After Access: Can Economies Absorb the Capabilities They Create?

If I am going to spend the next three decades working in this space, what exactly are we working towards?

For years, development has focused on expanding access: to education, finance, electricity, connectivity, information, and now technology and AI.

Much of that work is still unfinished.

But imagine twenty years from now.

Knowledge is far more accessible. AI makes expertise cheaper and more widely available. Digital finance and connectivity continue to expand. People become more educated, informed and capable.

That is progress.

But will our economies create productive opportunities as quickly as human capability is expanding?

I jokingly thought of this as “knowledge diabetes”. Not because knowledge is a problem, but because capability can accumulate faster than the mechanisms available to convert it into meaningful economic participation.

Perhaps the question gradually shifts from:

How do we expand access?

to:

Access to what end?

and eventually:

How do economies productively absorb the capabilities of their people?

This also reinforces something I have seen repeatedly in conversations across developing and emerging economies.

We often speak about micro and small enterprise as a choice: pursuing an idea, leaving corporate employment, building something independently.

But for many people, enterprise starts somewhere else.

• It is self-employment because there is no employment.
• It is income security when public and private institutions cannot absorb everyone seeking work.
• It is people creating their own economic opportunity because the formal economy has not created one for them.

As technology reshapes work, I wonder whether the distance between these two realities will narrow across more economies.

If so, the MSME question becomes much bigger than access to finance alone.

It becomes about whether we can build enterprises capable of absorbing capital productively, participating in markets, creating employment, generating domestic value and strengthening local economies.

There is also a governance question.

Technology, information and expectations move quickly. Institutions necessarily move more slowly.

What happens when people’s capabilities and expectations change faster than the systems designed to respond to them?

Perhaps the next frontier is not simply inclusion.

Perhaps it is productive participation, supported by economies capable of productive absorption.

I shared this thought with Prof Njuguna Ndung’u. His response made me pause:

“This is a difficult concept. The world is a theatre.”

Perhaps that is exactly why the question is worth pursuing.