Climate change is an existential threat to humanity and to the many species that inhabit our planet. This is not hyperbole; indeed, as I write these words, we are realizing that we may have badly miscalculated. Events we thought were decades away are unfolding now, and are worse than anticipated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that if we continue with “business as usual” (BAU), by 2032, we will reach a tipping point where we face dire, irreversible consequences. Accordingly, it is imperative that we move beyond BAU and begin to identify and then reduce GHG emissions; hence, the time truly is now.

“Philanthropy” means “love of humanity”; it encompasses the “process of using capital to create change and includes both the act of philanthropy and the institutions that facilitate it.” While philanthropy harkens back to the Middle Ages, if not antiquity, periodically it takes great leaps forward, and evolves to a new level. We are currently witnessing such an evolution, with private giving at an all-time high and new ideas shaking up the status quo. Private assistance in the international realm has a long history, ranging from private individual donations when disaster strikes, to foundations that support non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other entities on a systematic and ongoing basis. Philanthropies such as the Ford and Carnegie Foundations have been engaged in impoverished nations in the Global South for over a century.

The “rise of the rest,” discussed in the last chapter, has had significant consequences for low-income Global South countries that are struggling to industrialize and escape poverty. Global South Middle-Income Countries (MICs) that are former, and sometimes current, recipients of development assistance have become development donors themselves, even if most avoid the “donor” characterization, preferring some variant of the term “development partner” to describe their endeavors. Generally functioning separate and apart from traditional donors and international financial institutions (IFIs), these nations are re-making and redefining the nature of bilateral assistance.

Part I briefly discusses the history of development, which with the exception of Southeast Asia, has not turned out particularly well despite many good intentions. As depicted in Chapter 1, the project turned out to be much more complex than developers, namely members of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, surmised. What began as a mission to end poverty and bring progress to what we now term the Global South or developing countries, metastasized into a much larger project that would in essence charge these countries with operating in the image of their Global North patrons. Rather than viewing assistance to former colonies and the impoverished as a form of reparations for the ravages of colonialism or other forms of subjugation, the Global North viewed aid as a form of charity. Charitable benefactors dictate terms and can impose conditions on their charges, and they did just that, mandating programs that proved to be of limited usefulness and often based on current Western, and particularly American, dogmas.

In 1950, the per capita incomes of East Asian nations (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China), and the East Asian city-states (Singapore and Hong Kong) were approximately 10 percent or less of US per capita income. By the end of the twentieth century, however, they were “Asian miracles,” “East Asian tigers,” or “newly industrialized countries’ to cite a few monikers, with per capita incomes ranging between 50 percent and 80 percent of US GDP. They are development success stories but eschewed neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, and the other World Bank policies chronicled in the last chapter. They have been spectacularly successful, and this does not account for China, which has lifted over a billion people out of poverty. This chapter accounts for the developmental state and the very different road to economic prosperity undertaken by countries that declined to follow the Global North development script.

Scholars have proclaimed a “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” a “Third Industrial Revolution,” “The Second Machine Age,” a “Zero Marginal Cost Society,” the “Industries of the Future,” “AI Super-Powers,” and that “Humans Need Not Apply as We Rage Against the Machine,” to name just a few of the numerous monikers to demarcate our current technological trajectory. While they have varying interpretations of the exact contours of this progression, they all have several themes in common. The first thesis was explored in Chapter 6 – to wit, that this transformation is unfolding rapidly and advancing broadly, including to countries in the Global South. Invariably, the next component is the negative impact that evolving technologies will have on the labor market. Technology is set to destroy many more jobs than it creates, and therefore to exert severe downward pressure on both blue- and white-collar jobs.

Part II focuses on an evolving international hierarchy and evolving development landscape that promises to transform development as we know it. Rising middle-income countries and China are at the center of the “rise of the rest,” the subject of Chapter 3. Variously described as middle income, middle power, emerging market, and industrializing states, among other monikers, the rise of these nations marks a turn in the international hierarchy that may materially affect the fortunes of the poorer nations of the Global South. The larger global economic hierarchy is evolving, and some low-income countries are surging and becoming part of a distinctive economic stratum.

This Part turns more directly to technology, including its role in the Global North and then how it might help re-make the Global South. Technology evolves exponentially, and we have reached a pace where it is advancing at an incredible pace. This is important for our purposes as it demonstrates that what now seems unattainable may indeed become possible, and it may happen sooner than we might think. Chapter 6 focuses on this evolution and how it is changing the environs of the Global North and South, which differs given the digital divide. This divide is very real and is a source of many discussions; yet it is not my emphasis here. Rather, I am more focused on perspectives and insights from Africans who are using technology to solve African problems, and on how technology might be a solution to problems that have defied solution. This is primarily due to the widespread adoption of cell phones which, of course, are computers. When a society’s initial encounter with computers is through cell phones, they are used in different, and especially useful ways.

This book is about a very good news story, not perfect by any means, but progress nonetheless as a new day dawns on the development horizon. For the past seventy years, unindustrialized Global South countries have pursued the quest for development, a concept US President Harry Truman envisioned in 1949, and that American-inspired post-war institutions were to make a reality. Unfortunately, often with the best of intentions, developers could not deliver on this promise and most countries that were impoverished and unindustrialized when President Truman delivered his call remain poor and unindustrialized. Yet a confluence of various phenomena in the modern era may mean this hope will finally be realized. This volume places this opportunity upon rapidly advancing technology deployed by rising Global South middle income nations, innovative philanthropists, indigenous entrepreneurs, and perhaps even a re-imagined traditional development edifice. To wit, like most things in the modern world, development is ripe for disruption.