Put the horse before the cart

Small farmers in ancient Greece farmed rough hillsides because the powerful Athenian aristocracy controlled more level farm lands. Terracing and innovative cultivation techniques helped the farmers build a valuable asset for which Greece became famous around the world–olives and the olive oil industry.  Due to the economic clout from the burgeoning olive industry, aristocrats had to begin acknowledging the voice of small farmers in governance. It’s the forgotten story behind how Athens gradually became the birthplace of western democracy. Professor Iqbal Z. Quadir is applying the lessons from ancient Greek small farmers and other stories to empowering today’s poor and marginalized.

In the latest interview for CIPE’s Economic Reform Feature Service, “Innovation, Economic Empowerment, and Democratization: Uncovering the Hidden Links,” Prof. Quadir uses the ancient Greece example and others to illustrate putting the horse before the cart—using innovations to diffuse economic power across wider swaths of the population, creating an enabling environment for broader empowerment and overall democratization.

Prof. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Professor of the Practice of Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. Prof. Quadir earlier founded Grameenphone, in late 1996, which provides effective mobile telephone access to poor people throughout Bangladesh. To date, it has built the largest cellular network in the country with investments of nearly $3 billion and a subscriber base of nearly 25 million. Through the innovation of cellular telephony Bangladesh’s poor are reaching new levels of productivity, and even faster than the small farmers in Greece did through innovative farming.

Grameenphone and the larger movement to implement information & communications technology for development (ICT4D) represent just one of the many new frontiers where new tools and ideas can increase productivity among the poor and very poor, empowering them to generate profit and income on their own initiative. Beyond creating jobs and wealth in new places, Prof. Quadir makes the case for why widespread economic empowerment matters for governance:

With taxable income, people would gain the economic clout to hold their governments accountable…When the poor gain sufficient economic clout for their governments to depend on them, they will succeed in holding their governments accountable from the bottom up. Governments will then be compelled to respond to the needs of their people. In other words, economically empowered people are a prerequisite to achieving an effective policy environment.

While neither ICT4D nor innovation itself are a panacea for poverty, the stakeholders they create are a massive force to drive progress, particularly when it comes to paving a pathway out of aid dependency.

There are certainly modern day “aristocrats”–today’s cronies and oligarchs. Prof. Quadir challenges entrepreneurs around the world to figure out what innovations they can bring to those outside the power structures of the modern day aristocracy, so that today’s poor and marginalized can gain a voice, have their own impact, and earn their own stake in progress.

Article at a glance

  • Barriers that prevent ordinary people from using their ingenuity and initiative productively are one of the key challenges to achieving broad-based economic growth.
  • Communication technologies are a compelling example of productivity tools that can set people on the path of economic empowerment.
  • Economic empowerment of the poor and democratization go hand in hand.

Download the full interview in PDF format.

Published Date: October 01, 2010