One of my favourite movies is a Bollywood flick called 3 Idiots,
which tells the story of three college friends. One them turns out to be a brilliant
mind called Phunsukh Wangdu, who invents a host of gadgets in a remote part of
India. Not only did this movie made me laugh throughout, it also gave me a
sense of happiness to see the simple Mr. Wangdu coming up triumphant against
someone who had become a corporate big shot.
It turns out that the character of Phunsukh Wangdu was based
on a real person, an inventor called Sonam Wangchuk, who is from the Ladakh, the
Indian State which shares a border with Tibet. Mr. Wangchuk has essentially
become famous for building a campus run entirely on renewable energy and a
technique of storing fresh water using artificial glaciers. More on Mr. Wangchuk
and his inventions can be found at:
Mr. Wangchuk is what I’d call one of the best things to
emerge in the science of development. He’s a local innovator, who creates solutions
that are unique to a particular region. If you look at Mr. Wangchuk’s two key
inventions, you will notice that they were perfect for the Himalayan region. Who
else but someone who grew up in that part of the world could have come up with
solutions for the issues faced by that part of the world?
While I believe that globalization has on balance been a positive
force, there has been one major flaw. It’s worked on the assumption that what
is good for the Western (mainly American) world has been good for the
developing world. This has been clearly seen in business where global business
has come to mean American multinationals and it’s also happened in the area of
development – one only has to visit any given developing country to witness the
number of “development” agents from Western NGOs hanging around.
This is not a bad thing in as much as both multinationals
and NGOs do provide capital and training for the local population. I think of
Singapore, a small island that has managed to achieve economic maturity within
a generation. Part of our success has been due to the fact that our economy is
built by multinationals and our people and businesses are placed in a situation
where “best in Singapore” is not acceptable – you have to be best in the world.
There is however, one problem. When you get solutions from
elsewhere, they don’t always in the local context and finding a solution to the
solution ends up becoming a very expensive process for all parties involved. Business
is many examples of how failing to take into account of the local context has failed.
Ford forgot that locals in South America are Spanish speaking rather than
English speaking. Hence, the launch of the Ford Nova was a failure. Who wants
to buy a car called “No Go” (direct translation of Nova from Spanish). Closer
to home, international burger chains found themselves getting beating in the Philippines
because they didn’t adapt to local taste and got a kicking by the local player,
Jollibee.
When this happens in business, its merely a case of the
business failing to make the money they hopped they’d make. It’s a little more
serious when it comes to development agencies and NGOs. When the foreign
solution fails, the development agencies and NGOs ask for and get more money.
However, the locals don’t see their lives improving. Hence, the common
criticism of development agencies being that they only develop the employees of
the development agencies.
Home grown solutions provided by the likes of Mr. Wangchuk tend
to be more effective in the goal of helping the local community. The reason is
simple, they understand the local context such as what the local communities
will accept, the local geography and the available resources. I read an
interview by Mr. Wangchuk who argued that his home province of Ladakh did not need
the industrialization as the rest of India. The interview can be found at:
Once again, I am by no means rejecting the role of the
outside world in developing and creating prosperity. It’s vital for the world
to be interconnected if it prospers. However, the most effective solutions
cannot be imposed on a community because they worked elsewhere. The cost-effective
ones are inevitably developed from the ground up by the people who understand the
ground and aided by people with the skills to execute no matter where they come
from.
My nation of Singapore has been thus far successful with
imported solutions. However, we’re discovering that as the economy matures, we
need a different way of solving problems. How do we do that? The answer is
clearly to look to the people who understand what’s going on.
It will take time for a culture of encouraging home-grown innovation
to develop, especially when the old method of importing solutions worked so
well. I think of a local inventor who once developed something for our water
utility. The civil servants told him, “Nobody else in the world does it the way
you’ve proposed.” His reply was “Nobody else in the world has water issues like
ours.” This is an answer that we need to apply to the way we do things if we
are to encourage the development of necessary home grown innovation.
No comments
Post a Comment