Opinion article: The response of the developing world

Global poverty and environmental degradation is what will stand between our success and failures in the world. According to Anup Shah, 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, and sub-Saharan Africa takes the fair share of this poverty and underdevelopment. Second in the race, is South East Asia accounting for high infant mortality rates and 22 000 children that die of poverty every day. 72 million children, who should be in primary school in the developing world, are not in primary school.

This data speaks an unfortunate message. The message that, even as the world enters times and moments of incredible economic growth, the developing world continues to lag behind, and so a significant part of what we ought to do to cope with exponential growth, is to challenge the realities of illiteracy, poverty, health and disease in the developing world, better to increase participation in the development of the world and of humanity.

As humans we are bound by the values of Ubuntu (African Philosophy). These are values of empathy, kindness, collectiveness, and love of humanity will and must play an integral role in coping with the exponential times in development. Because of development, the process of globalisation will dominate. These processes of globalisation, more often than not, contribute to the brain drain of developing countries and the removal of skilled labour from developing their respective communities and countries of origin. These become a pool of intellect for European and developed countries, and leave African, South Asian and Latin American countries barren of the intellectual capacity that will be necessary to successfully manage the resources (health, farming, mines, land) to improve the lives of the citizens and of humanity.

And so, a part of what must be done to cope with development, is to successfully ensure that the fruits of development and change are evenly distributed among the people of the world, and that whatever we do contributes to making the world a better place for everyone. Part of what must be done is to emphasise that the 20 000 African graduates that leave Africa every year due to soft power persuasion, globalisation and the search for a ‘better’ life must be encouraged to stay at home and use their skills to build a better society, and so the challenge is how do we encourage skilled labour to use their new found knowledge to improve humanity rather than search for individualistic interests which is the natural response?

Wandile Mamba