Innovation Born From Constraints

Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and an expert on how technology impacts the developing world, recently spoke with Nii Simmonds whose blog Nubian Cheetah I read regularly. The topic of their discussion was how innovation can thrive even where constraints are quite significant—as they often are in Africa. He offered seven rules about how innovation in the developing world happens, and I found that they ring quite true, particularly #2. Note: Comments/examples in parentheses are from Nii.

1. Innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

2. Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

3. Embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

4. Innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

5. Problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

6. What you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

7. Infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

Environmental Stewardship is Not a New Idea

One of my friends has the following Kenyan proverb below the signature line on her emails.

"The Earth was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children."

It's a good reminder that environmental stewardship is something that has been around for a long time and does not only reside so-called developed West/North (though we get the "credit" for causing a hugely disproportionate share of the damage).

Ecuador Gets It (Inalienably) Right

The following is from Grist (slightly modified by me)

Ecuador approved a new constitution last weekend that grants inalienable rights to nature, the first such inclusion in a nation's constitution, according to Ecuadorian officials. "Nature ... where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community, or nationality will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies..."

The specific mention of evolution isn't accidental; besides being an activity nature arguably likes to do anyway, evolution as we know it has close ties to Ecuador's territory of the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin formed his famous theory. Ecuador's constitution grants nature the right to "integral restoration" and says that the state "will promote respect toward all the elements that form an ecosystem" and that the state "will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems, or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles."