Leapfrogging

Technology adoption is accelerating development. Developing nations are choosing to skip whole generations of technology. This is leapfrogging. With a great deal of foresight, leapfrogging can help build sustainable communities.

The speakers in this section underscore the value of collaborative planning. Ismail Serageldin identifies the scale of social and environmental resources that are not normally accounted for. Parker Mitchell shows how the resources of developing nations can be used more effectively by making technology socially sensitive.

Although the population growth rate peaked around 1970, Cohen stresses that world population will continue to grow until 2050. At its peak the planet will hold between eight and twelve billion people.1 To sum up Cohen’s book on carrying capacity, his best guess is that five billion people can be supported in a sustainable way.2

 

This fun graph shows that the population bottleneck is a singular event in human history. Leapfrogging confronts the population challenge by improving human welfare, even though it may seem counter-intuitive. Proven ways to slow population growth include ensuring access to food supplies, treating preventable diseases, and above all increasing child survival. People whose basic needs are met choose to have smaller families. It is a consistent, rapid, voluntary shift in demographics.

The majority of a country’s wealth is in its people according to Serageldin’s studies. It makes sense that human resources are what drive development. Transferring project management to the local population makes development self-sustaining.

The Barefoot College in India is a learning centre for rural poor that teaches the social, financial, and engineering skills needed to manage complex systems. Barefoot engineers maintain water and power resources for their communities. The Gratis Foundation, a more advanced institute in Ghana, has given technical assistance and entrepreneurial training to 20,000 citizens.

The overseas work of Engineers Without Borders is all about capacity building. EWB creates awareness programs and provides training in developing countries. Their intent is to get people interested in adopting existing technologies. EWB’s programs are fundamentally sustainable because they work without handouts.

Mitchell believes that development can be made more intelligent by paying attention to three things: cultural factors, user’s functional needs, and user’s day to day economics. His concept of a healthy development program has a lot in common with horizontal management, especially the ideas of shared governance and shared accountability.

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Examples of leapfrogging

Food is an area where leapfrogging has had a huge influence, and where huge progress is still needed. Eight-hundred million subsistence farmers haven’t gained access to the biotechnology that fueled the Green Revolution. With thirty years of hindsight we can learn a great deal by asking why the Green Revolution hasn’t reached parts of India and Africa.

The poster child of leapfrogging is the adoption of cell phones worldwide. Cellular technology has made communication many times more affordable by eliminating the cost of landlines. An entire country can be outfitted for cellular coverage in a matter of months. As incredible evidence, Cambodia was the first country in the world to have more wireless users than wired users.

Cellular technology is now affordable for all but a few extremely poor regions. Nokia’s partnership with Village Phone is notable because it meets the remaining demand with a customized product.3

The One Laptop Per Child project relies in part on internet availability. Wireless service can be deployed in rural areas using the latest generation of low-power, low-cost computing. The TIER project and Inveneo are two examples of wireless technology adapted for places that have unreliable power and limited funds.

Development goes hand in hand with the wholesale import of urban infrastructure. The megacities of the world are seeing major congestion, but not because they have more vehicles. For example, Shanghai’s gridlock is caused by an incompatible mix of vehicle types, namely cars and bicycles. Transportation and city planners have the challenge of sorting out the mess that explosive growth has created.

All these examples show that we are already living in a ‘leapfrogged’ world. Middle-developed countries4 are proving that they are in a position to advance the state of the art:

• Faced with a major fuel shortage, Cuba reinvented organic farming methods. Over the course of several years they turned abandoned urban areas into a major source of agriculture. Cuba’s transition to community-based farming has many lessons to teach us about how we can end unsustainable agriculture practices.
  
• South Africa has taken the lead in developing a pebble bed reactor for safe nuclear power generation. With their renewed interest in nuclear energy, the US may be the first customer for the reactor.
  
• Brazil has become the world leader in ethanol biofuel production. Their production efficiency is unmatched by any other country. Brazil’s ethanol use shows that fuel replacement can be done, although the long-term sustainability of the industry is questionable.

State of the Planet 2006 asked the question, “Is sustainable development is feasible?” The whole conference was devoted to the topic. Jeff Sachs concluded the conference remarking, “I'm a little bit reminded of the old saying that if you're not thoroughly confused by now, you just don't understand the problem. This is complicated, and there is no single, simple [summary].” While leapfrogging is not the singular answer, it does allow any country in the world to provide leadership in sustainability.

 

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References

1. Population Reports, Winning the Food Race - Carrying Capacity [html]

2. Joel Cohen, How Many People can the Earth Support? [html]

3. Robert Katz, Village Phone Direct [ html]

4. Research and development as a percentage of spending is correlated to economic strength. See: Nation Master, Research and development spending by country [ html]

More resources

• Leapfrogging has a presence in internet journalism and in the research community.
• WorldChanging - Envisioning a Leapfrogged World by Vinay Gupta

 

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