Some Highlights From The Africa Attractiveness Survey 2013

 

Original post on Developed Africa

It’s always an exciting time of the year when the Ernst & Young Attractiveness Survey for Africa comes out as it offers some fascinating narratives about how Africa might be going forwards and how it might be going backwards. That being said, it is pretty long and number filled so I thought I’d do a brief highlight reel for the lazy busy people out there.

Seriously though, do read it if you get the chance – here’s the link.

The 2012 edition of the Survey focused on the huge jump in foreign direct investments (FDIs) in Africa – up 27% from the original survey in 2010 – and stressed that, despite the criticisms, the narrative surrounding the continent’s rise should be told “more confidently and consistently”. The new edition continues this bullishness, it’s Executive Summary titled, “Africa’s rise is real”. Ernst & Young focus on economic facts and dismiss any scepticism out of hand – this growth is consistent, it is diverse and it should be celebrated.

The story is not totally one-sided, however, as FDIs have decreased in the last year despite the ongoing rise in global esteem that the continent seems to be going through. Greenfield FDI projects were down 12% from 2012 – although, that is in a global context where all such projects were down 15%. There are other issues, too, such as the perception of conducting business in Africa. Again, despite Africa’s rise, many foreign investors remain unwilling to do business there. As it states on page 5,

However, the big take away for us from this year’s survey is the stark and enduring perception gap between those respondents who are already doing business in Africa versus those that have not yet invested in the continent… those with no business presence in Africa are far more negative about Africa’s progress and prospects. Only 47% of these respondents believe Africa’s attractiveness  will improve over the next three years, and they rank Africa as the least attractive investment destination in the world.

As Developed Africa recently highlighted, the potential of African business is being severely limited by the lack of proper communication about how much commercial potential there is. Developed Africa seeks to directly combat that so do check out our homepage for more.

The good news is that the percieved attractiveness of various sectors in Africa has improved allowing for more diverse business models. As stated on page 41,

There has been a marked shift in perceived sector attractiveness; resources remain top of the list, but not by far, with infrastructure and some of the service sectors gaining considerably in prominence

Previously unheralded sectors like Education, ICT or Financial Services have become hugely more attractive, complimenting the long standing interest in commodities and energy related projects in the region. This is a terrific opportunity for entrepreneurs and established businesses alike to move into new and exciting ventures.

The survey ends with a section focused on how Africa can continue to grow in the next year. The first point this section makes is to stress the vital importance of FDIs to the region. These act as catalysts for intra-continental trade, improvements in infrastructure and job creation. Africa has the largest employable population in the world and will continue to grow with or without foreign investors. However, it will grow faster and more effectively with the injection of funds and the creation of international commercial partnerships.

The conclusion on page 64 puts it neatly,

Business has to be viewed as an essential partner in driving the growth and development agenda.

…

P.S.

I threw in that Eric Hersman talk as it fits E&Y’s bullish narrative and who doesn’t need an excuse to watch it again?

No Child Left Offline

Originally posted on Developed Africa

In his successful run for the presidency of Kenya earlier this year, Uhuru Kenyatta has promised to deliver one laptop per child to those attending primary schools from January 2014. This scheme has been met with some scepticism, not least for the potential cost as this article from one of Kenya’s largest daily newspapers put it,

However, given the cost implications, the ministry has proposed to roll out the project in three phases. According to the estimates tabled by [Education Secretary] Kaimenyi, each laptop will cost Sh28,000, a sum that may be out of reach of many parents in public schools whose children are covered by the project.

There are other criticisms out there. A recent excellent blog post by Will Mutua (co-founder for Nairobi’s Open Academy) summed up the main areas of concern for such a scheme very succinctly,

Lack of Supporting Infrastructure: Many schools in rural areas have no access to electricity, some have dilapidated classrooms and other amenities, not to mention some extreme cases where learning does not even happen inside a classroom. What’s the point of giving these students laptops? Their schools have other more pressing needs.

Lack of Capacity: There are teachers who are computer-illiterate. What happens when computers break down, who will have the technical skills to troubleshoot these laptops?

Timing: It’s just not the right time for such an initiative. There are other pressing matters that can be dealt with instead of ‘throwing away’ money in an impractical project. How about jobs, healthcare etc.? And even if it is a matter of enhancing education – why not first hire more teachers, there’s clearly a shortage of them, or pay teachers better?

It is interesting that such problems have been highlighted for a government project – if you didn’t know what they were about you would be forgiven for guessing that Mutua was criticising a poorly planned charitable project. It lacks sustainability, it lacks a proper appreciation of local context, and seems to seek headlines more than anything else. These are all classic complaints of donor-driven development models.

Promoting computer literacy is a great project, particularly for Kenya as it looks to become the tech hub of Africa. Giving a laptop to every child is something that has been attempted before (see Mutua’s article for some good examples of similar schemes in East Africa in recent years) but often falls on the tertiary aspects of promoting computer literacy – you can’t just give the equipment, you have to support that equipment and its users as well. Governments and NGOs can start projects like this but it is through commercial partnerships that African nations can really build a lasting, economically functioning tech sector. The talent is there, schemes something like Kenyatta’s one laptop per child can open up the opportunity – now it is up to business investors to bring those things together.

Hollywood To Be More Ethical Than #Globaldev On Interns

Anyone who knows me or who has read this blog regularly will know my stance on unpaid internships. It seems some recent lawsuits in the USA might mean that employees are coming over to my side of thinking – it isn’t really excusable.

https://twitter.com/GeeBrunswick/status/345177708269031424

I started this blog when I was an intern (unpaid), as the URL implies, and became increasingly annoyed by the setup as time went by. I have done more than two years of interning/full-time volunteering. I appreciate you need to pay your dues and put in your time but it feels like minimum wage laws are put in place for a reason: I have only been able to rack up that unpaid experience because I come from a middle class family in London. Privilege, as well as a determination to get experience, dictates that I am now probably better placed than many of my peers to move into the job market having finished our undergraduate degrees. Clearly, that isn’t right.

So well done to those people involved in taking Fox to court over the internships offered on the movie Black Swan. Here’s a summary of what happened (via @Hanna_Schwing):

Just a month after one judge dismissed the class-action suit filed by free New York City media interns at Hearst Magazines, another has now granted the Hollywood coffee-fetchers who worked on Black Swan a precedent-setting win, ruling that the two production interns “worked as paid employees” and that Fox Searchlight should have to pay them as such. It’s a pivotal decision, says the attorney for the two young men who worked on the Oscar-winning film: “This is the first time a judge has held that interns as we know them today are employees entitled to wages and protections,” the lawyer, Juno Turner, told The Atlantic Wire in a phone interview Wednesday.

Indeed, it’s the first time a major U.S. court has ruled that zero dollars for legitimate work does not a legal unpaid internship make. “Considering the totality of the circumstances,” reads the ruling from federal judge William Pauley, the plaintiffs, Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, “were classified improperly as unpaid interns and are ’employees’ covered by” the the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as well as New York’s labor laws. The judge added: “They worked as paid employees work, providing an immediate advantage to their employer and performing low-level tasks not requiring specialized training.”

Read the whole article here

I realise Hollywood has a higher profile and it looks better for any lawyers involved but am I the only one who’s a bit disappointed that the global development industry didn’t take the lead on this issue? For a sector that fights inequality and strives for fair and ethical treatment of all people, it’s a bit embarrassing that the impetus to, you know, pay their interns has to come from the outside.

Digital Media Worse Than Traditional On Talking About Africa

A fascinating set of highlights over a recent report ‘Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: The geography of Twitter’. Perhaps the brave new world of online media isn’t quite as fair and international as we might like to think.

Compared to Twitter, mainstream media has significantly less coverage of Latin America, vastly greater of Africa http://t.co/TvhH2z4x9N

— Patrick Meier, PhD (@PatrickMeier) June 12, 2013

Other than that revealed in the tweet that lured me in, there’s a bunch of very interesting info on how to get proper geographical data from Twitter. Where people tweet from, apparently, has little influence on, well, their online influence (square brackets my own):

Kalet et al. [the authors] also carried out a comprehensive analysis of geo-tagged retweets. They find that “geography plays little role in the location of influential users, with the volume of retweets instead simply being a factor of the total population of tweets originating from that city.” They also calculated that the average geographical distance between two Twitter users “connected” by retweets (RTs) and who geotag their tweets is about 750 miles or 1,200 kilometers. When a Twitter user references another (@), the average geographical distance between the two is 744 miles. This means that RTs and @’s cannot be used for geo-referencing Twitter data, even when coupling this information with time zone data.

Read the full report here

Why The Development Community Must Choose Transparency

Some pretty big news has been rocking Washington in the last few weeks. First, there was the long awaited release of the post Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agenda. This, as far as I can tell, has been pretty well received, particularly in its focus on sustainability and accountability. Despite being annoyingly jargonised in recent years, most people would agree that these two things are damned useful and strongly interlinked – a good way to ensure sustainability is to create systems that can hold people to account. It is all seems rather obvious.

The next  bit of Big News has been the Guardian’s dissemination of a series of National Security Agency (NSA) leaks (the British media isn’t so tawdry and celebrity obsessed after all) revealing that, yes, this enormous spy agency is wantonly collecting a mind-boggling amount of data on, well, just about everybody. This has hit Obama pretty hard – the cool, liberal face of change is now linked with potentially the biggest breach of US citizens’ 4th Amendment rights ever. Pretty bad image-wise. He was in China when the thing was announced – talk about bad timing.

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/343041989018804224

A few people seem to regard this furore as a real turning point, perhaps as big as 9/11 was, in the debate between civil liberties and national interests. After 9/11, Americans were happy to give up some of their rights in exchange for increased security from external threats. With the NSA, it seems they have given away too much – the threat to them is perhaps internal now. The worst part was that nobody in the public even knew about the monitoring. Surely they should have been told, consulted over whether this was a step too far?

Development bloggers and agencies have been, I think, strangely quiet on this issue. With the MDG 2015 outline in place, accountability must now take centre stage. It underpins good governance, it feeds into rights-based programming and it allows for better oversight of the mis/management of development projects en masse. As a sector, we should be striving to be open, transparent and accountable: it combats the persistent charges of paternalism, it allows for more powerful feedback loops and, importantly, it puts us on one side of a historical debate that nobody is likely to ignore any more.

Open versus closed society has been the concern of many governments for the past ten years or so. It has also been a concern of civil society – see the Open Government Partnership for more on this intersection. Closed societies understandably benefit governments or ruling bodies as open ones breed debate, instability and de-centralisation of power. It is very hard to dominate the public sphere when that public sphere widens enormously – one of the reasons traditional media organisations have struggled to adapt to the internet age. I understand why some groups want to limit this. I cannot understand why development organisations are not fighting to achieve it.

As anyone who has spent much time doing development work (or research for that matter) will tell you, inscrutable organisations – companies, NGOs, governmental bodies etc. – can be just about the biggest block to getting your work done. Everything from not being able to trust the mail system and thus having to hand deliver important documents to trying to get access to official documentation only to be faced with inefficient bureaucrats. It’s a nightmare. Thankfully, we should all be trying to make such institutions better, according to the UN post MDG report (page 9):

Without sound institutions, there can be no chance of sustainable development…

Societies organise their dialogues through institutions. In order to play a substantive role, citizens need a legal environment which enables them to form and join CSOs, to protest and express opinions peacefully, and which protects their right to due process.

Internationally, too, institutions are important channels of dialogue and cooperation. Working together, in and through domestic and international institutions, governments could bring about a swift reduction in corruption, money laundering, tax evasion and aggressive avoidance, hidden ownership of assets, and the illicit trade in drugs and arms. They must commit themselves to doing so.

What better way is there to achieve this than through embracing and protecting the right to information? Or by encouraging whistle-blowers rather than prosecuting them? Condemning the treatment of such individuals in Africa or Asia isn’t enough – development organisations need to rally behind Edward Snowden and his ilk. This isn’t like the Manning case, this isn’t a young, confused, possibly ill man heedlessly releasing information. This was a guy who weighed up what he knew and what world he wanted to live in and realised he had to make a stand – he was careful to redact potentially harmful documents, for instance.

Isn’t that what development organisations should be all about? Improving the world, one person at a time. That doesn’t mean ramping up the number of vaccines given out, although it’s part of it. It also means taking a stand and pitching in whenever you can make a difference and not hiding from that responsibility. Transparency can help more people to make the right choice and I believe the way to achieve it falls partly to the development community. We certainly don’t want to look back and realise we ended up choosing closed societies.