To help solve global problems look to developing countries Bright Simons
I am an ideas activist.
That means I fight
for ideas I believe in
to have their place in the sun,
regardless of which side
of the equator they were born.
As well I should.
I myself am from that part of the world
often euphemistically referred to
as either “the Global South”
or “the developing world.”
But let’s be blunt about it:
when we say those words,
what we really mean is the poor world –
those corners of the world
with ready-made containers
for the hand-me-down ideas
of other places and other people.
But I’m here to depart
a little bit from the script
and to try and convince you
that these places are actually
alive and bubbling with ideas.
My real issue is: Where do I even start?
So maybe Egypt, Alexandria,
where we meet Rizwan.
When he walks outside his souk,
walks into a pharmacy for heart medicine
that can prevent the blood
in his arteries from clotting,
he confronts the fact that,
despite a growing epidemic
that currently accounts for 82 percent
of all deaths in Egypt,
it is the medicines that
can address these conditions
that counterfeiters,
ever the evil geniuses they are,
have decided to target.
Counterfeiters making knockoff medicines.
Luckily for Rizwan,
my team and I,
working in partnership with the largest
pharmaceutical company in Africa,
have placed unique codes –
think of them like one-time passwords –
on each pack of the best-selling
heart medicine in Egypt.
So when Rizwan buys heart medicine,
he can key in these one-time passwords
to a toll-free short code
that we’ve set up on all
the telecom companies in Egypt
for free.
He gets a message –
call it the message of life –
which reassures him
that this medicine is not one of the 12
percent of all medicines in Egypt
that are counterfeits.
From the gorgeous banks of the Nile,
we glide into the beautiful
Rift Valley of Kenya.
In Narok Town, we meet Ole Lenku,
salt-of-the-earth fellow.
When he walks into an agrodealer’s shop,
all he wants is certified
and proper cabbage seeds
that, if he were to plant them,
will yield a harvest rich enough
that he can pay for
the school fees of his children.
That’s all he wants.
Unfortunately,
by the reckoning of most
international organizations,
40 percent of all the seeds
sold in Eastern and Southern Africa
are of questionable quality,
sometimes outrightly fake.
Luckily for Ole,
once again, our team has been at work,
and, working with the leading
agriculture regulator in Kenya,
we’ve digitized the entire
certification process
for seeds in that country,
every seed – millet, sorghum, maize –
such that when Ole Lenku
keys in a code on a packet of millet,
he’s able to retrieve
a digital certificate
that assures him that the seed
is properly certified.
From Kenya, we head to Noida in India,
where the irrepressible Ambika
is holding on very fast to her dream
of becoming an elite athlete,
safe in the knowledge that
because of our ingredients
rating technology,
she’s not going to ingest
something accidentally,
which will mess up her doping tests
and kick her out of the sports she loves.
Finally, we alight in Ghana,
my own home country,
where another problem needs addressing –
the problem of under-vaccination
or poor-quality vaccination.
You see, when you put some vaccines
into the bloodstream of an infant,
you are giving them a lifetime insurance
against dangerous diseases
that can cripple them or kill them.
Sometimes, this is for a lifetime.
The problem is that vaccines
are delicate organisms really,
and they need to be stored
between two degrees and eight degrees.
And if you don’t do that,
they lose their potency,
and they no longer confer the immunity
the child deserves.
Working with computer vision scientists,
we’ve converted simple markers
on the vials of vaccines
into what you might regard
as crude thermometers.
So then, these patterns change slowly
over time in response to temperature
until they leave a distinct pattern
on the surface of the vaccine,
such that a nurse,
with a scan of the phone,
can detect if the vaccine was stored
properly in the right temperature
and therefore is still good for use
before administering this to the child –
literally securing the next generation.
These are some of the solutions at work
saving lives, redeeming societies,
in these parts of the world.
But I would remind you
that there are powerful ideas behind them,
and I’ll recap a few.
One, that social trust
is not the same as interpersonal trust.
Two, that the division between
consumption and regulation
in an increasingly interdependent world
is no longer viable.
And three, that decentralized autonomy,
regardless of what our blockchain
enthusiasts in the West –
whom I respect a lot – say,
are not as important as reinforcing
social accountability feedback loops.
These are some of the ideas.
Now, every time I go somewhere
and I give this speech
and I make these comments
and I provide these examples,
people say, “If these ideas
are so damn brilliant,
why aren’t they everywhere?
I’ve never heard of them.”
I want to assure you,
the reason why you have not
heard of these ideas
is exactly the point I made
in the beginning.
And that is that there are
parts of the world
whose good ideas simply don’t scale
because of the latitude
on which they were born.
I call that “mental latitude imperialism.”
(Laughter)
That really is the reason.
But you may counter and say, “Well,
maybe it’s an important problem,
but it’s sort of an obscure problem
in parts of the world.
Why do you want
to globalize such problems?
I mean, they are better local.”
What if, in response, I told you
that actually, underlying each
of these problems that I’ve described
is a fundamental issue
of the breakdown of trust
in markets and institutions,
and that there’s nothing more global,
more universal, closer to you and I
than the problem of trust.
For example, a quarter of all the seafood
marketed in the US is falsely labeled.
So when you buy a tuna
or salmon sandwich in Manhattan,
you are eating something that could be
banned for being toxic in Japan.
Literally.
Most of you have heard of a time
when horsemeat was masquerading as beef
in burger patties in Europe?
You have.
What you don’t know is that a good chunk
of these fake meat patties
were also contaminated with cadmium,
which can damage your kidneys.
This was Europe.
Many of you are aware of plane crashes
and you worry about plane crashes,
because every now and then, one of them
intrudes into your consciousness.
But I bet you don’t know
that a single investigation uncovered
one million counterfeit incidents
in the aeronautical
supply chain in the US.
So this is a global problem, full stop.
It’s a global problem.
The only reason we are not addressing it
with the urgency it deserves
is that the best solutions,
the most advanced solutions,
the most progressive solutions,
are, unfortunately, in parts of the world
where solutions don’t scale.
And that is why it is not surprising
that attempts to create this same
verification models for pharmaceuticals
are now a decade behind
in the USA and Europe,
while it’s already available in Nigeria.
A decade, and costing
a hundred times more.
And that is why, when you walk
into a Walgreens in New York,
you cannot check the source
of your medicine,
but you can in Maiduguri
in Northern Nigeria.
That is the reality.
(Applause)
That is the reality.
(Applause)
So we go back to the issue of ideas.
Remember, solutions are merely
packaged ideas,
so it is the ideas
that are most important.
In a world where we marginalize the
ideas of the Global South,
we cannot create globally inclusive
problem-solving models.
Now, you might say, “Well, that’s bad,
but in such a world
where we have so many other problems,
do we need another cause?”
I say yes, we need another cause.
Actually, that cause will surprise you:
the cause of intellectual justice.
You say, “What? Intellectual justice?
In a world of human rights abuses?”
And I explain this way:
all the solutions to the other problems
that affect us and confront us
need solutions.
So you need the best ideas
to address them.
And that is why today I ask you,
can we all give it one time
for intellectual justice?
(Applause)