21 APRIL 2015 – 07:52
A Zimbabwean girl retrieves a solar panel from a demolished makeshift shelter at Manzou Farm in Mazowe. Epic leaps are required to go from subsistence farming to digital employment.
Change in isolated areas due to greater connectivity is understudied, writes Shawn Hagedorn
FABULOUSLY wealthy technologists are exploring ingenious ways to spread internet connectivity across the world’s most isolated and least developed communities. People whose hand tools and huts have evolved imperceptibly for generations are suddenly having the world’s sights and sounds thrust upon them.
It is presumed that this is a good thing, based on the belief that lifestyles untouched by industrialisation — due to long distances, poor roads, and self-sufficiency reinforcing one another — have no choice but to engage with the ever more integrated, information-driven, global economy.
Yet the looming social disruptions are staggering and underappreciated. Among the profound considerations receiving inadequate attention are the commercial opportunities.
The physics, and thus economics, of moving bits and bytes are far less daunting than transporting commodities and manufactured goods across Africa’s demanding landscapes.
Thus, rapid and unprecedented disruptions have become inevitable.
Western societies are also undergoing tremendous dislocations from the shift to the information age along with the rise of Asia. Prospects for low-and medium-skilled workers have dimmed markedly.
Much attention is focused on the top 1%, the “new normal”, secular stagnation, and deflation. These concerns reflect materialism’s influence being in flux.
Many young people are reacting to less encouraging job prospects by being less fascinated by material pursuits. The sharing economy is as real as the related climate change threats.
There are at least 250-million people in rural Africa who are a lengthy walk from the closest all-season road. There are no viable options to transport grains or livestock products to distant urban markets.
These residents typically do not carry money nor have their modest material desires been inflated by marketers or product managers. Subsistence farming is inherently antidevelopment in that isolated communities eventually expand to where the land cannot generate large enough surpluses to justify building roads.
For many isolated communities it makes sense to forgo any hope of development through commercial farming or industrialisation; this leaves information age employment as the way forward.
Yet epic leaps are required to go from subsistence farming to digital employment without the benefit of the wealth, knowledge and infrastructure advantages other societies have attained from commercial farming and industrialisation.
The goods news is that internet access can provide the skill and information transfers required. Of All the things that wealthy societies can do for rural sub-Saharan African communities, providing internet connectivity and appropriate devices is probably the most promising. As the poorer communities cannot cover the costs for lack of employment opportunities, innovative minds will need to devise viable long-term initiatives. Such commercial mindedness is essential for economic development across rural sub-Saharan Africa.
Just as focusing on the “low-hanging fruit” is a popular business expression, various forms of talent searches are likely to feature prominently as the internet reaches remote African communities.
Some talents are much more expensive to develop than others, such as music versus medicine. The early talent searches might seek to identify performing artists with instant commercial value….
IDENTIFYING and developing skills in scientific fields will happen slowly. There is a middle segment with much profit and development potential.
Rural Africa houses an amorphous mix of talents and perspectives with rising commercial relevance as the lustre of many aspects of materialism fall from favour. Just as the consumer pendulum now favours whole foods over highly processed alternatives, mass-produced goods will cede ground to the sharing economy and one-to-one production.
Just as the future of junk food appears to be dimming, consumers can be expected to soon question why they give — and receive — mass-produced goods as expressions of warmth and caring….
IF SHARING is caring, is shoving “loving”, when marketing campaigns shove perceptions of how their mass-produced products best express love and affection?
To reject junk food is to reject excessive innovation in favour of more natural options. Young, prosperous people passionately pursue relationships and aspirations without appreciating how aspirations have greatly expanded over the past several generations from a meagre base.
In rural, sub-Saharan Africa young people have nearly always followed in their parents’ footsteps. The incursion of the internet upends this stability while in wealthy regions of the world possibilities are contracting for those lacking strong information-era skills.
People in remote farming communities do not need Facebook to manage relationships until their friends and relatives start to migrate to urban centres. Internet access will encourage such migration through advancing skills development.
Many of these rural-urban migrants will have much to add as part of product design teams. It is not just foods that have become distressingly unnatural. How prosperous people advance and maintain relationships often reflects impoverished priorities.
Ideally, everyone would spend time in a remote African village. More realistically, people from such communities should help design consumer experiences for people far removed from their roots.
Published in Business Day