Innovation in Africa: Best advice (and one I take exception with)

From my own research into African development (and really, development anywhere) is that understanding the people, the culture, the environment and the constrains of an area are crucial to the success of any solution. This might be a bit of a cop out, since this could also include economic considerations and a variety of other African development tips, but the example of solar ovens is a good one.

On the surface, solar ovens make a lot of sense. They need no fuel, which is in increasing shortage in Africa, they produce no pollutants and can be made for next to nothing. However, they have never really caught on. One of the main reasons is that many communities only cook at night, or like the post I mentioned earlier, prefer to stir food or some other constraint that makes solar ovens more of a hassle than it's worth, at least in terms of time and convenience. This is why understanding is key in development, as without it even the most obvious solutions to you or I will fall flat in their intended area of use.

However, I have to take exception with the idea that you should only innovate on existing platforms in Africa. This might be for the simple reason that the advice is contradictory. The bicycles and cell phones used as an example for platforms on which to build are not native African technologies. They were imported, and so saying that new technologies have no place in African development I think is not only false, but a disservice to Africa and the developing world as a wh***.

I myself used to be quite a skeptic to the contrary I must admit. But as I started learning more about what Africans from around the continent are asking for and what they are going through great lengths to obtain, my opinion shifted. I would like to share two examples, that of William Kamkwamba and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee.

William Kamkwamba, a Malawian, as a teenager, faced the ridicule of his community, friends and family to build a wind turbine with nothing but what he could find in his village. But his reasons for doing so were nothing if not extremely practical. First and foremost, he built the wind turbine after suffering through a famine in Malawi beyond anything I can comprehend. Many people died, and those who survived were often left in precarious economic conditions, having sold everything they own to get the food they needed. William vowed to never let this happen to his family and community again, and built the wind mill to generate the electricity he needed to have light to study at night, and even one day to power a pump to bring water to his family's fields, making them not only free of the rains that had caused the famine, but even able to have two crops a year instead of just one. Electricity here wasn't seen as a luxury, but as a key to development and even survival.

William also built the wind mill, to a much lesser extent, to help break the environmental cycle of poverty in Malawi. Malawi is a heavily deforested country, and the degraded land quality only exacerbates the poverty that fuels deforestation in the first place. If enough electricity could be generated to run an oven or heater, it could help address that problem as well.

If you would like to follow William, you can read his blog here (let's not even talk about how the internet, another import, has helped his story, and life for that matter!).

The next example is the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee. While admittedly very controversial, the SECC reconnects residents of one of South Africa's poorest areas, Soweto, to the electrical grid if their power has been turned off by the South African utility Eskom. The SECC even prides itself on its professionalism and claims its connections are at least as good as Eskom's. But their reasons for this behavior are compelling. The SECC sees electricity, again, not as a luxury, but as a service of vital importance to people in Soweto. Again, to deny that higher technology has no place in African development denies the realities on the ground. You can read more about the SECC here.

Finally, I would like to finish with two images. The first is a wind potential map of Africa, with brighter shades of green indicating better wind quality on a global scale. The second is the solar photovoltaic potential of Africa, with deeper brown showing the better potential.

Both these maps show that the wind and solar potentials in Africa are at least as good, if not better, than many developed nations. In fact, the continent of Africa has, overall, better solar quality than the nation of Spain, which has a huge solar power sector. Does advanced technology really have no place in development? Or are we just limiting African development because of our own preconceptions?