2024-02-16 18:30:42
It’s a very rich and varied program that we are offering you this week in Éco d’ici Éco d’ailleurs, with our guests and journalists from RFI’s economics department: fight against poverty and inequalities in the world, second anniversary of the outbreak of war in Ukraine in a context darkened by the death of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, development of the automobile industry in Africa, consequences of instability in the Sahel on the raw materials sector, economic issues digital on the African continent (following internet network cuts in Senegal) and assessment of the CAN 2024 football tournament in Ivory Coast.
* First, we go to Ukraine with Nathanaël Vittrant, special correspondent from RFI’s economics department. He filmed reports there on the economic development of the country, particularly in the agricultural sector, two years after the Russian invasion, the functioning of businesses in times of war and the state of reconstruction.
The Centravis factory in Nikopol (Ukraine). © Nathanaël Vittrant/RFI
* At the same time, Russia is engaged in a military but also economic war with its enemies. Despite Western sanctions, and contrary to what many observers predicted, the Russian economy has not collapsed.
Arthur Ponchelet takes stock of the effectiveness of these sanctions and the way in which Russia tries to circumvent them.
2-YEAR REVIEW SANCTIONS RUSSIA
* She is therefore our exceptional guest: the Franco-American Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 with the Americans Abhijit Banerjee and Michaël Kremer for their work on poverty. She is today the president of the Innovation Fund for Development (FID) hosted by the French Development Agency. Launched in 2021, it offers an innovative development financing system in the poorest countries based on the evaluation of the impact of projects using scientific methods. Esther Duflo, new director of the Paris School of Economics, explained this exclusively to Charlotte Cosset, journalist specializing in the African economy at RFI.
► Also listen: The FID, a fund to support social innovation in Africa.
INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER DUFLO
Thanks to the support of the FID, a financial product allows so-called tontine associations to improve social coverage in Cameroon. © FID Mental health represents an urgent, although underinvested, public health and development challenge according to the FID. © FID
Esther Duflo is the author from a series of works aimed at children to explain poverty in the world with illustrator Cheyenne Olivier.
* To move towards economic sovereignty in Africa, one of the priorities is certainly to develop an industry on its own territory. Building vehicles “made in Africa” for the African consumer is therefore the Mobius Motors project, a start-up created in 2010 in Kenya. It is one of two manufacturers in East Africa with Ugandan Kiira Motors. Pauline Gleize visited her site in the suburbs of Nairobi a few weeks ago.
REPORTAGE AUTOMOBILE MOBIUS
A production line for Mobius vehicles in Kenya. © Pauline Gleize/RFI
* It is a traditional product used since the dawn of time or almost, undoubtedly the third Egyptian dynasty, around 2,700 BC and which remains very popular today in the food industry, confectionery, cosmetics, or still industry (building, painting, textiles, etc.). Gum arabic, from acacia, is a natural resource and wealth of several African countries, particularly the Sahel (Maghreb, Mali, Senegal, Chad, Egypt, Sudan, Niger).
Its market is growing quite strongly. Among the few companies that process and market gum: a French SME, Alland and Robert, founded in 1884 and which holds a 25% market share. Its CEO Charles Alland gave an interview to Marie-Pierre Olphand, raw materials specialist on RFI.
INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES ALLAND, CEO ALLAND AND ROBERT
Gum arabic produced by the Alland and Robert company. © Marie-Pierre Olphand/RFI
* To end this program full of diversity in its subjects, we offer you a long interview with the most Ivorian of Nigerians and the most Nigerian of Ivorians: Nnenna Nwakanma, in the State of Abia in the south-east of Nigeria and Abidjanese from The adoption therefore experienced very intensely the last CAN 2024 football final won by the Elephants of Côte d’Ivoire.
Nenna Nwakanma. © Nnenna Nwakanma
But if we invited her to Éco d’ici Éco d’ailleurs, it is also because she has important responsibilities on the continent to promote the digital economy, particularly for women. Specialized in international development issues, digital access activist, she is chief ambassador within the World Wide Web Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes an open web. In this interview, she directly criticizes governments, like that of Senegal, which cut off the internet network during protest movements and electoral meetings.
ENTRETIEN AVEC NNENNA NWAKANMA
Nenna Nwakanma. © Nnenna Nwakanma
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Esther Duflo (Nobel Prize in Economics): Faced with poverty, reaching new audiences
The Innovation Fund for Development (FID) hosted by the French Development Agency (AFD) supports projects selected for their social impacts, particularly in Africa. It is chaired by Esther Duflo, development economist, awarded a Nobel Prize in 2019 for her work against poverty.
RFI: What is the Development Innovation Fund (FID) and how is it specific?
Esther Duflo : It is a fund which aims to enable new players, whether NGOs, universities, governments, laboratories, to propose social innovation. It’s not innovation to make a profit, that’s really very different, but it’s to improve the quality of life of people in sectors like education, health, protection of the climate, agriculture, etc. Always with this objective of creating social value, not market value.
How does this work? Normally a fund is based on its profitability…
As profitability is not the indicator of success, what replaces it is impact, the difference it makes in people’s lives. We require rigorous preliminary impact assessments, and we support them in the implementation of the project itself. If it works, it allows it to be scaled up, to increase the number of partners.
You explain that the objective is to reach audiences different from traditional funds. How do you reach these audiences who are often isolated?
It’s a successful bet. How do we reach new audiences? I believe this is mainly due to the simplicity of the application process. The process of applying for funds is not particularly long, it is very transparent. We finance projects that are innovative, with significant potential for scale, and that are capable and willing to play the impact evaluation game. We react very quickly, we are able to provide small amounts of funding, which is not the case for many projects from larger donors. We work with organizations that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to navigate the bureaucracy required for much larger funding.
These must be people who are already quite connected?
No, it’s often people that we initially didn’t know from here or elsewhere. A first call for projects was distributed as widely as possible by all the networks in which development actors operate. And then, there is a word of mouth effect which is reinforced by a series of summer schools that we hold every summer in the field. We went to Ivory Coast, Morocco. This makes it possible to raise awareness of the possibility of this financing within the local ecosystem. Since the creation of the Fund, we have already received 2,700 new projects.
Do you hope to see this type of fund develop? Is there a message behind it, showing that social profitability does not necessarily mean making a profit directly?
It’s clear that this is another subject than social value. This model of research for innovation, openness, risk-taking which we associate more with the private sector, can be applied to the research for innovation in the social sector. It is a model which, in my opinion, has strong potential for improving the effectiveness of public policies, whether national policies or cooperation policies.
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