Africa Development Forum
Opening Remarks by
K. Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary, UN Economic Commission for Africa
Addis Ababa,
25 October 1999
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would now like to offer my own perspectives on Africa’s future and how an information society will fit within that future.
Our lives are being influenced by the remarkable Millennial turning point we live in. We are Janus faced: We look backwards at our regrets, our inspirations and our accomplishments. At the same time, we look forward to build upon our accomplishments. We find ourselves as individuals and as society unusually reflective and unusually focused upon the long term.
In the statements you have heard in this session, important visions of Africa’s future have been presented. These visions reflect a consensus that the Africa ahead of us will be far more dynamic. There will be uneven, but marked progress. We will be more like Asia than we have admitted: we will have our tigers and we will have our disappointments. Overall, in the decades ahead we will live in a predominantly urban Africa, an Africa of business, media and science. An Africa where governance is more localized and more shared with civil society. This will be an Africa of significant gains in social well being, particularly as science comes to our rescue to cope with health and environmental crises. In sum, we can vision an Africa in which the great majority of people are better off and in which Africa as a whole is far more significant to the rest of the world.
Many see this as the African Renaissance, a tomorrow’s development more broad-based and substantive than anything in the past. All of this means a more complex Africa, calling for more policy sophistication.
We can be optimistic about Africa’s future because of new possibilities for leapfrogging development. In turn, the leapfrogging possibilities are rooted in science and technology, particularly in three scientific developments that will transform the prospects of all humanity.
As the science futurist Michio Kaku has observed: In the 20th century with quantum theory, for the first time, humans gained an understanding of the physical world around us. In the next century, the quantum revolution may well allow us to manipulate and change the physical world, creating new forms of matter. In the past, we could only marvel at intelligence; in the future, with the aid of miniaturized computers, we will be able to create and manipulate intelligence according to our wishes. As this century ends we are at the edge of understanding the full human genome. In the decades ahead, instead of merely watching life, we will have the nearly godlike ability to repair and manipulate life, almost at will.
In the 20th century we were intelligent observers of nature. In the 21st century we will be changers of nature. In the 20th century nations depended upon natural resources for wealth. In the 21st century and probably well beyond, wealth will depend upon the ability to master the three revolutions of physics, information intelligence, biomolecular science, and the ways they converge.
In terms of development, it is not the magic of a new Millennium that is transforming the prospects for our children and grandchildren. It is scientific revolutions that will utterly change their abilities to learn, live and produce. In other words, what development is and can be will be transformed.
Among the breakthroughs in the years ahead will not only be vast improvements in artificial intelligence, but far greater use of human intelligence. There will be a shift in education from rote learning, to development of real understanding. Education will be a lifelong affair, starting in the first year (when brain development is growing fast) and lasting through old age. Far more of our brain capacity will be cultivated and used than in the past.
The issues for Africa will not be whether these changes take place, but how much we can be part of the changes. If we do not prepare for a development based more on science and technology, the marginalization we will feel in the future will eclipse the marginalization we feel now.
How, then, do we shift from simple agriculture and simple manufacturing to economies which imbed innovation, technologically advanced applications, and are based more on information? The experience of other countries indicates that, intelligent public policies play a tremendous role. Such policies must relate to almost the entire range of society. Policies which are goal focused, carefully monitored, long-term, and which are intelligently led.
Policies in education are critical since the most important resource for science-based economies is the human mind. In the past we settled for quantitative gain through expansion of enrollments. Now we must focus like a laser beam on qualitative gain. Science and technology belongs at all levels of education. At the higher education levels, I can only report with a straight face that correlation analysis shows a very positive relationship between the number of science and technology graduates and economic performance, whereas there is no correlation between the production of lawyers and economic gain. And to think that two of my daughters are on their way to becoming lawyers!
To produce the innovating societies necessary for the next generations, there must be very active setting of incentives, fostering of industries, facilitating research and development, and literally a myriad of economic, investment, patent, finance and technology policies. The range of policies involved is too complex to detail here. But it is worth noting that new alliances are always necessary, between an enabling public sector and a competitive private sector. And clear short term and long-term goals will have to be set and implemented through a range of public policy incentives and rules.
It is within the context of science and technology-led development that I see the necessity of Africa striving mightily to be an information society. The image is not just of students sitting behind computers. It is of economies having innovation capabilities, production capabilities and network and service capabilities in information management.
As a start, we must at least have the ability to repair and maintain systems, and we must give much greater urgency to creating the basic telecommunications infrastructure necessary for an information economy. Governments that give their telecommunications portfolio to their most dynamic and enlightened public administrators, will have a much brighter future.
At the same time that I see an information society as a critically important part of science-based development, I see it as essential to creating Africa’s economic community. To all of us in Mwalimu’s heritage, linkage and solidarity within the continent is at least as important as linkage with the global economy. Satellite broadcasting and filling in the information grid across our continent, will enormously further regional and sub-regional unity. Those of us charged with helping to manage the Abuja regional integration process, will have to run to catch up with the integrating innovations the private sector will carry out.
Accelerated systems of information and computation, are answers and opportunities. But like the agricultural age of the past and our industrial age of the present, an emerging information age is now filled with questions calling for leadership in development. There are classic development questions which need to be reformulated for a 21st century economy: who will participate, who will benefit, will the poor continue to be left behind, will the wealth of information be hoarded by an information elite, can regulators find ways of accelerating information societies and not stand in the way, can we afford this new game, and can we avoid treating this as a new fad where we are dazzled by the pretty wrapping but fail to find the gift within?
Questions like these are the ones calling for an updated policy community, a policy community ahead of the issues, selecting among opportunities, making strategic choices, guiding public opinion, and finding new alliances in a more pluralistic world, to further this new development. In short: taking time now to understand options and to think through how choices will affect the future of our nations, and the future of Africa as a whole.
Just over the horizon, the financial costs to Africa of internal linkage and for generating our own information society will become increasingly affordable for more and more segments of our societies. A wired Africa, an Africa where a significant proportion of our human potential is really developed, an Africa seeing globalizing world markets not as its biggest threat, but as its biggest playing field.
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The bottom line is that the topic is vital; the process of this Forum has potentially great importance for Africa’s policy community. This audience is filled with wise and wired leaders from government, business, civil society and academia; you are affiliated with community, national, regional and global organizations. You are a good representation of the policy community affecting Africa’s future. I urge you to be in top form.
Let us make the most of this opportunity. Welcome to the first African Development Forum!
Thank you.