Please donate to help cover the costs of operating Greater Democracy. Note that Greater Democracy is not a formal organization, and your donation is not tax deductible. Greater Democracy is not affiliated with any other business, organization, or party.
March 31, 2005Citizen to Citizen Development ConceptHuman Capital Development in Villages in Least Developed CountriesAn Open Source model for Direct Citizen to Citizen Engagement Economic development in LDCs [Least Developed Countries] is very hard and, historically, very prone to failure. It rarely fits neatly into corporate time frames, earnings requirements or agendas. To date, nobody has figured out how to do it on a consistently successful basis: Not Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR] programs, not the World Bank, not USAID, not the UN, not NGOs -- or any combination of the above. That is what makes the problem so very interesting and so worthy of all of our efforts to honestly learn from experience and keep on trying. Further, those programs which have tried to use profits1 to end poverty have been, in fact, hindered by their profit requirements. The imperative to deliver 15% compounded profit growth rates becomes a harsh limiting factor on CSR programs. It is possibly the case that profits can not be appropriately extracted from a village until it has benefited from sufficient economic development to be able to develop and maintain stores of capital -- ie to move beyond an early stage cash flow based economy. One thing that is clearly missing from all of our efforts to date is direct and long term citizen to citizen engagement in the development process. A key new development is Information, Communications Technology centers [ICTs] with proper connectivity for real time video conversations between donors on the one hand and micro-credit organizations in LDC villages on the other. With these new video enabled ICTs, we may now have the necessary preconditions to give a C2C project a trial effort. To read the rest of this paper, please download the PDF file C2C Concept paper. Posted by Jock Gill at March 31, 2005 8:16 AM | TrackBackComments
FAQ #1 A reader writes: I am a little unclear. How is this different from the vogue "wealth at the bottom of the pyramid" thinking? My answer is: Essentially C. K. Prahalad is the source of the "Bottom of the Pyramid" concept. We now need to go beyond that. Folks who only have cash flow: 1] Asking folks living on cash flow to pay profit taxes slows down, or unnecessarily limits, the development process - counter to the goal! 2] Corporations seeking 15% compounded annual growth in profits can not sustain the long term engagements in villages that yield break even financial results at best. HP was not able, unwilling, to renew its three year contract for the iVillage they started in Kuppan, India. If it had been a raging success, in terms of required Western profit margins, I bet they would have renewed. So we have to get profit off the table until these villages are able to establish economies that support capital accumulation and thus the ability to afford to pay profit taxes. In the right situations extracting profits makes a lot of sense. But not all situations are right. 3] The villagers need access to affordable capital, in small amounts, over time, to build their local economies to the next level, ie beyond cash flow only. C. K. P. recognized that the people living on $2 dollars per day, moreor less, have cash flow but not capital. He failed to address the problem of getting these villagers the low cost capital they need to jump start their local economies. The ability of small groups of women to give small amounts of capital as a gift is very powerful -- especially if they can afford to stay engaged for years. And especially if it is aggregated over many groups and many years. We need to start edge to edge development projects and move beyond hub and spoke models that have not worked well. ----- And please see the foot notes in the paper. Dear Jock: Your essay is a missing key I had long been looking for in my own research into the P2P relational dynamic, which is exactly what you seem to be describing. Could you please have a look at I would appreciate if you'd mention it in your blog as well. I'll mention your important essay in the newsletter Pluralities/Integration which monitors social p2p developments, Thanks, Michel Bauwens Posted by: Michel Bauwens at April 9, 2005 11:27 PMPost a comment
|