
Development Aid is sustainable when it leaves behind an independent and exponentially growing sector, that continues to grow and respond to future environmental, social and economic challenges.
So how do we create such independent exponential growth? Experience in creating sectors in Europe and Africa have shown that to “jump-start” a sector from the outside, you need to work through 3 development stages:

To illustrate this development, you could look at the development of the German solar energy market from the 1990s up until now. This market started with a small demonstration programme called “100 roofs”, then it the government introduced an even larger “1000 roofs” programme and finally the government introduced a law guaranteeing a fixed price for solar electricity to private and public operators. The solar electricity market took off and is now one of the largest solar energy markets in the world.

Sustainable development is hard to achieve. It is unclear whether such a complicated issue is within the abilities of a large, bureaucratic, inflexible and uncoordinated donor industry. Time will tell: If in the next 50 years we achieve as little development in Africa as we have in the last 50, we will once again have failed.
No comments:
Post a Comment