sustainable in Africa. Online advertising has been the business model that sustained the internet’s biggest platforms, led by Facebook and Google. But with little disposable income, expensive data plans and small local online ad markets, there are doubts the current models can sustain the much-coveted “next billion” internet users in the long term.
Unpacking the argument for curbing Africa’s population growth. In late July, West African politicians committed to allocating 5% of national budgets to family planning in order to cut birth rates down to three children per woman by 2030. It followed comments France and Denmark on the subject. But as Joe Penney notes, it’s never been clear cut how population growth impedes development in African countries.
Aid agencies may need shocking imagery to sound the alarm on an ignored famine crisis. Much has been done to drop the use of stereotypical images of gaunt, emaciated children to raise awareness on humanitarian crises in Africa and elsewhere. But as Western governments cut much-needed funding, aid organizations are considering returning to those most desperate of images to get the public on their side, explains Lynsey Chutel.
Parsing Kenya and Rwanda’s very different elections. As expected, Rwandans voted handily for president Paul Kagame, confirming him for a third seven-year term. But it was the scale of his victory that raised eyebrows around the world—a 98.6% mandate. Despite that, longtime election watchers suggest by supporting the electoral process we stand a better chance of strengthening African democracies. To that end, Facebook, which also owns the influential WhatsApp, promised to improve protections against so-called fake news spreading via its platforms in Kenya. Here’s what happened when a robot studied presidential candidate Raila Odinga’s solo performance at the last TV debate to which president Kenyatta was a no-show. In the interim Nairobi is becoming a ghost town as people leave to their home regions and some foreigners head home ahead of the tense and close election on Aug. 8.
CHART OF THE WEEK
The practical guide to traveling around Africa—if you are African. Over the last 12 months, it has become easier for Africans to travel within their own continent. Among the reasons this is happening is more African countries have liberalized their visa policies.
Other Things We Liked
Loss of fertile land is fueling a crisis across Africa. Data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shows Africa’s land is undergoing a process of degradation due to the effects of climate change. New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman unpacks the impact of this looming crisis and its implication for millions of people who live off the land.
Life—and soccer—inside one of the world’s largest refugee camp. The Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya hosts roughly 180,000 people on 12 square miles of terse terrain near the borders of Uganda, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. To escape the idleness and monotony that defines the camp, young people have taken to sports and especially soccer, writes Louis Bien in SB Nation.
How Nigeria’s wood logging business works. For Guardian Nigeria, Yemisi Adegoke and Yinka Obebe take pen and camera down to Lagos’ waterside log markets. They follow the trail of how some of Nigeria’s biggest wood merchants create the local industry out of the country’s forests.
Keep an eye on
Nigeria is set to release its GDP data (Aug. 10). Africa’s largest economy will release its GDP data at a time when the economy continues to face risks. Last week, IMF said the country’s economy will not grow enough to reduce unemployment and poverty levels.
Our best wishes for a productive and thought-filled week ahead. Please send any news, comments, suggestions, tickets to Seychelles and suggested new African names to africa@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @qzafrica for updates throughout the day.
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