[Pieter Fourie works as a Senior research Officer at the Australian High Commission in Pretoria, South Africa. -ed.] Goods which are not shared are not goods. La Celestina, Act I.
In Africa we live in anachronistic, even paradoxical times. On the one hand we receive a daily dose of symbolic, and by now rather academic statements regarding the rebirth of Africa, whilst on the other we are faced with poverty and the reality of conflict and war. Africa is hungry, and burning: from Algeria to Lesotho, from Nigeria to Eritrea. Clearly, the 'African Renaissance' is a prescriptive rather than a descriptive concept - the expression of a desire, need and hope rather than a plan for the future. Indeed, this might be the most disquieting facet of the so-called Renaissance: the absence of any coherent, continent-wide agenda or framework for change. We need to move beyond the symbolism of and lip service to a cultural revival in Africa. Isolated evenings of African dance and poetry -- imperative as they are -- will not feed mouths or stop wars; they will not lead to economic development and real growth. We need to realize that the mere statement of the concept of an 'African Renaissance' does not mean that it exists. It is going to take hard and co-ordinated effort to make this happen. President Thabo Mbeki said as much at the African Renaissance conference that was held in Johannesburg. In his keynote address, Mbeki asked: "If we know what needs to be done, why then, is [it] not being done?"
The challenge is immense: according to the World Bank's 1998 world development indicators, 29.4 percent of the world in 1993 earned less than $1 per day. Most regions experienced improvements when measured against 1987 levels, but the ratio in sub-Saharan Africa actually rose from 38.5 to 39.1 percent. The sub-Saharan economy heads into two years of substandard economic growth -- in October 1998 the Economist Intelligence Unit forecasted sub-Saharan economic expansion for 1998 at only 1.1 percent, with a recovery to 2.6 percent in 1999. Since 1990 the South African economy has grown more slowly than in the 1980s, and the South African Chamber of Business recently reported that its business confidence index had fallen to a 12-year low. Clearly, the 'Asian contagion' has derailed any economic African Renaissance for the time being.
Other than blame exogenous global economic meltdowns, what can Africa do to remedy its status? In economic and trade terms (for a genuine Renaissance will have to be economically driven), we must face the reality that, since the 1970s but even more so since the end of the cold war, the structure of international trade has changed significantly, from being dominated by primary products to being concentrated on technologically intensive goods -- knowledge has become the prime commodity in the global economy.
How do sub-Saharan Africa and the continent as a whole compare with the rest of the world regarding our general technological status? The answer is short -- poorly: according to Unesco's 1996 World Science Report , the continent's government expenditure on research and development (R&D) as a percentage of GDP came to 0.4 percent, as opposed to Japan and the US's 2.8 percent each, and even India's 0.8 percent, China's 0.7 percent, or the central of eastern European countries' 1.5 percent. Knowledge and technology specifically cannot be produced and national systems of innovation cannot be fostered if governments do not invest in them. This fact is painfully attested to by Africa's poor contribution to world scientific journals: Science & Engineering Indicators 1996 showed that Africa had contributed only one percent of all science and technology articles published in the world (the lowest global share), whilst the 1996 World Science Report indicated that Africa as a whole possessed only 0.4 R&D scientists per 1000 population (the global average being 0.8).
Africa needs technology and knowledge, and the only way we can get it is to either make it ourselves (through successful and applied national systems of innovation) or to get it from somewhere else (through the transfer of technologies). In order to create technology, a state or region needs capital input. The figures quoted above shows that national governments in Africa do not invest nearly enough in the creation of national systems of innovation, whilst international trade and aid flows increasingly by-pass the continent. In addition, the debt burden placed on this continent and expenditures on military conflicts make it almost impossible to foresee any imminent redesign of African national budgets around technology acquisition as national priorities, no matter how urgently this needs to be done.
Despite the technological marginalization that continues to bog the continent, Africans who are serious about the new 'African dream' of a continental renewal should take note -- maybe as an action point on the still-illusive agenda for change -- of the complexity, the pitfalls and opportunities, of technology transfers to Africa. A first point should touch on exactly this perception, namely that such transfers could and should only occur from 'the outside' -- the developed world. Africans can start a program of technological action by taking stock of and disseminating what we already have -- technology transfers occur within states as well as amongst them, and within organizations, universities, firms, non-governmental organizations and other research bodies as much as between them.
Strategic linkages -- nationally as well as continentally -- are needed, as the example of China demonstrates: before the Chinese government embarked on its program of modernization in the late 1970s, the government was the sole foundor of R&D efforts. No serious attempts were made to link industrial demand to the research conducted in Chinese higher education institutions. The result was that the technologies produced by the institutions were under-utilized, and there were no economic incentives to transfer these technologies to technology consumers -- institutional compartmentalism actually blocked the dissemination of technological information. In 1978 this situation changed -- the Chinese government started to encourage the transfer of technology from R&D institutions to industry, and a Combined Research and Production Entity (CPRE) was founded to co-ordinate these activities and act as a technology consultant to R&D institutions such as universities, and industry. It is good to see that the South African department of trade and industry has in the last few years also moved towards the development of such inter-industry linkages -- cluster studies are being conducted in a range of economic sectors to get a macro-perspective on economic (and surely technological) exigencies. Nothing is stopping African countries from erecting CPREs of our own -- nationally as well as continentally.
We have to be aware, however, that technology transfers -- be they amongst African states or from states beyond the continent - should not automatically be perceived as an ever-benevolent panacea for our developmental ills. In fact, some transfers of technology can do more harm than good. Technology needs to be appropriate to the context into which it is transferred, and appropriate technological application is dependent upon a multitude of factors, for example on:
1. the absorptive capacity of the technology recipient (are there sufficient and appropriate technicians, scientists and engineers to indiginize the new knowledge, in other words to strip new or acquired technology down and adapt and apply it to local needs and conditions?),
2. considerations such as the prioritization of national sovereignty (one needs to be aware that some technology suppliers such as multinational corporations might only donate or sell technologies in order to gain a foot in new markets and to monopolize economic sectors), and
3. the question whether the imported technology is compatible with local cultural and economic conditions (eg. will local resources be utilised and will concurrent industrial pollution disrupt the local environment?).
The recipient state has a responsibility to -- along with local industry and
higher education institutions -- assure the appropriateness of imported technologies.
Some of the tools that the state can use to optimize technology transfers
are price control mechanisms (making appropriate technology cheaper and inappropriate
technology more expensive), (non)-participation in international intellectual
property regimes, and providing subsidies for certain joint ventures with
foreign technology suppliers.
For an economic African Renaissance to move beyond excited rhetoric and academic interest, the continent and its leaders need to face the reality of our technological needs. 'Facing it' means more than measuring and bemoaning the science and technology gap that exists between the developed and the developing countries. We need to train more engineers and scientists (and not lose them to the developed world) in order to prepare the ground -- our absorptive capacity -- for technology flows. We need these trained individuals to build national systems of innovation that are appropriate to our own needs. We need to wake up and realise that 'foreign affairs' and 'foreign policy making' will increasingly centre around trade, and that trade, in turn, will increasingly centre around the global dissemination of knowledge. Failure to do so will mean the difference between using technology as an economic liberator, or forever lagging and viewing it as a destroyer. This is the difference between beautiful words about an African renewal, or pragmatism that can improve the lives of millions.
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