UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER |
The following paper was prepared by Edward S. Marek, president, The Marek Enterprise, Inc. (MAREK), and editor of the monthly newsletter-magazine "africa." Comments and ideas about implementing the program described below should be sent by e-mail to "edwards930@aol.com" or please call Mr. Marek at the toll free number (800) 575-2735.
Subject: American-Africa Technology Consortium
Several regions in the USA are world-class leaders in advanced technologies and their applications, hubs for the international network of technology business.
Africa is a continent comprised of diverse countries, each of which is developing at a different rate, many of which are dynamic emerging economies, some of which are pivotal states to American national strategic interests, one of which (South Africa) has been identified by the U.S. Department of Commerce as one of ten "Big Emerging Markets" that will get the attention of American trade and development.
MAREK's objective is to link advanced American technologies
to the enormous economic development that is now in
train among the emerging markets of Africa. It is
true that these African markets lag behind those in
East Asia, Latin America, eastern Europe, and the states
of the former Soviet Union in their development. But,
they offer incredible opportunity for the long-term.
American exports to sub-Saharan Africa amounted to
$4.5 billion in 1995, higher than all American exports
to eastern Europe or to the republics of the former
Soviet Union.
The official position of the U.S. Government is that the U.S. will no longer concede the African marketplace to the European colonial powers. Secretary of Commerce Brown has made Africa one of his personal projects. For example, he is enroute to Africa now to advocate and promote $9 billion worth of business transactions.
At the moment, Africa commands little attention among American technologists, leaving the field open to the to those who might wish to take a commanding leadership role quickly and, perhaps, largely unchallenged.
There are two kinds of companies relevant to this discussion:
1. One set includes those companies with a long tradition of commercial activity in Africa. These companies are entrenched, they have strong ties to the governments involved, and in many instances they carry considerable political baggage resulting from American foreign policy treatment of Africa during the Cold War. These companies include the oil and mining companies, manufacturers of oil and mining equipment, and manufacturers of agricultural related equipment.
2. Another set includes those high technology companies with little or no previous experience in Africa. These companies carry little or no political baggage from the Cold War and they offer Africans the potential to leapfrog entire stages of economic development and solve globally worrisome strategic problems associated with the environment, population, food production, energy, poverty, and health care. These are the companies of that could be represented in Africa by a consortium of American high technology companies.
Potential strategic objectives for An American-Africa Technology Consortium
1. Pull a select set of promising African nations into
the global economy through new technology. This is
an objective of the European Commission and this market
should not be left to the Europeans uncontested. 2.
Shape the regulatory framework of a select set of promising
African nations to set the environment in which American
technologies can compete; set technical standards,
and substantially broaden African access to value-added
information services. The G7 states have discussed
this idea and agree that dynamic competition among
private sector companies will promote the kind of innovations
needed in Africa. 3. Influence select African leaders
and political systems to increase the percentage of
GDP devoted to developing science and technology for
the purposes of modernizing their rudimentary industrial
base and improving their capacity to deal with difficult
environmental, health, and energy issues and needs.
The Organization of African Unity (OAU), headquartered
in the pivotal state of Egypt, recognizes African science
and technology is most inadequate for modern development.
The OAU will be receptive to this objective.
Central to the OAU's thinking is that they must substantially
increase the exploration, development and use of their
abundant energy and mineral resources as a basis for
their development. 4. Work with the U.S. government
to obtain financing and economic incentives for the
application of American technologies to the crucial
challenges of the African continent. Work with the
American government and a select group of African governments
to establish programs that promote and reward new technologies
used to advance economic development in Africa. The
Corporate Council on Africa, whose membership consists
of some of America's top corporations such as Mobil,
Motorola, Kaiser Aluminum, Eli Lilly and Caterpillar
has recommended to the U.S. government that financing
be found for projects that will encourage the application
of American technology and services to critical African
issues. 5. Take advantage of the work already done
by a core of telecommunications companies and business
leaders and examine the options open to American technology
companies to enter the African telecommunications market,
including actions that will reduce the costs of American
technologies to Africans, such as the building of assembly
plants in Africa. Bell Atlantic's CEO Freeman is on
the record saying that communications technologies
for Africa are essential for it to develop; Emmit McHenry,
President of Netcom Solutions says telecommunications
in Africa will act as a magnet to bring in all kinds
of new businesses to Africa; AT&T Submarine is
working to lay the Africa One cable around Africa to
connect one country to the other; American experts
see the African telecommunications market as a $1.5
billion per year market that is likely to grow to $10-12
billion in sales over the next ten years; Millard
Arnold of the U.S. Commerce Department says American
firms must meet the Europeans head-on and take a leadership
role. The American-Africa Technology Consortium can
decide to lead the charge.
Sample sets of opportunities
There are many very exciting opportunities in Africa
and many unmet challenges. The technology consortium
could tackle both the opportunities and the challenges,
and produce "never-before-done" innovations
in technology development, application, and financing
that would carry global implications.
For example:
1. Response to privatization: African nations are
privatizing their energy, telecommunications and mining
companies. These are mind-boggling markets that demand
new solutions. Biomass, thermal, solar (photovoltaic),
and wind generation and new energy storage technology
solutions are being applied to energy in lieu of expensive
and politically entangled hydroelectric and nuclear
power systems. Housing and industrial developments
are being designed that have self-sufficient sources
of energy to avoid the expense of expanding the electrical
grid. Equipment in multiple countries is being monitored
from command centers in yet another country. All together,
the privatizations in Africa have the potential to
cause an explosion in whole new kinds of businesses
and industries. Environmental challenges: Africans
face serious environmental issues associated with population
growth, poverty, and economic development. Many of
these issues are strategic, with global implications.
Environmental irresponsibility is causing the rise
of new viruses and infectious diseases as humans disrupt
viruses that have peacefully lived in the jungles of
Africa. African scientists have ideas about and experience
with these kinds of problems and have a very important
contribution to make to finding global solutions.
But African science is being hindered by poor communications.
Much of the African scientific community is being impeded
from interacting with the global scientific community
because of poor communications.
Terrific opportunities exist to build National Information
Infrastructures in Africa to connect to the Global
Information Infrastructures to find solutions to these
and other critical strategic problems.
2. Sustainable development: This whole question of sustainable development creates perhaps the most exciting opportunities in Africa for technologies such as are represented by those working in the technology consortium. The term "sustainable development" means that life is a set of trade-offs, that development in places like Africa must occur and will occur, and therefore, one should not talk in terms of preserving or conserving, but rather talk in terms of economic development done smartly. This means that sustainable development offers enormous economic opportunities and is already spawning whole new industries and technology approaches to unmet problems. Costa Rica is now seen by many as a laboratory for the world. South Africa is also experimenting. The idea is to commercialize projects that sustain the environment yet enable economic development. In Cost Rica, for example, they are building up the National Institute for Biodiversity and new vehicles, buildings, computers and field biology stations are coming on-line. The World Bank is preparing to fund $80 million for a five-year project. An enormous amount of new knowledge is being created about organisms and ecology. Commercial software is being developed to support cataloging of over a half-million species, which has created alliances between Costa Rica and American biodiversity companies. Contracts have been signed to extract from local trees, migratory bird habitats are being established, deforestation projects are underway, bamboo plantations are being grown to replace wood and concrete for homes. In South Africa, the government is committed to electrifying 2.5 million households in five years. It cannot afford to extend the electrical grid, so the South Africans are switching to solar and wind sources of power. Battelle Memorial Institute has designed a biomass gasification system to produce power and FERCO of Atlanta has licensed the process and will soon start building a test project. The World Bank is funding similar projects in Scandinavia. Secretary of Energy O'Leary has shown considerable interest in such projects. Finally, in Curtiba, Brazil, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Bangalore, India and Jakarta, Indonesia, whole new sets of projects are coming on line to repair cities under pressure from poverty and population growth. Curtiba has learned how to mix manufacturing, services and commerce and offers services that exceed many First World cities. All of these kinds of initiatives apply to Africa.
3. Biotechnology: Significant developments have occurred
in biotechnology over the past two decades. Significant
biotech discoveries have been made in the agrofood
sector and real commercial production in the U.S. is
expected within the next two decades. Improvements
have been made in biofeeding, diagnostic kits, seed
and crop quality innovations, and trials of several
transgenic plants. Enormous progress is expected here
in the near future. Trial tests of genetically-modified
crop species and large-scale marketing of transgenic
plants are expected to come on line early in the next
century.
These dramatic changes caused by biotechnology will
permit African countries to generate more agricultural
products to the point where surpluses are possible.
Africans themselves have made significant achievements,
especially with regard to micropropagation of banana,
yams, cassava, soybeans, maize and rice. Africans
need more documentation centers and telecommunications
access to, and computerized storage of, biotechnology
information. They need better facilities, more specialized
equipment, and they need to find cost-effective ways
to integrate their biotechnology research into the
agricultural food production process.
4. Health care: The challenges in the area of health
care seem to many to be daunting, but they are actually
quite workable. Study after study shows that there
are a set of highly cost-effective actions that Africans
could take that would cause their health care systems
to make quantum leaps forward.
Developing countries tend to spend too much on urban
hospitals and far too much on tertiary-care hospitals
that focus on research, education and training. The
tendency is to spend far too little on public health
services and clinical care in public and community
health centers. They need primary health care interventions
designed to reduce childhood malnutrition and mortality,
mainly from infectious diseases; they need chemotherapy
against tuberculosis, integrated prenatal and delivery
care, mass programs to deworm children, provision of
condoms, and anti-smoking measures. Because of pressure
from the World Bank, some 22 countries are redesigning
their national health care packages and assessing how
best to reallocate their resources. This process has
been slow, but donor countries are jumping on the bandwagon
with particular focus on control of infectious diseases,
tuberculosis control, and AIDS control.
5. Legal Center: The Organization for African Unity
(OAU) and other organizations have shown a keen interest
in establishing a legal documentation center in Africa.
This idea has attracted the attention of various governments.
Most countries in Africa are moving toward free-market
economies. This requires each to update its laws and
regulations to support implementation of new economic
policies. Such an update will cause most of African
law to change, and will indeed require major changes
to entire judicial systems. There is not now a central
repository of any kind that makes information available
on the laws and regulations specific to each African
state. The World Bank has loaned money to Guinea to
put laws concerning economic development on computer
and then to train public administrators on those laws.
The French began a cooperation program to put the laws
of four or five West African states on computer. The
Ministers of the francophone states decided in Canada
to create a regional documentation center and the government
of Benin set aside a building in Cotonou to house such
a center. The European Commission approved the idea
for such a center but the project was impeded by the
desire to cross linguistic boundaries of French and
English. The UN Development Program has financed a
regional project to harmonize the penal and criminal
codes of Africa. But what is really needed is a center
that would serve all African governments who participated.
It could have a digitized library containing African
laws, international laws, and treaties concerning business
and economic development. Its digitization would facilitate
retrieval, alteration and communication over distance.
It would facilitate the study of research, study, preparation
and coordination of legal texts and regulations. It
could be used as a center for African judges and lawyers
to study the changes that are taking place in international
law and the legal aspects of privatization.
It would also serve as a training center for civil
servants. This is a concept that could attract American
government investment since it is in the American national
interest that American interests are reflected in African
law, especially since the main competitors in Africa
are French and British, the former colonizers.
In conclusion, there is enormous opportunity for the American-Africa Technology Consortium to organize American technology companies to tackle the far-reaching challenges presented by Africa. Furthermore, the consortium has the capacity to influence the American government to support its efforts and assist in the finance needed to move American technologies to applications in Africa that will produce the kind of commercial synergism needed to develop Africa into a mass market for American products and services. -------------
Message-Id: <199602231003.FAA05972@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 04:54:22 -0500 From: Abdul-Rehman Malik as-Shukri <arm@epas.utoronto.ca> Subject: Technology for Africa (fwd)
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