An earlier blog post on this site explored the rise of mobile payments and specifically looked at M-Pesa, Kenya’s highly successful mobile payment system that has surpassed expectations dramatically and been a huge success.
That post also touched on the problem that most other countries have not been able to replicate the service with anywhere near the same level of success as M-Pesa. The Brookings Institution, an independent non-profit research organization, recently released the above video describing the M-Pesa model in conjunction with a detailed report on the 2012 Brookings Blum Roundtable that can be accessed here.
The report outlines three reasons that came up during the roundtable that might help explain the challenges of replication.
This brief photo essay makes the argument that social entrepreneurs and innovators must make a conscious effort to include local perspectives in their designs for poverty solutions in order to have the most effective results. The inspiration for this video came from a symposium on New Development held at UC Berkeley.
The Event:
Is There A New Development? The promise and politics of provincializing experts, models, and knowledge in the 21st century.
“The “Is There A New Development?” spring symposium brought together scholars from both the STS and the development studies communities and provided a forum in which some of the most contemporary ideas of ‘development’ and expertise could be debated. Symposium participants came together from the broader Bay Area, within the United States, and from across multiple continents. The two day event held eight sessions and approximately twenty individual paper presentations and a special session dedicated to a broader discussion. Emerging themes ranged from ironic perceptions of local knowledge or the ‘dialectic of confirmation and critique’ that is embodied in all; the usefulness of thinking of southern- versus northern-led development projects; social science researchers as experts in practice; the future of critique; and new entanglements of experimentation, politics, capital, bureaucratic logics, and the material. Our keynote speaker, Professor Richard Rottenburg gave a wonderful address that was both accessible to a wide audience and conceptually provocative, in which he suggested a new post-critique approach to social inquiry that embodies compassion, responsibility, and an acceptance of uncertainty. In all, approximately 75 people shared differing notions of science, technology, and expertise over the two day event. Highlights included a robust debate on the existence of a division between the global south and north, comments and discussion representing multiple departments on Berkeley campus, and the continuation of the conversation well after the formal conclusion of the event on Saturday afternoon.” [1]
The event was held on April 5-6, 2013, at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the UC Berkeley campus.
TechnoCapital 