Year of Discovery (Week 32: Youth and Shifting from Globalization to Localization)
Yesterday, two suicide bombers killed 3 victims and wounded 27 others in the heart of Kampala. Before the attacks this year, the last suicide bombings in Kampala occurred in 2010.
In the pit of my stomach yesterday, I felt a deep, sinking feeling, which I held for most of the day — it ebbed with numbness and flowed with anxiety. I turned to distractions and dark humor to make the pit more shallow and less empty. The feeling wasn’t new to me: it was similar to one I had during the 14 Riverside terrorist attack in Nairobi. The only difference was that having just moved to Kampala, I know fewer people, meaning a smaller possibility of knowing someone directly who was harmed.
So I grieved silently not just for those who were killed and injured, but for the systemic issues and feelings of desperation that contributed to the violence. While I never condone violence, I could feel compassion for the pain and suffering that led to the destruction of innocent lives. When systems fail to support the youth — a formidable group that can be an incredible asset if given the chance — their frustration and desperation can create harm. It’s another reminder to me that the pain that’s inside of each of us is reflected in what we see in the world around us, and how important it is to see these tragedies as our shared pain.
Today, I’m sharing reflections on youth and localization.
Youth
I have believed in the power and energy of the youth for as long as I can remember. As a child, I craved having space for my ideas and my peers’ ideas to be heard. I was constantly inspired by the energy of my peers through how much they cared about making the lives of others better, their vulnerability, and their willingness to jump on new opportunities. I always wanted to do whatever I could to support the growth and aspirations of the other people in my generation.
There were many times growing up that I felt like the system I was raised in wasn’t built for me, but rather built for someone multiple generations before me. Understandably, the systems didn’t evolve as fast as the mindsets and beliefs of each new generation, but I always felt like addressing the gap was a massive opportunity for my generation to shift the world forward: From a world that values individual success to one that values the common good. From a world that believes there can be a few experts to one that believes in collective wisdom. From a world of scarcity to one of abundance.
My passion for doing whatever I could to enable the youth and my generation led me to Sub Saharan Africa because of the sheer number and quality of the youth. By quantity, SSA boasts one of the highest youth numbers in the world: almost 1 billion youth from 0–35 years old in 2020. By quality, I have been consistently impressed by the creativity, drive, and adaptability of the friends, peers, students, and team members I have been lucky to know across the continent. Each person I met strengthened my confidence in believing in a truly brighter future. I found myself listening to their stories, seeing their resolve, and feeling inspired by their solutions.
While innovation and entrepreneurship are usually hailed as a key solution to the high unemployment rates in SSA, youth can be seen as an incredible asset or a huge liability by the different stakeholders that make up any innovation ecosystem: entrepreneurs, government, universities, corporates, and funders.
So how ensure the voices of the future are at the table when decisions are made among these stakeholders? What role can youth play that’s more than the token ‘youth’ person represented among these stakeholders? How do we evolve with the times and recognize that not one person or stakeholder has all the answers and know that we need to grapple with the complexity before we have a way forward? How do we allow the youth to lead today and learn to be okay with the unknown? How do we build more trust in the youth to make and drive decisions?
Please share your thoughts.
Shifting from Globalization to Localization
Since the industrial revolution, companies shot up in efficiency and focused on building products and services for the masses. It was a quantity game (where oftentimes quality was traded off). This affected many different industries: from manufacturing to agriculture to textiles to education and more. When we look beyond economic indicators as to what a successful, prosperous world looks like, we begin to see the cracks within the efficient system we’ve created. The world we built today requires more energy use than ever, celebrates practices that are accelerating climate change (outside of the increase of our energy consumption), and tries to solve difficult challenges without nuance. And while scaling singular solutions continues to be the celebrated path, I’d argue that refocusing on building solutions with strong local stakeholders and an ecosystem-approach is critical for the survival of the planet.
In agriculture, we are on track to losing 1/3 of 1% of our global agricultural capacity each year to soil loss and degradation. This has come from mono cultures that are being planted and fertilizer, which degrades the land and depletes carbon from the soil. Long before the industrial revolution, many cultures around the world adopted practices based on these proven principles:
- No till agriculture
- Cover crops
- Rotate crops
The industrial revolution emphasized new technologies and efficiency: plowing the land, focusing on fewer crops and increasing fertilization / chemical inputs. But now, many climate change experts and agricultural experts are arguing for a return to the old ways (which have actually proven to be better economically and for the planet) and to trust that farmers know their land best, giving more space for local farmers to dictate the variety of crops that are farmed based on their knowledge of what’s best in the season and within their specific climate.
So how much of the 21st century is unlearning what we’ve learned since the industrial revolution on what we thought were best practices?
In textiles, we know how much fast fashion has become the epitome of capitalism: moving resources into the hands of a few and devaluing the labour market. During the industrial revolution, people flocked to the cities in search of a ‘better life’ and found poor working conditions. Factory owners prized production and profit over all else and worker safety and wages were less important. This has continued to modern day, but on a more global scale, where developed markets have the luxury of being service-oriented economies, buying cheaper garments manufactured inless developed markets that have as dangerous and poor working conditions as many had during the industrial revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, textiles were made by hand in the “cottage industry”, where materials would be brought to homes and picked up when the textiles were finished. This allowed for workers to decide their own schedules. Instead of continuing to scale this singular solution, how do we think about the textile industry as an ecosystem and how do we bring in more local stakeholders to the conversation about where it is going in the future? How do we sit in the complexity of this ecosystem?
All in all, what solutions have we globalized that need to be re-localized?
