In his article, “Connecting a Nation: Roshan Brings Communications Services to Afghanistan,” Karim Khoja provides a fascinating first-person account of the challenges of introducing a mobile phone network to Afghanistan. What little communications infrastructure the country had did not survive decades of war, so when Khoja arrived in 2002 he was part of an effort to build a system from scratch.
Paired with the article by Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’ — Turning Cellphones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya” some commonalities in establishing new services in challenging circumstances arise. Although M-PESA’s widespread adoption coincided with a period of civil unrest in Kenya, the situation there is very different from daily life in Afghanistan.
In both markets, it was necessary to train new employees to fill roles that hadn’t previously existed in their countries, navigate a maze of different languages and dialects, and solve cultural and logistical problems. But what I find most interesting is that both projects were the result of partnerships between for-profit companies, foreign government agencies, local government regulators, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Clearly we are in the era described by Prahalad in “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”: The excesses of colonial capitalism have become overshadowed by the pragmatic reality that nothing generates wealth like private enterprise, and that countries’ capacity for wealth generation is the single thing that most separates the global haves from the have-nots. These projects are post-post-colonial.
But neither of these articles addresses the relationship between emergent private enterprise and poor governance, one of the main barriers to raising standards of living that Collier identifies in “The Bottom Billion.” The wealth created by enterprise in a country where the rule of law is tenuous and transparency is not common can be a powerful temptation.
I’m increasingly seeing the value of co-operative business models, not only in providing cost containment for member/owners, but also in providing business structures that enforce transparency and accountability. At the same time I’ve come to recognize that some businesses, such as health care, might benefit from some of the principles of co-operatives but not necessarily all of them, such as member equity shares. The so-called “middle path” between individual capitalism and state control deserves a fresh look.
It seems to me that the primary benefit of the partnerships in these two articles is that the private sector partners are positioned to invest far more cash than a grassroots co-operative could. That’s a very real benefit, and pragmatically may be the only way these projects could happen. But I will be interested to see what the long-term future for the wealth generated by Roshan and M-PESA turns out to be.
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