$50 million MIT Biz Innovation Center Opens To Africans
Oct 01, 2008 
Categories: Africa, Bottom-up Development, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Technologies, News
Tags: Adnan Shahid, Amy Banzaert, Craig Doescher, Iqbal Quadir, John Peter Nshimyimana, Oladapo Tomori
Africa Link
October 2008
Psychiatrist and Health Economics specialist Dr. Oladapo Tomori of Nigeria and Environmental Civil Engineer, Jean-Pierre Mshimyimana of Rwanda are among the first class of 12 Legatum Fellows admitted to the prestigious Center for Development and Entrepreneurship hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge USA. They have since commenced their studies.
"In today's sub-Saharan Africa, the opportunity exists to put into motion true economic development. It will not happen by deluging African leaders with aid dollars, but rather by adopting practical ways to help Africa's citizens thrive. Their increased strength is the best way to remove blockages to progress in the long run." These words of Bangladeshi-born American Iqbal Quadir underline the philosophy of the Center that he heads as Director.
Founder of the immensely successful GrameenPhone mobile telephone company in his country of origin, past professor of Government at Harvard University and former Wall Street investment banker, Iqbal founded the Legatum Center with $50 Million of core funding from the Legatum Group, a multi-billion Dollar portfolio of companies owned by New Zealand entrepreneur, Christopher Chandler. In its statement of purpose, the center is defined as "devoted to promoting ‘bottom-up development' by attracting and training some of the world's great minds to innovate new technologies and businesses that will impact the developing world"
Manned by a lean staff overseen by the Managing Director, Michael F. Maltese, the Legatum Center aims to reach out to the world and attract some of the most creative entrepreneurial minds it can reach to apply their talents and skills to solving some of the most challenging problems facing low-income countries.
The first crop of 12 Legatum fellows is drawn from Columbia, Germany, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sri-Lanka and the United States of America. The problems that they are focusing on in the course of their programs at MIT include energy, water and sanitation, supply-chain dynamics for small-scale traders, market access for agricultural producers, rural telecommunications and E-commerce and the application of emerging technologies to improved health care delivery. As Quadir puts it, "We want to take people with half-baked ideas and help them to complete the baking process." Four of the half-baked ideas whose baking process will be completed with this initial crop of Fellows target problems in African countries.
Craig Doescher, born and brought up in the Baptist environment of the Detroit Michigan suburbia who studied Finance and Accounting and worked for a while on Wall Street hopes to use his time at MIT to perfect a replicable system of supply chain linkages among the retail corner shops (Spazas) of the South African townships. He hopes to enhance the efficiency and profitability of the thousands of corner shops doing business worth billions of Dollars in the townships of South Africa.
His research has shown that in the Cape Town area alone, about 15,000 of the Spazas are doing between 110 and 115 million Dollars of business annually. "This significant contribution is however outside the reckoning of the formal economy. It enjoys neither financial nor infrastructural support. It therefore forces both the shop-owner and his customers to pay much more, sometimes as much as 100% more for their basic needs. I hope to adapt and apply models of distribution that have already proved successful elsewhere to remedy this problem." Craig completes his MBA at the Sloan School of Management at MIT in 2009 and will be heading to South Africa where he already has a community development organization working on the ground.
If there is one quality that unites the Legatum Fellows, it is their passion. Amy Banzaert, a nursing mother who is still breast feeding her eight month old baby and taking a PhD in the Mechanical Engineering Faculty in the Class of 2010 is focusing on the creation and mass production of cost effective technologies for the production of charcoal blocks for fire from sugar cane and other agricultural waste. Asked about her motivation for the choice of that particular area of focus, she speaks of the environmental and energy crisis in Haiti that she has had the opportunity of experiencing first hand. "The country is about 98% deforested and up till now, the majority of the people have no alternative means of household fuel than more degradation of the environment through further depletion of the scant remaining tree cover." She hopes to perfect and put into production small charcoal block production units for use by households for the production of their needs as well as more industrial-type units for commercial manufacturing.
Jean Pierre Mshimyimana who was born in Muhoza Rwanda and has enrolled in the Masters in Civil and Environmental Engineering Class of 2009 has big ideas on the development of entrepreneurship in environmental engineering in Africa. His business "will provide superior services, designs and knowledge that will be able to supply a wide range of water engineering solutions to community-based initiatives." He recalls with a sense of destiny how he found his way into the program.
A graduate of the Kigali Institute of Health, Jean Pierre was already involved in the design and implementation of water and sanitation projects in Rwanda. A chance meeting with Dr. Peter Shanahan of the MIT Engineering Faculty on a volunteer assignment in his country led the 27-year old water and sanitation specialist to apply and be accepted for the Legatum fellowship.
Dr. Oladapo Tomori is a Nigerian psychiatrist and health economist who has worked in the British and American health service establishments and taught medicine at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He is passionate about providing universal access to quality health care. He is committed to using cost-effective technologies "to create convenient, affordable, commercially sustainable and efficient health-care interventions that address significant unmet needs in the developing world."
Some of the ideas still sound quite abstract to the uninitiated. Pakistani Oil Engineer and IT specialist Adnan Shahid is working on a business plan to use mobile telephony to provide financial services to the poor. Since mobile telephony has become established in the remotest rural areas of the country and among the urban poor. He hopes in the course of his time at MIT to perfect his plan to capitalize on the more than 88 million cell phones available in Pakistan for mobile commerce using the airtime minutes as the currency of exchange. By the time the scheme is fully in place, it should be possible for commercial transactions to be initiated and concluded online via mobile telephony.
I seek to find out from Iqbal how we can get more Africans into the program as it seems to be the constituency of greatest need in this laudable initiative. He explains.
The Legatum Center advertises for new applicants at the opening of the academic year. MIT students and prospective entrants into MIT may apply. So candidates for the fellowship must first qualify to enter MIT. They must meet the Institute's high standards of admission in addition to which they must have the desire and the commitment to be entrepreneurs in the developing world. They must have a business plan that they are prepared to place at the disposal of the Legatum Center for further development and finalization so that they can get back to their countries of focus to implement them.
Iqbal is a man who puts his money where his mouth is and whose middle name is persistence when it comes to proving that his ideas work. He was laughed to scorn when he started pushing the concept of marketing mobile telephony to the poor in the villages of Bangladesh in 1993. Then he created a US-based company called "Gonofone" ("phones for the masses" in Bengali), long before mobile phones were accessible to the masses even in the Western world. In fact, Iqbal spent several years persuading the Norwegian telephone company Telenor and the 2006 Nobel Peace Laureate and fellow Bangladeshi "Banker for the Poor" Professor Mohamed Yunus to come together to form what became GrameenPhone.
Today GrameenPhone has grown into a business recently valued at $3.5 billion company. Today, this company has 20 million subscribers and gives access to 100 million people. Its revenues are close to $1 billion. While he left the company in 2000 to teach at Harvard and MIT, millions have crossed from abject poverty to sustainable prosperity thanks to Iqbal's original idea.
Now it appears that the restless academic entrepreneur has set his sights on proving that Western big business and the Western donor community need to be looking to the African entrepreneur rather than to African governments for workable development models.
"What goes naturally with supporting small entrepreneurs is introducing technologies that cost-effectively empower individuals; an area where Western knowledge can obviously add value," Quadir says. "Such technologies multiply people's abilities and deliver aid to citizens directly. A pair of wheels, for example, provides invaluable assistance in moving heavy loads of bricks."
"Heightened productivity gives rise to four exciting benefits. First, as individuals control what they produce and consume, their lives improve. Second, when citizens accrue increased economic clout, institutions are forced to become more responsive to their needs. Third, by becoming more productive, users are able to pay for productivity tools, creating opportunity for entrepreneurs to launch profit-seeking enterprises to provide such tools. This is why businesses selling computers and cell phones sprang up naturally in Africa. Finally, profitable businesses attract imitators, unleashing competition. Competition gives rise to innovation, specialization, scalability, lower prices, higher wages, and a host of other good things including the curtailing of potential abuse by businesses. It is a virtuous cycle of organic economic growth that like a mighty wheel can move the entire African continent."
Here is to hoping that more Africans can step up to the plate and take up the challenge to be part of that mighty wheel that moves the entire continent forward.
