Category: Sustainable Economic Development

Supporting business that creates wealth and growth should be our main priority

I see that in the USA there is a similar debate as here in South Africa about whether government should support small firms or growing firms.
Andrew Hargadon wrote a brilliant post on the debate that was brought to my attention by Tim Kastelle. Hargadon argues that hindsight is often mistaken for foresight. He explains that many small firms stay small for many years before they grow, and that it is hard to predict which will grow, which will just survive and which would fail. From my own business and consulting experience I support his view and have seen on many occasions that it sometimes takes a change of ownership or management to get a small enterprise onto a growth path. But sometimes we are so obsessed with the romantic idea of an entrepreneur fighting an honorable fight against market forces and the onerous framework conditions that we miss the bigger picture. Some people are good at starting enterprises, others are good at growing enterprises, other good at maintaining an enterprises. Some will just never be able to do it no matter how much support you provide (or waste). Most people will make better employees than entrepreneurs.

The myth that small enterprises drives growth and employment is an old one, one that is firmly in the rooted in minds of policy makers and development practitioners here in RSA and in our region. There seems to be a confusion between correlation and causation. Even if statistics shows that 60% of people in RSA are employed in small enterprises (thus a correlation seem to exist between small firms and employment) it does not tell us anything about causation (does small firms create employment, or does more employment lead to more small firms being created). Research by many reputable scholars have shown that small enterprises hardly drives growth, but that it often responds to growth; it is more likely that larger better resourced companies will drive growth and efficiency in the economy, with ecosystems of small firms emerging around them providing specialized and also some general services.

For instance, the reputable scholar Thorsten Beck argues that the dynamism of enterprises is more important than the size of small firms in the total economy. I first came across Becks work while doing my PhD research (he has since moved from the Worlbank to Tilburg University). Beck has done many cross-country micro economic studies and argues that:“Policy efforts targeted at SMEs have often been justified with arguments that

(1) SMEs are an engine of innovation and growth and

(2) they help reduce poverty because they are labor-intensive and thus stimulate job growth, but

(3) they are constrained by institutional and market failures.

Cross-country, country-level, and microeconomic studies, however, do not support these claims. One study shows that, although faster-growing economies have a higher share of SME employment in their manufacturing sectors, it is not the size of this segment that drives growth“.

The full report can be found here

Here in South Africa development practitioners have the challenge that we have to pursue objectives that are in conflict.
Everyone seems to agree that we should create more employment, as the waste of human capital in our country is just socially not sustainable nor justifiable. Yet, we are constrained in that we cannot always support those firms that are more likely to create employment because of the race of the owners, or for other demographic criteria or preconditions. Sadly, many entrepreneurs that can help us absorb the unemployed have left, or have shifted into industries where they don’t have to rely so much on low skilled workers. Many have simply taken up jobs in the corporate or service sectors (people like me and many others I know). The current legislative environment just does not make it easy or attractive enough for people to start new firms or expand existing ones. In fact, many people that have the capacity to start medium sized firms are investing their money elsewhere. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against the principle of equity enshrined in our constitution, I strongly support this. I also believe that labor should be paid fairly in a just relationship. The current labour and BEE environment just does not make for an environment where people will start firms or spin-offs that will address our primary problem of unemployment.

I believe that having a job goes a long way to equipping (black or white, male or female, young or not-so-young) employees to start a business at some point when they have gained sufficient technical AND market experience. Employment experienced and education will still do much more for sustainable black economic empowerment than any other measure. Furthermore, a focus on employment (no matter what the profile of the employer is) will also increase our tax base so that we can do more to develop our country. I will not get into my feelings about too few taxpayers supporting a too big social spend and government here.

Whether big or small, I put my money behind family owned businesses (Yes, I have a small bias). They somehow have the ability to consider both short term but also long term priorities at the same time. Even if they don’t make decisions fast, or if they sometimes appear to be conservative, I found family owned businesses are more likely to continuously invest in better equipment, in developing capacity, and in securing new markets. Family owned businesses makes for more stable employment, and generally they are more aware of the social needs of their employees. But these are also the kind of firms that are least likely to give up shares and management positions if it does not make long term business sense, thus Black Economic Empowerment policies and many conditional support incentives actually undermines this (often unrecognized) backbone of our economy.

What most people choose to ignore is that 3 drivers of costs of business are escalating very rapidly. These are:

  1. cost of raw materials. We buy smaller volumes and pay more compared to other international markets, with many countries even subsidizing access to raw materials.
  2. cost of energy. Our energy cost has increased faster than firms could upgrade, so we are far from efficient and thus at disadvantage. Municipalities further charge double and triple digit margins on top of the official electricity rates. Lastly, those that want to expand often cannot secure or afford access to electricity due to more than a decade of underinvestment in the grid at municipal level
  3. cost of labour. Many other factors are making wages too low for workers to live on (like the cost of transport), while raising the cost component of labour in business without increasing productivity resulting in South African enterprises being uncompetitive. Most employers when they do agree to wage increases simply reduce their staff, because other types of productivity improvement simply takes too long to yield results.

There is only one way that I know of to overcome these 3 cost drivers, and that is innovation at all levels of the enterprise (product, process and business model innovation). We also need social innovation, especially with regards to finding better ways at training, re-training or current workforce and the unemployed.

I can see in many sectors that those entrepreneurs that can create businesses that mainly employes skilled or educated employees are able to compete domestically and internationally. Those enterprises that depend on low skilled workers will simply struggle to compete, their costs are just to high and more and more of them are failing. Larger firms with access to capital and debt are more likely to be able to balance the investments in capital and labour that is required to be profitable in our economy, while smaller firms are struggling to balance this while raising capital and exploring new markets at the same time. The transaction costs for smaller firms to experiment until the find a workable business model in many instances is just to high. This is visible in the popularity of franchises where an entrepreneur buys into a proven business model and where the costs of experimenting with the business model is shared by many franchisees. (I wish we had something similar in manufacturing).

From my research over the last 3 years into innovation in industries I can say with confidence that our smaller manufacturers are hardly investing in Research and Development, mainly because they are under such strong cost and competitive pressure. Those smaller firms that do innovate formally often do this on contract, meaning they are paid by larger firms to do so. Larger firms that are active internationally are more likely to pay for R & D in order to drive down costs while creating new markets and new products. In doing so they support a wide range of smaller firms that provide experts services, specialized components or other intermediary inputs needed by the larger firms.

In the end, we have to direct our funds to those that can create employment, create wealth, create new markets and create new kinds of jobs. We should assess which firms we support by looking at the multiplier effects and the spillovers. We should support those firms that optimally and responsibly use existing resources, whether it be financial, natural or human resources. We must try to support the areas where dynamism already exist to start with, and then we have to try and support dynamism elsewhere. But we should not assume that our large and established smaller enterprises are able to develop all by themselves. The current focus is too much on small and not enough on multipliers and dynamism in the whole economy.

For me all other priorities come second to the objectives of growth and wealth creation, as we cannot achieve all of our countries many priorities at the same time. Growth will absorb more people, will attract more investment, will create new markets, new skills and new opportunities. Wealth creation is as important for employees as it is for investors, entrepreneurs, managers and also the government.

We have to send a strong message to ALL entrepreneurs that we value their investment, their energy and their attempts to create new markets. But we cannot help all of them, and by assisting some of them based on social criteria will not take us toward our countries biggest crises, the unemployed youth, nor will it allow us to optimally leverage the wisdom and experience of our older generation of technicians, engineers, managers and academics no matter what their demographic profile.

Supporting business that creates wealth and responsible growth should be our main priority.

There is more value to the value chain than adding value to products

I am supporting value chain practitioners in various programmes where I am coaching, teaching, supporting, pushing and pulling experts. This is one of the perks of my job as I get to look over the shoulders of practitioners working all around the world on commodity, agricultural, manufacturing and service value chains.

While marking some assignments for a course I am tutoring for the ILO I realized that many practitioners are trapped in a particular chain, just like the actors that they are trying to empower. With trapped, I mean that they are working with the actors and the chain for the benefit of the chain. They completely miss the broader impact of their work. (I know that this is often more the fault of the people who design programmes, more about this elsewhere in my blogs).

Let me explain.

For me a value chain is something we construct so that we can understand a part of a sub-system. If you are diagnosing a tomato value chain then it is true that you are getting a deeper understanding of the tomato system. But you are also gaining an insight into an agricultural system, a regional system of stakeholders and communities, but also an insight into the national or maybe even global economy. While some value chains exists in a very formal way, with contracts linking the different actors, most value chains can rather be described as temporary social phenomena. Temporary because they tend to change over time.

Back to my main argument. While it is true that value chains are known by their end products or markets, there is more to a value chain than just the conversion stages of a product/service. Value chains show us how an economic system works. It show us how responsive institutions and supporting organizations and indeed a whole society is towards economic activities of a certain kind. Value chains also tell us some fluffy yet important things about the society it is framed by. It tell us something about the social relations, the search costs (finding people to do business with), the social capital (how well we trust each other, how easily we collaborate), the enabling environment, and the returns on investment and effort in different parts of the system.

So if we find that tomato farmers are not very sophisticated, that they have poor market relations, that entry barriers are very low hence nobody has an incentive to invest, that suppliers are dishonest, that there are some new market niches developing but that nobody knows, that intermediaries have disproportionate power; I am not surprised at all. In fact, your findings are rather typical, even predictable in some sectors. What I am surprised by is if you treat this like it is a unique finding contained only to the tomato farming sector. The chance that these characteristics are contained only to those involved in the tomato chain is rather slim. This is the real risk of having a too narrow product focus.

Yes. Value chains are known by their end markets or products. But no, we are not locked into a product. We want to understand the system better so that we can support the emergence of institutions, market systems and interventions that make the whole system work better. Those issues that I outlined before in my tomato example can be verified in the sectors or crops around it. In my experience, many crops or business sectors sometimes have similar challenges. Therefore instead of trying to work at a low scale with some tomato farmers, you could possible be working with 10 crop types in a region, involving 1000s of farmers, and maybe a dozen supporting institutions. Few extension services for instance focus on one crop, they often handle a variety of crops, animals and markets. So you have to try and understand what each kind of economy activity (like farming with tomatoes) have in common with other business types or farms, and then what is unique. When you do this you often find that the actors in the chain have far more in common than the product or crop. They could all be equally unskilled, equally under-capitalised, equally vulnerable to market fluctuations, equally exposed to poor contract enforcement, or monopolies. This is how we get to real systemic interventions.

But the idea should never be to promote some products. This is the job of business people and entrepreneurs, not development practitioners. No, development practitioners should try to understand and strengthen the system. We make the features of the system that is overlooked or not visible to stakeholders more apparent. I also dislike it when practitioners start with an hypothesis that profit is unfairly distributed, or many of the other typical biases that exists in this field. The simple truth is that investments in economies flows to where there are (visible) returns. If it becomes more profitable to invest in retail than in manufacturing or farming, then this tells us something about the system. It is an important finding in itself which then allows us to ask the next question “how to make farming more profitable for investors (farmers and the poor are also investors)?”.

Your value chain has more value in it than the value added at each stage of the chain. What is valuable is the insight you are gaining about how a part of the economy works. Don’t become a product promoter. Be a system builder.

The MaFI-festo: changing the rules of the international development “game” to unleash the power of markets to end poverty

I am supporting great initiative of the Market Facilitation Initiative. Lucho submitted the online debate we’ve been having since 2008 into the annual Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation (called MIX). I am a member of the MaFI discussions.

Lucho provides the following short summary “Bilateral and multilateral donors and NGOs re-write the rules of the International Development Cooperation System to unleash the real potential of markets and the private sector to end poverty at a large scale… easier, faster and cheaper. How? Through trust-based partnerships, complexity science, effective organisational learning, systemic M&E and co-evolutionary experimentation.”

The solution offered by Lucho (based on the MaFI dialogue) is:

A series of national and international conferences, seminars and workshops to bring donors, NGOs and leading firms to identify the rules of the development “game” that need to change to make market development initiatives more inclusive, accountable, responsive, innovative, holistic and cost-effective.
MaFI (The Market Facilitation Initiative) started in 2008 and has more than 240 experts from all over the world working in NGOs, donor agencies, private firms and academic institutions. The aim of MaFI is to advance policies and practices based on facilitation and systems thinking to make markets work better for the poor and the environment. MaFI is a working group of The SEEP Network with the technical support of Practical Action.

After almost two years of of discussions, MaFI members produced a manifesto (The MaFI-festo) which has three main objectives:

  •  To focus the attention of key stakeholders on a set of strategic changes that are urgently needed if the international development system is to effectively harness the full potential of markets to reduce poverty at scale and protect the environment
  • To promote convergence and collaboration between bilateral and multilateral donors, practitioners and academic researchers working in the fields of “aid effectiveness” and inclusive markets.
  • To inspire NGO leaders to promote the adoption of systems thinking and facilitation approaches in their own organizations and networks to increase their ability to interact with the private sector and leverage the full potential of inclusive market development programs.

The MaFI-festo focuses on four areas (in no particular order of importance):

  1. Changing how we work in the field
  2. Balancing flexibility and accountability
  3. Building the capacity of facilitators
  4. Changing what and how we measure change

The MaFI-festo will give content and focus to the series of conferences, seminars and workshops mentioned above. These are called the MaFI-festo Dialogues.

What must you do?

To see the application go to http://www.managementexchange.com/node/62551

Find out more about the M-Prize go to: http://www.managementexchange.com/m-prize/long-term-capitalism-challenge

We need you to:

Comment, vote and throw in your ideas!

With each comment, like, or Tweet our submission goes up in the rankings!

Why is private sector development such a low priority in Sub-Saharan Africa?

I will start my post by linking to another blog from Kenya. The blogger makes reference to a report by Robert Wade, professor of political economy and development at the London School of Economics, which discusses the role of industrial policy in Asia and how donors completely neglected it in Africa. In essence, Prof Wade compared the economic development activities of donors in Asia with development efforts in Africa.

I can’t help but wonder why industrial development is such a low priority for Africa.

Although donors generally respond to the demands from their developing country counterparts, I know from experience that donors also have preferential aid packages. But why is private sector development such a low priority? Why are we not seeing the same kind of productive infrastructure and technology transfer into Africa that we saw go into Asia? Even donors with “Sustainable Economic Development” Programmes are more concerned with rural development, gender and limited agri-processing support. What about building new industries, new processing facilities, new productive capacity in Africa? Instead the focus as at a micro level, and perhaps at some regional level.

Please don’t tell me it is because the enabling environment is not right. When it suited Western countries they invested in autocratic countries with very poor human rights track records.  Billions of dollars went (and still go) into countries without an enabling business environment. Most countries in Africa today are at a better governance standing than their Asian counterparts were in the 1980s-1990s.

Just thinking out loud. What can we do to make industrial development more important in Sub-Saharan Africa?

The benefits of being aware of how a system works

For those that have participated in any of the training events that I have contributed to in the last years would hopefully recall my favorite energizer called the Systems Game. In this game we simulate a complex system, with all the participants moving around trying to position themselves between two targets in the group, without the targets being aware who is chasing them. Things usually start of neat and tidy, but soon chaos breaks out.  After the game we reflect on the system and how to better understand its behavior, and also how to figure out how to stimulate change of behavior in the system.

The pictures below were taken in the last Mesopartner International Summer Academy on Economic Development.

The participants secretly determine who they will follow
The participants tries to become system aware – who is following me?

One of the first insights is that our job as practitioners is not to try and fix the system, nor to solve a problem on behalf of the system. Our first job is to try and get the system to become more aware of its own behaviors, issues and dilemmas. Very often this will allow us to use some of the existing relationships, routines and networks of the system to improve the performance or to address some issues in the system.

I received the following little e-mail story recently that actually shows how actors that are aware of the system can easier manipulate the system to achieve certain outcomes. From a few google searches I could not determine the source of the story, except to see that its been featured in many fora. Therefere if you know the original source then please let me know so that I can give proper credit.

Here is the story as I received in my e-mail:

An old man wanted to plant a tomato garden, but it was difficult work, as the ground was hard.

His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison, and so the old man wrote a letter to his son:
Dear Vincent,
I am feeling sad because I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m too old already.
I know if you were here,  you would happily dig the plot for me, like in the old days.
Love,
Papa

A few days later, he received a letter from his son.
Dear Papa,
Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried.
Love, Vinnie

At 4 am the next morning, FBI agents and police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies.
They apologised to the old man and left.

That day, he received another letter from his son:

Dear Papa,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love, Vinnie

Now the moral of this story is that only people that are aware of how a system might behave can fully exploit the system to their advantage. I wonder how we can use this insight to promote better inclusiveness in development? From my everyday work experience I know that in value chains and production systems the poor, weak, small and marginalized are often the least aware of how the bigger system(s) around them work. The powerful, better informed and more successful entrepreneurs often have better information at their disposal. While some of this information could be formal, quite a bit of it is qualitative based on a deeper understanding of how things (might) work.

UNCTAD releases Economic Development in Africa report 2010

UNCTAD release.

Two weeks ago the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released the “Economic Development in Africa Report 2010-South-South Cooperation: Africa and the New Forms of Development Partnership” report. The report examines the recent trends in the economic relationships in Africa with other developing countries, as well as new forms of partnership that have emerged in the past years.

The report argues that South-South cooperation has the potential to enhance Africa’s capacity to deal with the challenges of poverty and poor infrastructure, the development of productive capacity, and emerging threats associated with climate change, as well as the food, energy, financial and economic crises. In this regard, the report argues that there is a need for African countries to mainstream South–South cooperation into their development strategies to ensure that it further contributes to the achievement of national and regional development goals.

Highlights of the report can be found here

The effect of the financial crisis on Africa

The 2010 African Economic Outlook was launched on the 24th of May 2010.  The report states that 80% of economies in Africa still showed economic growth in 2009, compared to 10% of the OECD countries. To see the statistics, head over to their website. You can even manipulate (or interact) with the data for your own research. The best thing is that access to this data is free!

While browsing their site I found an interesting page on the topic of “China in Africa: Debunking myths and debating truths“. The influence of China in Africa is now even a topic at family barbecues, so perhaps this is a good place to gain some new perspectives.

Why the theories underlying economic development matters

I have been accused on several occasions of being too theoretical in my training approaches. These comments typically come from highly experienced development consultants and not from the target groups of my training, namely government officials, development facilitators and experts based within developmental organizations. I am not denying that I like to raise some more nerdy-like topics during my training, but this is based on my belief that you cannot be a developmental practitioner without understanding what the deeper knowledge bases are that we are working with.

I am always amused by this negative attitude towards of theoretical bases, especially when these consultants themselves start blurring the lines between the bases that they work from and the outcomes that they prefer.

Why do theories matter?

Bodies of knowledge, or theoretical basis are useful to development practitioners and are not only the domain of clever academics. Not only does a body of knowledge or theory provide us with some guiding principles, it also provides us with lines of inquiry or research questions. A theory also provides a boundary which typically explains what a theory does not cover. You could say that each theoretical base has its strengths (which means that it can structure, explain or questions certain phenomena) and its limitations (which means it does not provide structure, explanations or questions for other phenomena). So the main point is that a theory gives a development practitioner guidance as to what a theoretical base can inquiry, what questions it can find answers to, and which topics it does not provide much insight into. The main function thus of a theory is it helps us structure questions so that we can develop robust answers.

The importance of questions in development practice

Very often we find that developmental practitioners have posed very weak or generic questions at the start of a project or intervention. For instance, the question “how can we help the poor in this region?” is a poorly defined question as you will not be able to deal with the hundreds of answers ranging from “they must do it for themselves” all the way to “we must do it for them“.

Einstein is quoted as saying “if I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes“.

So we have to ask more specific questions that lead to more precise questions. These questions are shaped by our theoretical bases. For instance, someone from an engineering background (using an engineering base) will ask that question slightly differently than someone from a business background (using business management) or a social worker (using certain social subjects).

The result of blurring the lines between theories is that questions becomes blurred, leading to vague answers. When questions becomes blurred by experienced consultants, manipulation may occur.  This can be achieved by sequencing questions in a way that people (beneficiaries, donors, organizations, political interests) are lead into one or two “solutions” or conclusions. These conclusions, recommendations, or solutions (call it what you will) are also sometimes known as “magic bullets” or recipes for success. We all know that magic bullets are blind, because they are so dependent on a specific context or the experience of the expert advising them.

You should never trust the answer of a research study or report if you do not understand which questions were asked to guide the study. Despite the content of the research, the questions gives an important hint as to which theoretical bases where used, which also provides us with a clue to the limitations (or blindspots) of that theory.

I am not arguing that we cannot combine theories, rather, I am arguing that we should always remember which theories we are combining in our work. For example, if you are promoting value chains and you are not basing your questions on business management theories (including production, industrial, strategic and other forms of management), then on what bases are you relying for your questions? Are you depending on gut feel, past experience, anecdotal experience, ideology or personal value systems? Or even worse, do you see value chain promotion as an answer to an unasked question? (What was that question again?). And let us say you are depending on the example I provided of business management as a basis for value chain promotion, then what are you blind to because of the choice of theory? Business management theories provide very little insight into social issues, market functioning (not to be confused with marketing management) poverty alleviation, or more technical or scientific issues that you are typically confronted with when working with value chains in a developmental context. I could have of course used another example, but this is one that I am frequently confronted with.

Perhaps it is worth your while to reflect for a few moments on which bases you draw when you come up with recommendations or are confronted by a specific problem. You will be surprised to find that there are many other bases that will provide you with different questions that you might want to consider reading up on. Perhaps you will even find some explanations why some of your favourite viewpoints seems to be so vulnerable or prone to failure within certain contexts, or why people resist some of your ideas. Let me know what you find!!

From good governance to good development governance

In its latest Least Development Country Report , UNCTAD is reflecting on the impact of the financial crisis on the 49 LDCs and is stipulating a move from “good governance” to “good development governance”. The report describes the weaknesses of the current “good governance” trend that has trapped many development agencies and governments, and provides recommendations on how to improve the impact of good governance interventions through a move to good development governance.

“Development governance is about the processes, policies and institutions associated with purposefully promoting national development and ensuring a socially legitimate and inclusive distribution of its costs and benefits”

 

http://www.unctad.org/Templates/webflyer.asp?docid=11721&intItemID=2097&lang=1

The UNCTAD LDC reports are an annual highlight, I strongly recommend that you take a look at this document.

 

Innovative firms

Have you ever wondered why not all firms are innovative? If you are a development practitioner like I am, then you must have come across hundreds if not thousands of small and large firms that are not very innovative. This results in these firms also not being very competitive.

There could be many reasons why so many firms are not innovating, and one of these is that the firms are serving undemanding customers. This very often happens in rural or isolated areas, of where companies provide convenient goods and services.  Another reason why firms do not innovate is that innovation requires change, and this change is uncertain. This makes innovation not only risky, but also potentially expensive.

One of the reasons why development practitioners should try to stimulate the competitiveness of firms that they work with, is that increased competitiveness requires innovation. Again, this does not simply imply new products or processes are developed or improved, but also that firms try new management innovations. However, many development practitioners are not comfortable with competition, or do not understand the importance of competition to the socio-economic development of a society. There is a tendency in the field to try and get groups of individuals or firms to compete together against a competitor ‘out there’. This is a first step in the right direction, but we must also try to get our local firms to compete against each other. Thus we must try to create opportunities to collaborate, but at the same time we must try and increase or stimulate the local competition against each other. With this I am implying the nice and healthy kind of competition.

What is often forgotten in economic development, is that we are not only concerned with the health and the well-being of the business owners. Firms must also innovate to create better, healthier and more stimulating jobs, attract foreign investment, skills and knowledge into our areas, and finally, provide improved goods and services to local communities. The latter is usually overlooked. Thus, we want firms to be competing with each other, and together also competing with others, not only to make business owners and managers rich, but to ensure that our society in itself becomes wealthier and more innovative. This will then lead to more innovative and competitive businesses, and so the virtuous cycle is complete.