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Reflections On Technology |
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On Technology, the Information Revolution, and Development.....
By: Haeran Fisseha
Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely sit in a café for a peaceful cup of coffee without overhearing some twenty year olds brainstorming ideas for their new startup, or a young woman advising her friend on the virtues of registering a domain name for her internet business. Every other person it seems is either working in some high-tech startup or is brainstorming an idea for a startup. The highways here are lined with billboards for "dot com" companies promising to "move your business at internet speed" or some such lofty goal. Just as one excitedly points out famous actors in Los Angeles, here we gossip about Larry Ellison (of Oracle) being spotted at Spago's or of a Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) sighting in the neighborhood.
It is the "information revolution" and here in the middle of the hyper energy, the hyper technology and the hyper money, I can't help wondering what this all could mean for Ethiopia, for Africa? Admittedly, sitting in Silicon Valley, one can easily lose perspective on the role of "the Information Revolution" and technology as a whole in the world. But can we leverage this "revolution" to pull ourselves out of abject poverty? If technology can create so much wealth in Silicon Valley, can it at least create a livable life in Ethiopia? How have other countries been able to use technology to pull themselves up? What is the role of all of us Ethiopians, who have had exposure to the best of technology in every field, in realizing this goal? These are the questions that led to my reflections below. I will not pretend to have answered these questions conclusively, and I beg the dear reader to forgive any lack of structure that may be detected in my ramblings. My attempt is to add meaningful discussion to this topic, highlight some of the stubbornly unanswered question marks, and perhaps maybe even provoke some new thought in the discussion.
A gentleman from Wyoming who decided to exchange his cowboy days on a cattle ranch for a new life in Silicon Valley, wrote about the ease of the transformation from cows to cyberspace. Mr. John Perry Barlow attributed his low learning curve to the fact that his agricultural background "..spared me some crippling assumptions about this emerging world" 1 He theorized that the same would be true about Africa and set out to prove that Africa could leapfrog over industrialization altogether and land neatly in the information age. He traveled throughout Africa and in his fascinating article 2 concludes that Africa can indeed leapfrog directly into the information age. I was very encouraged to hear him say that he had never before ".. met people anywhere who could learn how to operate a computer more quickly ". But as for Africa leapfrogging over industrialization entirely and jumping into an information economy, as tempting as this sounds I am not quite convinced. You can not eat information, you can not wear it and it will not keep you warm at night. Information is valuable only when it gives you the knowledge to solve a specific problem. I heard my brother quote a slogan from one of the gazillion startups here. I forget the name of the start up but I found its message very profound. It goes "Information + Context = Knowledge". In order to be useful and valuable, information has to be given a context.
The rage right now in Silicon Valley is "business to business e-commerce" - using the internet to build a virtual marketplace where companies can buy and sell from each other. Information technology is then used to integrate their business processes so the whole process of buying and selling is dramatically streamlined and made more efficient. I agree that this is not a fad but a fundamental change in the way business will be done. When General Motors and Ford recently announced their plans to jump on the bandwagon by partnering with Silicon Valley software companies, the implications were astounding. Each would be moving over $80 billion of business with their suppliers to the internet. Information with a context.
I heard of the case of Ugandan coffee farmers who were given access to the internet so they could access information about coffee prices on the global market. Just by having access to this information, they were able to determine when to sell their coffee for export and when to hold it. They no longer blindly sold their coffee to some middleman at the same low price and their profit skyrocketed. Information with a context.
I guess my point is that there is no doubt that information technology can dramatically improve the operation of an enterprise, whether it is a network of businesses that manufacture and buy and sell, or a farmer learning about market prices or new pesticides for that matter. But the fact remains that we must make or grow things we consume and information alone will not do that for us. Unfortunately we don't seem to make a whole lot of anything in Africa. A friend tells me that the tools they use to pound yam in Nigeria are imported from some Asian country (where yam pounding is most certainly not practiced). And we all know that (recent developments in assembling TV's etc not withstanding), Ethiopia manufactures very few items even by African standards. So in addition to talking about information, perhaps we should also talk about creating the context that will make this information valuable and relevant. This context could be about growing food, or curing sick people, or making some of the basic things we use. Since I am more familiar with the part about making things, I will focus on manufacturing.
So why is it again that we make so very few of the goods we consume in Africa? I remember our self-critical discussions in Ethiopia "speel inkwan aniseram". I wonder if it is still true. I think we would find it very insightful to look at the experience of some other countries to understand our situation today.
We should remind ourselves that the gap between Africa and the rest of the planet was not so wide a few years ago. "In 1962 Taiwan stood between Zaire and the Congo on the global ranking of income per head, by 1986 its neighbors were Greece and Malta. In 1962 South Korea was poorer than Sudan, by 1986 it was richer than Argentina"3. What exactly happened?
Starting with the first industrial revolution in England, governments have been playing an increasing role in ensuring the success of industries in their countries. The British government really had no role in the beginning of industrialization in England. Individual inventors started creating gadget s to make a variety of consumer goods on a more massive scale and with better quality. By the time the industrial revolution got to the US, the American government was already playing a more active role by imposing taxes and tariffs to protect the newly budding American industries from the more established British ones. By the time Industrialization gets to Japan, the technology gap is already significantly wider, and the Japanese government decides to take matters into its own hands and plays a critical role in closing the gap. For the first time ever, a national government constructs a National Technology Policy.
For all the talk about "Free Markets", the fact is that when one looks at the success stories of Japan and the Asian Tigers, it is obvious that the governments played a very active role in the growing industrial might of their countries. By delicately balancing infant industry protection (imposing trade barriers on imports to allow local industries to develop) with a policy of export promotion, these governments skillfully developed world class manufacturing in their countries. Through infant industry protection, they ensured that their local industries were given a chance to develop at a time when they could easily be drowned by much more sophisticated and cheaper imports. After allowing for this development phase however, these governments then proceeded to open up their markets to force their local industries to compete with world class manufacturers. This then provided the incentive to manufacture at or above global standards of quality. The Japanese automotive industry is one beneficiary of such a policy.
But perhaps even more importantly, these governments invested in their human capital. From the Meiji dynasty in Japan to Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, we see that these governments invested in quality education for the masses. Using a well defined technology policy, they made a concerted effort to build the "local technological capability" by ensuring that education is not limited to an elite few who are educated at the highest level possible. In addition, basic education was made available to all, and the population was trained in technical skills needed to support the new industries. It was also stipulated that foreign companies who invested in their countries contribute to meaningful technology transfer by forming joint ventures with local companies on favorable terms. The role of the Japanese government in the education and industrialization of that nation is a fascinating story. In the early 1950's a well known Ethiopian, Ato Kebede Michael found the story of industrialization in Japan so interesting and relevant to Ethiopia that he took the initiative to research and write a book on the topic. His goal in writing the book "Japan Indemin Seletenech" was that the Ethiopian government would learn some valuable lessons from the Japanese experience. On the topic of building local technological capability he says  4
As Ato Kebede pointed out, the education system must be able to meet the needs of local industries. Workers need good basic education and technical training to be effective on the job because building local technological capability means more than being able to assemble foreign made parts. It means that the local people have the skill and the ability to modify the technology to make it more appropriate to their particular context, that they have the understanding to make incremental improvements on the product or process, and use the technology to address their unique needs. This building of local technological capability does not seem to be happening in Africa, at least not to a significant extent. One reason is the obvious lack of an educated and skilled workforce. Another reason is that, although joint ventures with multinational corporations have been successfully used by Asian governments as a means for transferring technology and thus building local technological capability, this has not been the case in Africa. As an example of the failure of Industrialization due to lack of local technological capability, we can look at the case of the Bonsa Tire Company (BTC) in Ghana. According to a case study by Stephen Adei of the UNDP5, BTC which started as a joint venture between the government of Ghana and Firestone, is a story that illustrates among other things, the failure that is assured when there is no meaningful technology transfer to the host country. To make a long story short, one of the primary reasons why this joint venture failed is that despite being given a 10 year tax holiday, exemption from import duties and all kinds of favorable credit terms, the specialists and senior staff at BTC were strictly expatriates. Although the contract had stated that "Firestone shall train Ghanaians in all aspects of the industry", the Ghanaian government failed to ensure that this was in fact the case. There were no training schedules, and no penalty for failure to train the local staff. As it turned out the company had no formal training program and the local staff did not even have technical manuals and journals to read.
As another example, in Ethiopia Ato Kebede observed back in the 1950's that the country depended too much on expatriate skills. He says  6
Well one can learn from success as much as from failure. One of the very few brilliantly successful stories we have in Ethiopia is o f course our airlines. Though I don't have a case study on the airlines, it seems obvious that one of the main reasons for its success was its ability to build Ethiopian technical and managerial capability. The airline was set up in 1945 under an agreement between the Ethiopian government and TWA. TWA initially provided the management staff for the airline, but according to our historian Bahru Zewde, "The issue of Ethiopianization dominated the history of the airline with the Americans trying to delay its realization for as long as possible. But the airline managed to achieve self-sufficiency in flying, technical and administrative personnel by the end of the period under study. The first Ethiopian general manager was appointed in 1971"7. The success of the airline since then seems to have been based on a combination of achieving local technical expertise (so much so that Ethiopian Airlines trains staff for other African airlines), and a market strategy that focused on the under served African continent. It is doubtful that had TWA retained control of the airline, it would have evolved in a manner that is relevant to its unique African context. In addition to building local technological capability, another factor that was important to the success of much of Asia was a sense of "shared destiny" among the people. This means that individuals did not necessarily measure success by their own personal achievement only. Since there was a strong identification with the community, success meant pulling up the community with you. For example as Japan developed, the emerging middle class purchased locally manufactured furniture and other items. This had the effect of pulling up a whole new segment of society, the local craftsmen and artisans. In contrast, in most developing countries in Latin America and Africa, middle class society rushes to invest in imported consumer goods, thus their improved standard of living does nothing to pull up the rest of their society. As another illustration of this sense of "shared destiny", I recall reading how a Japanese doctor would be far more inclined to sit down and discuss affairs of his country with a Japanese farmer than he would with a European doctor. A doctor from Latin America on the other hand, would identify more closely with a European doctor and talk disparagingly of the illiterate farmer from his country. As stereotypical as this sounds I think it has an element of truth, and I believe the same can be said of an Ethiopian doctor or any other African doctor (and I am not trying to single out doctors here). The point is that unless we are all able to see the problem of the lowliest of our country folk as our common problem we will make precious little progress as a nation. So among the many reasons for the Asian miracle, we have the carefully planned intervention of visionary governments to build local technological expertise, and a sense of "shared destiny" amongst the people. Well if there is one thing that Africa lacks it is visionary leadership, so what is an African to do ? The growing technological gap requires prompt action by governments to invest in basic education and technical training for all (in addition of course to food security and public health), and to carefully craft a technology policy to bridge the gap. Until this ideal state of affairs is realized, it seems that the only choice is for each of us individuals who have had the benefit of being exposed to cutting edge technology in every field, to contribute to building technological capability in Ethiopia to solve some of the pressing needs of the country. Now this was not an easy conclusion for me to make since it is not very clear to me exactly how I personally would achieve this goal. However if we look at specific areas of need, perhaps the task could look less daunting. For example one thing I find very striking about the Ethiopian landscape is that there seem to be absolutely no trees left anymore. The country seems to be on the verge of being transformed into one big desert. In most developing countries, over 90% of the firewood needs are for cooking. We have all seen women in Addis Ababa bent over double carrying inhumanely large loads of firewood on their backs. Not only are the trees chopped down, and the soil eroded, these women also suffer terribly by damaging their spines with the load, and ruining their lungs with the smoke from the firewood. I remember one of the nuns from my high school in Ethiopia telling us "if you somehow find a permanent solution for these women and it is the only thing you ever achieve in your life you will have accomplished a great deal". Well I may never have had to carry firewood on my back myself, but if I have any sense of shared destiny with my countrywomen, their problem should be a very pressing problem for me as well. So what can I do about it ? Well as it turns out the "sunbelt" of the world, i.e. the area that receives the most solar radiation on the planet is also the most energy starved. Would it not make sense for us to leverage technology and this God given resource to meet our energy needs ? There is no need to re-invent the wheel, significant amount of work has already been done in this area that we can leverage. India has a significant solar energy industry and even manufactures high tech photovoltaic cells (to convert sunlight into electricity). In addition, I know there is a professor at a certain university here in the US doing research on highly efficient thermal solar cells for solar cookers. Can I play a role in aiding the development of a project say at the mechanical engineering department at Addis Ababa University, that would focus on developing and building an efficient and affordable solar cooker that can be produced locally ? My presence in the US provides me great access to information and funding, can I assist AAU gain this same access ? Can I assist in setting up Ethiopian businesses to manufacture and sell these cookers locally ? This is just a small example and it may sound idealistic and simplistic. But I am sure each of us can think of a specific way we can contribute to building the technological capability in Ethiopia to solve a local problem. Although studies show that as the technology gap widens, successful and visionary governments have had to play a greater role in closing the gap, the unfortunate reality of Africa indicates that we will in fact need a new paradigm. Or maybe it is not a new paradigm. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, it was entrepreneurial, thoughtful, and creative individuals not governments who were behind the development of their countries. Now this late in the game, perhaps we're back to this model. Like Ato Kebede Michael, maybe we as individuals or groups of individuals should take the initiative to start looking at who has developed how and why. And like the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, perhaps we should start thinking in terms of creating new, profitable businesses in Ethiopia that use technology and local talent to solve specific problems. In the process we would build local technical skill, encourage self-sufficiency, creativity, and entrepreneurship. And just maybe, we will never hear of famine in Ethiopia again.
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