Cyber Ethiopia

Ethiopia hid itself and missed the chance of participating in the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century. With the might of its heroes, it spared itself from being colonized by any industrial nation of the west in the late 19th and early 20th century.  In the past 100 years, a glimpse of civilization in transport, communication, education and some basic infrastructures sparkled around a handful of urban towns. The educated output of the school system has never been that much in quantity. However, it has been and still is beyond the demand of the skilled labor and job market. The land is the only and sole resource of mere existence for the entire population. Way into the 21st century the peoples of Ethiopia are

still using biblical tools to exploit the land and drudge in sub-subsistence living. The political turmoil of the late 70’s opened the flood gate and became a pretext for the best and brightest intelligentsia of Ethiopia to migrate overseas. Once the valve of the flow of young intellectuals has been opened to full throttle, it does not seem to slow down the brain drain for now or for anytime soon. There is, however, a light in tunnel to reverse the brain drain and to give Ethiopia a chance to participate in a new revolution – The Information and Technological Revolution. The technological revolution, led by advances in information and communications technology, is changing the global economy by increasing the importance of knowledge as a factor of production. It is also changing the nature of markets, competition, and sources of comparative advantage. And it is providing solutions to the ramifications of rapid population growth and resource depletion, offering hope for the sustainability of increased economic activity. Technology allows developing countries to participate more fully in the global economy. The danger is that countries that fail to use technology to their advantage will fall further behind than countries that do, worsening their socio-economic and environmental conditions. The prevention and remedy for a developing country like Ethiopia is a better diffusion, adaptation, and use of the new technologies, which requires raising the awareness of leaders and populations, strengthening global linkages, creating an environment receptive to technology, and adapting new technologies to local problems and conditions. When information is readily available at the tip of a finger, countries with hi-tech intellectual wealth start to prosper and those without it start to get poorer and poorer. This gap has left poor countries like Ethiopia behind not only in terms of wealth, trade and production but also in terms of health, education and environmental protection of a vibrant civil society. Adopting IT and the digital revolution has become a short-cut for many poor countries that were left behind in last century’s Industrial revolution, in order to catch up with the western world and compete in the market place quite formidably. It has worked for South Asian countries to become major players in the economic and technological dynamics of the world, by participation in the digital and information revolution with in a matter of two decades. This paper presents a simple analytical model of how Ethiopia can easily become a technological center, exporting high tech design and software solutions and services such as data mining, storage and content analysis for many western firms that face exorbitant labor cost.   At the nucleus this proposal is a technological park for training, research and development that will be surrounded by private enterprises that attract outsourced projects from places like the Silicon Valley.      It is incumbent upon all concerned, the World Bank, the IMF, the Ethiopian government, Ethiopian universities and the diaspora that Ethiopia does not miss the opportunity to participate in this revolution and not fall back into the abyss of poverty and destitution for another 3000 years.   What is to be done? It is often very easy to articulate the problems of third world countries like Ethiopia with regards to the poverty level and the incapacity to the creation of wealth. International organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank have tried various ways of funding governmental institutions to fight poverty and disease.  These attempts were made with the intention of creating jobs, spreading wealth into the community and stimulating trade. These attempts were directed in old technological infrastructure in the likes of brick and mortal. Thanks to the advent of modern technology the global economy has moved into a different dimension, quite different from the old one with different sets of requirements. The new high tech and information revolution is moving in a warp speed where a life span of a product is being measured in terms of dog years. As technology and products move faster than ever in a global market without boundary, the gap widens between countries that embrace the digital paradigm and that do not.   Thus governmental and non-governmental agencies, private investors and intellectuals, foreign donors and monetary foundations have to play different and major roles in bridging the digital divide and help alleviate the health, wealth and path to the pursuit of happiness for new generations of many poor countries like Ethiopia. This project on Technology Park is a timely and cost-effective project. It has a tremendous potential to show-case the synergy and convergence of education, technology and wealth creation.   Tech Park The simplest approach is to launch a SHOWCASE for ·      Training skilled people in an industry standard software and hardware ·      Technology and knowledge transfer to underdeveloped countries ·      Creation of private enterprises that can - Employ the trained work force for high paying jobs - Compete in the global market with the best skilled labor force - Take contracts from hi-tech firms globally. This showcase project is a technological park, a demonstration lab, a training facility and an incubation center for many hi-tech private firms to come alive.   The role of the skilled and the technically trained Diaspora community, the World Bank and the Ethiopian government can be summarized in one word - ‘removing obstacles’.    Removing Obstacles This proposal suggests that the IMF, the EU, the World Bank and the Ethiopian government have to think out of the box and start to remove obstacles for infrastructural issues and obstacles for talent and job creation.   Removing Obstacles in Physical infrastructure We are in an era of transmission of information in terabits per second using fiber optics, satellite and wireless communication tools. Many countries like Ethiopia do not have a resilient and robust telecommunication infrastructure that the information revolution relies on. Access to information depends on an uninterrupted information super high way. Investment in physical infrastructure must be oriented toward the needs of technological innovation and global markets. Access to computers and telecommunications hardware and software are critical. Thanks to satellites and fiber optics, countries now have the opportunity to leapfrog several developmental stages and acquire advanced telecommunications capabilities immediately. For the long haul, an overall Telecom infrastructure migration to a robust and converged MPLS network would solve all problems. Fiber link or Micro wave link from the fiber line on coastlines the Red Sea and around Africa would be the most ideal solution. There are however intermediate solutions that can be provided in order to remove some of the obstacles.  Obstacles particularly for the Tech Park can be removed with a very a very reasonable investment in: ·   Broadband Satellite communication lines ·   Few state of the art computer servers and subsystems ·   Few state of the art routers and switches ·  Few redundant power source generators Removing Obstacles of Technological infrastructure The effective use and diffusion of technological information require networks of institutions that can tap into information about technology and market trends both worldwide and locally. Some governments are either oblivious to or afraid of information technology. Some are utterly unable to comprehend the need and necessity for it. Key institutions for this include technological information centers and extension services productivity centers, metrology, standards, testing, and quality control; and networked research and development institutions that are linked with the potential users of the knowledge they create. The proposed Tech-Park particularly needs a direct initiative and sponsorship by a group or groups of people that are highly qualified in the fields of science and engineering, in order to convince the governments of countries like Ethiopia with regard to the merits of the project and the liberalizations of some eclectic regulations. Removing Obstacles of Education and training The technological revolution requires workers who are technologically literate and receptive to innovation and who have a broad understanding of the modern world. The education system must therefore give students practice in understanding systems, manipulating them, talking about them to one another, and envisioning their function from many viewpoints. The use of tools for managing information complexity needs to become part of schooling for an ever-increasing portion of the population. With the rapid growth of information and changes in the structure of production, the set of knowledge learned in school or in early years on the job frequently is not sufficient. Workers need an educational and training system that enables them to stretch their knowledge to deal with emergent situations and that provides opportunities for permanent learning. Preparing them to use technology requires a combination of skill development, practice with complexity, and the development of adaptive problem solving capabilities. A combination of coached apprenticeship and guided self-assessment has proved most successful in training workers to deal with changing situations. Training in organizational management has also been shown to help firms manage their knowledge assets more effectively. Fortunately, technology is creating new and better ways to educate workers, such as interactive radio instruction, instruction transmitted by satellite, and computer simulated work environments. Technology can thus be used to increase the access to higher quality education, while reducing costs.   A modest investment in training capable people, not only will it have an immediate impact in employment to the skilled labor force but also in generating a much needed hard currency to the economy of a developing country like Ethiopia.  Thus the main purpose of this Tech-Park is to train people who can be employed by private enterprises. These enterprises can be incubated by this project and assisted by international agencies such as the World Bank with regard to access to the underlying infrastructure, specially the satellite and fiber optics link. Advantage for a developing country In some sense, today's technological revolution is not new. Over the past 100 years, impressive advances in transport, electrification, communications, and medicine have changed the way people live and work. What is different now is the convergence and interaction of many strands of technological change, with social consequences far more profound, far more difficult to foresee. Information: A cluster of innovations in telecommunications and informatics is feeding a revolution in information technology. Faster transmission speeds of optical fibers and new lightweight materials make construction faster and cheaper. Undersea telephone links now connect 51 countries with telephone circuits, and 7.4 million miles of fiber optic cables were installed last year alone. Information already is flowing faster, more generously, and less expensively throughout the planet, but this information technology revolution is still young, with full digitalization and intensive exploitation of bandwidth still years away.  Knowledge: A Factor Of Production Knowledge is complex and multidimensional. Yet in models of economic growth, whether neoclassical or evolutionary knowledge usually gets reduced to a single number: total factor productivity. Knowledge is an input, when combined with capital, labor, and other inputs, it produces goods and services. Thus it is a source of total factor productivity. But knowledge is also an output, the product of existing knowledge and investments in innovative activity. Knowledge has characteristics of a public good. As information spreads, the producer of knowledge cannot permanently and fully appropriate its value, though it is essential that the producer hold on to some of it. Fueled by research and the rapid generation of new knowledge, technological innovation has become the major factor behind increases in productivity. The "knowledge content" of goods and services – from science, advanced design concepts, intelligent materials, automation, software, sensors, advanced services, new medical concepts–has increased. And more and more of the goods and services in the world market are the result of complex production processes. The great speed of technological change and the rapid accumulation of new knowledge adversely affect countries that fail to incorporate new knowledge lag behind in productivity and competitiveness. As the world economy becomes more knowledge-based, the value added by information propels the more developed countries. But the knowledge revolution also creates opportunities for developing countries to emerge from dependence on low-cost labor as a source of comparative advantage, increasing productivity and incomes. Skilled labor force and knowledge base has become the most valuable asset of every country in this new economy. Intellectual Property has replaced any raw material resource such as gold or oil reserve that a country had in the past century. The opportunities for the skilled labor force of a poor country to be employed within the country by importing and in sourcing business opportunities is important. This will have a glaring effect on the GDP of the country by generating hard currency. Poverty reduction has become a buzz word lately in many international forums and plans. There is better way of reducing poverty than exporting a product of intellectual property while making people earn globally competitive salary. Even though it seems that most of these opportunities are for the best trained and best skilled group, it  has an important wealth effect for the whole community around. When we create high earning social group we directly create a strong consumer. This consumer group needs goods and services from the rest of society. Thus the whole country can prosper faster and better and hence reduce poverty. Capacity building has also become another buzzword for poor countries. Capacity should be built in order to be utilized locally. If not utilized and employed locally, these countries will be exporting skilled labor for nothing. In fact the amount of money and energy spent in building these capacities will be a waste. Thus such a Tech-Park and the idea of bringing outsourced contracts from hi-tech firms retains the skilled labor force at home and it is the best solution against a problem known as 'the brain drain'.