Margaret Grieco,
Professor of Transport and Society,
Transport Research Institute,
Napier University,
Edinburgh
e-mail: m.grieco@napier.ac.uk
web sites:
http://www.geocities.com/margaret_grieco (the Change Page)
http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society
"South African consumers will spend R2,7-billion in Internet-generated purchases in 1999, while business-to-business e-commerce will reach almost R4-billion this year, according to a new survey by Acuity Media Africa."
A fast moving development: the globalisation of information communication technologies.
Five years ago, I left my position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana to join the Technical Department of the Africa Region of the World Bank in Washington D.C. Coming out of Ghana, I was a technology sceptic - I had lived in a world of power cuts, failing technology and poor quality imported communications machinery. One of my first tasks at the World Bank was to develop a web site on Gender and Development in Africa - I was given two weeks to meet the remit. With the able technical support of Michael Matovina at the World Bank, I put my conceptual and communication skills into practice and developed a web site which strived to be a one stop shop for busy task managers requiring information on gender and development in Africa. The experience persuaded me of the usefulness of the new communication form for advancing regional development in Africa: to me it seemed that the electronic communication forms could be harnessed to low income micro banking and to the development of community business linking the poor with funding and marketing opportunities for their goods and services. Putting information on world market prices in the hands of small farmers through the low cost technology of pagers and similar schemes seemed within the capabilities of donors and development agencies. At this point e-business was largely undiscussed; e-governance was simply not on the agenda and tele-health was regarded as having as much practical utility as science fiction. In the last five years, all three of these contours have dramatically changed. E-business, e-governance and tele-health are all established, intensifying and enlarging realities. E-communication and its harnessing to the various aspects of social, economic and political life has certainly seen rapid development.
There are many reasons for this rapid development and different experts focus on different dimensions. Today here in Cape Town, I invite you to think about the distributed character of the technology, distributed access to the technology and the rapidly decreasing costs of access to the technology. The miniaturisation of communications technologies and the development of satellite linkages have combined to enable access to instant global information and interaction with that information in the most remote of locations. The development of solar powered, hand held, communications devices such as the Cyber Tracker invented here in South Africa can extend access to remote locations where there is no source of electrical power. Satellite technology has real potential benefits for developing countries - land line technologies bypassed developing countries in a way that satellite technologies do not. Access to the benefits of satellite technology can be obtained without own development of a satellite - developing countries can buy in to the low cost function of access rather than find the necessary capital for satellite operation.
Much of the focus on globalisation of communication technologies has assumed that communications traffic will be between centre and periphery, between the developing and developed worlds and that it will necessarily flatten or eliminate cultures through the increasing dominance of US values and practices. This is often called the MacDonaldisation of culture. However, nested within the globalisation of communications is the ability to intensify, enlarge and improve upon local communications, regional communications and intra-continental communications. The new information communication technologies have the capability of relocalising interactions within a business to business environment, within a government to business environment, within a business to government environment, within a business to consumer and a consumer to business environment and within a consumer to government and government to consumer environment.
Within the developed world electronic communications technology is increasingly found within the domestic space - it has become a household technology with the household television now capable of providing e-mail and internet access. For developing countries, the profile will be very different. But the same miniaturisation of technology that has made ICT a household good in the west is capable of enabling community access in low income countries; the same portability of technology which has become a necessary business tool for the international businessman is usable by a health worker in a remote location. And for many purposes, electronic communication does not need to be available on a continuous access basis but can provide very useful economic and social functions on a periodic or crisis basis. The organisation of ICT provision found in developed countries is not necessarily appropriate for developing countries nor is it necessarily a good guide to how ICT provision will grow in developing countries. Regional e-malls are one form of organisation that may be appropriate for low income countries with lower levels of business activities (see http://www.aism.co.za -The African International Shopping Mall) similarly, the development of Commerce Service Providers (CSP) which enable, buyers, on line merchants and banks to transact on line may very well be a form which has a particular utility for developing countries (for a South African example of a CSP go to http://www.pqafrica.co.za ECnet).
The speed and range of new developments can be viewed at the four South African web sites given below:
http://www.exinet.co.za
http://www.ecasa.org.za
http://www.sa.internet.com/Emarket/Ecommerce/ecomhome.htm
http://www.mediaafrica.co.za/ecomm.html.
In the break out sessions for this presentation, it would be useful for each group to explore one site and to comment upon the potentials, strengths and weaknesses they observe both of the site and of South African e-developments.
Getting to grips with corruption: the benefits of transparency.
The importance of good governance for the development of a healthy business environment is critical. Currently discussions of corruption in Africa have surfaced as explicit tasks for development agency attention and action. In practice, the flight of capital from Africa has for a long time stood as a measure of problems within the trust and social capital system of the continent: the flight of capital creates in its turn very real problems for the development of indigenous businesses and employment levels. At one level, those who have accumulated substantial wealth within the African continent are uneasy about the likelihood of this wealth being alienated and so transfer resources to external and 'safer' locations. At another level, wealth is frequently transferred out of Africa because it has been accumulated in a corrupt fashion. Such wealth is often transferred under conditions of secrecy, a secrecy which is possible because of the behaviour of the receiving institutions of the first world - most particularly the international banks. The auditing capabilities of the new technology can do much to reveal where resources have been drained off from donor projects, government income or other related activities. Indeed, the recent round of exposure of corruption in Russia owes its emergence to patterns revealed by an intelligent audit of the location and distribution of international assistance. Historically the evidence of corruption lay in identification through conspicuous indicators such as the conspicuous spending of the official or his/ her household and would require an act of social challenge for its resolution. Transparency through intelligent auditing procedures, as opposed to relying on conspicuous indicators, opens up paths for better and more equitable governance. And given the insistence on poverty reduction as the mark of good governance, it is difficult to imagine that this characteristic of the new technology will remain neglected for much longer (www.netaid.org).
Similarly, the auditing capabilities of the new technology allow partners to track the fortunes of their business where businesses operate in an international terrain. One form of business linkage which has developed around the electronic communication and the internet takes the form of an African business having a partner in a North American location who is trading the goods shipped from Africa through the Internet in North America: intelligent auditing allows the African partner to shadow the earnings and performance of the American end of the business. This model could be used by a Fair Trading organisation such as Oxfam to enable community businesses from Africa to trader in the international market but also to trade within the region.
E-commerce: a global business practice.
E-commerce produced the environment in which e-governance became a possibility but now e-governance issues have implications for e-commerce. The technology of client consultation through the electronic modes which has been used by the development aid agencies for delivering a new vision of political and social organisation also has a very important economic face (http://www.undp.org/info21/e-com/e2.html). Exactly the same technologies used in the development of consultation systems can be used as a path for economic development (http://www.peoplink.org/). E-trading (http://www.untpdc.org) is already a major commercial feature of the developing world, most particularly Asia (www.sewa.org).
Within Africa, there has already been pathbreaking activity in respect of e-forms (http://www.re-skill/papers/bitworld.htm). There has been a proliferation of web sites marketing African goods which enable the customer to purchase goods on line: in addition, the development of e-malls which collect together the web sites of a range of traders has begun to take hold (http://www.steerage.co.za/aism). The World Bank has recently linked with Bill Gates of Microsoft to establish major electronic gateways for Africa: this combination of development agency and market developer has real potential for altering and improving Africa's participation in international trade but it also has very real potential for assisting in the development of intra-regional trade. The traditional communication barriers between African states are legendary: the volume of red tape and unnecessary delays destructive of trade. The transparency afforded by new technology and the ability to resolve difficulties over distance interactively and at low cost are key to business development in Africa. For South African business in its interaction with black Africa, better connectivity with its promise of improved transparency and speed of transaction is critical to sustainable trade within the Africa region. In the absence of better transparency and streamlined commercial processes, South Africa will probably look elsewhere for its business partners.
In considering E-business for Africa, it is important to ensure that community business receives explicit attention. E-business opens up the prospect of community businesses which enable women to gain greater bargaining power in the economic exchange despite their heavily constricted mobility. The development agencies, after a slow start, have begun to wake up to the opportunities that the e-form can offer the poor ( http://www.itu.int/ECDC/english-home.htm). African governments, unlike some of the governments of the Pacific area, have not yet seen the light. However, the benefits that e-servicing and e-scheduling offer resource poor states should not be underestimated and commercial agencies have begun to see the potential market with Plessey Malawi moving precisely into this area of activity. E-forms can be used not only for servicing and scheduling the activities of populations which are poorly served by existing infrastructure and commerce (http://www.geocities.com/margaret_grieco/working/space.html )and enable them to connect with global markets but can also be used for technical development and training and skilling. A clear discussion of the potential of e-forms in terms of skill transference, transformation and capacity building has still to take place.
Conclusion: Contributing to the shaping of e-business for Africa: local content and regional development.
This short presentation considered the new opportunities afforded for African regional development by the advent of electronic communication. Electronic communications have considerably lower transaction costs than other forms of information and coordination processes. Most of the discussion of e-forms is in terms of integrating Africa into global markets however the e-form can be used to better advance both local and regional integration. The pursuit of local and regional integration and African economic development may require some strategic thinking about the organisation and presentation of African information. Regional e-malls, for example, would enable and assist in the intra-African search for business partners and customers. Ensuring that information on and communication forms for Africa are not primarily authored outside of Africa is critical in the new organisation of knowledge management and business communication enabled by the new technologies.
After our discussion, this presentation will be expanded to take into account the interests of today's working group and will be posted on the web at http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/E-businessforAfrica