Interesting statistics announced today by the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) that 253 million people in the country are now online, meaning China now has the world’s largest number of Net users in the world (topping the US’ 223 million). These numbers are still much inferior to the country’s stock of mobile-phone users (500 million) but nonetheless, the continued growth of China’s online participant community bears watching. Least of all because the current user-base represents a penetration rate of only 19% suggesting that as the country develops, and as infrastructure spreads West throughout China, it will dwarf the rest of the worlds (i.e. start publishing/marketing in Mandarin). CINIC projects the number of Chinese users to grow to 490 by 2012.

The growth of China’s online community has been acknowledged by many within the Chinese Communist Party, including the country’s most powerful leader, Hu Jintao. In mid-June he took part in an online web-chat at the People’s Daily website that marked the first time a senior party official publicly engaged with internet users. While commentators noted that “there was no real substance to the online conversation,” it has since been referred to as symbolic of the central governments acknowledgement of the internet as an important source of public information and public opinion.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18^th century French philosopher and one of the fathers of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution once wrote, “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.  

 

Rousseau believed that a true citizen was one that put aside his or her private interests in reverence to the will of society. Man was, in essence, chained to his fellow man. And so developed society through this period of moral and social enlightenment.

 

Such societies, however, were by and large ethnically, racially and linguistically homogeneous. The following two centuries saw further dissolution of the remaining empires in Europe, and outside of our more recent moves towards integration, saw a steady return to small, individualistic nation states which used such social and cultural cohesion to develop strong national identities.

 

But how does this concept of a social contract evolve in countries where the composition of the population, notably its ethnic, racial, religious and linguistic participants begins to become more heterogeneous. Do the ties that helped create national identity and social cohesion in its former form become weaker in this multi-cultural model?

 

Or, given our insistence on unfettered freedoms, is a social contract a realistic possibility in today’s global world? Rousseau feared chaos would takeover should man operate without one but perhaps times have change.

The following was published in the Awareness Times, one of Sierra Leone’s daily newspapers, back in November 2006. I wrote it in response to an editorial entitled “Thank God the Chinese have come to transform economies of disadvantaged Third World Economies.”

I read with great interest in one of your recent publications a commentary regarding improving Sino-African relations, written by Alhaji Morikeh Fofanah. Indeed, while not new, over the past decade Chinese interests on the continent have increased tremendously. His article points out several key issues that are of benefit to African countries, notably the development of infrastructure that will be key if the continent is to industrialize on a large scale, let alone provide sufficient services to its constituents.

That said I believe there are several points in his article that need further analysis. While I will not question the unfair trade subsidies that hinder the entry of African products, notably agricultural products, into the world market, nor the appropriation of natural resources in the colonial period, I do have to question several of his assumptions about both the past and present.

Chinese economic development must be looked at very carefully – the pre-1978 period was by no means a panacea of growth, one must simply look at the failed Great Leap Forward or the mass starvations under Mao. Growth has been a marked phenomenon since 1979 and the introduction of agricultural reforms. Also, China’s giant leap in terms of GDP has been tied in large part to its export-oriented growth strategy, one that today risks undermining long-term industrialization or manufacturing efforts in Africa.

While aid from China comes with no political strings attached, it is often tied to a policy of open markets whereby cheap Chinese consumer products flood African markets. If China, or any other country no matter their political or geographic circumstance, wanted to help Africa, they would

While the world waits to see how the outcome of the Zimbabwean presidential election unfolds, one can’t help but wonder what the world’s action (as opposed to what will evidently be a vociferous reaction) will be if Robert Mugabe disregards the actual results and attempts to continue his now 28 year reign of Zimbabwe.

My thoughts begin with reference to the first-of-its kind intervention of African Union troops in the Comoros less than two weeks ago. While there are very large differences between this situation and what may unfold in Zim, I think the situation bears analysing.

The Comoros is a small three-island (Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli) archipelago off the coast of East Africa. Home to just over 700,000, the three islands have suffered through 20 coups or coup attempts since independence from France in 1975. In 2001 a new constitution was agreed upon that, in theory, saw central military power give way to a dispersed-democratic system that endowed each of the islands a significant amount of autonomy and control over local affairs. Oversight of the union of the three islands would rotate between the Presidents of each of the three islands. But things haven’t quite gone as planned.

Mohamed Bacar, who became President of the island of Anjouan in 2001, saw his re-election in June 2007 rejected by the Comorian central government, as well as the African Union, on the grounds that the elections weren’t held with the approval of the Central government and were fraught with voting irregularaties and initimidation. And so despite his supposed 90% approval rating, Bacar was told to exit forthwith.

Months of failed negotiations, threats and bravado led the Central Comorian government to forego sanctions on the Island in favour of a “military solution.”

Award winning columnist cum author Stephanie Nolan has an interesting article at the Globe and Mail about  travel in Africa, and among other things, the impact of civil strife on the Kenyan tourist industry. Beyond Kenya, however, she notes that “there’s a wealth of other vacation options on this vast continent. You can take both wildly opulent and budget safaris in South Africa. You can trek in the ancient cliff villages of Mali. Or sail a dhow in Zanzibar. There is much more to Africa than Kenya, despite what Papa Hemingway may have led you to believe.”

No freaking kidding. Nolan does a great job at painting the popular tourist haunts on the Cape to Cairo trail through South Africa, Zambia, and into Tanzania, and deserves credit for highlighting the legendary music of Mali. But in highlighting the most frequented places on the Continent she misses an opportunity to spread the wealth around, and draw attention to equally tourist-dollar starved locations ever so slightly off the beaten path. Now I’ll admit that any mention of travel to Africa is usually met with blank stares and offers of life insurance but having travelled through 17 countries on the Continent, and having crossed 17 borders by land, I’d like to offer an alternative to Nolan’s list.

But before I get to the list, a few important points that may help convince would-be travellers believe that I’m not alone in pushing these far-off destinations. In December 2007, Delta Airlines officially opened three new routes from the U.S. to the Continent, with flights linking New York and Atlanta to Accra, Dakar and Lagos. Even more exotic was British Midland’s decision in February to take over operations of a London to Freetown, Sierra Leone route.

And so I’ll start with this last destination, a former outpost of mine, Sierra Leone.

Microfinance is justly seen as a savior for millions around the world. As of 2007 it’s estimated that over 16 million of the world’s poorest benefit from the small extensions of credit that the over 7000 global microcredit organizations channel. The volume of loans now approaches some $25 billion, including an increasing share of direct peer-to-peer loans through sites such as Kiva, Microplace and MyC4. It’s primacy role in economic development and poverty alleviation was perhaps best showcased by the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to the father of microfinance, Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the now-famous Grameen Bank.

At the time of the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee noted that, “Micro-credit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions…Yunus’s long-term vision is to eliminate poverty in the world. That vision can not be realised by means of micro-credit alone. But Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that, in the continuing efforts to achieve it, micro-credit must play a major part.”

But building at the bottom of the economic pyramid has it’s limits. Indeed, microfinance can enable millions to survive where and when they could not previously. But as James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, points out in his recent editorial in the New Yorker, there are definite limits to how far microfinance can go in enabling economic development.

He writes,

“What poor countries need most, then, is not more microbusinesses. They need more small-to-medium-sized enterprises, the kind that are bigger than a fruit stand but smaller than a Fortune 1000 corporation. In high-income countries, these companies create more than sixty per cent of all jobs, but in the developing world they’re relatively rare, thanks to a lack of institutions able to provide them with the capital they need. It’s easy for really big companies in poor countries to tap the markets for funding, and now, because of microfinance, it’s possible for really small enterprises to get money, too. But the companies in between find it hard. It’s a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “missing middle.”

Filling this missing middle, usually neglected by both domestic and international lending sources, has come to be termed “meso-finance” and aims at enabling SME’s to grow and subsequently expand their employment bases. One of the means of doing so is taking a Prosper/Zopa like approach to peer-lending, and aggregating small loans into $10,000 + amounts for entrepreneurs in the developing world. Evidently there are some significant risk issues that accompany the extension of such credit but with the right local structures in place, Web 2.0 lending might just offer meso-finance the channel it needs to extend the credit that small business owners the world over desperately want.

Here’s a fantastic application created by Gilles Bruno, a French media and IT buff, that maps media attention from some of the world’s largest newspapers. The result is a series of distorted cartograms that measure how much attention various newspapers from around the world are paying to individual countries. Moreover, it creates an interesting discussion about what matters in today’s world, and why.

For example, the image below highlights media attention from La Croix, a French catholic daily. If you compare this to a North American daily you can see a significant difference in the attention paid to French speaking countries and former colonies. The one constant seems to be attention on trade partners.

These cartograms are quite similar to work being done by Harvard/Berkman Centre fellow Ethan Zuckerman. Back in 2003 he led a very interesting analysis of media trends, “First steps towards a quantitative approach to the study of media attention.” The following quote from that paper drives home this concept of what matters:

“For an “apples to apples” comparison, it is useful to consider whether Japan or Nigeria is more important. Their populations are roughly equal – 130 million in Nigeria, 127 million in Japan. Neither is short on possible news stories. Nigeria, in particular, seems to have all the factors we commonly associate with headline news: crime, violence, ethnic strife and religious conflict. If we define “media attention” as “the number of stories on a given subject”, the statistics give us a clear answer: Japan is roughly seven times more important than Nigeria. Searching the archives of seven media sites and two media aggregators, we find between 2 times (BBC) and 16 times (CNN) as many stories that reference the search string “Japan” as those that reference the search string “Nigeria”, averaging 7.28 times as many Japanese stories across the sources sampled.”

His research found that the economy, above racial, ethnic or lingual affinity, is the cause of such disparities. Fair enough but it makes you wonder about the “news” that were missing when constrained to economic or geo-political lenses.

Earlier in the year I blogged about the true costs of healthcare and the role technology and the Web 2.0 might play in reducing those costs. But maybe we should forget about providing expensive healthcare procedures all–together and instead take a true free-market / division of labour approach and outsource expensive procedures to where they’re cheapest.

Unlikely and politically unpalatable as that may seem, global medical tourism is a $20 billion industry, expected to grow to 40 million cross-border trips by 2010. In the US, 750,000 Americans went abroad for some type in treatment in 2007, and by 2012 that number is expected to top 6 million. Evidently, there are questions about standards but Joint Commission International , a US not-for-profit that accredits American hospitals, has accredited over 140 international hospitals (based on US standards) and expects the number to grow to almost 300 over the next three years.

For host countries, this is big business. For example, according to the Jordanian Ministry of Health incoming medical tourism attracts 120,000 patients a year, and generates between $650 million and $700 million annually. For a country whose total GDP (PPP) comes in at approximately $27billion and total exports at just $5 billion, medical tourism thus represents a pretty significant, and growing, share of the country’s income.

Moreover, for countries such as the US developing country healthcare hosts represent massive potential savings. The Journal of Financial Planning estimates that savings may range from 50 to 95 percent of the U.S. cost.

Here are some examples from the National Centre on Policy Analysis:

• Apollo Hospital in New Delhi, India, charges $4,000 for cardiac surgery, compared to about $30,000 in the United States.
• Hospitals in Singapore charge $18,000 and hospitals in India charge only $12,000 for a knee replacement that runs $30,000 in the United States.
• A rhinoplasty (nose reconstruction) procedure that costs only $850 in India would cost $4,500 in the United States.

Given those cost savings, should government run healthcare outsource expensive procedures and focus their budgets on what they do best, and most efficiently? Sounds a bit like a basic Ricardo-esque gains-from-trade analysis. And perhaps this is the next frontier of globalization: a world where government budgets are divvied up on a per capita basis and citizens shop the world for the best deal on government services…. global government anyone?

Bill Vadja, CIO of the US Department of Education, joined us in Washington for our Government 2.0 launch meeting and in the spirit of fair trades I thought I’d give one of his key projects a little press. The School 2.0 initiative is led by the Director of the Office of Educational Technology, Tim Magner, and focuses on how the education system needs to proactively adapt to changes in our global economy.

You can download their nifty map here. It’s quite similar to our nifty network map shown here:

Regardless of the source, what these models entail is a focus on a new, networked form of education. A model shaped by the following (amongst other) factors: 60% of new jobs require a post-secondary education; 22% of college freshmen are taking remedial math courses; allophones form a growing proportion of the workforce; and the number of college students in the U.S. choosing engineering as a major fell 20% between 1993 and 2002.

Moreover, we’re increasingly talking about jobs that we can’t actually define. In a recent conversation with European Union Commissioner for Social Affairs Vladimir Spidla, he noted the need to adapt the European education system for jobs that don’t yet exist but for whom the skill sets needed are yet to be a regular component of the European education system. What comes first, you might ask…

So given the new set of demands being placed on the education system, what’s the solution? This discussion often gets sidetracked by mention of collective bargaining agreements, compensation, etc, but the focus needs to be on what the future of the classroom is. We’ve all grown up in a very linear learning space – Barbara Kurshan, executive director of Curriki notes, “we started at page 1, finished at page 365, and considered ourselves learned.”

But this model is increasingly giving way to a random knowledge space where we define a problem and go to multiple sources to find pieces of the answer. And while this may hold true for the manner in which students currently study, it has yet to become an institutionalized part of the classroom. Doing so would mean not only putting a computer in every classroom ala Al Gore but rather connecting students from across regions and nations to create peered/shared learning communities, where knowledge is built in up-to-date iterative cycles, with the teacher, or networks of teachers and other stakeholders, available to vet and direct these processes – like in the above diagram.

And while we’ve yet to see too much movement in this direction, projects such as the Department of Education’s School 2.0 Initiative are steps in the right direction, and highlight the role of top-level leadership in making things happen.

Much has been said, often in this space, about the Net Generation, and how their digital upbringing has instilled in them a different set of values and norms. That’s all well and good (ok, maybe not… see below), except, for the possibility that – perhaps – the “Net Gen” isn’t quite as “Net” as we often think. Or so go the findings of a just released study by Ipsos Reid. Entitled “Inter@ctive Teens: The Impact of the Internet on Canada’s Next Generation,” the report highlights some rather interesting findings that may in fact dispell the belief that N-Geners are “Internet-savvy, constantly-wired early adopter(s).”

The report notes that:

• “12 to 17 year olds spend, on average, only 13 hours per week on the Internet (compared to a weekly average of 19 hours for online adults), and that number has not increased since Ipsos last measured online teen behaviour in 2004.”

• “Slightly more than one-quarter (28%) of online teens consider themselves to be very skilled or expert. Another one-quarter (24%) admit to not being skilled in the use of the Internet, with the remaining teens identifying themselves as fairly skilled”.
• “While adults are going to a multitude of different websites for a variety of online activities, teens are focused mainly on websites that allow them to socialize, download music, or play games.”

So what does this leave us to believe about this generation? Are they really the digital captains of today’s world?

Over the past couple of months I’ve increasingly questioned this assumption, in large part because nearly every one I talk to who is leading activities in the Web 2.0 space is, alas, not a N-Gener but rather a Gen Xr. I’m not alone in thinking this either. Author Jeff Gordinier agrees, having penned “X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.” In it he points out that today’s networked era has in large part been shaped and developed by Gen Xrs, perhaps allowing them to “trump boomer narcissism and millenial entitlement.”

We’re thus left to wonder how accurate the generational segments we’ve created really are. Gen Xrs were lazy but are now leaders. N-Geners were digital natives and bathed in bits but are now kind of like Gen Xrs were, but with the Internet… kind of makes you wonder about all the hype we throw on today’s youth. Sure they’re voting and using viral campaigns to make change but is that really that different than the late 60’s/early 70’s anti-war movement? It too was led by students who wanted change but they didn’t have the Net, nor mobile phones, nor Facebook.

And so I’m left to conclude that this type of generational segmentation is in fact completely incorrect and what we should be doing is looking at how we operate at different life stages. And while it’s likely true that thanks to technology today’s youth are wired differently then their predecessors, I’m of the opinion that what matters more is the confluence of specific life stages with specific events that galvanize action.