Ka riik saab olla ettevõtlik ja luua innovatsiooni

Kui USA riigiasutused ei oleks innovatsioonilisi ideid rahastanud, siis poleks meil täna nutitelefoni, kirjutab rahvusvahelise arengu konsultant Marje Aksli.

Miks on suured ja mõjukad firmad nagu Facebook ja Google tekkinud just Ameerikas? Mis teeb ameeriklased palju innovaatilisemaks kui Euroopa? Kas äkki pakutakse USAs start-up’idele mingeid erapankade finantstooted, mis pakuvad kõrge riskiga ettevõtetele laenusüste? Või arenevadki sealsed gasellid pelgalt selle tõttu, et maksukoormus on väiksem?

Hiljuti maineka Leontiefi auhinna saanud professor Mariana Mazzucato on just seda küsimust uurinud. Ta kirjutas raamatu “Ettevõtlik riik” just selleks, et Eestiski levinud puudulikku narratiivi lollist ja laisast riigist ning nutikast erasektorist ümber lükata. Eesti ettevõtjad, kes õhukest riiki ihalevad, peaks küsima, kes või mis rahastas tõeliselt innovaatiliste tehnoloogiate väljatöötamist USAs. Mazzucato selgitaks neile, et vidinad, mis meie nutitelefonid tegelikult nutikaks teevad – ehk siis internet, mobiilside, GPS, mikrokiibid, Siri ja puutetundlik ekraan – on tegelikult kõik riigi rahastatud.

Kui USA valitsusasutused ei oleks andnud innovatsiooni toetamiseks jaoks raha, siis ei oleks meil täna nutitelefoni. Seega, riik ei olnud mitte pelgalt passiivne äri võimaldaja, vaid aktiivne osaline teadusavastuste muutmisel kommertslikult tasuvaks, ning tihti ka strateegiliste innovatsiooniharude looja.

USA firmasid on oluliselt aidanud valitsuse rahastatud programmid väikeettevõtetele. Nii näiteks aitab Small Business Innovation Research (ehk SBIR) programm teatud väikeseid ettevõtteid teha kallist uurimus- ja arendustööd (R&D). Teine riigiprogramm, mis suures osas Ameerika väledaid gaselle aitab, on Small Business Technology Transfer programm (ehk STTR), mis koordineerib föderaalse innovatsiooni uurimus- ja arendustööd koos erasektoriga. See programm hõlmab erasektori kui avaliku sektori koostööd (PPP partnerlusi), ja õhutab koostööd väikefirmadele mõeldud investeerimiserakapitali ja mittetulunduslike uurimisasutuste vahel. See mudel nõuab, et väikefirma töötaks ametlikult koos uurimisasutusega, et aidata teaduslikke avastusi muuta turukõlbulikuks innovatsiooniks.

Kuna riskikapital otsib väga lühikese tagasitootlusmääraga investeerimisvõimalusi, ei ole nende lühike tähelepanuvõime suurte innovaatiliste läbimurrete jaoks piisav. Riigi eelis erasektori ees innovaatiliste leiutiste toetamisel ongi see, et riigil on palju pikem riskitaluvus: 15-20 aastat. Riigiprogrammid on ulatanud oma abistava käe just siis, kui erakapital ei julge veel investeerida. Neile olid kas riskid liiga suured või ei lubanud investeering kasumit vaid paari kiire aasta jooksul.

Näiteks nanotehnoloogia tõestab, et tihti tuleb just riigilt strateegiline visioon, kus suunas areneda. Sama kehtib ravimite kohta – tervelt 75 protsenti uutest innovaatilistest ravimitest on valitsuse rahade eest leiutatud.

Kui Eesti ärimehed seavad meile USAd innovatsiooni toetamisel eeskujuks, siis rääkigu nad ka ausalt sellest, kuidas sealsed teaduslahendused rahaliselt edukaks innovatsiooniks said. Hoopis riik on käitunud riskialtilt, panustades maksumaksjate raha riskantsetesse investeeringutesse, kus puudub selgus selle võimalikus kommertsväärtuses. See on aga hoopis vastupidine jutt kui see, mida Eestis laisast riigiametist ja hulljulgetest erainvesteerijatest räägitakse.

Praegu on USAst kui õhukese riigi eeskujust üldse kohatu rääkida. Tõi ju soss-sepast ärimehe Donald Trumpi võimule just see protestifenomen, et peaasjalikult innovatsiooni tõttu ja automatiseerimise käigus töö kaotanud inimesed ei leidnud endale enam majanduslikku rolli. Nende sissetulek kahanes, head töökohad haihtusid ja meeleheide oligi platsis. Neile oleks hädasti mõnda riigi pakutavat ümberõppe- või mujale kolimise programmi vaja läinud. Sama kehtib Eestis – ettevõtlikku riiki on vaja rohkem, mitte vähem.

Paljud Eesti ettevõtjad kiruvad süsteemi, mis võtab „inimestelt raha ära ja siis pakub neile tasuta teenustena tagasi“ osutades, et „vahepeal on veel „administreerimiskuludena“ suur osa sellest rahast juba ära kasutatud või tuuri pandud“. Kas on ikka nii, et inimesed ei vaja neid nn tasuta asju? Kas Eestis on tõesti liiga palju haridust ja tervishoidu, kõbusaid vanainimesi ja hästi toidetud lapsukesi? Ka valitsuse rahastatatud innovatsiooniprogrammid kasutasid maksumaksja raha, ning evisid administeerimiskulusid.

Eesti peab aru saama, et ilma kõrge kvaliteediga inimkapitalita ei saa innovatsiooni luua, mis ongi üks majanduse mootoreid. Just need tasuta teenused ongi kindlustanud selle, et väike ja USAst viis korda vaesem Eesti on suutnud USAga võrreldes pakkuda sarnase tasemega sotsiaalset heaolu. Eesti ebavõrdsuse indeks ehk Gini koefitsient annab aga aimu, et riigi rahastatavaid programme peaks veelgi tõhusamaks muutma, et heaolu laotuks endiselt ühtlasemalt Eesti elanike vahel, nii maal kui linnas. Innovatsiooni varjukülg ongi kahjuks sissetulekute kui varanduslik ebavõrdsuse kasv.

Oleks tore, kui Eesti riik panustaks USA eeskujul samuti idufirmadesse ja saaks paarikümne aasta pärast idufirmadesse tehtud kulutused kopsaka protsendiga tagasi. Just selleks, et globaliseerumise käigus kaotajaks jäänud täiendhariduseta kaevureid ja endisi tehasetöölisi 21. sajandisse aidata. Räägitakse USAs ju tõsimeeli sellest, et Facebook, kes meie tasuta saadud andmeid silmagi pilgutamata sularahaks vahetab, võiks meile kõigile palka maksta.

Canada’s feminist international assistance policy is not the most effective way to reduce poverty

In the early 2000s, a director of a Moldovan women’s nongovernmental organization (NGO) told me that she would never publicly associate herself with feminism. I found this statement quite curious as I had just asked her to submit an article on gender issues for the Moldovan family planning association’s website. My goal of promoting gender equality and reproductive health awareness with local voices was clearly a feminist one, wasn’t it? Not really, she explained. If she were to declare publicly that she’s a feminist, her colleagues and friends would stop shaking her hand, she told me. She would lose all credibility, and she needed credibility to run an NGO dealing with gender-based violence.

She then referred to an obscure instance of Western feminists publicly berating Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, as a reason why feminism had lost its appeal for her. They were not respectful, she argued. This scandalous event might not even have been real, but the story was influential nonetheless. It led this local leader in women’s issues to say that not only is she not a feminist but she would be ashamed of being considered one.

Fifteen years later, Canada has adopted a feminist international assistance policy to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls as “the most effective way to reduce poverty and build a more inclusive, peaceful and prosperous world.”

Canada means well. The fact that women often bear the costs in development stands out: women and girls are more likely to be among the poor, the least educated and the ones experiencing violence. There clearly is a need to help women and girls.

Effective aid is locally owned

However, the first principle of effective foreign aid is that development needs to be locally owned. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, adopted in 2005, clearly states that developing countries are supposed to set their own strategies for poverty reduction, and the donor countries are expected to align behind these objectives and to use local systems. It’s difficult to imagine that the countries with the gravest conditions for women will “own” feminism, a Western concept.

Evaluators assessing foreign aid programming for relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability – the criteria set by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, know that the projects that are implemented with low levels of local ownership are less likely to be sustainable after the donor funding is withdrawn. Feminism has to be relevant to Canada’s development partners, and it would need to be reflected in their governments’ poverty reduction strategies. Additionally, achieving outcomes that are in serious disagreement with local traditions ends up being less efficient economically than running projects that enjoy strong local ownership. Potentially low relevance, high inefficiency, and low long-term sustainability mean that development interventions cannot be considered effective.

The second set of problems related to feminist development initiatives is associated with impact and attribution. In the near future, can Canada truly credibly claim that any success in the partner countries was due to our feminist development interventions, and not caused by other favourable trends beyond Canada’s control?

The truth is, social norms guiding the behaviour of men and women have evolved across centuries, following a local logic, and they relate to people’s innate mindset. They are “sticky”: outsiders’ efforts to change ways of life by rearranging power relationships are doomed to fail if they do not follow the local logic. Tinkering with gender relations is not viewed universally as bringing benefits to everyone. Some high-powered men might perceive Canada’s well-meaning efforts as threatening, and they are not likely to support feminist policies that come from abroad. And yet they are also stakeholders in development, interested in maintaining or increasing their prestige or status in their respective societies.

Sticky cultures

In his book The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich of Harvard University writes that when politicians design new policies, they inevitably import their own assumptions about human nature, often rooted in Enlightenment philosophies. He points out that as we have seen from the sad experience of transplanting Western institutions to countries that have different incentives and standards for judging and punishing people, the new norms need to fit in with people’s social norms, informal institutions and cultural psychology.

People are selective social learners, Henrich warns, which means that they do not change their habits purely based on “the facts” or “education”; rather, they copy the behaviour of influential people in their social circles. People are more likely to learn from those whose prestige, success, sex, dialect and ethnicity they consider important, especially on issues related to food, sex, danger and norm violations. It seems as if the best way to alter gender relations is to work with influential local men, allowing them to lead by example. It’s true that Canada has increased its profile internationally, but its high prestige is probably not strong enough to contribute to change in distinctly different societies. 

Cultures are long-lasting; they have evolved over centuries and they change slowly. That is especially true when influential religious organizations work to maintain the status quo in relations between the sexes and have strong views about sexual minorities. Change in social policies depends on the entire society. Or, as Henrich puts it, change depends on the expansion of the collective brain, which in turn depends on openness to discuss issues and ideas. Instead of artificially transplanting copies of Western institutions to other countries, Henrich recommends designing a “variation and selection system” allowing alternative institutions and organizational forms to compete. Locals then decide which form wins and will be adopted.

Win-win for all?

Canada’s new feminist international assistance policy argues that the feminist approach to development “leads to better development results and benefits everyone, including men and boys.” How this claim works out in practice needs to be substantiated in the program monitoring phase and in evaluations. When men perceive that their traditional social status is threatened, a backlash may follow. Evaluators, therefore, need to be attuned to the unintended consequences.

Another risk of the explicitly feminist approach is that it may ignore cases where men, especially gay men, and boys are disadvantaged and vulnerable. Canadian feminist international development policy sees men and boys predominantly as a target group that should be lectured, educated and engaged but not as direct beneficiaries of assistance.

At yet, as Sean Stevens of New York University points out in an article on gender differences, boys seem to be hurt more than girls by living in deprived neighbourhoods. The cycle of poverty seems to be more persistent for the poorest boys than for girls. Even in Canada, as the Canadian economist Miles Corak found, boys born into the poorest families (the bottom 5 percent) were less likely to escape poverty than girls born into the same conditions.

An article by Diane Halpern, professor emerita at Claremont McKenna College and her coauthors discussing sex differences in science and mathematics adds that male development is more sensitive to environmental conditions, which can explain why there is more variability among males in their academic performance. It seems that in the most deprived conditions, it is boys who would benefit from additional help.

That is why a successful development policy would be an inclusive one that would engage men, women, boys, and girls equally depending on their needs and within the social systems where they live. A development policy designed around Paris Declaration principles, evaluative recommendations on program effectiveness and – most importantly - equal opportunities for all would be more effective than an explicitly feminist one.

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Marje Aksli is an independent evaluation consultant based in Washington, DC, focusing on international development and security programming. Her thematic interests include the impact of global governance on policy-making.

Canada – 6th largest donor at the African Development Bank!

My interview with Mr. Montador, published in The Rising Africa magazine, 2012

For a while Bruce Montador was our man in Tunis: from 2007 to 2011, he represented Canada at the African Development Bank as an Executive Director. Having travelled to 28 countries in Africa either for work or fun, he shared his thorough Africa-insights with The Rising Africa.

First of all, how does the development work of AfDB differ from the one of World Bank (and the planned development bank by the BRICs)?

The AfDB has fewer resources than the World Bank has for the African region, so it needs to focus. It tries to limit its programming to a relatively few areas – infrastructure, private sector, governance and higher education. Infrastructure is critical, particularly for things like electricity, regional integration and water. The private sector is taking off – there are ever more references to Africa in the mainstream business press, but there are still many challenges facing both African and foreign entrepreneurs.

It is hard to comment on the proposed BRICs development bank, since as far as I know it is not yet operational. There is a tendency to announce projects like that without them ever doing very much for a range of practical reasons.

How does Canada participate and finance the bank? Is the contribution from Canada growing or the opposite?

Canada supports the Bank in two ways. As a shareholder, Canada’s capital pledges allow the Bank to borrow at good rates on the market, to on-lend to middle income countries and the private sector. As one of the few remaining AAA credits, Canada’s pledge is important to the Bank, particularly since Canada is already a big shareholder for our size (about 10 percent of the non-regional share).

Moreover, during the financial crisis, there was a need to increase the Bank's capital, and the temporary pledge of capital Canada made at the Pittsburgh G-20 meeting in 2009 allowed the Bank to continue to serve its members.

The other way we, Canadians support the Bank is through the budgetary grants to the African Development Fund to allow for loans and grants to low-income countries and for regional public goods. We currently give 108.5 million dollars a year – it will be up for renegotiation next year for the cycle starting in 2014. We are the 6^th largest donor, and our contribution has grown with each replenishment.

Canada is seen as an important partner – though for African Development Fund, the big players are really the Europeans – the UK, Germany and France. Canada also supports some multi-donor trust funds that do additional work – in areas like preparatory work for regional infrastructure projects and water, and for Aid for Trade.

What can Canadian companies and NGOs do to benefit from the AfBD? Please share recommendations...

Canadian consulting companies do quite well from AfDB contracts. Firms that are interested should be in touch with the Embassy in Tunis, which can help keep them informed of opportunities. Companies with bigger investment interests should check with the Bank's private sector department to see if there are possible synergies. Some NGOs may find consulting opportunities, and some of the thematic trust funds, like the Congo Basin Forest Fund, have approved projects from Canadian NGOs. AfDB does not do as much outreach to NGOs as at the World Bank, in part because NGOs have not typically paid a lot of attention to the AfDB.

What are the trends affecting the AfBD and how does it affect Canadian companies and NGOs?

The AfDB is bolstered by the growing Afro-optimism, and companies and NGOs will see growing opportunities. However, the tight fiscal environment in donor countries will probably limit growth of the concessional window, the AfDF, and thus limit growth in the Bank Group's operations in least developed countries. There may be fewer Bank contracts available in traditional areas of health and basic education. Finally, there will probably be more competition from African firms in the markets for Bank procurement.

Can you share your personal opinion on Africa’s development; say from 2007 to 2011, on the example of one or two countries of your choice?

Since my work in AfDB largely coincided with the financial crisis – I can say that Africa was doing quite well before the crisis, and was not directly touched by the financial crisis. The only country that was really integrated into the international financial system, South Africa, has a sound banking system. However, like Canada, the continent was adversely affected by the economic downturn created by the financial crisis in the US and Europe.

In addition, the nervousness of international lenders led them to pull back from marginal markets with which they were less familiar, a description which basically fit the whole of Africa. 

Fortunately, the relatively rapid recovery in Asia, and in commodity prices, as well as a return of Asian investors looking to secure supplies of commodities, helped Africa to get back on to a solid growth path relatively quickly.

That is an overview, obviously situations vary. A country like Ghana, where governance and economic reforms were well underway, and where new oil production is adding to growth, is a very positive story. Tunisia, where political uncertainty has devastated the tourist sector, has actually not done badly in terms of sustaining exports despite the weakness in the euro-zone, its main market. The East African Community has been showing fairly solid growth, based on resources but also the gains from growing integration.

Professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science Alwyn Young has claimed in his research paper ‘The African growth miracle’ that Sub-Saharan living standards (as measured in ownership of durable goods, the quality of housing, the health and mortality of children, the education of youth and the allocation of female time in the household) have been growing three and a half to four times the rate indicated in international data sets.

It is an interesting analysis, and not inconsistent with the AfDB's estimates of a larger African middle class than might be expected.  However, it is still important to recognize that many of those people emerging from poverty are still relatively vulnerable; the trend is positive, but there is a long way to go. This of course also means that there is lots of scope for further strong growth.

In your view, is it justified to compare North African countries with Sub-Saharan countries – or should the stats and analysis be always separated, as two very different entities?

From the political perspective of African countries and the African Union, it is all of Africa that is the frame of reference. Obviously there are cultural and economic differences between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa but I don’t know if looking at the Middle East and North Africa together is a better framework. There are lots of differences between the Maghreb and the Mashreq.

We in CCAfrica often make country-based overviews of development (so called Monthly African Indicators), but perhaps there are other units (cities, nationality, culture etc) which would tell a better story?

With 54 countries the indicators become a sea of data, but the cities, cultures etc are open to interpretation. I would suggest looking at the five broad regions – North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, Central Africa and West Africa. There are one or two countries whose allocation is controversial or in flux, but broadly this approach produces relatively homogeneous (or less heterogeneous!) subsets. One story to tell in this context would be the relative success of regional integration in the different areas – best in East Africa and weakest, so far, in North Africa.

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