So the first question we want to really ask as a frontier economist for Africa, What's the different story in development from Africa compared to Asia, in your opinion? Thank you.

First of all, thanks for inviting me on.

That's a big question.

In a nutshell, Asia got ahead of Africa, and then the forces of economics then accelerated that divergence, but Asia's big advantage, and it's hard to believe now, but When all this story gets going, beginning of the 1960s, Asia was poorer than Africa.

And if you're trying to break in the global markets, Poverty, sadly, is an advantage because it means your wages are very low.

Super labor, yeah.

And the wage cliff between the North, if we might call it that at the time, and Asia was so enormous.

If we

So in that environment where, okay, you created the governance, the rule of law, everything else, how do you balance the competitive dynamics, the forces that jostle you around, the waves in the storm, as it were?

Well, you have to play to your comparative advantage.

And what is Africa's huge comparative advantage is its demographics.

And that is massive advantage.

It's also something that particularly favors Africa's own financial institutions, if they actually were to put their money to where my passion is.

You asked at the beginning, what's my passion? And my passion is to try and get African pension money and insurance money into investing in Africa, but not at the price of lower returns.

But I think first and foremost, Africans are citizens of their country.

Ultimately, if you leave it up to the private actors and ultimately the Zambia has the benefit of having some pretty bankable mining companies that actually you can build energy infrastructure on the back of the firms that have chosen to locate themselves in the country.

What separates a truly integrated campaign from a campaign that's just, you know, they have a lot going on in terms of different assets and channels? Because I think there's a little bit of a distinction there.

Something we discussed at one of the sessions we ran at Ignite a couple of months ago, and we'll probably have a more in-depth discussion a couple of months time at the ABM conference.

One of the things from my perspective is looking at true inverted commas on a channel or multi-channel, whichever phrase you want to use, because just using a load of vehicles at different channels isn't necessarily where we're thinking this industry should and could be moving towards, which is why we're doing what we're doing.

From an ABM point of view as well, I even challenged the audience when we discussed this at Ignite, is that I think we've got that path where we're still brushing our vehicles or execution across an ABM program.

Well, if one of those entrances has actually formulated a methodology in terms of the way that they actually construct their campaign, in an omnichannel and a multichannel starting point, either sector per ABN classification, and then follows that all the way through.

That's an interesting angle from my perspective.

And then ultimately, Chris, you mentioned in one of the earlier questions here about the leverage or bringing forward B2C-esque categories in some of the awards, the humor you mentioned as well as the emotion.

And again, like you said, how do you communicate that internally? So yeah, really, really good point.

There's

something to do with technology.

There's trade.

But trade provides linkages.

Trade can work just as much to stitch people together as to take them apart.

And so the same is true with technology.

The technology can take away the drudgery out of the tasks in a job that are just plain boring.

How do you bring that which you've just talked about in terms of upswing and hope and so on into some relation with value pluralism?

[dramatic music] [audience applauding]

So can we dare to be optimistic? Well, the thesis of The Bottom Billion is that a billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stagnant for 40 years, and hence diverging from the rest of mankind.

And so the real question to pose is not can we be optimistic, it's how can we give credible hope to that billion people? That, to my mind, is the fundamental challenge now of development.

What I'm going to offer you is a recipe, a combination of the two forces that change the world for good, which is the alliance of compassion and enlightened self-interest.

Compassion because a billion people are living in societies that have not offered credible hope.

That is a human tragedy.

Enlightened self-interest because if that economic divergence continues for another 40 years, combined with social integration globally, it will build a nightmare for our children.

[laughs]

Are you saying it would just be better if any, if something had to be cut, then let local people sort of make the decision and local politicians take the, take the blame?

So what actually got cut was m- making Sheffield University forced into making people redundant, and they've just made their top professor of engineering redundant because he was the most expensive.

Is that wise of Whitehall to have inflicted that sort of damage on such an important university? No, really stupid.

Um, so, um, do I believe in localism? Do I believe in innovation? Yes.

Uh, is there a right balance? Well, somebody said subsidiarity.

Completely right.

The principle of subsidiarity was bought, was pushed in the European Union by Whitehall when it muted it.

I mean, is there a case to be made that actually the most successful anti-poverty initiative this world has ever seen is a product of an extremely centralized political system rather than a devolved one?