Dr Prime

I will elaborate Every time something arrives in Africa either free or priced way below what it costs elsewhere, ask what’s being extracted in place of money. It’s rarely charity, it’s a different currency. Facebook’s Free Basics is the cleanest tech example. Launched as “free internet” across more than 30 African countries, it was actually a curated slice of the web with Facebook at the center. India banned it in 2016 over net neutrality concerns. Researchers in Ghana found the app harvested browsing behavior and phone numbers while offering little locally relevant content (aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/…). You weren’t getting internet access, you were becoming a data source for a company that sells attention to advertisers. Healthcare has its own version, and it’s often worse because the stakes are life and death. In 1996, Pfizer ran a trial of an unapproved antibiotic, Trovan, on children during a meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria, instead of the proven treatment being used next door by Doctors Without Borders. Eleven children died, others were left blind, paralyzed, or deaf. Pfizer denied wrongdoing but settled with Kano State for 75 million dollars in 2009 (brookings.edu/articles/what-…). It’s a textbook case of a population treated as a testing ground because informed consent and price were both cheaper there. More broadly, the WHO has found that a large share of the world’s reported substandard and falsified medicines end up in Africa, roughly 42 percent of reported cases, driving anti-microbial resistance and an estimated 116,000 extra malaria deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa alone from fake or weak antimalarials (qz.com/africa/1140890/one-in…). The “cheap medicine” isn’t cheap, it’s just failing quietly, in bodies that have less recourse. Same pattern with the “affordable” smartphones flooding African markets. Brands undercutting global prices by huge margins have been found shipping devices with preinstalled adware and malware baked in before the box is even opened, generating ad revenue from users who never agreed to it and can’t remove it. Same pattern with pay-as-you-go solar kits like M-KOPA. The hardware looks affordable upfront, but it’s locked with firmware that disables the unit if you miss a payment. You don’t own the panel, you’re renting it indefinitely, and the company holds the kill switch. Same pattern with digital lending apps like OKash, Branch, and Tala, which offer instant loans with almost no paperwork. The catch is in the permissions, contacts, SMS, sometimes location, harvested and in documented cases used to pressure or shame borrowers into repayment. Same pattern with secondhand clothing exports. What looks like a cheap deal is often unsellable Western overstock, offloaded in volumes now overwhelming landfills and waterways in places like Ghana’s Kantamanto market. None of this means every affordable product is a trap. It means the question is always worth asking, if the price doesn’t match the cost of making the thing, something else is covering the gap. Sometimes it’s your data, sometimes it’s your health, sometimes it’s your autonomy. Find out which one before you assume you got a good deal. Thank you @DavidHundeyin