[Music]
so I have a confession to make
about a year after I graduated secondary
school I failed the entrance exam into
University in Nigeria twice and between
you and me if I took the exam a third
time I think I would have failed again
but that’s not even the saddest part of
the story I think for me the hardest
part of the story is that if I was
successful and if I passed the exams
here are images of some of the
universities where I would have had the
opportunity to study some of these
universities have the same acceptance
rates as some of the most elite
institutions in the United States of
America this is what poverty looks like
many books have been written about how
to end poverty organizations make it
their mission to end poverty in fact
every year we spend hundreds of billions
of dollars trying to end extreme poverty
and we’ve made some progress we’ve
reduced the global poverty rate from
about 35% in the 1990s to just under 10%
today but if we’re honest with ourselves
and there is no progress without honesty
what we will find is that a majority of
the countries that have escaped poverty
are in Asia and primarily one which is
China a majority of the people who have
escaped poverty are from China and what
you find is that more than half the
number of people living in poverty today
exist in our continent in Africa in fact
when you take these 18 countries and you
look at their GDP per capita in the
1960s and you compare it with the GDP
per capita in 2015 what you find is that
these countries are poorer today than
they were in the 1960s and so how is it
that we’re spending billions of dollars
every year trying to eradicate poverty
but we’ve got some countries that are
poorer today
and they were 50 years ago that’s one of
the questions at the core of my research
at the Clayton Christensen Institute in
Boston but this isn’t always how I
planned I would spend my life about 17
years ago when I could not get into
University in America I was fortunate to
get a scholarship and I got the
University in America the University in
Nigeria I went to university in America
in fact I felt like this guy I felt like
I had just won the lottery in fact I
tell my friends I felt like I was in
prison I escaped then I won the lottery
I had no plans of ever coming back to
Africa
I mean who wins the lottery and goes
back to prison but as I was chasing my
American dream and I opened a book in
February 2008 one night and I read about
this girl so 10 year old girl in
Ethiopia who had to wake up every
morning at 3 a.m. walk miles fetch
firewood and sell so she could take her
of herself and her family something
happened to me that night because I
thought about the hundreds of millions
of other children on this continent that
lived life like her
and I dedicated my life to making sure
that we improve the lives of people like
her so I got some friends together and
we started an organization called
poverty stops here which since raised
funds so that we could build wells
invest in education and give out micro
loans in struggling communities in
Nigeria we’d build wells in communities
where women and children would have to
walk miles to fetch water but something
interesting started to happen after we’d
build a few wells the wells started to
break at first I thought maybe this is
our problem we were just a bunch of
passionate guys excited about ending
poverty and didn’t really know what we
were doing after I researched this some
more I realized this isn’t just us there
are hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of wells on the continent that are
broken
and this problem was so important to me
that I went back to school to figure out
how to solve it while I was at school I
was lucky to meet this man he’s one of
the most prominent professors at Harvard
and he’s one of the world’s leading
management thinkers is the father of
disruptive innovation over the past
couple years we’ve been studying what
role innovation has to play in
development we’ve been thinking about
why we spent so much money trying to
eradicate poverty but we don’t get the
results that we want and he has helped
me see that our obsession with ending
poverty is actually where the problem
lies
the first reason for that is
interestingly the end of poverty is not
the same as prosperity the end of
poverty is not the same as the end of
suffering it’s not the the same as the
end of hardship and the end of struggles
there are billions of people in the
world who are technically not living in
poverty you know less than a couple of
dollars a day who are still living very
difficult lives and so as difficult as
it is to end poverty it turns out that
we’re focusing on the wrong thing
a friend of mine once told me one day
that focusing so intently on poverty is
like a student doing everything they can
so they don’t get an S in school I mean
it’sit’s a good thing not to get an F
but is it really admirable
should that be what we should be focused
on and the second thing is that when we
focus on poverty we see everything
through that lens and because poverty
almost always shows itself as a lack of
resources a lack of food a lack of water
a lack of schools a lack of roads a lack
of clinics infrastructure a lack of
things that rich people have and poor
people don’t what we end up with is that
poverty is a resource problem and so
what do we do we push these resources
onto these poor communities in the hopes
that we can eradicate poverty and create
prosperity but then we get the results
that aren’t quite what we expected
it’s the same thing that happened to me
when I went into the wells to try to get
water into the community and what I
found is that this image actually
represents many projects in the
development community where we push and
push and push resources and poor
communities but the progress that we
make is actually very limited and that’s
because many of the projects are
anchored on this question how can we
eradicate poverty but if we tweak that
question just a little bit and asked a
different question how can we create
prosperity what we begin to find is that
this is not a resource problem at all
this is an innovation problem and I mean
innovation simply put is practical
solutions to real problems and we find
that many of the resources that are
pushed on these poor communities are not
practical because they can’t afford them
and they’re not getting to the root
cause of the problems you know a few
weeks ago I was in Washington DC giving
a presentation on the importance of
innovation in development and I showed
this slide with different demographics
70% of rural population 10% access to
electricity the average person spends
more than half their income on food the
infant mortality rate is almost 20
percent and I asked people in the
audience I said what country do you
think this is and of course you know we
we won that one people you know Somalia
Sudan Mali the Democratic DRC and after
I saw that they weren’t gonna get it I
said this is the United States of
America now they were shocked and I said
this is the United States of America in
the 1850s through the early 1900’s it
had demographics that were worse than
some of the poorest countries on the
continent today and in order for us to
figure out how to create prosperity in
Africa we have to ask ourselves a
question what happened in America
did they push a bunch of resources on
the populace or did they use a different
strategy well America innovated I’ll
give you an example in the 1900s the car
was a luxury that only rich people could
afford but in 1908 Henry Ford decided to
make a car for the average American he
decided to make a car simple and
affordable
now many people laughed at him he lost
several investors people thought he was
crazy because there weren’t even roads
in America to drive the car on but he
was successful he persevered and as a
result millions of people pull the cars
into their lives
he created tens of thousands of jobs and
industries began to emerge around the
car people started to build suburbs in
the outskirts of the cities agriculture
became more productive as you could
easily transport food from the farms and
to the cities in fact the United States
government had tried to build roads in
the 1800s but they couldn’t race the
money to build the roads but after Henry
Ford’s innovation the government was
able to tax the citizens with the car
sales and gas taxes and as a result they
were able to build roads the car came
before the roads the innovations come
before the infrastructure but you see
Ford was not alone he was born into an
America that had this culture of
innovation even though the demographics
were worst in some of the countries in
Africa today from innovations in
agriculture to innovations in financial
services innovators in the 1800’s and
early 1900s developed products that were
simple and affordable so that millions
of Americans could pull them into their
lives now the one thing that these
innovations have in common is that they
made product simple and affordable as a
result of doing this millions of people
pull these products into their lives the
companies needed to create jobs so that
they could serve these customers and as
a result development happened now I know
some of you are probably thinking
there’s no way we can do this in Africa
we’ve got way too many issues that we
need to solve that’s understandable but
we’ve been trying to fix our issues
since since the wave of Independence
swept across this continent in the 1950s
and 60s and how are we doing on that if
America tried to fix their issues the
way we’re trying to fix our issues the
country would not be where it is today
see for America and virtually every
prosperous country that we have studied
innovation came before development but
for Africa somehow we want development
to come before innovation and we have
the equation backwards unfortunately it
just can’t work that way thankfully
there are a few innovators on the
continent that are making products more
accessible simple and affordable so that
more Africans can pull them into their
lives these are the kinds of innovations
that we need to foster take the
late-1990s for instance when the cell
phone was called a rich man’s toy very
few people on the continent had it but
Mo Ibrahim decided that he would create
a mobile telecommunications
infrastructure in several African
countries that could serve millions of
people and just like Henry Ford people
thought he was crazy
banks refused to give him money but he
persevered and he was able to develop
this infrastructure in several countries
from Chad to Nazir to Sudan to the DRC
and now millions of people have pooled
these products into their lives
we have industries that have emerged
around it but interestingly he was able
to unlock 3.4 billion dollars worth of
value in seven years from some of the
poorest countries on this continent
think about that for a second he was
able to sell his company for 3.4 billion
dollars in about seven years that’s the
kind of prosperity that exists if we
think about creating market creating
innovations
there are a few other innovators doing
the same in financial services from M
paisa and micro insurer to even
entertainment the Nigerian movie
industry Nollywood that currently
employs about a million people to
another innovation that’s making malaria
diagnostics really simple malaria still
kills hundreds of thousands of Africans
every year but with a product that cost
a little over $1 you can find out if you
have malaria in about 20 minutes so that
you can treat it more easily now
focusing on these kinds of innovations
is more important now than ever here’s
why you know in 2015 the Pew Research
Center did a study that said about 92
percent of Africans earn less than $300
a month now this is after the decade of
the Africa rising narrative I don’t know
where we were rise into well we didn’t
rise very high but here’s what that
looks like
that means these are the people on this
continent as a proportion that earned
more than $300 every month we need to
start developing innovations for the
millions of people for whom a decent
education is not available for whom
access to health care is not available
access to affordable housing we can’t
find what would happen if we started to
focus on innovations that targeted the
hundreds of millions of Africans who
don’t have access to these products now
I think what we would see is an
innovation revolution on this continent
that’s going to catapult us from poverty
to prosperity in less than two decades
but the first thing we have to do is we
really have to stop focusing stop
obsessing about eradicating poverty and
we have to start thinking about creating
innovations that can lead to prosperity
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
so I have a confession to make
about a year after I graduated secondary
school I failed the entrance exam into
University in Nigeria twice and between
you and me if I took the exam a third
time I think I would have failed again
but that’s not even the saddest part of
the story I think for me the hardest
part of the story is that if I was
successful and if I passed the exams
here are images of some of the
universities where I would have had the
opportunity to study some of these
universities have the same acceptance
rates as some of the most elite
institutions in the United States of
America this is what poverty looks like
many books have been written about how
to end poverty organizations make it
their mission to end poverty in fact
every year we spend hundreds of billions
of dollars trying to end extreme poverty
and we’ve made some progress we’ve
reduced the global poverty rate from
about 35% in the 1990s to just under 10%
today but if we’re honest with ourselves
and there is no progress without honesty
what we will find is that a majority of
the countries that have escaped poverty
are in Asia and primarily one which is
China a majority of the people who have
escaped poverty are from China and what
you find is that more than half the
number of people living in poverty today
exist in our continent in Africa in fact
when you take these 18 countries and you
look at their GDP per capita in the
1960s and you compare it with the GDP
per capita in 2015 what you find is that
these countries are poorer today than
they were in the 1960s and so how is it
that we’re spending billions of dollars
every year trying to eradicate poverty
but we’ve got some countries that are
poorer today
and they were 50 years ago that’s one of
the questions at the core of my research
at the Clayton Christensen Institute in
Boston but this isn’t always how I
planned I would spend my life about 17
years ago when I could not get into
University in America I was fortunate to
get a scholarship and I got the
University in America the University in
Nigeria I went to university in America
in fact I felt like this guy I felt like
I had just won the lottery in fact I
tell my friends I felt like I was in
prison I escaped then I won the lottery
I had no plans of ever coming back to
Africa
I mean who wins the lottery and goes
back to prison but as I was chasing my
American dream and I opened a book in
February 2008 one night and I read about
this girl so 10 year old girl in
Ethiopia who had to wake up every
morning at 3 a.m. walk miles fetch
firewood and sell so she could take her
of herself and her family something
happened to me that night because I
thought about the hundreds of millions
of other children on this continent that
lived life like her
and I dedicated my life to making sure
that we improve the lives of people like
her so I got some friends together and
we started an organization called
poverty stops here which since raised
funds so that we could build wells
invest in education and give out micro
loans in struggling communities in
Nigeria we’d build wells in communities
where women and children would have to
walk miles to fetch water but something
interesting started to happen after we’d
build a few wells the wells started to
break at first I thought maybe this is
our problem we were just a bunch of
passionate guys excited about ending
poverty and didn’t really know what we
were doing after I researched this some
more I realized this isn’t just us there
are hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of wells on the continent that are
broken
and this problem was so important to me
that I went back to school to figure out
how to solve it while I was at school I
was lucky to meet this man he’s one of
the most prominent professors at Harvard
and he’s one of the world’s leading
management thinkers is the father of
disruptive innovation over the past
couple years we’ve been studying what
role innovation has to play in
development we’ve been thinking about
why we spent so much money trying to
eradicate poverty but we don’t get the
results that we want and he has helped
me see that our obsession with ending
poverty is actually where the problem
lies
the first reason for that is
interestingly the end of poverty is not
the same as prosperity the end of
poverty is not the same as the end of
suffering it’s not the the same as the
end of hardship and the end of struggles
there are billions of people in the
world who are technically not living in
poverty you know less than a couple of
dollars a day who are still living very
difficult lives and so as difficult as
it is to end poverty it turns out that
we’re focusing on the wrong thing
a friend of mine once told me one day
that focusing so intently on poverty is
like a student doing everything they can
so they don’t get an S in school I mean
it’sit’s a good thing not to get an F
but is it really admirable
should that be what we should be focused
on and the second thing is that when we
focus on poverty we see everything
through that lens and because poverty
almost always shows itself as a lack of
resources a lack of food a lack of water
a lack of schools a lack of roads a lack
of clinics infrastructure a lack of
things that rich people have and poor
people don’t what we end up with is that
poverty is a resource problem and so
what do we do we push these resources
onto these poor communities in the hopes
that we can eradicate poverty and create
prosperity but then we get the results
that aren’t quite what we expected
it’s the same thing that happened to me
when I went into the wells to try to get
water into the community and what I
found is that this image actually
represents many projects in the
development community where we push and
push and push resources and poor
communities but the progress that we
make is actually very limited and that’s
because many of the projects are
anchored on this question how can we
eradicate poverty but if we tweak that
question just a little bit and asked a
different question how can we create
prosperity what we begin to find is that
this is not a resource problem at all
this is an innovation problem and I mean
innovation simply put is practical
solutions to real problems and we find
that many of the resources that are
pushed on these poor communities are not
practical because they can’t afford them
and they’re not getting to the root
cause of the problems you know a few
weeks ago I was in Washington DC giving
a presentation on the importance of
innovation in development and I showed
this slide with different demographics
70% of rural population 10% access to
electricity the average person spends
more than half their income on food the
infant mortality rate is almost 20
percent and I asked people in the
audience I said what country do you
think this is and of course you know we
we won that one people you know Somalia
Sudan Mali the Democratic DRC and after
I saw that they weren’t gonna get it I
said this is the United States of
America now they were shocked and I said
this is the United States of America in
the 1850s through the early 1900’s it
had demographics that were worse than
some of the poorest countries on the
continent today and in order for us to
figure out how to create prosperity in
Africa we have to ask ourselves a
question what happened in America
did they push a bunch of resources on
the populace or did they use a different
strategy well America innovated I’ll
give you an example in the 1900s the car
was a luxury that only rich people could
afford but in 1908 Henry Ford decided to
make a car for the average American he
decided to make a car simple and
affordable
now many people laughed at him he lost
several investors people thought he was
crazy because there weren’t even roads
in America to drive the car on but he
was successful he persevered and as a
result millions of people pull the cars
into their lives
he created tens of thousands of jobs and
industries began to emerge around the
car people started to build suburbs in
the outskirts of the cities agriculture
became more productive as you could
easily transport food from the farms and
to the cities in fact the United States
government had tried to build roads in
the 1800s but they couldn’t race the
money to build the roads but after Henry
Ford’s innovation the government was
able to tax the citizens with the car
sales and gas taxes and as a result they
were able to build roads the car came
before the roads the innovations come
before the infrastructure but you see
Ford was not alone he was born into an
America that had this culture of
innovation even though the demographics
were worst in some of the countries in
Africa today from innovations in
agriculture to innovations in financial
services innovators in the 1800’s and
early 1900s developed products that were
simple and affordable so that millions
of Americans could pull them into their
lives now the one thing that these
innovations have in common is that they
made product simple and affordable as a
result of doing this millions of people
pull these products into their lives the
companies needed to create jobs so that
they could serve these customers and as
a result development happened now I know
some of you are probably thinking
there’s no way we can do this in Africa
we’ve got way too many issues that we
need to solve that’s understandable but
we’ve been trying to fix our issues
since since the wave of Independence
swept across this continent in the 1950s
and 60s and how are we doing on that if
America tried to fix their issues the
way we’re trying to fix our issues the
country would not be where it is today
see for America and virtually every
prosperous country that we have studied
innovation came before development but
for Africa somehow we want development
to come before innovation and we have
the equation backwards unfortunately it
just can’t work that way thankfully
there are a few innovators on the
continent that are making products more
accessible simple and affordable so that
more Africans can pull them into their
lives these are the kinds of innovations
that we need to foster take the
late-1990s for instance when the cell
phone was called a rich man’s toy very
few people on the continent had it but
Mo Ibrahim decided that he would create
a mobile telecommunications
infrastructure in several African
countries that could serve millions of
people and just like Henry Ford people
thought he was crazy
banks refused to give him money but he
persevered and he was able to develop
this infrastructure in several countries
from Chad to Nazir to Sudan to the DRC
and now millions of people have pooled
these products into their lives
we have industries that have emerged
around it but interestingly he was able
to unlock 3.4 billion dollars worth of
value in seven years from some of the
poorest countries on this continent
think about that for a second he was
able to sell his company for 3.4 billion
dollars in about seven years that’s the
kind of prosperity that exists if we
think about creating market creating
innovations
there are a few other innovators doing
the same in financial services from M
paisa and micro insurer to even
entertainment the Nigerian movie
industry Nollywood that currently
employs about a million people to
another innovation that’s making malaria
diagnostics really simple malaria still
kills hundreds of thousands of Africans
every year but with a product that cost
a little over $1 you can find out if you
have malaria in about 20 minutes so that
you can treat it more easily now
focusing on these kinds of innovations
is more important now than ever here’s
why you know in 2015 the Pew Research
Center did a study that said about 92
percent of Africans earn less than $300
a month now this is after the decade of
the Africa rising narrative I don’t know
where we were rise into well we didn’t
rise very high but here’s what that
looks like
that means these are the people on this
continent as a proportion that earned
more than $300 every month we need to
start developing innovations for the
millions of people for whom a decent
education is not available for whom
access to health care is not available
access to affordable housing we can’t
find what would happen if we started to
focus on innovations that targeted the
hundreds of millions of Africans who
don’t have access to these products now
I think what we would see is an
innovation revolution on this continent
that’s going to catapult us from poverty
to prosperity in less than two decades
but the first thing we have to do is we
really have to stop focusing stop
obsessing about eradicating poverty and
we have to start thinking about creating
innovations that can lead to prosperity
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
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