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."

These Words Hold True

The following is excerpted from an email to students and alumnae from Drew Gilpin Faust, the current president of Harvard University.

One hundred years ago, Charles William Eliot, the nonpareil of Harvard presidents, began the last of his 40 academic years in office. He remarked that Harvard was a place "to observe keenly, to reason soundly, and to imagine vividly." In this time of financial, political and environmental turmoil these words are ones that should be embraced far beyond the banks of the Charles.

Something Great Is Happening in Rwanda

The dedicated members of the Business Council for Peace (BPeace) have undertaken a super new project in Rwanda to train hair salon professionals. As they state on their blog: "One of the first businesses to emerge when war ends is the business of beauty. Women return to the feminine community gathering in small salons to reconnect and feel good again. Rwanda has been no exception and four of Bpeace's Associates run bustling salons. So busy are these salons, and many others like them across the country, that supply cannot keep up with demand. Indeed despite high unemployment rates among Rwandans, salon workers are often not Rwandan. With no local training available owners must import skilled labor from nearby countries."

BPeace worked with two associates to help pursue their dream of launching The Beauty School of Rwanda, a first of its kind vocational school bringing a future to the youth of Rwanda. This is just the kind of business development that a country like Rwanda needs - it's self-sustaining, it meets a local need, and it is something that never really goes out of fashion even when the fashions change.

Kudos to BPeace for their efforts!

The Birth of Blue

I was sent a link to very interesting video of a speech given by Andrew Werbach at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Andrew, for those who don't know him, was the youngest president ever of the Sierra Club (at 23!) and has been working in the "green" space throughout his entire life. Note: Paul Hawken gives a nice intro on Andrew at the beginning. He had given a very powerful speech a few years earlier called the "death of environmentalism" and this was in a sense his follow-up to that talk. (for more on this background see Joel Makower's blog)

What Andrew is best known for now, however, is his work at Wal-Mart where he is working with the biggest retailer on the planet to help them meet their vast sustainability goals such as producing zero waste. Many people have vilified Andrew for essentially sleeping with the enemy, and he has responded by saying that if he can work with 1.2 million employees at Wal-Mart who influence more than 200 million shoppers, then he can have a far greater influence on sustainability than in almost any other venue.

What I particularly liked though was that Andrew has moved beyond "green" which is focused on the environment which lives in the world of politics (e.g., laws and regulations) to what he calls "blue" -- a concept which most certainly includes the environment, but also considers the social, economic and cultural elements of sustainability. He sees this as a lifestyle movement that allows people from all different backgrounds to join it through multiple touch points. Rather than fight against companies like Wal-Mart, he wants to create a consumer revolution and use buying power and consumption habits as tools rather than as weapons that need to be fought against.

In his words "blue is a way to integrate your green ideals into your broader ideals. We still can't get where we need to go without political change, but it's time to get serious about bringing our ideals to the way we live and the way we shop." With 1 billion people on the planet consuming $1 trillion worth of products, moving the needle even a little can cause a true revolution.

Each Friday I get an email from the Development Executive Group called the Global Development Briefing. It gives a quick summary of what has happened in the developing world. Today's briefing has a section called 2008 State of the Future:

The future continues to get better for most of the world, but a series of tipping points could drastically alter global prospects, according to the latest State of the Future report by the Millennium Project. Half the world is vulnerable to social instability and violence due to rising food and energy prices, failing states, falling water tables, climate change, decreasing water-food-energy supply per person, desertification, and increasing migrations due to political, environmental, and economic conditions, it says. “With nearly 3 billion people making USD 2 or less per day, long-term global social conflict seems inevitable without more serious food policies, useful scientific breakthroughs, and dietary changes," the Millennium Project says. “However, advances in science, technology, education, economics, and management seem capable of making the world work far better than it does today."

I've highlighted the word "management" from this quote because it stood out to me. It's not often that you see management listed among disciplines such as science, technology and education. It's good to see that while applying macro-economic theory and improving telecommunications infrastructure, people are starting to realize that it will take skilled managers, likely from the private sector, along with government officials and NGOs to make development programs work. Let's hear it for the MBAs!