Professor Arthur will go to Muthambara | April 11, 2025
AI-driven 4IR offers an unprecedented and unique opportunity for the Global South to impact it, envision agencies, actively participate, and leverage technology to achieve comprehensive development and shared prosperity.
Global South refers to socioeconomic and geopolitical concepts rather than precise geographical locations. It explains the most under-industrialized emerging economies and countries.
As a result, the global South is known as a developing country or a group of developing countries. The global South is widely composed of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Israel, Japan and South Korea), and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).
Global North includes North America, Europe, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The world's highly industrialized countries make up the global North, while the global South is made up of emerging and smallest industrialized economies.
Comparing the populations of the Global South and Global North, it is clear that there are more people than the former. Therefore, the term global majority is sometimes used in place of global south.
The phrases of the global majority have the usefulness to emphasize the superiority, centrality and importance of the demands, aspirations, and ambitions of the global South before the minorities of the global North.
Development is often associated with advances in areas such as income, education, health, human rights, and industrialization.
The aim is to improve the standard of living of the population through factors such as wealth creation and distribution, social differentiation, industrial transformation, and economic growth. AI can play an important role in achieving such ambitions and aspirations.
However, given the global North, extreme inequality, and the history of fierce colonization and exploitation due to terrible poverty, the global South needs a special type of development: comprehensive development. This emphasis aims to ensure that the benefits of development are widely shared across all segments of society, especially those alienated and vulnerable.
Economist Amartia Sen proposed this approach to human development in a broader paper clarified in his original book, Development as Development. Economic and social inequality can hinder development and lead to social unrest. Corruption, incompetence, and poor governance undermines development by distracting resources from public goods and services, reducing capabilities and leading to a lack of accountability.
Globalization and technology can drive economic growth, but they can also exacerbate inequality, lead to cultural homogenization, and create digital disparities. Political instability and conflict can disrupt development efforts and lead to set-offs of economic and social progress.
Certainly there are potential obstacles to the global South's developmental ambitions and trajectories.
Shared prosperity and development are linked. Prosperity includes a variety of aspects of happiness, including economic wealth, social stability, health, and overall quality of life. In fact, prosperity is often associated with material abundance, but also includes immaterial aspects such as happiness, satisfaction and the ability to lead a fulfilling life.
In most global northern countries, economic performance is not shared among the general population. This is very problematic. The rest of Africa and the Global South shares prosperity, requiring comprehensive development. Per capita GDP is more important than GDP.
The GINI coefficient is more important than GDP growth rate. In a country, the size of the middle class as a percentage of the population is an important indicator that needs to be closely monitored and tracked.
However, this is never done.
Only traditional economic indicators such as GDP and per capita GDP are measured and analyzed.
It is beneficial and wise to note that major countries in the northern world, such as the US, the UK, and France, have not achieved comprehensive development and shared prosperity.
The Gini coefficient, also known as the Gini index or Gini ratio, is a statistical measure of economic inequality within the population. It measures the income variance or distribution of wealth among citizens of the country.
The Gini coefficient is one of the most frequently used measures of economic inequality. The coefficient takes a value between zero and one.
A coefficient of zero indicates perfect equality in the distribution of income or wealth within a population, while one coefficient indicates perfect inequality or absolute disparity. In contrast, the remaining population gets nothing.
South Africa has the world's highest Gini coefficient for income, 0.67. This explains the country's constant challenges of inequality, terrible poverty and unrelenting unemployment, despite being Africa's most developed and largest economy in terms of GDP.
One of the most powerful tools for shared economic growth is that quality education, quantifiable skills, abilities and abilities are characterized by fixed by financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills. Financial literacy, computer literacy, entrepreneurship, digital skills, and AI literacy must be a required subject for all university students, regardless of their degree program.
Better yet, these subjects should be featured in secondary schools, if not primary. This training should be based on learning and learning methods, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Global South doesn't just want development. We are looking for comprehensive development. We need to share economic growth.
People in developing countries and the smallest developed countries don't just want to prosper. They demand shared prosperity – the creation of a society where everyone can improve their lives and benefit from economic growth. Certainly, the opportunity economy must characterize the global South.
This includes reducing inequality, ensuring equitable access to resources and opportunities, and promoting sustainable development.
The question is, what is the potential role of AI in ignite and powering the pursuit of inclusive development and shared prosperity in the Global South? In which economic sector and in what ways? What are the use cases, AI tools, expected impacts, and associated risks?
Professor Arthur Go Muthambara is Director and Full Professor of the Institute for Future Knowledge at the University of Johannesburg. This is an excerpt from his book: Artificial Intelligence: It shares the prosperity of the Global South with drivers of comprehensive development.
“Disclaimer – the views and opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author and are not necessarily those of the Bee Room.”
