Science and Technology: The African Search for a Third Way to Development

1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Forje

Development strategies so far followed in the Third World are now being increasingly questioned because they have not led to meeting basic human needs and also because they promote Third World dependence on the developed nations. Science and technology of the Western kind only perpetuates an already deteriorating situation in Africa. Although no nation can develop in isolation, African countries must initiate, control and direct their own pattern of development. Peaceful co-existence and progress for all mankind can only be a reality if the North and the South embark on a harmonious and simultaneous process of reshaping the existing international order, including the technological order.

1989 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-46

Today the world is in crisis. The impact of this crisis on the countries and people of the Third World has been very severe. In this context, Africa is the most affected continent as this economic crisis is aggravated by natural disasters such as drought in many parts of the continent. However, the major problems faced by Africa are external domination and the misplaced priorities of existing development strategies resulting in internal mismanagement. We note the disproportionate bias of the national budget in favor of military expenditure at the expense of basic human needs and services. Past experience has shown that the total emancipation of women and their full participation in the governance of their societies depend largely on the socio-economic and political conditions in which they live.


1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ward Morehouse

In the past 30 years, the role of science and technology in the international system has changed markedly. Science and technology have emerged as primary instruments of power and social control, with the major industrialized countries, especially the superpowers, relying more and more on science and technology as a means of maintaining their dominance in that system. Notwithstanding beachheads of technological competence and scientific excellence in the Third World, the technological gap between the North and the South has widened during this period because of the near-monopoly that a few industrialized countries have acquired on the generation and productive use of new technology based on modern science. Development strategies, relying on importation of capital-intensive, socially inappropriate, environmentally destructive Western technologies, cannot but lead to a massive global equity crisis in the 1980s. These technologies have been at the heart of the accelerating de-industrialization of the Third World by the First and Second Worlds on a scale far beyond what occurred in historical colonialism. The critical need is to focus the debate, at the forthcoming world conferences dealing with science, technology and development, on these underlying issues, leading to the formulation of concrete action proposals at the national and international levels which will effectively promote the technological autonomy of the Third World. While we cannot be certain that greater autonomy will lead to greater equity, few Southern countries can go very far in meeting the minimum material needs of most, not to speak all, of their people without a greatly strengthened autonomous capacity for creating, acquiring, adapting and using technology to solve their own urgent economic and social problems.


1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 50-51
Author(s):  
Ephraim Nkwute Aniebona

The term, “technology,” as used here, refers basically to: (1) the science or art of devising tools and instruments and how to use them; (2) the development of new materials and substances and their application; (3) the development of machines to supplement or replace human effort, where desirable and feasible; (4) the development of energy and power resources for running the machines; and (5) the development of efficient methods of doing work—that is, using tools, machines, and instruments. From an observation of human efforts throughout the world, it is clear that every human society is concerned with technology, for it is a proven means by which man has extended his power beyond his physical capacity and gained some control over his environment. Although technology exists in every society, it is the amount and quality of the technology that separates nations today on a scale of economic development. Whilst the developing, technologically backward countries of Africa constantly face the basic human needs of food, shelter, and clothing, the developed nations consume and enjoy a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources and wealth by reason of their technological advancement.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-119
Author(s):  
VA Okosun ◽  
JO Ezomo

It is a credo amongst scholars cum academics all over the globe that well coordinated and elaborate programmes and policies of rural development mounted by the third world countries in sub-Saharan Africa will lift her entire citizenry from manacle of gross underdevelopment to a region of  development in all facets of their economies. The countries in sub-Saharan African have spent trillions of dollars in rural development sector but an overview of the economies of these countries show that the vast population are marooned and encapsulated in gross poverty, ignorance, and  underdevelopment. The reason is attributable to poor implementation of rural development policies and programmes coupled with a host of  variegated factors. This paper therefore defines the concept of  implementation and rural development. The authors of this paper adopt the modernization theory to explicate the work. It discusses the significance of rural development to the economies of Sub-Saharan African countries. The paper also explains how poor implementation of rural  development programmes affects these countries. Moreover, it  orchestrates the factors/problems that impede rural development drives of various governments in Sub-Saharan African. Furthermore, it elucidates on the prospects of rural development. The paper finally suggests that an effective implementation of rural development programmes in all  ramifications is the only vehicle for rapid growth and economic  development in Sub-Saharan Africa.


Author(s):  
Gregg A. Brazinsky

During the early 1960s, Beijing launched a new diplomatic effort to raise its visibility and promote its viewpoints in the Third World. Its goal was to assemble a radical coalition (or united front) of Afro-Asian states that opposed imperialism and revisionism. The PRC took advantage of the frustrations with the Great Powers harbored by Indonesia, Cambodia, Pakistan and some of the newly independent African countries to win allies in the Third World. The United States constantly sought to undermine these efforts by advocating more moderate versions of nonalignment and mobilizing public opinion against Chinese officials when they travelled abroad.


1987 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Jackson

Decolonization in parts of the Third World and particularly Africa has resulted in the emergence of numerous “quasi-states,” which are independent largely by international courtesy. They exist by virtue of an external right of self-determination— negative sovereignty—without yet demonstrating much internal capacity for effective and civil government—positive sovereignty. They therefore disclose a new dual international civil regime in which two standards of statehood now coexist: the traditional empirical standard of the North and a new juridical standard of the South. The biases in the constitutive rules of the sovereignty game today and for the first time in modern international history arguably favor the weak. If international theory is to account for this novel situation it must acknowledge the possibility that morality and legality can, in certain circumstances, be independent of power in international relations. This suggests that contemporary international theory must accommodate not only Machiavellian realism and the sociological discourse of power but also Grotian rationalism and the jurisprudential idiom of law.


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