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COVID-19: An opportunity for Africa’s frugal innovation

By Esther Ekong , University of Ottawa,  Canada

The 4th African network of researchers in learning, innovation and competence building systems (AfricaLics) Conference held in Dar es salaam, Tanzania in October 2019 was an eye opener for most of the participants who attended a special session on “the role of frugal innovation in sustainable development in Africa”. The main idea behind frugal innovation is the development of products and services that fit mainly emerging markets’ special needs and requirements and that are cheap enough to give non-affluent customers opportunities for consumption (Weyrauch and Herstatt, 2017).

Frugal innovation: an embedded African cultural practice?

For a number of participants, it was the first time they were learning about “frugal innovation” in the context of a changing world phenomena. This phenomenon elicited a number of questions from the participants.  For instance, why has frugal innovation become a new buzz word? Is this not a normal cultural behaviour of Africans in pursuit of survival in difficult situation? Indeed, even though the notion of ‘Frugal Economies’(Prabhu, 2015) is an emerging concept in different parts of the world (Knorringa et al., 2016), it is not new in Africa. This is because frugality is a defining characteristic of most innovative endeavours and livelihood strategies in African countries due to the often-severe economic constraints faced by the communities. Hence, many innovations developed in Africa are typically aimed at solving local problems. Faced with scarce resources, entrepreneurs in developing countries have often had to find low-cost solutions to their problems (Srinivas & Sutz, 2008).

COVID-19: Rethinking Frugal Innovation

The frugal innovation session was perhaps a forewarning of the impending COVID-19 pandemic which no one at the time knew was lurking around. Fast forward to March 2020, the whole world was shut down to control the spread of the virus. This became a great opportunity for frugal innovation. African countries had to re-think their decisions to accept external support that characterize the African health systems including hospitals and related medical infrastructures.  The pandemic is a global phenomena and the advanced economies that Africa had looked up to for financial support have also been severely impacted by the virus. Suddenly supplies from China, India, Europe or the US have been in short supply and no longer flood the streets of major African towns and cities. The African governments and people have woken up to the reality that they must look inwards to solve their problems.

A local outlook towards dealing with COVID -19

As the world comes to grips with the COVID-19 global pandemic and the increased need for medical equipment, African governments and people have turned to the locally available resources, mainly frugal innovation, to meet the emerging and urgent needs. This response was confounded by the fact that it was necessary for everyone to stay at home, in their respective zones and fight COVID-19 with whatever was at their disposal.  This is unlike the Ebola crises “whose geographical concentration in Africa enabled the world to mobilize variegated supplies – medical personnel, infrastructure, R&D resources among other resources, to halt the disease”(Oguamanam, 2020, 4), the rapid global spread of COVID-19 led to a scenario where all countries looked inward for their own devises to curb the disease. Arguably, COVID-19 has thrust more opportunities for Africa to innovate in a number of ways. Innovations often emerge under conditions of resource scarcity where the usual solutions are deemed too expensive or unavailable (Ahuja & Chan, 2014). In the constrained environments such as those imposed by COVID-19, people work with what they have, using affordable but effective tools, processes and techniques to solve their problems (Tran & Ravaud, 2016).

Drawing insights from selected examples in Africa

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic socially and economically ravaging the world, African governments and people are rising to the COVID-19 challenge by innovating. Some of the innovations include local ventilators, masks, air purifiers and hand sanitizers machine. The following are selected examples:

  1. Locally produced ventilators and medical supplies – the case of Nigeria and East Africa

In Nigeria, the following developments have been recorded:

  • The government has partnered with institutions to ensure that various machines produced locally meet the required standards so as not to end up in the shelves (Adekoya, 2020).
  • Initiatives including startups are coming up with locally made ventilators to fight the disease, supported by the government (Emi, 2020; Chiedozie, 2020).
  • In line with its drive to provide indigenous solutions to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) unveiled 2 emergency ventilators produced by a team of Nigerian researchers (Umeh, 2020)
  • Two Nigerian software engineers discovered that there were 40 faulty machines at a teaching hospital and have been fixing ventilators for free (Ilevbare, 2020).

Similarly, within East Africa, different forms of frugal innovation are taking place to fight Covid-19 (Onsongo, 2020).  For instance, in Kenya there is an enhanced local manufacture of hand sanitizers and soaps using locally available, affordable materials at the grassroots level (see also Kirengo  & Garrett, 2020). In Uganda, students at a University in Uganda have developed a hands-free hand sanitizer that uses sensors to automatically dispense water and soap for hand washing (Abet, 2020).

  1. ‘Agbo’ and traditional medicine to the rescue?

The use of “agbo”, a herbal concoction made from roots and herbs is trending even more among Nigerian and other African communities as Africans react to the pandemic (Igbokwe, 2020). The COVID-19 menace has reinforced the need to rely on local resources and has jarred Africans to look for indigenous medical remedies. African women have risen to the COVID-19 occasion as they are putting their extensive traditional knowledge of roots and herbs to innovative use by producing a broad range of traditional medicines (agbo) which is fiercely believed to be effective for preventing infection from COVID-19. In spite of the fact that these claims are not yet scientifically proven, the consumers of agbo believe that taking the herbal concoction will either protect them from contracting the virus or cure them of malaria fever which has the same symptoms as COVID-19 (Igbokwe, 2020). The fear of stigma keeps these consumers from going to the hospitals and those who are willing to go either do not have access to medical services or the funds to foot medical bills.

African traditional medicine is the oldest and perhaps the most diverse of all medicine systems. The traditions of collecting plants as well as processing herbal remedies and applying them have been handed down from generation to generation. Christian (2009) explains that knowledge of traditional medicine is an integral part of the indigenous knowledge of local communities. Indigenous knowledge is a complete body of knowledge, know-how and practices maintained and developed by the people, generally in rural areas, who have extended histories of interaction with the natural environment. This interaction sets understandings, interpretations and meanings that are part of a cultural complex (Sithole, 2007).

Traditional medicine is ingrained in the health responses of different countries including Africans as evidenced by the current response to the COVID-19 pandemic (see for instance Anaja 2020). It is therefore necessary to investigate more intensively how to integrate African traditional medicine into conventional health practice. This calls for investment in the development of traditional medicine in Africa. According to Oguamanam (2020, 4), “Africa needs a peculiarly African-made public health response”. Whatever such a response entails, the ‘agbo’ innovators are likely to be a huge part of it, as many Africans firmly believe that God has provided roots and herbs to keep them safe from COVID-19.

Conclusion

The selected examples outlined in the preceding section suggest that Africans have further leaned inwards to be creative, innovative and resourceful during this pandemic. This partially confirms the agility and creativity of the Africans that had been recorded previously before COVID-19. For instance, research conducted by the Open African Innovation Research  (Open AIR) has shown how Africans regularly utilize lean resources to innovate and create technology to improve the lives of Africans (de Beer, et al, 2016). Debatably, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly inspired and triggered (Harris, et al., 2020) the innovative potential of Africans. Perhaps it is time to rethink frugal innovation from an African context – the potential use of minimal resources to innovatively create what everyone needs. The foresight demonstrated by the organizers of the 2019 AfricaLics Conference in drawing the attention of African researchers and innovators to the primal need for organized frugal innovation, just before the onslaught of the virus should be commended. One key lesson learned from COVID-19 will be the need for more recognition of the fact that Africans will look inwardly in order to solve their own problems and potentially take care of their problems themselves. This requires a more concerted research agenda as frugal innovation debate and related initiatives will remain with us long after the pandemic has passed.

References

About the Author

Esther Ekong

Esther Ekong is a PhD (Law) Candidate at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. Her PhD research thesis is titled: The role of intellectual property rights as a development tool for women entrepreneurs in developing countries: The case of the cosmetics sector in Nigeria. Esther holds a Bachelor of Laws (LLB), Master of Laws (LLM) and a Masters in Public Administration (MPA). Prior to relocating to Canada for her PhD studies, she worked as a Research Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal studies, Lagos, Nigeria’s foremost legal research institute, for seven years. Esther currently holds the position of the New and Emerging Research Group Ombudsman, Open African Innovation Research (OpenAIR) Project as well as Graduate Students Representative, Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS). She is married with children.

COVID-19: An opportunity for Africa’s frugal innovation

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