eBusiness Weekly
Aurra Kawanzaruwa
The conversations around ‘inclusive capitalism’ gained traction in Southern Africa at the end of 2015 leading into 2016. The King IV report on corporate governance highlights the move from financial capitalism to inclusive capitalism as one of the three connected paradigm shifts in the corporate world.
“There is now general acceptance that the employment, transformation and provision of financial capital represent only a fraction of an organization’s activities.”
The report states. The thinking behind inclusive capitalism says that the more an organization’s business model positively impacts on society and the environment, the more the quality of life will improve, and this improvement will in turn, positively affect the prospects for those organisations.
Dr Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys, says that “the strength of inclusive capitalism is that it recognises resources and potential beyond those that we traditionally consider (namely capital, raw materials and machines) to enable focus on the things that make us uniquely human.”
The biggest catalyst to the growth of inclusive capitalism is technology, which is continuously revolutionising ways that people experience and interact with products and services that shape the world around them.
Banking and communication are sectors that have become the fourth industrial revolution’s breeding ground for innovation.
This is especially true for Zimbabwe which, albeit is years behind in its migration to a 4IR driven economy, has seen positive technological transformation in its telecoms and finance sectors in the past 5 years.
In the Zimbabwean context, for inclusive capitalism to even begin to take shape there needs to be aggressive reformation in a number of key areas like infrastructure, job creation and investment in innovation.
Technology has allowed for new and diverse ways for people to change their lives and circumstances, and offers policy makers an opportunity to implement effective ways to combat systemic inefficiencies.
With this in mind some may query that perhaps adopting a Sharing Economy or Collaborative Consumption model might help us reach inclusive capitalism quicker than the current trajectory we are on. Driven by data, a sharing economy is a means of describing a generally more democratised marketplace centred on economic activity involving online transactions.
The biggest tool for this activity is the mobile phone.
Great examples of typical sharing economy companies are Airbnb and Uber which use mobile applications to offer consumers paid access to a service.
In Zimbabwe, companies like GTaxi, Hwindi and Munch ZW, also use apps to allow convenient access to products and services.
Bernard Marr, a Big Data analyst and author said, “Beyond a disillusionment with consumerism, what’s driving this trend is data. Most — if not all — of these upstarts would not be viable businesses, certainly not on a large scale, without leveraging a platform and a foundation of big data.”
Zimbabwe’s capacity to utilise Big Data is still at its infancy and unfortunately the shared economy is not yet a viable option to completely transform the country’s economy.
There is still serious investment that needs to be made in fostering a culture of ICT innovation across all sectors, in order to allow for sharing economy strategies to be fully effective and efficient. So as much as a sharing economy is a solution, it may not be the most effective one for the current context of Zimbabwe. Much ground work still needs to be done.
