How Africa can embrace technology
Genetically modified (GM) food is “poison.” That was the reason Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, gave for rejecting American food aid during a famine. It was in 2002, when all the badly governed countries of southern Africa were seriously short of food.
People were dying. It was hard to say how many, because most of the victims did not actually starve to death; rather, lack of food left them weak and unable to fight off infections that might not otherwise have killed them. AIDS, of course, aggravated matters.
According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), 2.3 million Zambians – a quarter of the population – were dangerously hungry and in urgent need of aid. America, the largest donor, had sent a big shipment of corn and soybeans, some of which had been genetically modified. Two hundred fifty million Americans had been munching this sort of stuff for seven years without detectable harm, but President Mwanawasa decided it was too risky for his starving people.
All new technology carries potential risks, as well as rewards. Some fears are fanciful. When coffee first arrived in Europe, doctors warned that it would cause sterility, stillbirths, and paralysis. When electric light bulbs were introduced, the New York Timeswarned that they might blind people. Occasionally, new inventions really are dangerous: thalidomide causes birth defects, and cars crash, especially when the driver has a mobile phone pressed to his ear. One can never prove with absolute certainty that anything is safe. But in the case of genetically modified foods, seven years of trouble-free consumption in the world’s largest rich country, a nation known for its health-consciousness, food fads, and tendency to sue at the first whiff of harm, comes pretty close.
Farmers have been manipulating genomes since before they knew about genes. For thousands of years, they sought to transfer desirable traits from one plant to another by cross-breeding: this is how wild grasses were turned into wheat. They also selectively bred animals to make them fatter and tastier: this was how wild boars became pigs.
GM technology aims to achieve similar, but faster, results. It typically takes eight to twelve years to produce a better plant by cross-breeding. But if scientists can isolate a gene in one species that is associated with, say, drought resistance, they can sometimes transfer it directly into the genetic code of another species without wasting years crossing and back-crossing successive generations.
Genetic modification is more precise than cross-breeding, too. As any parent knows, sexual reproduction is unpredictable. The union of a brilliant woman and an athletic man does not always produce a brilliant and athletic child. In plants as in people, some traits are inherited, others are not. In theory, genetic modification solves this problem by transferring only the gene associated with the trait that the farmer wants.
The final advantage of genetic modification is that it makes it possible to transfer traits between unrelated species. You cannot cross-breed cacti with corn, but you can take a cactus gene that promotes drought resistance and put it in a corn plant.
So far, scientists have produced GM crops that are more resistant to viruses or insects and more tolerant of herbicides. In the future, genetic modification could fill the world’s larders with high-protein cereals, vegetables with extra vitamins, and all manner of cheaper, tastier, and more nutritious foods than we currently enjoy. Researchers at Cornell University have even created bananas that contain a vaccine for hepatitis B. A single banana chip inoculates a child for one fifteenth of the price of an injection, and with fewer tears.
Against these actual and potential benefits must be set the potential dangers. Shifting genes between different species could create health risks. For example, soybeans given brazil nut genes have been found to express brazil nut proteins of the sort that might trigger allergic reactions. Soybeans are used in thousands of food products, so this could make life hazardous for people with nut allergies.
Genetically modified crops may also cause environmental problems. Pollen from GM crops can blow into fields of ordinary crops and fertilize them, which might affect ecosystems in some unpredictable way. Also, crops genetically modified to repel pests might spur the evolution of super-pests or poison other species. Laboratory tests have found that butterfly larvae are harmed when fed the pollen of plants genetically modified to express a toxin called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which protects corn and cotton from boll worms. There is no evidence, however, that this has happened in the wild.
All these dangers are rather speculative. It is essential to test genetically modified products carefully before releasing them and to keep monitoring them afterwards. But so far there is little or no evidence that GM crops hurt either humans or the environment. The available evidence suggests that GM crops actually help to protect the environment by reducing the need for chemical pesticides.
China has embraced GM crops with gusto. The Chinese government sees the technology as one of the most powerful tools available for making farms more productive. This is a matter of immense importance: if millions of Chinese peasants can grow more rice and cotton, they will become more prosperous. Africa has been much more wary of the new technology partly, perhaps, because of the continent’s strong links to Europe.
In Europe, although regulators have concluded that GM products are safe, an energetic campaign by NGOs such as Greenpeace has convinced consumers that they are not and prompted supermarkets to refuse to stock them.
Africans heed these doubts. President Mwanawasa appears to accept the Greenpeace line in its entirety, although a Greenpeace spokesman told me he did not think him wise to reject food aid during a famine. Other Africans might like to experiment with planting GM crops but hesitate to do so for fear of wrecking their exports to Europe. This is not an unreasonable fear. If an African country were to plant GM crops which then fertilized (or “contaminated,” as the NGOs say) neighboring fields, European supermarkets might start refusing to buy any farm products from that country, as they could not with confidence label them “GM-free.”
In Zimbabwe, Malawi, and other countries stricken with food shortages, the problem was solved by milling American grain before distributing it. Milled corn cannot be replanted, so it cannot pollinate non-GM crops.
Of course all this milling took time and money. In November 2002, I asked Judith Lewis, the World Food Programme’s personable director for eastern and southern Africa, about it. “This issue totally came out of left field for us,” she said. “I mean, we’ve been handing out GM food aid for seven years, all over the world. There were no problems until now. But now, in Zambia, we’re seeing just a drip of food aid going in. We have 100,000 tons of American maize [corn] sitting in nearby ports like Durban, Maputo, and Beira, just waiting to go. But we have to send samples to South Africa to test them. This takes ten days. Then we have to get the GM maize to a mill, mill it, and put it back on the road to wherever it was supposed to be going. That can take up to two or three weeks.”
All the while, people were dying. The most spare milling capacity, Lewis told me, was in Zimbabwe, where many mills had been mothballed. But the Zimbabwean government refused to let the WFP either grind GM corn on its territory or even transport it along Zimbabwean roads. The reason cited was “biosafety,” but this may have been a pretext. Robert Mugabe’s regime used its monopoly of grain distribution to reward its supporters and punish dissidents. It did not want Western charities to start handing out food to members of the opposition party.
Technology cannot solve all problems. Famines are usually caused by the interplay of bad weather and bad government, with war and pestilence often lending a helping claw. Biotechnology offers no cure for the likes of Robert Mugabe. But it does offer the prospect of more and better food, and in the long term there are few more important goals than that. The world’s population is swelling while the area of cultivable land is not. Somehow, farmers will have to continue squeezing more calories out of each hectare.
Past predictions that overpopulation would cause mass starvation have always proven wrong, because people have found ingenious ways to raise agricultural productivity. The techniques of the “green revolution” of the 1960s and 70s – high-yielding hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and weedkillers – worked wonders in India and China and saved, by one estimate, a billion people from starving.1
Africa was slow to embrace the green revolution. In Asia by 1998 an impressive 86 percent of wheat fields were sown with modern hybrid seeds, as were 65 percent of rice paddies, 70 percent of corn fields, and 78 percent of millet fields. For Africa the figures were 52 percent, 40 percent, 17 percent, and 14 percent.2 Partly, this reflects the fact that some of these seeds were not suitable for African soil. But it also reflects a reluctance or inability on the part of African governments to promote new technologies and a reluctance among many Africans to embrace them.
Among the very poor, such reluctance is rational. All change carries risks, and when you live perpetually on the brink of starvation, all unquantifiable risks are terrifying. If a peasant with no safety net tries a new hybrid seed and his crop fails, his family may starve. But governments have no such excuse. Official technophobia seems especially perverse when you consider the benefits that technology has brought to people’s lives in the past century.
Getting better all the time
I once spent a piteous morning interviewing Angolans who had trodden on landmines. It was easy to imagine, as I glanced uncomfortably at their stumps, that twentieth-century technology has done more harm than good in Africa. Cluster bombs shred limbs. Helicopter-gunships keep evil men in power.
But even in Angola, the country UNICEF rated in 1999 to be the worst place on earth, people are living nearly twice as long as their great-grandparents. A life expectancy of forty-five sounds awful by Western standards. But a century ago, Angolans, like most people throughout human history, survived for an average of only twenty-five years.3
The main reason for this improvement is modern medicine. Even the sad souls in Luanda’s refugee camps have access to drugs. Antibiotics clear up infections that would previously have been fatal. Vaccines prevent countless children from dying before they can walk. In Angola as a whole, two thirds of one-year-olds are immunized against tuberculosis. This is one of the lowest rates on earth, but it is a vast improvement on nobody 100 years ago.
The conventional wisdom is that as rich countries innovate with ever-increasing speed, the poor are left behind. This is not true. Technology certainly makes the rich richer, but it also makes the poor less poor, not to mention healthier, better-fed, longer-lived, and supplied with a wider variety of entertainment.
Consider the most basic (and least falsifiable) indicator of well-being: staying alive. Angus Maddison, an economic historian, estimates that life expectancy in 1900 in what we now call the developing world – roughly speaking, everywhere apart from Western Europe, North America, Australasia, and Japan – was twenty-six. In the West it was forty-six, about the same as in Angola today.
Westerners now live 70 percent longer than they did a century ago, to an average of seventy-eight. People from developing countries have done better: they can expect to live two and a half times longer than in 1900, to sixty-four. These figures are astonishing. In the millennium before 1900, lifespans in Asia, Africa, and Latin America barely budged. But then again, medicine has improved more in the past 100 years than in the previous million.
Brains v. bugs
Imagine a hospital where the water is dirty, where tuberculosis is rife, and where the doctors are so ignorant that a patient has only a fifty-fifty chance of benefiting from a consultation. Imagine, too, that most of the drugs are useless, and some are poisonous. This is a fair description of what health care was like in America a century ago. One in four children died before the age of fourteen, mostly from infectious diseases. In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American wit, declared that if all the medicines of his day were tossed into the ocean, it would be better for mankind and worse for the fish.4
Health care in poor countries today is rather better than that. Poor people are living longer, not because the natural human lifespan has increased, but because many of the horrors that prevent people from reaching old age are being tamed. A child born in the developing world today can expect to live eight years longer than one born thirty years ago. Even in the forty poorest countries, infant mortality fell by a third between 1970 and 1999. A recent World Bank study concluded that technical progress was the biggest single cause of reductions in mortality, accounting for 40–50 percent of the improvement between 1960 and 1990.
Vaccines, for example, have had a startling effect. Influenza, which killed between 20 and 100 million people in 1918–19, is now largely under control. Smallpox has been eradicated and measles, whooping cough, rubella, diptheria, tetanus, and tuberculosis have been curbed by vaccination. In recent decades, technology has made vaccines easier to deliver in poor countries. A droplet of polio vaccine can be swallowed – no need for needles. More heat-stable vaccines have been created which do not need refrigeration. Combination vaccines can be delivered in a single shot.
Antibiotics have been a great blessing, too. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it was only during the Second World War that a way to mass-produce it was invented. Infections that used to be fatal can now be quickly cured.
One of the simplest and most effective medicines ever is oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which was developed in Bangladesh and has saved millions of babies from dying of diarrhea. Take a mixture of sugar and salt, dissolve it in water, and give it to the ailing child. It prevents dehydration and so keeps her alive. Before ORT, the standard treatment was an intravenous drip, at a cost of $50 per baby. Packets of oral rehydration salts were mass-produced in the 1980s: they cost less than 10 cents each.
Despite all these advances, people in poor countries, and Africans in particular, are much sicker than they need be. Technology has conspicuously failed to conquer AIDS, which, by scuppering people’s immune systems, has allowed diseases that were retreating, such as tuberculosis, to rally and attack once more. In much of eastern and southern Africa, life expectancies have actually fallen in the last decade, often quite dramatically, because of AIDS.
How can Africans fight back? Better logistics would help. Existing medical technology is not nearly as widely used as it should be. In Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, for example, under 20 percent of those who need ORT receive it.
One problem that Africans are almost powerless to solve, at least in the short term, is that most medical research is done in rich countries for the benefit of rich people. The fattest profits are to be made tackling chronic conditions that affect lots of Westerners, such as heart disease and cancer. The ills of the poor are neglected: of the 1,223 drugs introduced between 1975 and 1996, only thirteen were aimed at tropical diseases. In 1998, the world spent $70 billion on health research, but only $300 million of this was directed at developing an AIDS vaccine, and a mere $100 million was devoted to fighting malaria.
When drug firms do produce pills that might help the poor, their patents allow them to charge monopoly prices which the poor cannot pay. The patented drugs that have curbed AIDS in rich countries used to cost $10,000 a year. For most Africans this is an outlandish sum. AIDS activists have gone so far as to claim that “patents kill.”
This is unfair. Without patents, there would be no incentive for private companies to invent new medicines. Drugs firms spend $300–$500 million creating a single pill. They could never recoup this investment if others were allowed to copy their drugs and sell them at a thin margin over what they cost to manufacture.
Patent protection is temporary and conditional. To win it, an invention must be original, useful, and non-obvious. The inventor must reveal how his invention works, and this information is made public. The inventor is then typically granted the sole right to sell it for seventeen to twenty years from the time the patent application was filed. For drugs, the effective monopoly period is shorter. It can take a decade for a drug firm to develop, test, and bring to market a patented molecule. This leaves only seven to ten years for the firm to cover its research costs and turn a profit.
Abolishing patents would more or less halt progress in pharmacology. But there is a strong argument for pricing drugs differently in poor countries. A treaty that most countries signed in 1994 allows governments to override patent protection during a national emergency. AIDS in Africa obviously qualifies as such an emergency.
Several drug firms, partly because of international pressure and partly because they noticed that they were not generating significant profits in Africa anyway, have started to offer AIDS drugs to Africans for less than a tenth of their normal price. This gesture has certainly prolonged some lives, but the drugs are still too expensive for most Africans, and some have been bought up by corrupt officials, shipped back to Europe, and sold, illegally, at a huge profit.
Differential pricing will not, in any case, address the other problem, that drug firms’ research concentrates on problems that affect rich people. Only public money can fill the gap. As I mentioned earlier, foreign aid would lift more people out of poverty if it bankrolled vaccine research instead of dodgy governments.
Some donors see this. In 2001, the UN announced the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, asking rich countries to chip in $7–$10 billion. In the first year, it raised $2.1 billion, which is a start. Another organization, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, launched by the Rockefeller Foundation, which brings together states, academics, and drug firms, started clinical trials of its first vaccine candidate in Kenya in January 2001.
The more that developing countries themselves contribute to these efforts, the more likely they are to succeed. No African country, except South Africa, can plausibly handle the whole process of drug discovery, development, testing, and marketing. But several have pockets of unique expertise or a wide variety of potentially medicinal plants.
Turning biodiversity into medicine is not easy, however. Vietnamese scientists extracted an effective malaria drug from a tree long used in traditional medicine, but there are only a handful of other recent triumphs. Congo’s jungles may well hide a cure for heart disease, but no one has found it yet. The trouble is that countries with rainforests tend to lack pharmacological expertise, while the big drug firms that have the know-how are all based in countries without rainforests.
Unscrupulous Western researchers sometimes solve the problem by stealing plants from poor countries. Some firms have learned about the healing properties of plants from locals, taken this information, and patented the plant’s active ingredient without acknowledging the locals’ contribution or rewarding them for it. Two cancer drugs, for example, were developed using a rose periwinkle plant found in Madagascar, but Madagascar received no benefit. Stopping “biopiracy” is tricky; bacteria are easy to smuggle. But multinationals hate bad publicity, so many are striking fairer deals. The Brazilian government, for example, receives royalties from Novartis, a Swiss drug firm, for providing it with micro-organisms. Monsanto, another multinational biotech firm, is working with the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute to create virus-resistant sweet potatoes.
Some day, biotechnology may allow scientists to modify the insects that spread disease: perhaps to create a mosquito that cannot carry malaria. Using a more basic technology, irradiation, health workers managed to eradicate sleeping sickness, a horribly debilitating disease that hits both people and their cows, from the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania. Tsetse flies, which carry the disease, were sterilized with radiation and then released. The sterile flies mated with fertile ones, producing no offspring but convincing the fertile flies that they did not need to mate again. Eventually, the island’s tsetses died out. I spoke to John Kabayo, a doctor who was trying to organize a similar feat in Ethiopia. This was clearly going to be harder as Ethiopia is not surrounded by water. But Dr. Kabayo seemed confident. “Sleeping sickness is a poor man’s disease; no one is going to develop a vaccine for it,” he told me, “So we’re just going to have to wipe out the tsetse flies that carry it.”5
Fishermen on the Net
Working as a journalist in Africa, I find myself using Internet cafes a lot. Television crews need their own satellite link-ups to whizz pictures home in time for the six o’clock news, but a scribe on a weekly paper can get by with much less fancy equipment. A humble laptop with a floppy drive is all I usually carry. When I have to send a story home, I save it onto a disk, walk into a cyber-cafe, order a strong black coffee, log on, and buzz the piece to London. It’s cheap and more reliable than you might think. These days, even small African towns have Web access. Sitting at a terminal in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, I’ve looked up facts about the history of an island that has not yet been properly mapped.
The Internet has been so loudly hyped that I hesitate to add to the noise. Africans need food and medicine before they need Google. But information and communication technology (ICT) could help them lay hands on both of these more easily.
While surfing in Tanzania, I’ve overheard locals using Internet telephony to bypass the price-gouging state phone company, call Hong Kong, and sell hand-carved elephants for hard currency. In Niger, weather forecasts are downloaded from the Internet, relayed to local radio stations, and broadcast to cattle-herders with wind-up radios. This tells the herders where to herd their cows for the best grazing, crucial information in a country that is mostly desert.6
Communication, as you may have heard, is getting cheaper. Any task that can be digitized can now be done at a distance. Dial a helpline for a British bank, and you may find yourself talking to someone in South Africa. It’s in roughly the same time zone and has adequate telephone lines and a lot of English-speakers who will work for a quarter of the going rate in England. The operators are glad to have jobs (staff turnover is much lower at South African call centers than at British ones), British banks save money, and their customers enjoy slightly lower bank charges as a result. In Ghana, a firm called ACS employs 1,000 locals to process American health insurance claims and bounce them back to Kentucky via satellite. None of this remotely compares with what is going on India, where the software industry employs 400,000 people. But you have to start somewhere.
Accurate, timely information is useful in almost every field. Take health care. The Internet is the quickest and cheapest way yet devised of disseminating medical research. African doctors with Web access can read journals online that they could not afford to have mailed to them. In Gambia, nurses in remote villages use digital cameras to download images of symptoms on to a PC and email them to doctors in the capital for diagnosis. Throughout Africa, outbreaks of meningitis are tracked over the Internet so that epidemics can be stopped early.
Information and communication technology could make government more efficient and accountable. Email creates an unshreddable paper trail for decisions. In Madhya Pradesh, in India, an experimental government intranet service allowed ordinary people to get hold of official documents (farmers, for example, might want land title deeds) for as little as 10 cents. Previously, such documents were only available if the farmers bribed corrupt officials to dig them up, which could cost as much as $100. And academics find the Internet invaluable. A decade ago if a researcher in Nairobi wanted to bounce ideas off lots of other experts each day, he probably had to move to Boston. Now, he simply logs on. Cheaper communications mean more North–South collaboration and indeed more South–South collaboration. Between 1995 and 1997, Kenyan scientists coauthored papers with colleagues from eighty-one other nations.
As I write, most Africans have still never made a telephone call. But by the time you read this book, that may no longer be true. Landlines are still expensive and unreliable, but mobile telephones are spreading throughout the continent with the pace and annoying chirrups of a swarm of locusts. In 1998, only 2 million Africans had cellphones. Four years later, 30 million did.7
Most African cellphone firms are privately owned, and many operate in competitive markets. It shows. Walk into a mobile phone shop in Lagos or Nairobi, and your handset will be up and ringing in five minutes. The old state-owned fixed-line monopolies used to take several years to connect your house to the network and then charged exorbitant rates for woeful service. A friend of mine in Nairobi whose telephone regularly broke down paid several bribes to engineers from the state phone company to fix it until he discovered that the engineers were deliberately cutting him off again after they fixed it to earn more bribes. Another friend, who lived in Nigeria, received a colossal bill one month because someone at the state phone company had hired his office line out at night to people who wanted to call relatives in Europe.
Most Africans cannot open accounts with traditional telephone firms because they have no credit history. Private mobile firms, however, sell them pre-paid cards. When they use up all their minutes, they buy another. There is no chance – and this is tremendously important for poor people – that they will receive an unpayable bill at the end of the month.
The mobile phone companies, because they receive payment in advance, waste none of the time and money that fixed-line firms do chasing bad debtors. So their cash flow is better, and they are able to expand their networks faster. In several African countries, the number of mobile users has overtaken the number of landline users in less time than it can take to get a landline installed.
How countries go high-tech
Visitors to the Ajaokuta steel plant in Nigeria are surprised to see goats grazing among the gantries and children playing by the silent rolling mills. The Nigerian government flushed away $8 billion trying to build a steel industry at Ajaokuta and elsewhere. The idea was first proposed in the 1970s, after the oil boom began. Nigeria’s military rulers saw steel as the first goose-step down a forced march to industrialization. Steel mills would turn local coke and iron ore into shiny metal, which would then be used to build railways.
Contractors from the Soviet Union, bidding to build Ajaokuta, produced a twenty-one-volume feasibility study, but it was never translated from Russian and probably never read by any Nigerian decision-makers. They wanted a steel industry whatever the cost, partly as a matter of national pride and partly because big projects brought big kickbacks. Ajaokuta has yet to produce a single bar of steel and will probably never be able to do so at a profit. Other steel mills in Nigeria operate fitfully, at a loss, and usually at a small fraction of capacity.8
As this story illustrates, it is hard for governments to micromanage technological change. Most African politicians want their countries to become more technologically competent. But it is not easy. To make the best use of foreign technology you need some locals who understand it. Airplanes and telephone networks need to be maintained. Foreign products sometimes need to be adapted to local conditions. And if a country is to start coming up with inventions of its own, it needs the kind of political, social, and economic arrangements that foster innovation.
The example that everyone looks to is, unsurprisingly, America. How, ask politicians from Abuja to Cape Town, can we build a Silicon Valley in our own country? The short answer is, they can’t. America’s thriving high-tech industries were not planned. Silicon Valley is what happens when thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs migrate to a sunny rich state with tough patent laws, a sophisticated financial system, and a culture of inventing things and then making money out of them.
All these things take time to evolve. Governments can remove obstacles and prod things in the right direction. But when they start making detailed plans they tend to come unstuck. Public investment in basic science is useful, for those who can afford it. But public investment in developing high-tech products is usually wasteful. Politicians are slow to admit mistakes; hence Nigeria’s steel folly.
The head of South Africa’s Medical Research Council, Malegapuru Makgoba, argues that politicians find it hard to understand scientific method because it is more or less the opposite of politics. “Politicians are trained for loyalty, whilst scientists are trained for independence. Politicians get promoted for being economical with the truth, whilst scientists get fired for bending the truth.”9
After making these observations, Dr. Makgoba and his colleagues produced a report, based on five years of research (it was leaked in 2001), concluding that AIDS was the leading cause of death in South Africa. This contradicted President Thabo Mbeki’s odd beliefs, so the government was furious. Dr. Makgoba says that the minister in the presidency, Essop Pahad, Mbeki’s hatchet man, called him and threatened that he would be fired and “forgotten by history.” “Part of his portfolio is to phone and threaten scientists,” said Dr. Makgoba. “He is trying to overrule science with politics. It is very frightening.” Pahad denies it all.10
But Dr. Makgoba is not the only South African scientist to complain about the president’s alleged meddling. Sipho Seepe, a physicist and newspaper columnist, argues that “Mbeki conflates and confuses his political authority with intellectual authority.” Hence the difficulty of persuading the president that the global medical establishment knows more than he does about AIDS. “Of course scientists can be wrong,” says Dr. Seepe, “but they are usually corrected by other scientists, not by a politician with no training in science.”11
Many of the things that governments can do to promote technology are worth doing anyway. Establishing peace and stability, for example. Clever people are mobile and prefer not to live in war zones. Another crucial factor is openness to trade and investment. Isolating yourself from the rest of the world is a good way to stay technologically backward.
I once sneaked into North Korea, pretending to be a tourist, to take a look at the world’s last totalitarian state. It was a useful reminder of how fortunate we all are that the Cold War didn’t go the other way. I was followed everywhere by two official guides who, if I commented on how nice a building was, would reply: “Yes, thanks to the benevolent leadership of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, there are many great buildings in Pyongyang.”
Everywhere I looked I saw the stultifying effect of the government’s policy of “self-sufficiency.” Nothing invented since the 1950s appeared to have entered the country. The government tried to hide this, naturally. At an exhibition I was shown a computer with a “North Korean” operating system. It didn’t do much. I asked the party functionary in charge why, and he said it was “in display mode.” I re-booted it and saw the logo “Texas Instruments” flash up on the screen. The functionary was so embarrassed I felt sorry for him.
“Self-reliance” used to be a popular mantra among poor countries. In Africa, as well as Latin America and India, many governments made a virtue of shutting out foreign goods and investment. Inevitably, they shut out ideas, too. With no foreign competition, local firms had no one to learn from and little incentive to make their own products better. In Tanzania, a ban on importing computers was not wholly lifted until 1994.12
In the last decade or two, most developing countries have opened up a bit. Freer trade has brought new products, which can be taken apart and copied. Foreign direct investment has spread skills and technology. When BMW and Daimler Chrysler build cars in South Africa, they train African engineers and transfer know-how to their local suppliers.
High-tech trade has made a big chunk of the developing world much richer. Between 1985 and 1998, developing countries’ exports of high-tech products grew twelvefold. Exports of things dug out of the ground or grown in it rose by a paltry 14 percent over the same period. By 1999, high-tech goods were actually a larger slice of developing-country exports than they were of the exports of advanced industrialized nations.
Africa, sadly, missed out. Between 1970 and 1997 African exports per head fell, from $175 to $163 (in constant 1987 dollars). If we leave out South Africa and oil-producers, Africa’s cumulative terms of trade losses between 1970 and 1997 were equivalent to 120 percent of GDP.13 That is, the prices of the sorts of things that Africa traditionally produces have fallen. Most of Africa’s exports are of primary products, that is, unprocessed raw materials: copper, cocoa, and all sorts of other crops and minerals. Apart from oil, the prices of such commodities have been sliding in real terms ever since the industrial revolution. As the world grows ever more technologically advanced, the proportion of its wealth that it needs to spend on raw materials falls.
Think of a computer. The cost of the metal and plastic that go into its wiring and casing is a minute fraction of the final price tag. The expensive parts are the skills that went into making it, the software that runs it, the promise of technical support that comes with it, and the advertising and marketing that persuades customers that the whole package is worth buying. Africa produces the copper from which some of its wires are made.
But the continent is not doomed to do so for ever. Countries that start at the bottom of the technology ladder can leapfrog. In building a railway network, they don’t have to bother with the steam age. When setting up a telephone system, they can skip copper wiring and go straight to fiber optics and mobile telephones. And they don’t necessarily have to pay for these things themselves.
The firms that know how to wire countries are usually willing to do so at no cost to the public purse so long as they are then allowed to charge people to make calls. In fact, they will pay good money for the privilege. In 2001 Nigeria raised $570 million auctioning licenses to set up mobile networks.
Intellectual property rights, and wrongs
I was once standing in a Zambian market, browsing through a fine selection of tapes. There was a lot of Congolese dance music and a good sprinkling of Western pop: Madonna, Kenny G, Dr. Dre, and so on. Both types of music are popular in Zambia, and both types of tape had fairly obviously been pirated. (The misspellings on the packaging were a bit of a giveaway.)
Suddenly, a furious crowd surged around the corner, pursuing a man I guessed was suspected of stealing something, because he was covered in blood. They caught him and started kicking and punching him. A man on the mob’s periphery, noticing the shocked look on my face, shouted at me: “This is what we do with thieves!” The robber was dragged to the police station on the other side of the marketplace. I think he survived, but I am not sure. I put down the bootleg Papa Wemba tape I was holding and bought nothing.
In Africa, few people think that piracy is immoral. Unlike those who steal sheep or loaves of bread, thieves of intellectual property are never lynched. One can understand the Africans’ point of view: most patents and copyrights are held by rich Westerners who will not go hungry if a few enterprising Zambians filch their ideas. Poor countries, runs the argument, need to steal ideas, for they will never scale the technology ladder if Merck and Microsoft extract royalties at every rung.
This is a reasonable argument but only in the short term. Piracy is a cheap way to climb the lower rungs, but failure to respect intellectual property rights deters high-tech investment. Firms will not bring new technology to countries where it can be stolen with impunity. Furthermore, if poor countries do not reward innovation, their people will have no incentive to innovate. The most inventive African country by far is the one that takes intellectual property rights most seriously: South Africa. Scientists in South Africa are actually rewarded for their efforts. So are South African musicians, up to a point. Half a dozen bootleg CDs are sold in South Africa for every genuine one, but that still leaves kwaito stars from Soweto much better off than Congolese rumba bands, who sell almost no records at home (which is a pity; the Congolese musicians sound much better).
The one area where Africa can free-ride with impunity is in regulation. It takes time, money, and expertise to determine whether a drug or foodstuff is safe. Agencies such as America’s Food and Drug Administration have huge budgets and make few mistakes. Poor countries could save millions, and get valuable medicines on the shelves more quickly, if they simply decided that a product safe enough for Americans is safe enough for them, unless there is good reason to assume that, for example, it might work differently in a tropical climate.
Getting the basics right first
Most important, to take advantage of technology, Africa needs better scientific and mathematical skills. The good news is that education is improving in Africa. A hundred years ago, almost no Africans could read. Now, 60 percent of adults can. Since 1985, literacy has improved or stayed the same in every African country for which the UN Development Programme could find data. The bad news is that the data are incomplete, and the data-less countries tend to be battlefields such as Angola and Sierra Leone, so the true picture is less rosy.
One problem is that many African countries’ education budgets have been captured by the elite, who want free university education for their children but are less worried about the masses who cannot even attend primary school. Zambia, for example, spends 135 times more public money on each university student than on each primary school pupil despite the fact that university students typically come from affluent families. Each year in Niger, 4,700 students receive university scholarships worth ten times the national average income while 900,000 rural children receive no education at all.14
This makes no sense. You cannot build an education system from the top down. There is no point having lots of universities before there are enough adequately prepared children to fill them. Besides, the benefits of primary education accrue to society at large, whereas those of higher education are more concentrated on the individual who receives it. So primary schools should have first claim on scarce public funds.
East Asian countries have tended to put first things first. Japan introduced universal and compulsory primary education in 1872, when its citizens were on average no richer than the people of Djibouti are today. Other East Asian countries achieved universal primary enrollment in the 1970s. Secondary enrollments initially lagged but surged ahead in the 1980s as the “tiger” economies boomed and demand for skilled workers soared. Tertiary enrollments rose last: in South Korea from 16 percent in 1980 to 68 percent in 1996.
The tigers have also, with the notable exception of Singapore, tended to make advanced students pay for their own tuition. In South Korea in 1993, 61 percent of upper secondary students attended private institutions, and 81 percent of university students. Poor but bright students can win scholarships. But for most university is a costly venture, which perhaps helps explain why so many Koreans opt for the kind of technical subjects that lead to well-paid careers. Koreans are 116 times more likely to study science at the tertiary level than youngsters from Burkina Faso.
Another lesson from East Asia is that how much you spend on education is less important than how you spend it. Public education spending in East Asia was only about 2.5 percent of GNP in 1960, inching up to 2.9 percent by 1997. Other developing countries spent far more – 3.9 percent on average – while African governments spent a whopping 5.1 percent. As East Asia grew richer, the absolute level of spending rose, but not nearly to the levels common in Western Europe or North America. And yet East Asian students consistently thrashed everyone else in internationally comparable tests. How did they do it?
What went on outside the school walls was crucial: mothers nagged children to do their homework; the job market rewarded educational attainment. But what went on in the classroom was important, too. The state saw its role as making sure that every child learned to read, write, and manipulate numbers. Calculators were forbidden until students could do sums in their heads. Laggards were coached until they reached the required standard.
Teachers addressed the whole class at once, quizzing individual students from time to time to make sure everyone was following. Classes were large. In Korean primary schools in 1975 the pupil–teacher ratio was more than fifty-five to one; in secondary schools it was thirty-five to one. Big classes are thought to deprive students of individual attention. In other developing countries ratios were kept down to an average of thirty-six in primary schools and twenty-two in secondary schools, for this reason. But, given a limited budget, there is a trade-off between class size and teachers’ pay. With fewer teachers, Korea was able to pay them more, relative to average income, than any other comparable country. This made it easier to recruit good teachers.
Recently, some African countries have begun to charge college students so that primary school can be free. During the 1990s both Uganda and Malawi went from spending less than half of their education budgets on primary schools to two thirds. The results have been excellent, especially in Uganda, despite protests from the elite.
Unfortunately, even in countries where primary schools are supposed to be free, parents are often hit with extra charges for books and uniforms or to supplement the teachers’ salaries. Some of these charges are illegal: teachers are not supposed to demand bribes to do their jobs, and schools often keep no records of what happens to the extra cash they squeeze out of parents. Some charges are pointless: Uganda greatly increased enrollments by scrapping uniforms, which many poor families cannot afford.
There are many other things that African governments can do to foster a more educated population. Since money is always a problem, they could spend less on defense, which absorbs on average half as much as health and education combined (and four times as much in Sudan). They could stop expelling girls who become pregnant, a common practice. And they could copy South Africa’s program of handing out free peanut-butter sandwiches to primary school pupils. Malnutrition stunts a child’s ability to learn.
Once people have valuable expertise, however, keeping them is a problem. Africa loses 23,000 professionals each year,15 which helps explain why Chad has only one doctor for every 30,000 people.16 It is the brightest and best-educated who leave: émigré Africans in America are among the most highly educated of all ethnic groups in that country. The more demand there is for a particular skill, the easier it is for those who have it to find work in a rich country, so software specialists are especially flighty.
One recent emigrant was Mark Shuttleworth, by far the most successful South African Internet entrepreneur. Shuttleworth is best known among his compatriots as the first African in space: he paid the Russian space program several million dollars to let him join one of their crews in orbit. He could afford such an expensive holiday because, while still in his twenties, he created software that let people do business online without fear of having their credit card details stolen. In 1999, he signed a deal to sell his company for $575 million. At the time he said he would never leave Africa, but less than two years later he packed his bags for London, griping that South African capital controls prevented him from making the most constructive use of his money. “If I see some crazy project in Norway I want to invest in,” he said, “I should be able to get the money from South Africa now, not in six months. That is what entrepreneurs do.”17 His case is not typical, of course, but if African countries want to keep their home-grown talent, they will have to allow them a bit more freedom. Still, Shuttleworth says he’ll return one day.