Schumpeter: Look Before You Leap

熊彼特：三思而后行

 

The notion of leapfrogging poor infrastructure in Africa needs to come back down to earth

想直接越过非洲薄弱的基础设施？还是面对现实吧

 

Can entrepreneurs make up for a lack of roads? In Rwanda, where most of the population live in cut-off villages, the government wants to skip straight to drones. Encouraged by Paul Kagame, the president and a darling of the development industry (if not of human-rights activists), some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture-capital firms, including Sequoia Capital and the investment arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, have bet that tiny, unmanned aircraft carrying medical supplies can simply hop over the rolling green hills and the mud tracks that barely connect people now.

 

有了众多创业者，就能弥补道路交通的不足吗？在卢旺达，大多数人口都居住在彼此相隔较远的村庄，针对这种情况，该国政府想跨越修路这一步，直接采用无人机。开发行业（人权活动家们可能就不是这样了）向来对其总统保罗·卡加梅（Paul Kagame）青眼有加。在他的感染之下，硅谷一些最为知名的风险投资公司如红杉资本（Sequoia Capita）及谷歌母公司Alphabet的投资部门也相信，这些用来运送医疗用品的迷你无人驾驶飞行器可轻松越过绵延的青翠山岭，以及勉强将人们连接起来的泥泞土路。

 

It is the latest example of what businesspeople working across Africa call “leapfrogging”. Usually married to an almost evangelical belief in the power of startups, this is the notion that, having failed to adopt now-outdated technology, Africa can simply jump straight over it and go right to the latest thing. Just as drones can make up for poor roads, the theory goes, mobile phones can overcome a lack of well-functioning banks, portable solar panels can stand in for missing power stations and free learning apps can substitute for patchy education.

 

说到在非洲各地开创事业的商务人士们口中的“跨越式发展”，以上便是最新例证。这一理念常与几近狂热地相信创业公司的力量这一情形密不可分；其主要观点是，既然非洲之前没能采用的技术现已过时，那么干脆就越过它们，直接采用最新的技术。依此观点，就像状况不佳的道路可由无人机弥补一样，缺少运作良好的银行可仰仗移动电话，没有发电站可使用便携的太阳能电池板，不尽人意的教育也可为自主学习应用所替代。

 

There is a compelling precedent. Fifteen years ago, only a tiny fraction of Africans had access to phones of any kind. Getting a landline installed meant waiting years. Then mobile telephony exploded. In some African countries, such as Uganda, the number of mobile phones came to surpass the total number of landlines in less time than the old state monopoly would take to install a single connection in your house (typically two years or more). When a telecoms mast goes up, other new businesses follow. Young men start selling airtime; farmers find new markets.

 

在此之前已有一个颇具说服力的案例。十五年前，不管是哪种类型的电话，只有一小部分的非洲人能用得上。要安装一部固定电话需等上好几年，但随后便迎来了移动通讯突飞猛进的发展。在一些非洲国家如乌干达，移动电话的总数量已超过固话，这一过程用时还不到从前国有垄断企业为住户安装一台座机大致所需的时间（通常要两年或更久）。一旦电信行业发展起来，其他新的生意也会随之而来。年轻人们开始兜售电话卡，农民们也找到了新市场。

 

Now the hope is that drones could take over from mobile phones as the way to transform Africa. The project under way in Rwanda is courtesy of a startup based in Silicon Valley called Zipline. Its idea is to use small, fixed-wing drones to drop off packets of blood with parachutes from Rwanda’s five blood banks to hospitals and health-care centres, under a contract with the government. A lot of women die in childbirth because they cannot get blood quickly enough.

 

如今人们希望无人机可以继移动电话之后，成为又一改变非洲面貌的事物。硅谷一家创业公司Zipline正在为卢旺达开展一个项目。这家公司打算依照与当地政府的合同，利用小型固定翼无人机将装有血液的包裹从卢旺达五家血库运送至各个医院及医疗保健中心，并用降落伞空投。很多女人因不能及时输血而在分娩过程中死亡。

 

But the hype about machines saving African lives ought to elicit caution. No one can say how many people will benefit from Zipline, which has yet to begin operating, or whether there will be sufficient profits to continue over the long term. Another project is the world’s very first “drone port”, designed for Rwanda by Foster + Partners, a fancy British firm of architects that wants every small town in Africa to have its own drone port by 2030. Yet its Rwandan project won’t be completed for another four years. A separate initiative, in Malawi, to transport blood samples for HIV tests, received money from UNICEF, a branch of the UN, and testing is under way. The project is pricey – at $7,000 a drone. Paying drivers on motorbikes would be cheaper.

 

这些能够帮助非洲挽救生命的机器得到了热火朝天的宣传，但我们对此应持谨慎态度。Zipline尚未开始运作，因而无从知晓多少人会因其而受益，或该项目能否获得足够的收益以支撑长期的运营。另一个项目是世界第一个“无人机机场”，由英国高端建筑公司福斯特建筑事务所（Foster + Partners）为卢旺达设计。该公司希望到2030年每个非洲小镇都能有自己的无人机机场，但它在卢旺达的项目还得再有四年才能完工。在马拉维，另一项用无人机运送血样以进行HIV检测的计划得到了联合国分支机构联合国儿童基金会（UNICEF）的资金支持，目前正在进行飞行测试。该项目花费不菲，仅一个无人机造价就要7000美元。雇佣摩托车手也许会便宜些。

 

Such caveats hardly dampen the mood at business conferences in Africa, where you find hundreds of investors gushing about their plans to help the poor with new technology and make big profits while doing it. “Within the next few years you’ll really see leapfrogging taking off,” says Ashish Thakkar, a British-born, Ugandan businessman whose Mara Group, a business-services firm, is setting up tech businesses across the continent. Perhaps, but tech booms based on leapfrogging have been wrongly anticipated in the past. Americans who turn up in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam with millions of dollars hoping to buy startups that have risen as part of the so-called “Silicon Savannah”, an east African cluster, for example, frequently leave empty-handed because there isn’t all that much to buy.

 

然而非洲商务会议讨论的热烈气氛几乎并没因这些警示而有所冷却。在那里你会发现数百位投资者滔滔不绝地夸耀自己用新技术救助穷人、还能从中赚大钱的计划。“接下来的几年内，你将会真正见识到跨越式发展的成功。”艾希什·塔卡尔（Ashish Takkar）说道。这位英国出生的乌干达商人创办了商业服务公司玛拉集团（Mara Group），其科技业务现正在整个非洲铺开。塔卡尔所言也许会成真，但在过去人们曾对跨越式发展所造就的科技繁荣做出过错误的预判。例如，怀揣大把美元的美国人来到内罗毕（Nairobi）和达累斯萨拉姆（Dar es Salaam），希望能收购些崛起于非洲东部技术集群地、造就了所谓“大草原硅谷”（Silicon Savannah）的创业公司。但是他们常常会空手而归，因为并没什么可买的。

 

African tech types often think they can quickly copy rich-country products and sell them to the urban middle class. But then they discover that there is no getting around complex tax laws, a dearth of engineers and fragmented markets. The Western investors who back them have even less grasp of just how dysfunctional basic infrastructure can be, notes Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan investor and a political activist. All the evidence suggests that technology firms are no better at leapfrogging such hurdles than, say, a carmaker. The only part of the continent with a mature tech scene is South Africa: a country which also has good roads, reliable power and plenty of well-educated graduates.

 

非洲科技公司常会以为它们可以很快就复制出富裕国家的产品并将之出售给城市的中产阶级。但它们随后就发现无法绕开税法复杂、工程师严重紧缺、市场破碎等问题。肯尼亚投资人及政治活动家奥瑞·奥科罗（Ory Okolloh）指出，与这些公司相比，支持它们的西方投资者甚至更加不了解非洲最基本的基础设施究竟有多落后。这些证据表明，科技公司并不会比其他企业如汽车制造商更擅长跨越这种障碍。整个非洲只有南非科技领域的发展还算成熟：除此之外，该国还有优质的道路，可靠的电力供应及大量受过良好教育的毕业生。

 

Mr Kagame himself has admitted that leapfrogging has limits. Drones can transport blood, but they can’t transport doctors, who need roads. Solar panels will help people light their homes without burning kerosene, but they will not replace the functioning grid that manufacturers need. Nor will clever technology firms do away with the need for well-drafted regulation and the rule of law.

 

卡加梅本人也承认，跨越式发展也有其局限之处。无人机可运送血液，但却并不能运送医生，医生仍需要道路。太阳能电池板能让人不用煤油就能点亮自己的家，但它们并不能替代制造商所需要的运转顺畅的电网。即使有了高明的科技公司，也还需要完善的法规与法治。

 

A few tech firms are pulling off impressive feats. M-Kopa, a Kenyan company backed by the Gates Foundation, has sold some 375,000 solar panels on credit, using mobile money to collect payments and to monitor the creditworthiness of borrowers. But it has had to build an entire network of old-fashioned marketers going from door to door. Jumia, a Nigerian e-commerce firm, built separate logistics systems in seven different countries. In other words, to make the most of digital opportunities these firms had to construct their own basic physical infrastructure.

 

确有一些科技公司正在成就一番光辉业绩。由盖茨基金会（Gates Foundation）支持的肯尼亚公司M-Kopa通过允许赊购的方式售出了约37.5万个太阳能电池板，并通过移动支付收取费用及监控赊购人的信誉度。然而公司却不得不为此打造了一整套传统的上门推销员网络。尼日利亚电子商务公司Jumia也在七个不同的国家分别建立了物流体系。换言之，为了善加利用数字时代的机遇，这些科技公司只得自行建造最基本的实体基础设施。

 

Wander the streets of any big African city and it soon becomes clear that a lack of enterprise is hardly the problem. In Nairobi’s biggest slum, Kibera, the narrow dirt streets bustle with businesses charging phones from generators; running tiny cinemas showing Premier League football on satellite TVs; and selling solar panels. What you won’t find are clean toilets, potable water or anyone earning much over a few dollars a day. The main leapfrogging that takes place is over the open sewers. That is not something you can fix with a mobile-phone app.

 

到任何一个非洲大城市的街道随便转转就会明白，根本问题似乎并不是企业数量太少。在内罗毕最大的贫民窟基贝拉（Kibera），狭窄的土路上各种生意如火如荼地开展着：用发电机为手机充电，小型剧院通过卫星电视播放超级联赛，此外还有卖太阳能电池板的。但在那里你不会找到干净的厕所和饮用水，也不会看到一个一天能赚好几美元的人。所谓的跨越式发展大体只会在露天的阴沟之上发生——这可不是一个移动电话应用就能补救的问题。

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