[governance] How do we engender effective participation from developing countries (Africa)?

[Dan Krimm]

At 5:28 PM -0800 12/11/07, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>Nyangkwe Agien Aaron [11/12/07 18:33 +0100]:
>>It was Suresh that was narrowing the solutioning of those problems to
>>local level well as I looked at it from your point of perception.
>
>>I agree, nobody cares. That is why I am a proponent of the civil
>>society being more proactive to finding solutions to the problems of
>>the masses and allowing these corrupt so called Governments to rot.
>>Look at Yunnus and the Grameen bank. I hope you got me?
>
>I am all for CS being more proactive. I still dont particularly believe
>that international effort is going to help or solve something that calls
>for significant local efforts.


This is an interesting policy question in general terms.  It is often the
case that local efforts are hampered by lack of experience in dealing with
specific types of goals, and in such cases non-local expertise can be
significantly useful in helping to understand the dynamics and
conceptualize the options for solutions.

So, why are local problems necessarily not within the realm of
international efforts?  I don't disagree that the local solutions
ultimately will need to be resourced (money, human effort) and politically
driven locally, but the international community might well be able to add
meaningful (and perhaps critical) value in terms of strategy.  It may make
sense to establish a general resource for strategic expertise at the
international level to be applied to a variety of local circumstances.

That whole "access to knowledge" thing, y'know.  In spite of the wealth of
data that is available in raw and distributed form on the web, making
effective use of all that (wading through it -- even with Google's help you
have to know what you're looking for to a significant extent -- to find
what is relevant and putting it together into an effective plan) can be
aided (and more importantly, accelerated through what otherwise would be a
bootstrap learning process) tremendously by the participants of experts.

And I hope that no one will suggest that local problems don't have the
potential for broad international impact.  The Internet is a global
information and communication network, after all.  Everything has global
impact these days -- the only question is the delay of the multiplier
effects, and that delay is shrinking every day.

Dan
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