In 2005, I had the distinct honor of speaking with nearly
forty children in primary 5. These eleven-year-old rural boys and girls shared
their career dreams with amazing clarity and fervor. They dreamed of becoming
doctors, nurses, architects, pilots, engineers and professors.
But the poise and sense of urgent purpose of one
girl left me spellbound. Angela was a lot like her classmates except for one
thing: she wanted to find a cure for two diseases, HIV/AIDS, which left many of
her friends orphaned and malaria, which cut short the lives of millions of
children like her. Her belief in the power and promise of science was
awe-inspiring. Angela embodied everything that a father could ever wish for in
a daughter.
Amidst depravation at home and the less than
basic education infrastructure, made worse by chronic teacher absenteeism and
an unwieldy curriculum, Angela’s dream was indomitable. Angela’s aspiration is
the essence of development as defined by Amartya Sen in his book Development as
Freedom: “enlarging people's choices,
capabilities and freedoms, so that they can live a long and healthy life, have
access to knowledge, a decent standard of living, and participate in the life
of their community.”
Angela’s story has
caused me to question existing models of economic development. Have you
wondered why mobilizing aid, capacity building and technology have not lead to
transformative economic growth in Africa? In their conceptualization of development,
economists have long held that growth is a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle:
high investments lead to capital stock increases, which lead to high output and
more incomes and more savings and more investments, leading inevitably to
sustainable development.
As an ecosystems
ecologist, soaked in complexity and systems thinking, the liberating ideas of
adaptive systems, emergence and feedback are my staple. I therefore find the
dominant economic growth model woefully linear, intellectually stifling and limited
in its conception of development. It is no wonder that there is little to show
for six decades of the so-called development assistance in Africa. As systems
thinker, I know that throwing aid, technology, capacity building and
international best practice blueprints at Africa will not lead to economic development
in the sense of Amartya Sen.
As a complexity and
systems scholar, I think of economic development as a self-organizing emergent
property of complex interactions, adaptive transformation and feedback among
technology, finance, social, legal, political and cultural institutions, which give
children like Angela the liberty to pursue and live their dreams. The dominant and wrongheaded assumption of
economists and policy pundits is based on the notion that governments simply do
not understand what is needed to make their countries prosperous. This engineering
model driven by aid, policy reform, institutional strengthening and technical
assistance, favored by the World Bank, IMF and bilateral donors is flawed and
we have 60 years of empirical evidence.
In their book, “Why Nations Fail: The
origins of power, prosperity and poverty”, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
argue that policies, institutions and overall state effectiveness are not
exogenous but emergent properties of complex and adaptive feedback generated by
a country’s political culture. To most development economists, the fact that ranks
of Africa’s politicians and civil servants are dominated by kleptocrats,
blindly committed to feathering their nests, seems irrelevant to understanding
and explaining Africa’s sluggish pace of economic development.
Africa’s record of development over the last
60 years is unremarkable. Classical economic models cannot explain why African nations
have failed to prosper at the same pace as their Asian peers. Economists are
oblivious of the fact that the economy in which they are intervening is non‐linear, and comprises institutions that interact and
co-evolve with each other in a complex adaptive system.
Moreover, Africa’s ruling elites have no
interest in seeing the financial, political, judicial electoral or civil
society institutions adapt or co-evolve to become effective and independent. When
adaptive transformation and co‐evolution
are stymied, the self-organizing
emergent property of complex interactions, adaptive transformations and
feedback among agents and institutions, is economic stagnation and inequitable
development.
We cannot engineer poverty reduction or economic
growth through external flows of aid or capacity building or technology
transfer or legal or institutional or policy reform. Only a development model that
emerges from co-evolution and adaptive transformation of vital societal institutions
can give Angela the freedom to pursue her dreams. Such a model will unleash the
drivers of economic growth – technology, capital, education, policy and
institutional reform, land governance and democracy.
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