"What Does Africa Need Most: Technology or Aid?"

Read the full article in The New York Times, June 17, 2007.

Jason Pontin, after describing the poverty he saw near his lodge in Arusha, Tanzania writes:

I attended the Technology, Education and Design Global 2007 conference, in the modern Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge. The contrast between the two experiences troubled me.

TED conferences, mostly held in Monterey, Calif., are invitation-only affairs, are attended by the aristocracy of Silicon Valley and are known for their adventurousness in drawing together wildly disparate trends in technology, business and the arts.

On this occasion, Bono, the Irish rock star and champion of African causes, had persuaded the conference’s organizer, Chris Anderson, to invite the usual crowd, as well as African entrepreneurs, activists, health care professionals and artists to this tropical, leafy region midway between the Serengeti Plain and Mount Kilimanjaro.

Pontin goes on in the article to describe the success of Alieu Conteh in bringing mobile phones to the Congo in spite of the difficulties of working in that country. The fundamental issue Pontin identifies in this statement:

The question that the conference was really exploring was this: How can we make every African family richer?

At TED Global 2007, I witnessed one small skirmish in a larger ideological conflict between those who believe that Africa needs more and better international aid, and those who think entrepreneurialism and technology will lift the continent out of poverty and thus reduce its miseries.

Africa needs better governance, since poor policies, corruption and incompetent administration too often cripple development efforts. It needs an end to wars that often set back decades of progress. It needs a sound physical environment, since desertification, climate change, degradation of soils, pollution, and other environmental problems will halt and reverse development efforts. It needs fair and open access to international markets for the products it can produce, free from trade barriers, markets in which competitors from rich countries are not subsidized by their governments.

If the proper conditions are met, the private sector can reasonably be expected to lead in development. In those same conditions, experience has shown the foreign development assistance also works, especially in areas in which market forces do not or can not do what we believe to be necessary -- to educate the children, to provide public health services, etc.

Technological improvement will be important for development. It can be a motor for economic growth, improving the productivity with which resources are used; technological innovation is certainly necessary to keep an economy efficient as relative factor costs change with development. Sometimes new technologies will solve ancient problems, such as through the control of tropical diseases. Sometimes they will allow African nations to leapfrog development steps taken by European and North American countries in their historical development.