There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to cry and a time to laugh, a time for everything under heaven, says King Solomon. There is a time to be small because smallness has advantages that bigness does not have. Having read E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, I see even more, the advantages of smallness. However, smallness has limitations. 


In Africa right now, we have pockets of good things happening all around but they are so tiny compared to the magnitude of the challenges that I am not sure keeping initiatives small and localized is advantageous, especially for systemic change. That is why I like Bill McDonough saying that growth is not necessarily bad. Afterall, there is growth that at times bothers on excessive, in nature. The question is what do we want to grow? I think we need to grow our initiatives or link up small initiatives happening around so we can have systemic change. 


I think the new JoinAfrica initiative led by Kayak's Paul English is a great idea. I think the time for localized good initiatives is passé and this is the time to scale up good ideas that have the advantage of being local but broader and much more widespread. 

In Africa, we have experience in being small and local but what will completely change the landscape for the better is having many good small and local initiatives linked up to become not just fringe ideas but the new reality. We need truly game changing initiatives with the intention of addressing existing Africa-wide inefficiencies rather than within a tiny geographic area. I think this is a time to take local global.