Peter Guest, editor

Seeing the connection

By Peter Guest | Published: 08 April, 2009

African innovation can produce solutions with global application. Africa is not so disconnected from the world that it must be viewed in a vacuum. Its solutions can be universal and, as Microsoft’s Cheick Diarra says, Africa can be an incubator for innovation”

Ihad been warned that Cheick Diarra, Microsoft’s chairman for Africa, tends to keep his public relations advisers on their toes, and when we met in London earlier this year he was on good, controversial form. “Every problem that you encounter in the world, you encounter in Africa,” he explained, eliciting a nervous laugh from his PR, who presumably thought they were there to convey an altogether more positive message.

Expanding on his point, he explained that in emerging markets today, the opportunity for a company such as Microsoft is not just in finding the most advanced, the most visually appealing product for wealthy consumers desperate for the next status symbol. Rather, the opportunity is in facilitating access for the billions of people who demand simple but innovative solutions to their daily concerns.

Innovation in the Western world is going through a crisis. In the financial sector in particular it became synonymous with the derivative products and high-volume trading systems that have now been called out for their role in the financial crisis that is now turning into an economic collapse. In emerging markets, however, it is moving at an incredible speed, whether in the field of mobile payments, micro-generation or retail distribution models.

There is an oft-used cliché that necessity is the mother of invention, but it speaks to Mr Diarra’s point. African innovation can produce solutions with global application. Africa is not exceptional, it is not so disconnected from the world that it must be viewed in a vacuum. Its solutions can be universal and the continent can, as he says, be an incubator for innovation.

In the past, when we have said Africa’s problems are the world’s, we have done so with the baggage of the aid agenda. Flip this around, and now today the world’s problems are becoming Africa’s problems. Those tremors that began in the subprime mortgage sector in the US are fast becoming violent earthquakes worldwide, and they are rocking Africa. As Kofi Annan told the audience at a recent International Monetary Fund meeting in Dar Es Salaam, rather than being a passive victim of the global economic crisis, Africa can be at the nexus of a global recovery package.

This goes beyond the financial crisis. In the past, such things have proved cyclical. However, focusing on economics has allowed us to sideline discussions on much longer-term problems – climate change and food security. Both, again, could have catastrophic results for Africa. Both are not necessarily of the continent’s making.

Self-interest is the order of the day. Perhaps more so than during the period of explosive wealth generation that has now so dramatically ended. But self-interest does not mean protectionism. It means that leading economies must tap the creativity – as well as the natural resources – of Africa to come up with long term fixes.

Hopefully now those leading economies will be able to create an ‘Africa agenda’ that goes beyond the transparent use of aid or trade as foreign policy tools to gain power and resources, but instead reflects a realisation, forged in today’s understanding of how connected this world has become, that development is not a zero sum game; understanding that sustainability is not unbridled growth, or even mechanical measurements of carbon emissions, but is a vast web of considerations, where stakeholders and actors are not merely determined by their financial wealth or the outcome of World War II.

Peter Guest
EDITOR

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