 Okay, welcome everyone on a rainy evening, my name is Hajun Chang, I'm one of the three co-directors of Development Leadership Dialogue Institute, which is being officially launched today. You know, the world faces serious challenges with development, you know, we have seen a lot of people being lifted out of poverty, largely thanks to the super growth of China, but there's still 10% of global population living what is officially defined as extreme poverty, basically around $2 a day, you know, that at least according to one calculation, the average cow in the European Union gets that much subsidy every day. But I think that is a poverty figure really on the estimates at the extent of our challenge, you know, nearly 30% of world population over 2.2, 2.3 billion people do not even have access to safe drinking water, never mind that safe housing, sanitation. So we are still facing this huge challenge and we are living in a very complicated and difficult times, you know, there are geopolitical shifts, demographic shifts, new technologies and above all the challenge of climate change and other ecological breakdowns. So this is a time when we need people from different countries and different sectors of the development community, if you like, government, private sector, civil society, trade unions, international organizations to come and put their heads together to come up with solutions to this complex and difficult problems. And DLD was set up to help that cooperation with generous support from Hyundai Motor UK and Kia UK. We will in the coming years provide a forum for conversations, debates, workshops and other ways of dialogue and learning together so that we can help the world come up with more kind of reasons and inclusive solutions to our development challenges. So without further ado, let me invite Professor Adam Habib, Director of SOAS, to give us a speech. I'll vacate this place. But I'll keep coming back. Thank you, Arjun, colleagues, friends. I do want to say thank you, but I'm not so sure that this is going to be really a speech. Speech is more than I thought I was doing. I am going to do some welcoming remarks and say a few words about what I think this institute is about, this institute and this partnership is about. But let me kick off by saying it is a really wonderful opportunity and an honor to be launching this development leadership dialogue institute here at SOAS. We welcome a number of colleagues from Hyundai Motors UK, Kia UK and the Hyundai Motor Group in South Korea. And there are a couple individuals that I want to mention in particular. And please forgive me if I get the pronunciations of the name wrong. Executive Vice President of Hyundai Motor Group, Global Strategy Office, Jung Su Kim, the Executive Vice President of Hyundai Group's Business Intelligence Unit, Gyeon Kim, President of Hyundai Motors, Ashley Andrew, and of course, President of Kia UK, Paul Fulport. This institute is going to be managed by our Departments of Economics and Development Studies, both of which have extensive experience in partnering with institutions around the world. It's an enormously generous gift at 5.82 million pounds. And frankly, I want to thank all of you for the initiative in this regard. Let me say a couple of things about what I think we're doing. This morning, I was in a conversation with the standard group in South Africa. And they were having a climate change conversation, a conversation on how Africa can begin to think through and address the strategic challenges around addressing climate change. And the big debate was in thinking through a green industrialization strategy, in thinking through a developmental trajectory for Africa, the big debate emerged around initially what to do with the mining industry, what to do about fossil fuels, what to do about coal mining. And then the real debate quickly shifted to the motor industry. And the incredible capacity of the motor industry both to manage the challenges of this transition in the form of rethinking how to engage in the motor industry, how to restructure the motor industry in the African continent. But as importantly, because all of the estimates are suggesting that in the next 50 to 80 years, Africa would be one of the biggest markets for the procurement of motor vehicles, partly because there's so few people who own cars and partly because as the development trajectory takes off, you're going to need mobility to enable the development and economic development potential. And I was kind of thinking about this and thinking about this conversation I'm going to do today. So three or four hours later, I'm coming to welcome the high-end group here. And what am I coming them to welcome in? I'm welcoming them here for assisting in the development of an institute that is developing the leadership training to enable the green industrialization of the African continent. And so in many ways it's it's fortuitous. And that's what I really wanted to put under the agenda there. You know, so as exists for 110, 108, 109 years. And originally it was established to train people for the colonies. It was meant to train administrators. That's why we focus on languages and that's why we focus on culture. So that colonial administrators could understand the people that they were going to rule and think through how to subjugate them in nuanced ways. That was the agenda. In the last 100 years that agenda has changed in quite fundamental ways. It is now in many ways an institution that trains to disrupt the world order. To enable us to restructure the world in which social justice is its core. And our argument is that each of all of our challenges in this historical moment are transnational in character. Whether you think it's climate change, whether you think it's pandemics, whether you think it's inequality or social and political polarization. And if we're going to address those transnational challenges of our time, we need global science and technology. But we need local knowledge. You can have a pen in the pandemic. You had a vaccine that was deployed in South Korea, that was deployed in New York City and that was deployed in Tokyo. The consequences of the deployment of that vaccine were fundamentally different. Why? Because culture matters. Because history matters. Because institutional architecture matters. And in a sense, bringing local knowledge and global science and technology in conversations with each other. And that's the purpose of the so as agenda. It's the strategic response that so as is developed for this historical moment. And what is this agenda of this institute? It's a partnership between Ainda and Saez. So as a university in London but dedicated to understanding Africa Asia and the Middle East. Partnering a corporate entity, a global company whose headquarters are in South Korea. And what is it funding is an industrialization strategy on the African continent. It's thinking through transnational challenges. Imagining how to address national challenges. And in partnership between a public institution, a higher education institution and a corporate entity. One in the heart of London. Another, at least its headquarters in the heart of South Korea. Partnering together to think through an industrialization. In partnership with institutions in Africa. What it speaks about is transnational challenges. It speaks about bringing together capabilities from across sectors. And it brings together an alignment of strategies. Hyundai would imagine in part is doing this for social justice ends. But in part I'm imagining you doing this for because you're thinking about a sustainable business strategy. Over the next hundred years. These goals need not be mutually exclusive. We can bring them in alignment with each other. And in a sense that's the real purpose of this agenda. And so I want to bring this to an end by saying. So as is meant to be a bridge. It's meant to be an intellectual and academic bridge between sectors. Between nations. Between bringing our academy and our students in conversation with corporate partners. And this institute is one significant element in that. So thank you to all of you for coming. I know some of you have traveled from far. Thank you very much for the sponsorship. And we look forward to a fruitful partnership in the coming months. Yes. Thank you very much. Okay. Let me now invite Mr. Hungsuk Kim by the executive vice president in charge of the global strategy office at Hyundai Motor Group. Good evening. This thing is the guest. I'm honored to join you all at today's opening ceremony of Development Leadership Diary Institute. My name is Hungsuk Kim, executive vice president and head of global strategy office of Hyundai Motor Group. First of all, I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Adam Habib, director of SOA's University of London for his warm welcome. I also would like to thank Professor Hajun Jang, Professor Christopher Cramer, and Professor Jonathan Di Jong, as well as other SOA's officers for their dedication in making this partnership possible. As you all know, very well, Africa is often referred as a land of opportunity as it has a rapidly growing population, abundant resources, and potential renewable energy. Moreover, Africa is moving toward securing independent economic growth and strengthening alliance among its nations. For instance, as shown with the launch of African continental FDA in 2019. However, most sub-Saharan countries still need additional assistance for infrastructure and institutional reformation from the global community. We believe that Africa should not be merely viewed as a new business market. It will be essential for the global community to join hands to support Africa build a desire of a future. In this regard, Hyundai Motor Group will be able to leverage our expertise and experience to help pave the pathway and achieve fundamental growth for African nations. Hyundai Motor Group's founder, the late chairman, Jung Ju-young, built the entire business from the ground up and contribute to the industrialization of Korea. Today, Hyundai Motor Group's business portfolio not only covers mobility, but also steelmaking, construction, logistics, finance, and IT services. Moving forward, we aim to look beyond the short-term business performance figures and ultimately realize our vision together for a better future for all. We believe that the spirit and entrepreneurship of Hyundai Motor Group could be an inspiration for many in Africa. This is why we made the decision to support the establishment and operation of DLD Institute. With DLD, we will participate in the dialogue for sustainable growth of developing nations, including the African regions. Through the platform enabled by the DLD Institute, we look forward to collaborating with the future leaders of Africa to identify how these nations can successfully realize industrialization. I am certain that experts and leaders of various fields will be able to build meaningful relationships, attending DLD workshops, public conversations, and regular seminars. This interdisciplinary and cross-sectional conversation will guide the future leaders of developing nations, including Africa, to improve relevant policies and development plans. Hyundai Motor Group will fully support DLD's activities and also encourage the participation of our group's future leaders in these sessions. Finally, I hope the partnership between our two organizations to be the cornerstone of making progress for humanity in Africa. We look forward to embarking on a journey together for long-term cooperation. Thank you very much. Okay, we are now going to take a small photo opportunity to commemorate the signing of the contract. So if Adam and Mr. Philpott and Mr. Andrew and Executive Vice President Kyun Kim, if you can come to all these approaches, let's stand together. Right, now we are in the anticipation of what we'll be doing in the coming years. We are going to have a conversation between three prominent development scholars and practitioners. So we have David Pehling, the Africa Editor of the Financial Times, moderating, and three panelists. First, we have Professor Akebe Okbe, the former Minister and Advisor to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, someone who, yeah, I would say was the architect of the Ethiopian Economic Miracle, and we have Professor Naila Kabir from LSE, an expert on many development issues, including poverty, gender, and so on. And we have our own Christopher Cramer, who is an expert on the African economists, but focusing on poverty, agriculture, violence, and conflict. So can I invite the panelists and the moderators to the, and the topic of the conversation is ending poverty in the 21st century question mark. We are not presuming anything, but we'll have a nice conversation on whether this is possible, even something that we should even try. Okay. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, so my name's David Pehling. I'm the Africa Editor of the Financial Times. I've been on the Financial Times for more years than I'd care to tell you, and I used to be the Asia Editor of the Financial Times. So there may be, and I think it's very, it's appropriate, and it would be difficult to avoid talking about what happened in Asia. If we're looking at Africa, which is where the majority of poor people live in the world today, it would be very difficult to do that without talking about Asia, and I think in different ways each of our panelists have already been introduced, so I won't repeat that. Maybe I'll just say a few things. Nyla in the middle here is Professor of London School of Economics. She works primarily on poverty, gender, and social policy issues, and she's written widely on gender development and Bangladesh, and I would like to maybe talk to her about Bangladesh at some point. Christopher Kramer, the end there, a Professor of Political Economy of Development at SOAS, his expertise in development of political economy of war, poverty, and rural labour markets, and also it says on Wikipedia of the cashew nut. He doesn't know this, but I'm going to ask him about the cashew nut and al-Qabay al-Qabay, so we've got two academics here. Al-Qabay is also an academic, now attached to SOAS, but he has a very different trajectory as well. I don't know if you'll object to me calling him a guerrilla fighter, which I think he was. I've seen a photograph of him where he looked quite like Che Guevara in his house, so he was with the TPLF, which fought a war of liberation against the Durg, Mingista's Durg, which became victorious in 1991, and which then kind of formed the heart of a government that stayed in power for more than two decades, primarily under a man, I'm sure many of you know, called Meles Zinawi, and what Hajun referred to as the Ethiopian economic miracle. I would be careful of that phrase, but anyway, let's use it, maybe in quotation marks. Certainly something important happened, and al-Qabay was very much part of that, and we're going to talk about that. I want to start with Nyla. I think it would be silly to have a conversation about eradicating poverty without defining what we mean by it. What do we mean by poverty? Do we mean two dollars fifteen a day, which is the World Bank's very generous uplifting from one ninety a day, so those extra twenty-five cents I'm sure will come in handy. Are we talking about Amartya Sen, who talks about capabilities, you know, choice, human dignity, all of these things? Are we talking about the SDGs? There are, I can't remember, six million, or I think it's a hundred and quite a lot of SDGs, and so even people like me don't really know what they all are, and are we talking about those? What are we talking about, Nyla? Yes, I'm going to start by saying that while it's, you know, much more acceptable now to be very critical of the idea of absolute poverty, I did come from a country which, when I was becoming a student, was absolutely, absolutely poor, and it was I think the second poorest country in the world after either Rwanda or Ethiopia, depending on which data you looked at, and so for me the idea that we had to tackle some of the basic needs, that how you talked about water, etc., that, you know, we, we couldn't think about anything else unless we talked about food, water, health, and so on, and it seemed like absolute poverty was what was trying to do it. Have a go with this. For a time I became a little bit more cynical for a couple of reasons. One is, as you say, the World Bank's measure was so stingy that really all it allowed people to do was to think, you know, eat enough food and get biomedated to basis. And then secondly, of course, by keeping our eyes on absolute poverty, we were not paying attention to the increase in inequality, and so it seemed like if we could get, you know, people to meet their very basic needs, that was a big step forward. But what we hadn't really understood is that in the meanwhile, the rise of inequality was going to make it harder to meet, to do anything but to address absolute poverty. So I think since ideas about capabilities in moving away from the idea of money as the measure of well-being and so on, was a big step forward. And he focused our attention, what I think is the most important factor in development, which is the human being. You know, investing in people's health, education, lifelong learning, all of those things seemed to be very critical. But I think Sen too has that there is a limitation there because he talks about the opportunities for meeting these needs, but not about the processes by which we meet these needs. And so I think the idea of meeting needs in a way that respects people's dignity and all these other things that are not captured by either health outcomes and so on, you know, the processes. So I think we have to move on now from that and to think about what it is that inequality doesn't allow us to do. Okay. Well, we may come back to that. I'm sure we will. A very quick follow-up. I mean, I wrote a book where I sort of, in a sense, attacked the concept of GDP, and yet it's still a very useful concept, I think. Just remind us, I mean, it doesn't need to be only GDP, life expectancy, the fertility rate, which I think is important, although it's controversial. Where has Bangladesh gone from and to? Can you just remind us of the numbers, say, since you were a kid, to now? It's actually what I'm working on now, so I'll try not to go on about it. No, literally, I just want the numbers. You know, it was 500 bucks now. It's what, $3,500 per capita. I mean, what was it and what is it now? I can't. Okay. What I can tell you is that its rates of growth are pretty good. Sure. And it's going at about 6%, 7% a year now. It's supposed to be overcoming India, according to the IMF, in terms of the capital GDP growth, but those numbers keep changing. And the fertility rate's gone down from 6% to 2%. I mean, it's 2.1%. It's actually coming to net replacement rate. Yes. Okay. Chris, I would like to bring you in now. So how are we doing? By we, I guess I mean humanity. We've had a go at defining poverty. How are we doing? I mean, there's two, there's the sort of, there's the hands-ruzzling version of this. Any of you all know hands-ruzzling has seen his videos. He'll show you, everybody, poor and dying young in the corner of the graph, and then he winds the graph forward and people begin to move up quite dramatically on a log scale, I should say. And he sees in this tremendous hope, optimism, progress versus let's say Paul Collier, it might be a little unfair too, who's booked the bottom billion, was basically saying, look, a billion people are left behind in a cut out of this. Hajin wrote a book called Kicking Away the Ladder, has the ladder being kicked away. How are we doing the human race in eradicating poverty? Just a small little question there. So I'm an academic, so I have to begin by talking about evidence and data. And I do want to preface anything I say by saying, and I think this is really important for discussions in poverty, is that much of what we think we know when we discuss questions like that is clouded by really, really poor evidence. And sometimes that's because people want to fiddle the data, and that goes for the USA and poverty figures in the USA as much as it does for a lower middle income country. And sometimes it's just because the systems, what we have for the so-called gold standard of living standards measurement surveys, the way of generating comparable data is actually very, very unreliable and comes with massive margins of error. So we have to be terribly careful. So that said, I think one thing, and I agree with Nyla, but I think there's still a lot of use in using these poverty lines since Booth and Roundtree in the 19th century. They are absurdly low, really absurd, but they're still useful to immobilizing discussion and resources. You could say that in the long run, we've been winning. If you look at figures and charts, as you say, the Hans Rosling thing, and you look at the percentage of populations globally that live below this line or that line, it has transformed extraordinarily over the past century or century and a half. But in the short term, we're not winning. It seems like we're not winning, particularly in low-income countries. So there are estimates, reliable or otherwise, that things pretty much stagnated on the eve of the or through the pandemic, COVID-19 pandemic, and then the effects of the war in Ukraine and rising indebtedness and debt service problem. And there seems to be a real problem. So that a lot of the progress, particularly if you use a more meaningful poverty line, which would be higher, we're struggling and we're struggling on inequality too. In Africa, tens of millions have fallen back into poverty, almost however you define it. I mean, one important figure, I think, to think about is infant mortality, child mortality, which has gone down in, you know, across Africa from, you know, if you look at Angola, I don't know, 20 years ago, it was something like 200 per thousand. So one in five kids died before they were five. That's collapsed. I mean, collapsed in a good way. It's now 30, you know, 20, 30, 40, depends on the country. That is real progress. A lot of it has come through development aid and vaccination campaigns. It's not all organic, which I think is important. Anyway, I'm not meant to be talking. I'm meant to be asking the questions. Let me move to RKB. So what I want to ask RKB is, you know, we saw in Asia countries go from poverty, however defined, let's use GDP. So the classic example is Korea. It went from when Ghana became independent in, I think it was 1957. Korea was, had half the GDP. I'm very suspicious of that number actually per capita. I am really suspicious of that number, but let's just say it was roughly the same. I can tell you today I'm a regular visitor to Ghana. I'm sure many of you are as well. You know, Korea is some way ahead today by, I don't know, 15 times something like that. Ethiopia kind of deliberately in some ways went from, as you say, Nile being one of the very poorest countries in the world, a very agrarian subsistence in many ways and set off on a deliberately on an Asian path. Okay, but what were you trying to do exactly? How were you trying to do it and with what success? Thank you. First, I would like to highlight that from a policy perspective, I don't see a bulletproof solution or policies that can work in many countries. There are many, many issues that we don't really understand as policymakers and the context is also changing. If we look back to the past years back and now the external environment is changed, the demography has changed, a lot of changes, JP out of about 45 million, 1990. Now it's 120 million and urbanization is also accelerating. So I would like to highlight this because in recent years also we have seen poverty becoming a challenge not only in Africa but also in advanced economies. So there are many issues that we don't really understand, not only from academic point of view or evidence but also policy making. Having said this, the biggest challenge for each API has kicked off the growth. First, the economy grows in the 80s until 1991 was negative. Negative means the economy has been stagnant for over 10 years. So the issue is how do you kick off the economy to grow trajectory and once growth starts, how do you sustain it? And you have to do this with a limited resource. The demands are too many, the choices are quite limited and what you can have an impact in policy is not given. So if we start from the very sum of the facts, 1991, average life expectancy was 44. I raise average life expectancy more important than the conventional meaning of poverty because it's a combination of education, food security, health, rural roads, etc. And after 25 years in 2016, it reached 66 years. This is a 22 years addition of average life expectancy and this is compared with Africa's average which increased between 50 to 60. And then the economy also had been able to grow fast. First, between 1994 for about 10 years, 5.5% and from 2004 for 15 years, consecutively 10.5%. So from the policy perspective, a key lesson we took and what we pursued was first we didn't find the conventional recommendations, prescriptions not effective. We have never found them. In every area, the interventions that were made were I would say unorthodox or unconventional. Let me give you some specific example, education. In education, the biggest benefit a few years back, the figure was about 30 million were in primary schools. And the biggest benefit of primary schools was the impact on demography and family planning equally important as a change in education because especially girls, early marriage was being able pushed to higher age as education become accessible to girls. And in the other intervention areas also, the one that impacted on poverty overall was not just the policy specifically targeted on poverty but the focus on growth and structural change. Let's look at energy for instance. There is no any African countries that has hugely invested like Ethiopia. Despite the poverty level, results limited, energy was not only expanded but it was green and it was affordable, the cheapest, making it more accessible. So this has a significant impact in job creation in small towns, in big towns, in manufacturing. So employment has been at the center but the interventions have primarily focused on high growth and structural change and choices need to be made. You have to drop some priority and you have to focus. So the key parameter we have used consistently is which one has a significant impact in terms of spillover in terms of linkage effects. Right. Thank you so much. A few things. I mean, I'm sort of my knowledge of Ethiopia is now receding slightly but I mean one of the things that I remember is Melis and are we saying he didn't want to measure progress by GDP. He wanted to measure it by how near the nearest rural road was so that farmers could get their crops to market. The energy you talk about, one great symbol of that of course is the Grand Renaissance Ethiopian Dam, one of the biggest dams in the world. I think the 11th biggest in the world or something like that which was built entirely from savings that were recycled. I mean Ethiopia forced up the investment rate in a kind of ruthless fashion and determined fashion. It didn't kind of allow an elite to spend money on importing cars and going abroad or whatever. Ruthlessly kept control of foreign currency and pushed that into priority areas looked very much like what some of the Asian economies did. I'm fascinated with this kind of Asian African and I may keep coming back to that but I just wanted one follow-up with you, RKB. We saw how Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the China biggest of all kind of in a sense followed this same model some of which in a sense have just described much of it unorthodox but they also clambered aboard the global free trade China admitted into the WTO up 2001 and then just shot up. My question is what those countries did any longer possible because some things have changed. They all moved people from the countryside into sweatshops basically into the cities and industrialized that way. Manufacturing is less and less and less important in the global economy, AI, automation. Also the WTO is fragmenting. We've got America now breaking the rules. Some might say for good reasons but breaking the rules. The WTO, I interviewed Ngozi yesterday, the head of the WTO. It's a shadow of itself really. It no longer can enforce those global rules because there's big tensions. In that environment, is it still possible to do a Taiwan, to do a China, to do a South Korea or is that age over? First we need to look at what has changed. There are some changes we can look at. One is countries like Ethiopia are starting from a very low base but also we're rising emerging economies like China, India are competing in the global economy. So this means extraordinary effort is required for African countries to build their manufacturing capability. So this is one aspect. Secondly, 50, 60 years ago, climate change or green growth was not an agenda. So it was a brown industrial policy, brown industrialization, putting all the first resources to build industrial capacity. Now the vulnerability of African countries economies to climate change has increased. It's the most vulnerable continent but also the direction of investment has also changed. You cannot just invest in fossil oil now. You have to invest in new green industries but you also have to follow the path of decarbonization. Currently we are at SOAS with the British Academy grant. We are starting a landmark project on the greening of African economic development which is a four or five years project funded by the British Academy. The prime focus is how in this environment industrialization can be greener and carbon neutral. So this is a second element that has changed. In terms of global economic growth also, the global economic growth has decreased its growth rate since 2006 or 2005 for over 15 years. So FDI total size in 2007 was two trillion. Now it's about one trillion and the global economic growth rate has also stagnated. So it means we are playing in a very crowded place. Having said this, I see opportunities in even developing countries like Ethiopia or Bangladesh, Bangladesh a good example where FDI also can play an important role. So I would like to bring figures here. It required extraordinary effort to attract for instance manufacturing FDI to Ethiopia between 2007-2012 for instance or I can bring the figure between 1991 and 2012. The total FDI inflow to Ethiopia was five billion dollars for about 20 years. From 2013 since 2013 the last 10 years the total FDI has exceeded 30 billion and 75 percent is in manufacturing. But these results were not automatic. The government had to make serious changes in its approach to investment. How do you target companies? How do you target sectors? What incentives should you give? How do you manage FDI to a productive direction? How do you build an industrial ecosystem? Manufacturing cannot thrive without an industrial ecosystem that will allow firms to grow and be profitable. And the industrial parks which are considered as a major positive impact with positive impact in Ethiopia was also implemented after 2014. And in this whole process one key ingredient was all these new policy interventions where the result of assessing what is happening and the shortcomings and the variations but secondly also studying critically the experience of various countries both on the positive and negative side. Let's say when we adapted the industrial hubs policy the industrial parks policy we studied six countries in Africa Nigeria and Mauritius in Asia Singapore Vietnam South Korea and China and Vietnam. And based on this it was not a matter of copying first by increasing the number of countries we want to emulate we have to diversify and we also targeted the learning and we came up with a new approach so the new industrial hubs policy which is part of industrial policy is building sustainable industrial parks. Every park built has to be eco industrial park or green industrial park and also every park has to be specialized and sector based so that linkages can be promoted. So my belief is industrialization is possible but it has to be carbon neutral and every country has also to adapt industrial policy to its peculiar situation but an extraordinary effort and commitment from the government is required because without such interventions the level of commitment we have seen in East Asia or even China now or Vietnam it will not be possible to develop industrial capacity. Okay I'm going to go to Bangladesh in a second but before that why don't we go to the cashew nut. People will know you know Ethiopia has had some success in increasing its manufacturing industry much of Africa has not and manufacturing as a percentage of GDP in Africa has gone backwards over the last 20 years and a good example where actually something might be happening is Benin where it's one of the biggest producers of cashew nuts I think maybe in the world it's certainly one of the biggest in Africa all their cashew nuts until a few years ago. Cashew nuts I don't know quite how they look when they're grown but they don't not look like the cashew nut that you eat in a packet it looks totally different and you need to do something to them I've no idea what but you know there's a machine involved in a process then you put them in a packet and then you sell them at Harrods or W.H. Smith's and none of those were coming from Benin they all went from Benin to Vietnam where all of that happened and the Beninoir got you know almost no value this is unfortunately the story all across Africa fish oil cotton what are the obstacles for transforming a cashew nut in place and and how do you overcome those obstacles? Well you can do it in a frying pan on the side of the road it's not that hot with a knife but to do it properly it's it's very difficult and I can go on about cashew nut but you see the point I'm making I'm making a bigger point about the the the obstacles to industrialization which starts with processing you know there are many obstacles and and just to kind of draw a contrast in a way to to highlight one form of obstacle is a contrast between Ethiopia that Alkebi has been talking about and when I was first doing some work on cashew nuts in Mozambique in the in the mid-1990s and the differences in a way it's what what I or maybe he called the Sinatra approach to development policy is Melis your former colleague used to say not he wasn't just copying South Korea or or any or Taiwan or any else but trying to go around and work out how have other people addressed this problem how can we try to find solutions that may or may not work and try them and you know it's called the Sinatra method because it's we did it our way now the difference is with Mozambique emerging from war as Ethiopia was in the early 90s so was Mozambique Mozambique came under such intense pressure from external sources and became if you like to put it over simply dependent on external ideas and those ideas were they were kind of high school textbook economics there was a specific World Bank paper on the cashew sector that just said look it's very very easy you just liberalize everything all at once you don't need these factories and there's nothing you can do to save them and get rid of your tariffs on raw cashew nuts and all will be well in in a few days more or less you know and and actually what happened was Mozambique which had been the world's biggest producer of cashew nuts had been a major processor lost its processing industry we talk about poverty the single most important mechanism I would venture for poverty reduction it's historically always been thus is jobs in higher productivity sectors and what happened in that episode was a destruction of a lot of particularly women's jobs in cashew processing and it took if you're very benign and positive about the story you say it took a long time for some kind of cashew sector to recover that's a lot of people's lives damaged in the meantime if you're a little bit more negative about it you say it never happened and there was a massive lost opportunity so one source of the constraint is to do with the technology and to do with with trading rules and phytosanitary rules and so on so forth but I think those things are possible to overcome and if you look at the variations across countries even within continents you see that some governments are more effective in collaboration with private sector actors in overcoming those barriers so a lot of the barriers are perhaps more fundamentally to do with the politics of coming around together around a coherent strategy as there was in Ethiopia and breaking through that that power of or dependency on external ideas that are very often just you know okay if they were great ideas but very often they're not right okay well we could go back to that maybe but let's let's see how much time we have I would like to turn to Bangladesh and which probably comes somewhere in between there wasn't a kind of a thought-out industrial it was kind of a mess and yet something happened that worked in its own way and what has gone right in Bangladesh and how copyable is that can you define the Bangladesh model you know my least favorite word in development studies is replicability because it's just you know something happens right and you somehow think but if you want to do it your way you know that means you take what's what works somewhere and you do something else I think with Bangladesh the South Korean model the East Asian model was an important one because of its labor intensive promise I think the advantage Bangladesh has let us say over India was pragmatism it wasn't tied to a particular ideology of state-led you know industrialization and so on and I'm very struck by the fact that in India we talk about jobless growth which is actually a recent phenomenon but if you look at the Indian trajectory it's been jobless all along you know it has always focused on heavy industry and now the growth is driven by services but by ICT you know the kinds of services that don't generate the jobs you're talking about I think this the where Bangladesh went right is that it prioritized strategies that would generate jobs not just the garment sector which is the one that gets all the publicity but also non-farm off-farm enterprise you know so you had rural diversification so people weren't stuck in a stagnating agricultural sector rural enterprise rural industry has grown so I you know I'm looking at the history of Bangladesh right now and what went right and the word pragmatism comes up again and again whether it's about the way that the government decided successive governments took the advice of the IMF and the World Bank but tried to adjust it to what would work for its own people yes so that pragmatism has been important but pragmatism also on the ground you know I think I don't like these psychological explanations of people however there's a guy called Clarence Maloney who talked about pragmatic individualism in Bangladesh and I think one of the things that's done is it's turned a rural population away from they have to get out of farming but it's turned them into entrepreneurs and if you look at migration and the amount of remittances that are coming from wherever you go in the world there's a Bangladesh trying to sell you something and you know okay we didn't manage to generate those jobs inside the country but that push to allow people to migrate and short-term contracts and so on so I think that thing about where will the jobs come from we don't always have a choice yes sometimes it's from outside yeah remittances is a very understudied or certainly in journalism we don't write about it nearly enough well it's a huge source of foreign exchange for Bangladesh after governments sure um this may come out wrong but I want to talk about violence a lot of the poor people the poorest lot of the poorest people in the world live in places that are plagued by violence I'm thinking specifically of the Sahel I was in Niger last year Niger just had a had a coup and Niger surrounded by countries Mali, Burkina Faso northern Nigeria where Boko Haram is very active in fact when I was there they were very active i.e. they was like shooting at us you know poverty can beget violence and violence can beget poverty there are there are quite a lot of these pockets I mean the the horn of Africa is another part of the world Haiti is somewhere else that one might mention you can look at parts of the Middle East today Gaza you know there's a whole other story but maybe it's connected you know the the question and it was a question mark eradicating poverty in the 21st century question mark that would mean eradicating violence would it not in the 21st century otherwise the answer to that question is no so one part of that answer is that that violence often constitutes what what poverty is people living lives that we might describe as poor very often are experiencing quite close at hand violence and coercion and not necessarily from an armed conflict can be within their households for example or from the the structures around them but the the broader bigger question is really really difficult to answer because we got tied into what's often I think a very oversimplified thing which is you know you can't address poverty without addressing violence you can't address violence without addressing poverty and I think we get kind of sucked into that because it's a nice sounding nexus or trap and and we need to remember also that poverty on its own doesn't necessarily breed violence when you combine a lot of poverty with a lot of oppression with with severe forms of inequality or something then maybe more likely to so and guns I mean Libya for example collapsing all the guns flowed into the hell and off you went so we have to put it in in that context but the other the other thing we have to be very careful about is assuming that whatever we talk about reducing poverty development policies that we somehow think those are necessarily always violence reducing development everywhere I would suggest has been capitalist development has been highly contradictory very uneven and brutal and it often involves different forms of violence and conflict so it's worth talking about these things but so long as we don't pretend that once we've got nice policies everybody's going to be happy with them because it creates winners it creates losers and usually as you say when there's the means of violence hanging around and that can be by the way self-directed and it doesn't have to be a gun if you look at shock therapy in Russia and the end of the Soviet Union what happened to life expectancy there was very very rare outside of a major famine or or war and it was effectively a kind of form of mass alcoholic suicide self-directed so the means of violence can be an ak-47 or a bottle of vodka very very interesting again I could go back but let me let me move on I mean we've talked in a sense about the development path the industrialization path the following some kind of model or picking and choosing the kind of dragging yourself up form of eradicating poverty there may be other forms we've had a go I guess maybe in a limited way or maybe in a ill-advised way or maybe in a just totally blind way and I'm talking about development aid so there's a whole massive development aid or whatever you want to call it industry out there billions of dollars tens of billions of dollars you know from individual countries from multilateral institutions from donors like Gates etc who puts in huge amounts of money is this and I'd like to ask all three of you really actually this question is this part of eradicating poverty question mark is it in irrelevance and is it useful sometimes is it a catalyst is it a does it create perverse incentives what what can we say sensibly about what what you might call development aid sensibly we can say all the above I think you know I think it can be effective but it goes wrong very very frequently and and the problems are when when it comes when it's fickle when when the kind of fads and fashions change rapidly and people on the receiving end having to deal with that it goes wrong when the receiving end has got complicated politics of handling it so it's you know there isn't a kind of iron law of development is wonderful development is terrible so I think it can when it's if you like aligned with coherent strategies I think it's fundamentally not the main answer and I that comes to states and their policies and their social safety notes that neither knows more about but just to start that's a very good start yes Nyla I'd be interested in your view I I think you know development aid has been a very critical input into a lot of people the countries I it is a very poison chalice because it comes with its own strings but I'm hopeful that given what we're facing in the future given what we're first seeing in terms of climate change given the fact that unless all of us get our act together get our industrialized industries green and our agriculture more uh self-sufficient etc that it's it's in the interests of development providers to get things right you know up till now I think it's been largely driven by the interests of donors or their view of what the world needs but I think given what we are now facing and that it is going to affect us all equally if we don't get it right I'm hoping that there will be a very strong stake that people on the receiving end and people on the giving end will have to do it a bit more sustainably I guess thoughtfully sustainably yeah okay but again yeah thank you I just want to respond to this important point I feel this is a very important point because there is huge illusion even with us among African policymakers and Africans to see and just waiting for donor money my understanding and my experience tells me the answer is not yes or no I can bring multiple examples where the scenarios were completely different let's look at grand renaissance term this is a hydropower to be built on Nile river and the main rationale was this is a green energy and as the scale is the most significant 6600 megawatt the price will go down with scale and my government looked for resources no one was willing to make this resource available not the world bank not any European country not even the Chinese and there was a strong globally because of the geopolitical element so here what the government decided was we cannot leave this to be sabotage we have this is a national project we need to mobilize resources so the government allocated from its own treasury money significant but secondly also it's uh uh uh it launched uh a grand renaissance dam bond mobilizing the whole country and this is a mega project over six or seven billion dollar including the high tension transmission so this is the path pursued a very challenging one but ultimately is going to be rewarding but if we look at the other aspect let's look defeat for instance or UK assistance each of us being the biggest recipient of different assistance some years back and the main reason donors want to work with each of young government is they knew that they cannot put their policies and I just want to bring some story uh we're discussing with one of the professors here in in London who has been engaged in Africa and there was another guest and the guest asked him what is the difference you saw between Ethiopia and other African countries and what that professor anonymously say mentioned was in Ethiopia you have to argue you can never convince the policy makers but once you reach an agreement things move at the speed of light in some governments you discuss and they say okay and then things don't move so everyone wanted to be part of the process but also we had to come with our own agenda if there are many cases where assistance played important role world bank is a major financing of road projects is a very very important lending agency in terms of roads but we haven't used this for railway on the other aspect on industrial power it has financed so in health we have been able to use many donor funds for health infrastructure for education so the issue is first you need to have your own plan you cannot plan after looking at the fund and secondly once you have a plan you cannot expect all the donor just to follow you you have to negotiate you have to find midway and then you have to show an excellent level of performance because no one wants to join who is not which a project which is not successful when there is success everyone tries to be part of it thank you I'm just going to open up to the audience now there's a very good book called by Stefan Durkan called gambling on development the basic thesis is you don't develop unless you really want to unless the government's basically decided that's what it's going to do otherwise it doesn't happen it was a very simple but very quite compelling thesis I think and questions who would like to I couldn't resist the opportunity it seems to be that would it be nice to hear your thoughts on the value of political leadership because it seems to me I mean if you're looking at Ethiopian there's a question of a particular leadership that enables all of that you spoke about the case about the cashew nuts and the role of political leadership the failures of political leadership it must have been how important in this development trajectory you spoke about criticism in the role of how important is political leadership but I think that's a good question in a sense Durkan's aren't trying to answer that I mean he's saying it's without it you don't even start is what Durkan would answer but how do you see that I mean and we might even refine that question what kind of political leadership you know some people say you don't develop unless you have a kind of a dictator or a strong man others say you know democracy is the best way I mean I think neither of those are true actually but political leadership maybe quickly each of you and then we'll go back to the audience well yeah I think you can we we went along we without very good leadership exactly yeah that's true and we had a very good strong civil society that compensated for that is pretty awful leadership but it comes to a halt you know I think the future we but for me the question is how do you get it yeah what a country we're in for you to be asking that question and and I know where you come from Adam so it is a very pertinent question in in South Africa obviously I mean yeah neither is right it's it's a black box it's a difficult thing to explain but it's fundamentally important I mean I've I've had the the the privilege the luck to work quite closely with senior leadership in during the transition in South Africa in in Ethiopia and Mozambique and the variations are astonishing and I think they account for a huge amount of policy direction and not just headline policies but but how they're implemented it's kind of in a way that next level it's the follow through rather than coming up with a with a beautiful strategy it's can you implement it that I think is a level of leadership that we maybe don't talk quite enough about me just quickly say one other thing is that we've a lot of this conversation has been about growth and development strategies etc not enough about poverty and I think you can ask you know you can get very good leadership that allows a country to grow but does nothing on people and poverty and then you can get very good leadership that actually looks to how the development strategy addresses sure I mean I would say you can't alleviate poverty without what we might call growth but you can't a considerable amount of progress at the bottom without necessarily having grown a lot that's true yeah my understanding is that without a strong political leadership it will be difficult to sustain long-term growth but I don't consider this as given because the political leadership also evolves and I would like to bring the Taiwan as an example Shanghai shake was the most backward rightist force which was kicked off from mainland but once they are in Taiwan they had to review the whole process and they were compelled to change their direction so what I would like to say is first the political leadership we shouldn't look at it like you know static there is usually a discussion is this South African government developmental or utopian government developmental or not you cannot categorize it's a continuum the second element is with the same leadership there are times where not good policies are adopted not good strategies are adopted and there are cases where where the right strategies are also put and this shows us the learning process the so here we need to link it with the policy making the learning component and gradually also the political economy structure also shifts us and that one puts pressure so we shouldn't just say political leadership is everything we have to look at it as a critical element central element but that evolves through time I have a question that would follow on from that but I think it's only fair to ask let the audience ask some questions okay thank you for giving me chance I'm Oryong Jin from Korea and then it can be a sensible question about development but when we talk about Asian development model it can be seen very efficient and effective but it's more about focusing on government rule like a collaboration between government sectors and private sector but it always bears a a little bit of a justification of a power monopolize or the dictatorship so interstate agents like UN or ECHO usually when they provide the fund or they do the aid and then they put lots of requirement of a human right toward the democratization so isn't it the time that we also review and we have to talk about because it's not compatible about you know the democratic and also focusing too much on the like giving a power to the government for the driving about the development so what is your question that the development aid should be divorced from stipulations about democracy no no I don't insist but I want to know about your opinion about this because what level can we can put the standard because international level because it's very difficult to ideological issue right yeah I don't know if anyone wants to tackle that one okay okay if I correctly understood international organizations or let's say advanced economies should not put conditionalities linked with democracy or human rights etc and my view my view is absolutely right they shouldn't put any condition and one of the problem with donor fund is they try to put by their own parameter to measure which one is democratic which is not which is undemocratic and they it's not isolated from the interests of let's say former historically linked countries the situation we see in the let's say Sahel countries is not just the problem of the Cuditas or whatever it's also linked with intervention of many external forces so national interest comes and my key concept donors if they need to pursue and give assistances they have to give assistance and they shouldn't put pressure on what policy needs to be adopted and they shouldn't put condition who is the who is the ultimate judge on democracy by by the way no one I think we could go back into that but I'll I'll leave that that where it stands maybe I'd just like to ask one final question unfortunately it's a it's a big one in a sense which is state formation I mean it's almost quite difficult to to define what be what we mean by that but I wonder if economies that are going to do well and that are going to do well in tackling poverty are ones where there is a a strong state that doesn't mean a dictatorial state at all it means it means a strong sense of a state it could mean very high literacy going back a long way a sense of rule of law could it could mean a sense of hierarchy a sense of unity that's been forged say in China where you know that the idea of the Han people has been kind of in a sense invented and mythologized I'm thinking of that because of Africa because many countries in Africa are 67 or 70 year old years old and they're not really countries or you could argue that they're not they were formed by in Berlin by colonial cartographers and they're you know some of them only kind of only sort of just about feel like countries and how can you say anything about state formation and whether that is a kind of a prerequisite for the kind of growth that would begin to eliminate poverty I thought it was a big question times up broadly speaking yes but I think you're you're you're talking about two things in a way is the sense of nation in a sense of states and they're not necessarily quite the same some of what you were talking about David I think makes us think about kind of histories of a sense of sort of survival almost at a national level or at a regime level and and some of the policies had you I'm sorry I mentioned Chiang Kai-shek Taiwan so on so forth but there are there are other examples where actually policies were forged in the heat of having to try and survive and so that threat whether it's internal or external or combination of the two has often been a really important part of the process and it's a part of the process where you end up having to not have a massive divide between elites and people and that something might be forged within that that may as Nyla says we haven't talked quite enough about poverty may end up generating things that that make a difference there I mean that's the the beginnings of an answer it's it needs another hour I think so so Nyla why don't I give you the last word and forget the state formation Christian why don't you you want to address poverty just just address it how would you like to address it actually I'm going to go back to something that Chris said and that I didn't pick up on and I would like to put two words together two concepts and that social protection and synergy and the reason is and I think social protection safety needs to be like can be used in ways that left to themselves market civil societies and so on don't don't address and that is the kind of structural gaps that prevent people who are in disadvantaged situations from reaching opportunities and synergies because if we go back to Bangladesh and if we go back to something that the new UNESCO report talks about is there are certain places if you invest they generate multiplier effects right and education is one of them right health is one of them and there are certain things that are affected by what you invest in and life expectancy is that so I it might be the state it might be somebody else but designing the things that are missing which is through social protection in order to generate the kinds of bridges that you need to get poor people to opportunities is I think and what happened in Bangladesh was that synergy you had family planning children's education must all happening together so that they could feed off each other and on the state thing again I think the contrast between Bangladesh and Pakistan is precisely that even if we didn't have very strong state but we had a coherent sense of national identity whereas Pakistan has been made up of four or five very different all pulling in different direction and nobody's strong enough to build that sense of national identity and you know a national project thank you very much I think we should leave it there but thank you very much to the audience thank you of course especially to the panel not an easy topic but we gave it our best thanks so much hi my name is Jonathan Dijon I'm one of the three co-directors I just want to we're running a little over time just close very briefly just first of all to announce there'll be a reception outside you'll be directed to the next building in the cloisters of the senate house we'll have about a half hour to 45 minutes of drinks about an hour sorry um so you'll be directed um I just wanted to end by saying just give you a flavor of what we attempt to do in this center is to bring people from different perspective and sectors together conversation between our keby and nila you know a long time development practitioner and a scholar brings different perspectives on what the development goals are which are often very contested and how we might achieve them and we think this center is not just about an exchange of ideas but bringing people together so they can collaborate to come up with more effective solutions over time and we think that a lot of the development world has a set of incoherent wish lists like the SDGs which if you achieve progress on all of them you would have to do you'd have to give up on some of them it's an incoherent wish list we hope to move development thinking more to strategic thinking about how a coherent plan can be devised and implemented and adapted over time and we think because the world is very uncertain and it's very interrelated in its risks and uncertainties that you can't really have coherent strategies unless you bring practitioners sectors and disciplines together to discuss that problem together there's too many developments designs that are based on blueprints there's too much discussion of lessons learned from other countries without specifying the geopolitical and internal political factors that allowed those things to succeed nila mentioned the word replicability we want to connect dots of history and political economy and current trends in a way that make for more coherent thinking strategically so i'm going to stop here and we have a quick photo session before we go but i invite everyone to go to the cloisters for the reception which is starts now thanks for coming and thank you for hundai for funding us