You mightn’t be such a creative thinker if you’d done seven or eight more years of formal school, and we’d all be the poorer for it. So personally I’m glad.

I enjoyed your presentation and feed back to our work and thoughts a lot. Hope to learn more from you in the future.

I have been rereading recently a whole lot of books of the last generation of Development people, all of them give some ideas in what can be tried for Africa.

The Development Economist Peter Bauer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thomas_Bauer “Aid is a good way for the poor in rich countries to give to the rich in poor countries”.. He is really worth reading… His book Dissent on Development….. ” It is more meaningful to say that capital is created in the process of development, rather than that development is a function of capital.”

Then the other person that is well worth reading from opposite political side is E. F. Schumacher… Schumacher book refutes everything that Bono said at TED, in his first chapter of his book “Small Is Beautiful” …. and he should know as he was the Economic adviser for the rebuilding of Germany…

What is amazing is how much they agree on, even though politically they where opposite and how much there advice has been ignored by the development camp.

Then of course Ghandi… Ghandi kept going on about the importance of Production for Masses not Mass Production.. That everything needed to be human scale. Power / control / etc…

Yin-Yang, hot-cold… ebony and ivory ;) all that stuff, you know? :)))

Thanks for coming and sharing… no, wait, you already share on your blog since long ago. Just thanks for coming then.

About seven or eight years ago, I tried to coordinate an IXP in Lagos. After getting some interest from a few other ISPs, I contacted the NCC (Nigerian Communications Commission) to see about licensing. We were shot down immediately- we would need an ISP license, but ISP licenses were only available to companies that provided Internet services to the public. No amount of arguing or faxed diagrams explaining the concept of an IXP would do. Recently, the NCC themselves set up an IXP in Lagos, and it appears to be doing well.

When it comes to issues of technology, I think entrepreneurs are going to be thinking one or two steps ahead of the government. In 1999, government regulators didn’t have the slightest idea of what an Internet exchange was or what it could be used for. They only knew that it was something different than they were used to regulating, and automatically said “no way”. And of course, there are issues of corruption to deal with. In my consulting life, I’ve always preferred to deal with local businesses rather than with the government. Businessmen are concerned with getting things up and running properly and quickly… while I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been *headdesk* because of getting endless requests for cash under the table from government officials.

Great post on the summer program, btw. I’ve dropped in on the program a little bit, and it’s very exciting. What a group!