Revisiting the Issue of Trust in Rural Tanzania: The Prevalence of Its Fickle Fragility
When the author was still working in an ecommerce startup in Southeast Asia, he was surrounded by a highly optimistic environment for new online businesses there. The logic goes that people who are going online for the very first time are much more open to new technologies that they have not seen before, becoming first adopters of concepts that conservative consumers in the developed world would shun because such technologies goes against their established norms. Emerging markets, through open-mindedness toward new businesses, will make "technological leap" that puts them ahead of the developed world in no time.
In the urban Asian context, such logic had turned out quite true in many cases. The very real constraints to development in the form of infrastructural bottlenecks had made, in span of just a few years, tech-savvy societies that rely on the brick-and-mortar in ways inconceivable in many parts of the developed world. This allowed innovative businesses with new products to flourish despite comparatively low disposable incomes of the average client. These businesses, with a quick-to-adapt consumer base, are able to improve quickly based on constant changes in product specificities and even entire business models.
But sadly, that sense of "emerging market optimism" based on quick adoption of new business ideas is an exclusively urban Asian phenomenon. Out here in rural Tanzania, the consumer base shows an active fear toward new businesses and products that, in many firsthand observed cases, borders paranoia, a visible hatred toward the bringers of new things based almost on some sort of delusion of persecution. A business that changes pricing structure is in no time labelled as a "liar" and a new generation of products that improve upon the previous iterations are quickly concluded to be "fake."
Please do note that the above description is meant not as a ridicule, much less an insult. For rural consumers with very little money to spend outside getting fed and clothed, any purchase not directly tied to basic survival can be a major life decision, and requires very careful discernment to see if the purchase can achieve the intended values. And against that background of rural consumers purchasing only things that are most valuable for their lives, plenty of unscrupulous businesses must have screwed them over with shoddy products in the past. The paranoid fear of new things is not at all surprising, and indeed, quite rational.
Yet, this rational sense of fundamental distrust toward the new is also incongruent with completely irrational sense of trust in complete strangers, as noted in a previous post. If anything, by giving exclusive rights to operate to monopolistic operators, villages are setting themselves up to opportunists with intention to make a quick buck through "real" lying and "real" fake products. It only serves to strengthen the conviction among the rural consumers that anything they have not seen before is not to be trusted, and dramatically slow down the adoption of beneficial products that can improve people's lives in ways that they cannot even imagine.
The resulting fickleness of trust takes away probably the biggest asset the developing world has in terms of catching up with the developed world in standards of living. It is the ability for the developing to quickly adopt technologies, institutions, and processes that have proven to be successful in the developed world. By not having to reinvent the wheel on how to improve people's lives, emerging markets can quickly copy developed countries' historical trajectories, with sometimes little need for tweaks for differing local conditions. Simply said, developing countries often do not even need to innovate, they can just copy.
That persistent lack of trust toward anything new prevents such beneficial copying from happening in a fast enough pace to visibly change local economic conditions for the better. There will certainly be open-minded adopters of new things, but the fact that the majority does not means the new things will not achieve the intended developmental purposes in a quick enough way to gain the trust of the local populace. Considering that even in the most developed and resourceful of countries, people are distrusting of external actors, to expect the extremely poor to pay money and play along with something without visible results is unrealistic.
Unfortunately, there just is not a ready solution for making people more open-minded toward new products. Unlike in the Southeast Asian tech world, the consumer base is not self-selective. A few open-minded ones will not simply join up, adopt, and then spread the word about how great this new thing is. If anything, the village-based collectivist culture will deter the open-minded from being open-minded, at the risk of becoming social outcast in a community of ultra-conservatives. What is left for bringer of new ideas to do is a slow, painful, and often fruitless (in the short-term) persuasion of communities to think differently.
In the urban Asian context, such logic had turned out quite true in many cases. The very real constraints to development in the form of infrastructural bottlenecks had made, in span of just a few years, tech-savvy societies that rely on the brick-and-mortar in ways inconceivable in many parts of the developed world. This allowed innovative businesses with new products to flourish despite comparatively low disposable incomes of the average client. These businesses, with a quick-to-adapt consumer base, are able to improve quickly based on constant changes in product specificities and even entire business models.
But sadly, that sense of "emerging market optimism" based on quick adoption of new business ideas is an exclusively urban Asian phenomenon. Out here in rural Tanzania, the consumer base shows an active fear toward new businesses and products that, in many firsthand observed cases, borders paranoia, a visible hatred toward the bringers of new things based almost on some sort of delusion of persecution. A business that changes pricing structure is in no time labelled as a "liar" and a new generation of products that improve upon the previous iterations are quickly concluded to be "fake."
Please do note that the above description is meant not as a ridicule, much less an insult. For rural consumers with very little money to spend outside getting fed and clothed, any purchase not directly tied to basic survival can be a major life decision, and requires very careful discernment to see if the purchase can achieve the intended values. And against that background of rural consumers purchasing only things that are most valuable for their lives, plenty of unscrupulous businesses must have screwed them over with shoddy products in the past. The paranoid fear of new things is not at all surprising, and indeed, quite rational.
Yet, this rational sense of fundamental distrust toward the new is also incongruent with completely irrational sense of trust in complete strangers, as noted in a previous post. If anything, by giving exclusive rights to operate to monopolistic operators, villages are setting themselves up to opportunists with intention to make a quick buck through "real" lying and "real" fake products. It only serves to strengthen the conviction among the rural consumers that anything they have not seen before is not to be trusted, and dramatically slow down the adoption of beneficial products that can improve people's lives in ways that they cannot even imagine.
The resulting fickleness of trust takes away probably the biggest asset the developing world has in terms of catching up with the developed world in standards of living. It is the ability for the developing to quickly adopt technologies, institutions, and processes that have proven to be successful in the developed world. By not having to reinvent the wheel on how to improve people's lives, emerging markets can quickly copy developed countries' historical trajectories, with sometimes little need for tweaks for differing local conditions. Simply said, developing countries often do not even need to innovate, they can just copy.
That persistent lack of trust toward anything new prevents such beneficial copying from happening in a fast enough pace to visibly change local economic conditions for the better. There will certainly be open-minded adopters of new things, but the fact that the majority does not means the new things will not achieve the intended developmental purposes in a quick enough way to gain the trust of the local populace. Considering that even in the most developed and resourceful of countries, people are distrusting of external actors, to expect the extremely poor to pay money and play along with something without visible results is unrealistic.
Unfortunately, there just is not a ready solution for making people more open-minded toward new products. Unlike in the Southeast Asian tech world, the consumer base is not self-selective. A few open-minded ones will not simply join up, adopt, and then spread the word about how great this new thing is. If anything, the village-based collectivist culture will deter the open-minded from being open-minded, at the risk of becoming social outcast in a community of ultra-conservatives. What is left for bringer of new ideas to do is a slow, painful, and often fruitless (in the short-term) persuasion of communities to think differently.
Comments
Post a Comment