By the beginning of 2009, developing countries accounted for three-quarters of all the mobile phones in use around the world.
Cell phones have revolutionized communications in developing countries. In less than a decade, people living in some of the most underdeveloped areas of the world have gone from having no way to communicate outside their villages to being able to talk to almost anyone they wish to speak with. In Fanwargu, Burkina Faso, Natama Alimata calls to find out how many other women in her co-op are planning to use the mill that day and what times are open before she sets out on the 15-mile walk to mill the sorghum her family grows on their small farm.
Another benefit of technology: the mill that she and the other women in the co-op purchased with a microloan from the International Fund for Agricultural Development reduced the time it takes to mill grain by hand from 8-9 hours to 15 minutes. The time she saves allows Alimata to complete other tasks, relieving her daughters of chores so they can spend more time on schoolwork. In addition, renting out the use of the mill provides extra income to all the women in the co-op. Alimata spends her share on her children’s school supplies, clothes, and additional food.
Technology is crucial to development, and simple technologies, like the co-op’s mill, can lead to significant improvements in a community’s quality of life. New breakthroughs in clean energy technology augur another technological revolution in the developing world, one that will allow countries to leapfrog over a costly stage of development. In rural Burkina Faso, virtually no one has access to electricity. Expanding the heavy infrastructure required to produce and transmit electricity to remote rural areas would be cost-prohibitive, but compact technologies like solar panels make electricity much more feasible.
Another important part of climate change negotiations is determining how clean energy technologies will be shared and commercial developers compensated. Innovations, the speed at which they occur, and the scale on which they can be made available, will depend more on private industry than governments. Public policies can clear the way for private investors to launch new ventures, but the public sector cannot take the place of private initiatives and private capital responding to the discipline and demands of the market. The poorest countries are in no position to pay the market rate for new technology. But unless commercial producers believe there is an adequate return on investment, innovation will slow, and it is possible that some of the most groundbreaking possibilities for clean energy technology may never materialize.
Policy affects every link of the transfer chain
The role of the public sector, though limited, is still crucial. The right legal and policy environment can promote technology transfer, for example, with laws defining intellectual property rights (IPRs) and incentives like tax credits, grants, and loans that offset producers’ costs of research and development. In the case of IPRs, it is clearly up to government to strike the right balance of protecting the rights of patent holders while promoting a freer flow of technology across borders. The WTO agreement known as TRIPS [Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] has made possible the transfer of many life-saving drugs held under patent at below-market prices. There will be much greater ambiguity on the definition of a clean energy technology than on a drug designed to treat a specific condition. It is easy to imagine a proliferation of products, from those designed exclusively for the purpose of delivering clean energy to those for which the energy benefits are secondary or incidental. Does an improved caulk gun used to insulate buildings—a key way to mitigate the effects of CO2—belong under the same umbrella of clean energy technology as a solar panel? How technologies are included in trade agreements will have to be defined.
Outside the multilateral framework of the WTO, technology transfer takes place through bilateral and regional trade and commerce agreements. We should not assume that all technology transfers go from the developed world to the developing world. South-South transfer, as it’s sometimes called, occurs regularly. Some developing countries have emerged as world leaders in clean energy products and industries. Brazil is a leader in the production of ethanol, China and India are world leaders in wind power technology, and China is also a leading producer of solar photovoltaic cells.
The story of emerging leadership in the developing world is broader than China, India, and Brazil. Indonesia has become a leader in the production of compact fluorescent lamps, Mexico in solar hot water heaters, and Kenya in ceramic cook stoves. This last example highlights an important point about technology that is often overlooked. There are many simple and affordable technologies, like caulk guns or ceramic stoves, which can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While we want to make sure that advanced technologies like solar and wind power are shared, we also don’t want to miss relatively easy solutions that will have a big impact.
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