African Engineers: No Sweat?

Not extended after the Know-how Consultancy Centre (TCC) of the Kwame Nkrumah College of Science and Technologies (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, had been established in January 1972, the Director was describing the process of Correct Know-how to a browsing American professor and his spouse. First of all, he stated, it was necessary to research the technologies that were being now in use in grassroots enterprises and then to introduce a much more advanced technology that was achievable in just current constraints on raw materials supplies, infrastructure, industry dimensions and choices, and entrepreneurial competencies. Typically, this would be realised by adopting or adapting an historic extra labour-intense engineering, utilised in Western countries at a time when manufacturing models and their marketplaces ended up considerably scaled-down. ‘Oh no!’ the professor’s wife expostulated, ‘I never think these folks ought to be subjected to a Victorian period of sweated labour.’ At the time, it appeared unachievable to suggest a sweat-free route to a modern day technological culture, but as the years rolled by the excellent matron’s aspiration has appear to seem extra and far more achievable.

It was undoubtedly likely to be incredibly hard to introduce a Victorian era of sweated labour in Ghana. It was very clear, even in 1972, that Ghana would in no way progress as swiftly as Malaysia, fashioned from other British colonies granted independence in the exact 12 months of 1957. No question economists have discovered many aspects that contributed to the disparity in the level of financial progress, but a single change is evidently clear: the price of labour. Multinational firms established production units in South East Asian countries to just take benefit of the low labour expenses and Malaysia was just one of the initially nations to be enriched by this phenomenon. Ghana was usually unlikely to profit in this way. Overseas companies operating in Ghana in the 1970s complained that small labour productivity rendered their operations unviable, and numerous of them closed down. Research carried out by the TCC at that time indicated that labour productivity was approximately a few situations decreased in Ghana than in India. It seems that the professor’s wife need not have worried Ghanaians had an inborn resistance to sweated labour.

Couple of people in the 1970s could have predicted the digital revolution that has swept across the globe in the three subsequent many years. Anybody browsing Ghana currently, who realized the country in the 1970s, is right away struck by the evidently universal plague of earache. Anyone is clutching a mobile telephone. Outside the house in the streets of the cities and villages, incredibly minor else has altered, but inside of each individual office environment a individual pc has replaced the typewriters of outdated. A single marvels not so a lot at the technological innovation per se but at the fact that it appears to be to be universally obtainable in a very low cash flow nation. How it is afforded one particular can leave to the economists to clarify, but the truth that it is cost-effective are unable to be doubted. Has the exploitation of the electron opened a window of opportunity to an period of sweat-totally free wealth?

Personal computers and mobile telephones open up up fantastic vistas of quick communication and accessibility to facts that are vital conditions to financial progress, but in production industries the suggests of production must be similarly sophisticated. In the 1970s the superior industries of the Western nations applied technology of pretty substantial scale which the father of acceptable know-how, Dr E F Schumacher, rightly signalled in Compact is Attractive, was inappropriate for most producing nations around the world, not only since of its high cost but also simply because it was intended to serve a lot much larger markets. Even so, as electronically controlled production services have been launched, many of these have advanced as compact units that can be merged in substantial figures in large vegetation but also employed singly or in tiny numbers in smaller and medium enterprises. The development is on-heading and the price of NC machining centres and robotic manipulators is nevertheless unaffordable to most grassroots industrialists. At the exact same time, development is fast and further falls in value are likely.

Pc managed machines will be quite well known in Suame Magazine, Kumasi, and all of Ghana’s grassroots engineering enterprises. Machines that make 24 several hours a working day, 7 times a 7 days, have to have no wages, go to no funerals and steal no equipment or resources feel to current a panacea for all their ills. Just one need to hope that if this lady’s dream is realised, suited financial and social provision will be produced to ensure sweat-absolutely free employment for all all those technicians and artisans who are manufactured redundant.

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