[governance] Is enough happening? (was Re: Africa, ICT...)

[Norbert Bollow]

kwasi boakye-akyeampong <kboakye1 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> While I believe we should be a bit optimistic and have hope that
> things will change sometimes the pace of change can be
> frustrating. When it takes too long for the object of hope to be
> achieved, frustration takes over.

What is particularly frustrating is when when we see the magnitude
of the problem increasing more quickly than the progress towards
solving it, and we see no reason to hope for a change of the
underlying economics driving these processes.

What is needed is a fundamental economic change.  With that I don't
at all mean the arrogance of ideologically proclaiming how the world
should work and then forcefully trying to make the world conform to
those ideas.

What we need is a realistic and pragmatic approach towards achieving
fundamental economic change, with the goal of empowering all people
everywhere to participate in information society with honor and in a
way which empowers as many people as possible to earn sufficient
money for meeting their needs through their own work.

While ideology in my opinion certainly cannot help, I believe that
faith can be an important element in such an initiative, not only
because God answers humble prayers for wisdom and for blessing, but
also because I believe that the faith-related value system of being
willing to put community well-being ahead of greedy personal interests
could become Africa's great strength as soon as the appropriate kind
of infrastructure of economic processes is put in place for allowing
this strength to directly drive economic value-creating processes.

I think it is clear by now that the "Western" approach of setting
up the economy so that the greed of investors drives the economy
works quite effectively in certain cultural frameworks, but it does
not work well enough in African cultural contexts.

As I wrote on this list a while ago, I'd love to try adopting some
role of leadership in some kind of community effort (to be inspired
by the economic mechanisms that make the Free Software movement work)
that seriously attempts to get something in this direction going
(with emphasis not only on meeting the needs of the people in those
parts of the world where lack of economic development is the primary
problem, but also with emphasis on preventing technological
development from being disabling for anyone).  I hope that I'll be
ready to post a draft "work-programme" proposal soon.

> What you refer to in Burkina Faso is an exception, a pilot project,
> I suppose, that might not even be around in say 5
> years. Sustainability of such projects in Africa is also another
> issue.

>From the pragmatic economic viewpoint, the fundamental question of
sustainability is this:

How does the project's value creation relate to its costs?

In this context, the "value creation" measure does not include the
personal statisfaction of project participants or any increase in
their standard of living, but only goods and services and side-effects
with beneficiaries outside the group of project participants.

Ultimately, the way to achieve sustainability is to set up some
kind of trade in which the value creation is used to pay for the
costs.  For developmentally worthwhile projects this is almost
always difficult, but it should be obvious that there will never
be enough funding to solve at least a significant part of Africa's
problems unless most of the work can be done in economically
self-sustaining ways, and self-sustainability is impossible for any
project where the project's value creation is not greater than its
costs!

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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