George Kibala Bauer

Senior Advocacy and Insights Manager, GSMA Mobile for Development

How long have you been working in international development?

I’ve been working in international development in a full-time role for two years and eight months now. I had done a couple of internships previously in the space as well. So, depending on that, it’s either two and half, to three and a half years work experience in the field.

Where are you currently based?

In London, in the UK.

What has been your biggest personal challenge working in international development?

The challenge for me is that I’m highly aware of the different power structures, geopolitical inequalities, and structural challenges in the aid sector. But simultaneously I do believe that aid delivered in the right way can make a big difference. It’s a very difficult balance to strike. When you’re in an entry-level position in this industry, you often don’t get to make the calls to drive the changes you believe in. So, it’s understanding what you can change now versus the future and developing some patience with regards to that.

Personally, I often think of these higher-level issues. For example, how should rich countries approach the topic of climate change vis-à-vis low-income countries, when historically they are the ones who have polluted the world. This feeds into moral questions regarding fossil fuel issue in low-income countries. Does this mean Nigeria and Uganda should still be able to use fossil fuels whilst richer countries accelerate their own reductions? You find development finance institutions choosing not to finance fossil-fuel projects to middle-income countries anymore. These questions are interesting and tough to wrap your hard around because climate change is still a reality and will affect low- and middle-income countries too.

Another example is that I work for a company that provides financing to entrepreneurs and innovators in African and Asian countries. However, we know for instance in East Africa, expat entrepreneurs are preferred by certain investors in the West. There have been some studies that show that up to 90% of fintech investment goes to expat founders. It’s about going beyond statements that we should fund more local founders, to then articulate why it is beneficial not only from a moral perspective, but from a development impact and economic perspective.

I’m very passionate about posting angry status updates, but it’s also about creating action through data and action plans. I think this sector allows me to make tangible steps in this regard.

I like your last point and it leads onto my next question - from your experience, how can we ensure that innovative solutions are inclusive and transformative without causing harm?

Typically, majority of the funding may go to a start-up where they might not necessarily have the local contextual experience, or they’re focused on the glitz and glam of innovation as opposed to the actual long-term impact that they could have with this innovation if they had more nationals on their team driving this forward.

That is a great point and thanks for raising that. This is a huge challenge if you work at the intersection of innovation and international development. There is a tendency in the ICT4Development or the African tech ecosystem to buy into the ‘Africa rising’ narrative, which considers Africa’s developmental progress as a very linear and inevitable process. Much of the focus in on the fundraising amounts or the flashiness of the innovation but it’s not always contextualised with regards to the developmental challenges the continent continues to face.

You make an important point about paying attention to the risk of the innovation as well, because obviously digitisation and innovation require new regulations. It requires new ways of thinking about “how do we protect gig workers?” or “how do we ensure that new technologies such as AI don’t exclude minorities if majority of scientists are white?” All these questions are important especially from the perspective of understanding the impact of digitisation on political economy and democracy. There’s a book, “Digital Democracy” written by Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan author, who did a great job of conceptualising the impact of digitisation of the Kenyan economy on politics.

I think part of making innovative solutions more inclusive is more local representation, but it also fosters greater understanding between innovators and governments. Often tech innovations are conceptualised completely independently of governments - sometimes with the assumption that they are a slow acting force that’s mainly repressive. I can understand this but at the end of the day, there is no tech ecosystem in the world that has successfully developed without good regulation and proper government support. Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the entrepreneurial state shows how important the tole of the state is in innovation. Having more local stakeholders in the tech ecosystem can drive this kind of innovator-government interface.

“Working in digitisation is about understanding what problems can be solved by new technologies and what cannot be ‘leapfrogged’”

How did you end up working in the role that you have to date with GSMA?

My Master’s thesis was on industrial policy in post-apartheid South Africa, so not at all related to digitisation. but throughout my research, I came across this notion of premature de-industrialisation, by the economist Dani Rodrik - that for African countries to structurally transform, there isn’t necessarily the same pathway that was available to other countries in the past, which was manufacturing and growing an export base of manufacturing products. I still think this is important but there’s also an important challenge of understanding what role digitisation and the service industry play in driving structural transformation.

I think this is an open question which has remained unresolved. Knowing how important the telecommunications industry has become in multiple African and Asian countries - with the rise of mobile connectivity, mobile Internet penetration and mobile money - GSMA, which represents the mobile industry worldwide, was a great way to understand the questions at the intersection of tech services. I saw that a team within GSMA called ‘Digital Utilities’ was hiring and I thought that was exciting because we were looking at how innovations can drive more reliable and affordable basic services.

My father comes from a country with one of the largest un-electrified populations in the world, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Understanding why certain countries struggle to provide basic services such as energy and how digitisation can accelerate improvements in service provision is important to me. It’s really understanding what things new technology can enable you to leapfrog, and which things cannot be leapfrogged. For example, you can’t leapfrog sanitation - cities need proper sanitation systems because of the associated public health benefits. So, you end up thinking more deeply about the trade-offs involved and this is what attracted me to to this space.

I’ve seen you’ve done quite some work focusing on urbanisation in the African continent. What are some of the biggest opportunities and challenges that you’ve found regarding urbanisation?

That’s a great question. Historically, urbanisation worldwide is associated with an improvement of economic conditions. Most people move to cities to improve their economic opportunities and raise their income. Generally, I think urbanisation as a process is something to be celebrated but particularly in the African context, I see a lot of unique challenges with this trajectory. This is because in a lot of African countries, urbanisation is not necessarily associated with structural transformation, i.e. rising GDP per capita, and is generally not associated with a rise in industrialisation and manufacturing jobs.

This means that a lot of newcomers to African cities are being absorbed by informal settlements which already host much of the urban population in most low-income African countries. It will continue to be the case unless certain things change with the structural transformation trajectory. Another important challenge linked to the lack of structural transformation is the sheer speed of the process. If you translate Lagos’ urbanization rates to how many people it adds every hour, it's up to 90 new people every hour moving to Lagos. If you look at Kinshasa, I think the estimate is like 65.

But beyond these two metropoles, 90% of urban growth in Africa is actually captured by secondary cities. In Democratic Republic of Congo, nobody talks about Mbuji-mayi or Bunia, two cities that are growing rapidly. I fear that urban policymakers will not think ahead 15 years from now about what we want cities to look like – how does this affect land value policy, property tax regimes, piped water systems and so on. 

“Within my work, I focus on the role digital solutions can play to make cities more inclusive”

Looking at urbanization as one of existential challenges for African development over the next decade, within my work I’ve tried to focus on the role digital solutions can play to make cities more inclusive, particularly for low-income populations. What I find very frustrating when you look at the statistics, is how much time women in certain informal settlements spend just to access water, or the price low-income communities pay for water compared to richer counterparts, which perpetuates inequality of opportunity.

Likewise with transport, studies done by organizations such as the World Resources Institute compared access to matatu stops between poor and richer neighbourhoods in Nairobi and Kampala, and those in the poorest settlements had to walk even further to access these stops. There’s been an interesting line of research that links data to helping urban planners design more inclusive transport systems – we’ve been working a bit on this. With regards to water and sanitation, we’ve been working on partnerships between utilities and digital innovators to help utilities expand their service provisions to low-income areas. If you look at utility subsidies, they often benefit the rich and connected already, so it’s whether these partnerships with innovators can bring about subsidy provision that reaches low-income communities.

These are some of the themes I’m working on. I’m currently in the process of finalizing a report on innovative data sources for urban planning, which looks at the role of mobile big data, geospatial and observation data in helping urban policymakers understand some of these challenges and devise nuanced policies. Traditional datasets are very dated, and you can’t capture information such as how many people take informal transport daily in Kinshasa. You wouldn’t know that unless you had access to mobile data that captures the movement of people. That’s a really exciting prospect.