Re: [ENGLISH TRANSLATION] Seydina NDIAYE: Re: [ipr-ict] On your first comments - A propos des premières contributions

[Nigel Morris-Cotterill <nigelmc@antimoneylaundering.net>]

Dear Philippe et al

The issue of human resources is universal: poverty and lack of access to 
education are the two things that hold back societies. Although this 
iist is about Africa, this is not an African problem.

Seydina's comments are instructive. He says that African businesses 
prefer to sell and service software rather than to develop and market 
their own.

There is good reason for this: it's all got to do with filling the rice 
bowl. Simply, people need food, and the quickest way to make the money 
to buy food is to sell services. The investment is low (often only time) 
and the returns can be substantial. In developed countries, plumbers and 
builders earn a higher per hour rate after expenses than most lawyers. 
Developed countries are moving away from manufacture to service 
industries: those that Philippe mentions are merely over-reaching the 
industrialisation phase that developed countries went through.

Software design and implemenation is getting easier: a far bigger 
problem is selling the software. The reputation of West Africa for fraud 
means that any business with an African connection will have great 
difficulties selling product over the internet. Ukranians have the same 
problem. The reputation (generally unfounded) of Africans as unreliable, 
lazy, producing poor quality work militates against the willingness of 
foreigners to purchase any African made technology, or to outsource to 
Africa.

Consultancy is a polite form of selling oneself (I know, I'm a 
consultant!) and it is not surprising that this is the way that the more 
educated Africans are going. I live in a developing country and I am 
constantly surprised by the range of business consultants, who have 
simply set up shop and proclaimed themselves expert) which proliferate, 
and those desperate to achieve spend what they think is investment but, 
if they researched properly, they could get for themselves from a couple 
of books.

I'm afraid that IT consultancy is like this: people who know just a bit 
mroe than Mr Average are selling to Mr Average because he does not know 
how easy it is to find out for himself.

I agree with Seydina that poor countries should develop a software 
industry, and base it on open source. In this way the countries can 
reduce their software costs and have software that more readily meets 
local demands. After all, most "consultants" are only teaching companies 
how to change their ways to fit the software. Surely it should be the 
other way around.

Regards

Nigel Morris-Cotterill

Philipp Schmidt wrote:

> [ENGLISH TRANSLATION]
>
> Dear Andrea, No offense taken from your message. I just wanted to  
> clarify the issues of the quality of human resources one can find in  
> Africa (I speak overall about Africa here, because one finds  relatively 
> similar human resource situations across the continent).
>
> To return to our discussion, I think that if one places oneself at  the 
> internal level of a company, we have in Africa all necessary  skills to 
> make good software, and I do not speak about price. I work  in a 
> software development company in Paris and I am convinced that  all the 
> skills available in our company can also be found in Africa.  The 
> difference is at the level of the legal environment and the  protection 
> of innovation. The African companies are focused more on  providing 
> services than on the production of software because there  is less risk. 
> Innovation (in software development) is not valued or  protected. And 
> without innovation, I think that the "digital divide"  will be present 
> for a long time. One cannot be satisfied to remain  eternal imitators 
> and believe in the ability to attain a level of  technological development.
>
> Seydina
>
> >
>
>
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