Idea For Africa: Low Purchasing Power Regions and Firms Based On Reliable Abundant Products

 

I'm not sure if this would qualify as "research-level" as an idea, i.e., I'm not sure the material in this idea could be turned into a publishable economics research paper, so I'm just presenting it as an idea that could help Africa.

Suppose you have an area within a broader region that, compared to the broader region, has its population in such a state where the average person in the region has very low purchasing power--the person is poor and has no way to get more income.

This could be an inner city in a US state, or, it could be a country in Africa.

The solution to the dilemma of how to get the region to be able to rapidly grow its economy is:

Subsidize and possibly start a business that draws upon a "reliable abundant product" in the region, that enables people in the "low purchasing power region" to make money based on selling that reliable abundant product.

In an inner city, the reliable abundant product is time.  Someone outside of the city with a good heart, some business skills, and a little bit of money to spare could start a business--one that might lose money at first, but it might actually even become profitable over time--where the residents of the inner city can receive training in a particular skill that is related to time expenditure, such as telephone-based customer service, and, then the business, in exchange for the training, will be a staffing firm that will provide very good, affordable labor to nearby businesses--including ones that are not in the inner city but somewhat near it--in the form of trained customer service workers, who had previously had plenty of time to spare due to their low ability to find work before.

In an African region with low purchasing power, I imagine, the top reliable abundant product is actually likely to be land.  What the government of the African region could do is, split up the land among citizens and give each citizen a plot of land to call their own.  If there are natural resources on the land, the resident could gather them and sell them.  Even if there is not much in the way of natural resources beyond, say, grass, the owners of the land could either start a farm and raise and slaughter or sell eggs/milk from livestock, or, they could rent out the land to someone else who might want to do that.

The main problem with this arrangement is, the region has very low purchasing power, so there aren't going to be many high-paying customers to sell to.  The solution is to use "efficient export" technologies--a wealthy philanthropist could swoop in and provide these aircraft for free or for a very low rate--to allow the producers in this region to export their (perishable and other) products quickly, cheaply, safely, and in such a manner that the goods won't go bad before they are able to be stocked in a store in another country where purchasing power of residents and prices of products are higher.  It is not clear to me exactly how these aircraft would need to be designed...possibly, large jumbo jets that run on electricity instead of gasoline could be developed, and the idea would be, to make these jumbo jets self-piloting with AI, and able to get from Point A to Point B very efficiently, quickly, and above all cheaply.

I believe this is a very good idea.  If one wanted to speak about it in generalized terms, you might describe it as "the solution to the regional low-purchasing-power dilemma:  benevolent philanthropic intervention with technology and/or organization to enable 'reliable abundant product' gathering and sales via cheap and fast exporting to higher purchasing-power markets."  There might be a way to phrase this in mathematical terms; perhaps this idea could even be written as a theorem of some sort.