Found at: http://www.competitiveness.org/article/articleprint/923/-1/76/
Erica Elk, Director at the Cape Craft and Design Institute in South Africa has been one of the participants of the Pan African Competitiveness Forum in Addis Ababa in April and allows us to share her reflections on the Forum. This article was part of a monthly newsletter from the Western Cape Craft Initiative.
"In April I was very fortunate to be invited to join a 6-person South African delegation that attended the 1st Pan African Competitiveness Forum in Addis Ababa. The Forum brought together about 150 people from 22 countries on the continent to share experiences and lessons in developing clusters and competitiveness in Africa. Participants covered all regions of Africa from north to south and east to west and came from
government, the private sector, civil society and academia.
The Forum was convened by The Competitiveness Institute a not-for-profit alliance of cluster practitioners with the mission to improve living standards and the local competitiveness of regions throughout the world, by fostering cluster-based development initiatives and hosted by the African Union and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency at the UN Conference Centre in Addis.
The TCI was started in the late 1990s by a group of economic development professionals and cluster practitioners with the principal aim of collecting and exchanging information and best practices on cluster development initiatives worldwide and to build the skills of locally based facilitators.
Cluster Theory, along with a value chain analysis that promoted the concept of Value-Addition, was first described and popularised by American academic Michael Porter in the mid 1980s1. Over the last 20 years both of these concepts, have become quite central to local and regional economic development strategies of governments around the world. It has gained particular currency in developing countries where governments identify the need to intervene because of market, policy and systemic failures.
Since 1999, the Western Cape provincial government, through the Department of Economic Development, has been supporting cluster initiatives in 18 economic sectors as a way of driving economic development in the province. The primary 'agency' for supporting clusters in each of these sectors has been the SPVs (special purpose vehicles) of which the CCDI is one. So it was very interesting to 'see' that what we have been building and developing over the last 7-8 years in the Craft Sector could be part of a continental strategy to drive economic development and ultimately impact on poverty, unemployment and the quality of life of the 922 million people living in Africa.
The Pan African Competitiveness Forum which was mostly hard work and very little play came up with the ambitious all-encompassing goal of 'lighting 1000 cluster fires by 2010'. I can hear the cynics out there muttering but its not so far out of reach if you 'do the math' and look at the reality. Each of the 53 countries on the continent would need to support 18 clusters to reach this goal. The Western Cape is already doing it for SA; Tanzania has 8 cluster initiatives in process with 11 in the pipeline they cover areas as diverse as mushroom, sisal, seeds & seedlings, nutraceuticals and seaweed farming (where 10,000
people are already generating income in Zanzibar) to ICT and cultural heritage; Uganda has 7 initiatives with 15 more being planned in sectors such as bio-ethanol, basketry, fruit processing and bee-keeping; and Mozambique has 8 in process in cassava, cashew nuts, medicinal plants processing and small-scale mining.
And if each cluster supports 1000 enterprises (as we do) which in turn 'employ' 10,000 people (not quite but maybe close to the size of the sector in the WC) that means that 1000 clusters would support a total of 1m small businesses which means 10m jobs
So, its still a drop in the ocean. - There are 9 million people entering the labour force each year and it's predicted that by 2015 the population of Africa will have more than doubled to 1.9 billion people - 50% of whom will live in cities. But isn't that how you eat an elephant one bite at a time?
It was very sobering. The challenges are predictably enormous and too many and varied and complex to do
justice to in this short article (if you want more info on this subject visit the TCI website) - so I did not come back a raving Afro-optimist but I'm still not buying into the afro-pessimism mindset that is so easy to absorb given our daily mass media diet.
There is evidence that what we are doing in our own Cape Craft cluster is working to support growth, development and increasing competitiveness of the sector. (I'm determined that this year we will commission research to put numbers to the anecdotal evidence so that we can quantify this impact.) And there is evidence that it works in many other sectors too. It's a hard swallow for an instant gratification world like ours but it happens one step/bite at a time
"
If you want to have a look at the whole newsletter they publish monthly you can download it here. For receiving the newsletter you can also subscribe by mailing to Marjorie at naidooml@cput.ac.za. And they will certainly be represented at the TCI Global Annual Conference in October!