Trust Africa will be based in Dakar and hopefully will serve to provide much-desired "African slutions to African problems," but Africans cannot do it on their own, however much they ought to be allowed to take the lead and develop the vision for what the continent and her people most need. The truth remains that Africa still needs support from the outside, including investment and development. In today's Times Nikolas Kristof may surprise some by calling for what we label "sweatshops" in Africa. Since the geniuses at the Times hide their columnists behind a password-protected firewall, here is the gist:
Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops.
Oops, don't spill your coffee. We in the West mostly despise sweatshops as exploiters of the poor, while the poor themselves tend to see sweatshops as opportunities. [. . .]
Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops, demanding that companies set up factories in Africa. If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program. [. . .]
The problem is that it's still costly to manufacture in Africa. The headaches across much of the continent include red tape, corruption, political instability, unreliable electricity and ports, and an inexperienced labor force that leads to low productivity and quality. The anti-sweatshop movement isn't a prime obstacle, but it's one more reason not to manufacture in Africa.
Some of those who campaign against sweatshops respond to my arguments by noting that they aren't against factories in Africa, but only demand a "living wage" in them. After all, if labor costs amount to only $1 per shirt, then doubling wages would barely make a difference in the final cost.
One problem [. . .] is that it already isn't profitable to pay respectable salaries, and so any pressure to raise them becomes one more reason to avoid Africa altogether. Moreover, when Western companies do pay above-market wages, in places like Cambodia, local managers extort huge bribes in exchange for jobs. So the workers themselves don't get the benefit.
One of the best U.S. initiatives in Africa has been the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allows duty-free imports from Africa — and thus has stimulated manufacturing there. But last year, partly because of competition from China, textile and clothing imports under the initiative fell by 12 percent.
The Congo Republic's president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, told me that he would love to have more factories. It's incredibly frustrating, he noted, to see African countries export cotton, timber and other raw materials but rarely have the chance to process them. The American initiative "is a step in the right direction," he said. "But it needs more of a push."
One push needs to come from African countries themselves: a crackdown on corruption and red tape. But another useful step would be for American students to stop trying to ban sweatshops, and instead campaign to bring them to the most desperately poor countries.
The key to development in Africa along this model would be to ensure that big global companies pay a local, sustainable living wage in the context of the countries in which they invest. One of the most misleading trends for those who oppose "sweatshops" (and there is much to oppose, Kristoff's piece notwithstanding) is to couch worker wages in dollar terms. The problem with this, of course, is that the rest of the world oftentimes does not live by the standards of the dollar. What it might take to live comfortably, even well, in an African country might seem paltry, indeed outrageous, to an idealistic but largely uninformed college sophomore. Kristoff, then, is not actually caling for "sweatshops" as we understand them, but rather for investment, fair wages, and a deeper understanding of African needs on the part of well-meaning but sometimes self-righteous Americans who, as Stephen Colbert might say, know what feels right, even if the facts do not back them up.
Update: Reader GoodLiberal reveals that Paul Krugman made much the same point not so long ago.
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