Africa Matters kindly invited Trendtype to the Seminar for Japan-UK Cooperation in Africa at the Embassy of Japan yesterday evening. The seminar contained a number of viewpoints on risk and opportunity in Africa. It talked a little more about risk – perhaps because the opportunities of an explosive, young population and economic growth that will outstrip the rest of the world in the coming years are well understood. The seminar ended with the closing thoughts of Baroness Chalker, who emphasized, correctly, that many of the opportunities would involve ‘leapfrog’ technologies. In other words, African economies are not going to grow following the exact same path the US, Japan or even Turkey or China have taken. This economic growth is taking place firmly in a digital, connected universe.
After the event we talked to Mr Hiroshi Matsuura, the Minister (Economic) at the Embassy of Japan in the UK. He asked the question, what did we think Japan could or should export to Africa? There are many answers – Japanese companies’ expertise in automobile manufacturing, roads, rail, water, power and telecoms perhaps being the more obvious ones.
The less obvious answer is kaizen.
Kaizen means ‘good change’ but is also more colloquially translated as ‘continuous improvement.’ It is credited as the underlying philosophy and process that transformed Japan’s economy – and not least its rural economy – after the Second World War. Another characterization of kaizen is the accumulation of small innovations, an idea echoed in what successful sports coaches sometimes call the aggregation of marginal gains. The poster child for kaizen is Toyota, whose rise to dominance on the global stage came at a time when many European and US manufacturers had struggled to implement coherent strategies for manufacturing excellence. But perhaps more importantly, Toyota has successfully exported kaizen.
Kaizen has a major role to play in the economic growth in Africa. It provides a solution to a longstanding obstacle to growth: poor productivity.
That economic growth will require productivity solutions that are market appropriate, which help bridge the infrastructure gap, and which leverage the growing connectivity of African consumers. We can already see some of this in action: there are more than 100 more innovation hubs across Africa. In some shape or form, there are innovation hubs in every country in Africa. These are the pointy end of kaizen – the innovators translating the entrepreneurship of informal economies in a funded, formal, connected environment.
In a corporate environment, kaizen will help drive the transformation of the manufacturing, service and, above all, the agricultural sectors. It is here where integration and the power of scale will likely deliver the largest gains – increasing productivity, competitiveness and innovation, and in so doing bringing consumer products and services within reach of a larger audience.
You can see the areas where kaizen can have an impact in the top half of our African Trend Map, particularly around ‘Smart Living’ and ‘Adaptation and Leapfrogging.’ Above all, kaizen should be organic and embedded, and that is the key to its successful export: the productivity improvements African economies demand will need to marry domestic innovation with the successful transfer of knowledge from developed countries.
