Dear Colleagues, I will not make this a long post. From what I learned as an engineer and economics student, and then as an accountant and involved with business management and consultancy, and then relief and development ... it is absolutely clear that profitability is needed for sustainability. The word for profitability can be changed to suit the not-for-profit world or the public sector ... but nothing survives in the long run unless its value creation is greater than its cost.
In my view there can be enormous value in using modern ICT to facilitate productivity improvements ... but as private practitioners know, governments and regulators and incumbent controllers of local monopolies are not encouraging new innovations, but rather are discouraging valuable innovation. Hopefully enlightened leadership will soon embrace the great possibilities of modern ICT and make progress possible. My favorite major development project ... one that resulted in enormous improvement in US productivity was the US Interstate Highway System ... initially promoted by President Eisenhower ... and eventually built at tax-payer expense for the profit of almost everyone in the USA. The cost was huge but the incremental economic value was many times as much. And the capital markets encouraged the program. From the perspective of the US economy as a whole this was a profitable investment, though costly for the government. In contrast the information highways in developing countries are not getting built and the political and business leadership and the financial community (capital markets) have not yet become committed beyond the easy high profit elite (rather than universal) market. Hopefully this is now changing and will soon change a lot more. Some time ago I evaluated an FAO - UNDP project. It was an excellent project that did not cost much, and made a huge difference to a quite large rural community. The project was sustainable ... bit it did not sustain because, in this case, the country itself could not sustain anything beyond mere subsistance. The country had become totally dependent on foreign donor funding .... and then landed in the vicious cycle of guns and diamonds and all that. Sad. But the lesson is that both micro (the entity) and macro (the nation) need to be profitable to be sustainable. Sincerely, Peter Burgess ____________ Peter Burgess in New York Tel: 212 772 6918 Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Database http://www.afrifund.com/wiki/index.pcgi?page=AfrifundDatabase Coffee: http://afrifund.coffeefair.com Blog: http://taame.blogspot.com ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
