双语阅读｜科技让非洲制造业弯道超车
ALONG A WINDING road down the edge of an airport near Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, is an aeronautical version of a Mad Max world. An old UN cargo plane rusts in a field. Jammed up against fences are aeroplanes of various vintages and states of disassembly. “Airheads” (aviation enthusiasts) scrounge for parts to get their machines aloft again.
在南非首都比勒陀利亚附近机场边上的蜿蜒小路上有一个航空版的《疯狂麦克斯》电影场景。一架锈迹般般的联合国货机停放在空地上。围栏后面到处都堆满了不同年代的飞机残骸。航空爱好者（Airheads）为了使这些飞机再一次在高空飞行，到处搜寻着零件。
Just around the corner is one of the most modern aircraft assembly plants anywhere in the world. In it stand two brand new prototypes of the Advanced High Performance Reconnaissance Light Aircraft, or AHRLAC, designed to fill a gap in the market for a rugged aeroplane jam-packed with sensors that can patrol borders, look for poachers and drop guided weapons on insurgents.
一拐弯就出现一个飞机组装厂，是世界上最现代的飞机组装厂之一。在厂内停有两架先进高性能侦察与监视轻型飞机（简称AHRLAC）的样机，是用于填补坚固型飞机市场的空白。该飞机机身上下都装满了感应器，能够运用于边境巡逻、搜寻偷猎者，同时还有用于打击叛乱分子的制导武器。
This is not the first military aircraft designed in South Africa. During apartheid the country circumvented an arms embargo by building its own attack helicopters. But these planes are a private venture aimed at a niche in the export market. The firm that makes them, AHRLAC Holdings, has had some early successes. On the production line a wing that will be mounted on the first aircraft for export is taking shape. The factory is preparing to churn out between two and four planes a month, though it will not say who has ordered them, or in what quantities.
这不是南非设计的首个军用飞机项目。在种族隔离期间，南非组建了武装直升机队，用以规避武器禁运。不过，这些武装直升机都是私人企业制造，针对出口市场中的一个细分领域。生产这些武装直升机的AHRLAC控股最初大获成功。在生产线上，准备安装在第一架出口飞机上的机翼已成型。这家飞机制造厂准备在一个月里快速生产两到四架飞机，但是它不会告诉你是谁订购了这些飞机的，也不会说订购的数量。
Significantly, these planes were designed and built in an entirely novel way using the latest computers, which reduced the time it took to develop them from decades to just a few years. The digital design is so precise that its robot-made parts fit together like a child’s Meccano set, making assembly quick and cheap. “It is easier designing something new with a completely clean sheet of paper,” says Andries Uys, a metallurgist working on the plane. Legacy aircraft firms such as Boeing would “have to change 50 years of procedures and practices” to adopt such techniques.
意义非凡的是，这些飞机的设计与建造的方式很新颖，使用了最新的电脑，能将之前需要的数十年时间缩短到几年。飞机的数字化设计十分精确，在机器人制造的零部件组合在一起，犹如是孩子们玩的麦卡诺玩具，让飞机组装速度快，成本低。从事该飞机建造的冶金家Andries Uys说：“在一张白纸上画出新东西，更容易一些。”一些老牌的飞机制造商，如波音公司“得改变60年来既有流程和操作”，才能采用这些新技术。
The new plane is more than just a business venture for its backers, which include Paramount Group, Africa’s biggest defence firm. It started as a project to preserve engineering skills and reverse a brain drain of young local aerospace graduates who were leaving to work abroad, says Ivor Ichikowitz, Paramount’s founder. But it has morphed into a multimillion-dollar venture that is spurring the development of other technologies across South Africa. One taking shape in a nearby government laboratory is the world’s largest 3D printer, which can print aircraft parts from powdered titanium.
对于投资者——包括非洲最大的国防公司帕拉蒙特集团——来说，这种新型飞机不仅仅是一种商业投资。帕拉蒙特集团创始人Ivor Ichikowitz称，该公司成立之初时只是一项为了保存工程技术以及改变当地年轻的航空毕业生准备出国工作的人才流失现象。但是，它随即发展成为了一家价值数百万美元的投资，推动了南非国内其它科技发展。在附近一所政府实验室里，刚刚制成了全球最大的3D打印机，能用钛合金粉末打印出飞机的零部件。
In many parts of the world advanced robotics and 3D printers are seen as a threat to manufacturing jobs. Yet in most of Africa manufacturing has never taken off, contributing just 5% of the continent’s jobs, compared with 15-18% in other developing regions, so robots will not kill many jobs. Instead, they offer the opportunity to create new ones by helping African firms overcome bottlenecks in production and by lowering barriers to making and selling things to the world. Without the rapid advances recently seen in digital design and manufacturing, the AHRLAC would never have taken flight.
在世界上很多地方，先进的机器人技术和3D打印机被视为对制造业就业岗位的一种威胁。但是，大多数南非的制造业并没有因此倒闭。与比其它发达地区所占的15%到18%的比例相比，它的就业岗位只占南非总量的5%。因此，机器人的发展不会扼杀很多工作机会，相反，它能通过帮助非洲企业克服生产中遇到的一些瓶颈，降低销往世界的生产和销售门槛。如果没有近来快速发展的数字化设计和制造技术，AHRLAC将 永远不会起飞。
Other examples abound. In IBM’s new innovation centre in Johannesburg a 3D printer turns out cases for wearable electronics that IBM is developing to track the spread of infectious diseases. Additive manufacturing is helping to lower the cost of innovation for firms across Africa. Until recently, when BRCK wanted to make a prototype for its Wi-Fi transmitters, it had to order it from abroad, wait for weeks and pay up to $250 in shipping and taxes for a small part. Now that 3D printers are available in Nairobi, BRCK can get new prototypes made in days for about $25.
其他例子比比皆是。在IBM在约翰内斯堡新成立的一个创新中心，一台3D打印机制造可穿戴电子产品。这些IBM正在研发的可穿戴电子设备可追踪传染性疾病的传播。Addictive制造正在降低非洲各地企业的创新成本。最近，当BRCK想制作一个wifi发射器制样机时，不得不从国外订购，等待数周时间，运输和关税费用高达250美元。现在，在内罗毕可以买到3D打印机，BRCK可以在几天内就能制作样机，费用只有25美元左右。
Yet there are many aspects of technology where Africa is not moving fast enough. In 2016 it bought only 400 industrial robots, or less than 0.2% of the world’s total. The lion’s share, 86%, went to Asia. One reason why Africa buys so few is that its labour costs are low and finance is difficult to come by. Besides, it does not export a lot of manufactured goods. That is a problem, because it runs huge trade deficits with the rest of the world and needs to export more than just raw materials to provide jobs for the millions of youngsters leaving school every year. It also matters because African firms that export tend to grow faster and raise their productivity more quickly than those that do not, says Dirk Willem te Velde of the Overseas Development Institute in London. Africa’s weak infrastructure and inefficient ports have put many potential exporters off investing there. However, Andela, a high-tech firm, demonstrates how pure brainpower can be exported from a snazzy office block in Lagos to sophisticated customers halfway round the world without going near an overcrowded port or broken railway line.
智能终端然而，非洲科技在很多方面发展得不够迅速。2016年，非洲只购买了400个工业机器人，还不到全球总量的0.2%。亚洲占了最大份额，为86%。非洲购买工业机器人的数量少的原因是非洲的劳动力成本太低、资金难以周转。而且，非洲工业制品出口少。这是一个问题，因为它与世界其他国家存在巨大的贸易逆差，需要出口更多的原材料，才能给每年从学校毕业的数百万年轻人提供就业机会。伦敦的一家智库海外发展研究院的Dirk Willem te Velde称，由于非洲做出口的企业比非出口企业的发展得更快，生产力提高速度更为很迅速，因此出口也很重要。非洲薄弱的基础设施和低效港口把一些潜在出口商的投资拒之门外。然而，高科技公司Andela向我们证明纯粹的脑力也能从拉各斯的一座时髦的办公大楼出口至地球另一边的成熟顾客的手上，并不需要去到临近过于拥挤的港口或者是破旧的铁路线上等待。
Andela was founded on the premise that “talent is distributed evenly around the world but opportunity is not,” says Jeremy Johnson, the firm’s chief executive. It finds talented young computer programmers (many of whom have taught themselves to code online, using websites), trains them intensively and gets them to work remotely with mainly American tech firms. The company (which counts Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg among its investors) says its model is different from that of Indian outsourcing firms such as Tata Consultancy Services because its developers become fully fledged team members of the firms they are contracted to, even though Andela bills for them and provides ongoing training. For example, Andela collaborates with Fathom, a company in Austin, Texas, that provides cloud-based software used by water utilities across America, so in one corner of the Lagos campus large blue banners proclaim “Fathom Team East”. Fathom’s office in Austin has a similar sign saying “Fathom Team West”.
Andela公司首席执行官Jeremy Johnson说道，公司在成立时秉承着“天才随处可见，机会却凤毛麟角”的理念。该公司发掘了许多有才华的年轻程序员（大部分人在线自学在线写代码），给他们集中训练，让他们远程为美国大科技公司工作。尽管Andele向这些年轻程序员付工资，为他们提供持续培训，它声称（Andela认为Facebook创始人马克·扎尔伯格是投资者之一）公司的运行模式与许多印度外包公司（如像塔塔咨询服务）不同，因为Andela的开发工程师在合作公司中占有了举足轻重的地位。举例子来说，Andela与美国德克萨斯州的奥斯丁的Fathom合作，为美国所有的供水公司提供云计算软件服务。因此，在爱拉各斯校园的一角，会看到一条蓝色的横幅，写着“Fathom Team East”，而在奥斯丁的Fathom公司办公室也挂有一条相似的横幅，写着“Fathom Team West”。
Part of Andela’s appeal is that the cost of hiring a Nigerian developer is less than half that of a similarly qualified worker in Texas or California. More important, it helps tech firms overcome a desperate shortage of good programmers. “We’re trying to find the best talent in every corner of the world, which means looking beyond our own backyard,” says Chris Lambert, chief technology officer of Lyft, an American ride-hailing firm, who recently visited Lagos to see Andela.
Andela公司的一个吸引力在于其雇佣一个尼日尼亚开发者的成本还不到德克萨斯州和加尼福利亚州雇佣同样素质员工成本的一半。更重要的是，它能帮助科技企业解决优秀程序员严重缺乏的难题。“我们想在全球寻找到最优秀的人才，这就意味着我们要把我们的眼光放得更远。”美国出租车公司Lyft的首席技术官Chris Lambert在最近到拉各斯参观Andela公司后说道。
The search for talent has brought other big tech firms to Africa too. Amazon, for instance, opened a large centre in Cape Town in 2004 where it developed much of the technology used in its Elastic Cloud Compute platform, now the main plank of its web-services business. “This is where we are building the next-generation technologies for Amazon Web Services,” says Geoff Brown, AWS’s regional manager for sub-Saharan Africa. “In 2015 we continued expansion and opened an office in Johannesburg, and since then have added hundreds of jobs in the country to support the growth of AWS in Africa and around the world.”
对人才的渴求为非洲引入了大科技公司。例如，亚马逊2004年在开普敦建立了一个大型研发中心，开发出弹性云计算平台的部分技术，而这个平台目前成为其网络服务业务的主要支持技术。“这是我们开发新一代亚马逊网络服务的地方。”亚马逊网络服务驻撒哈拉以南非洲地区的地区经理Geoff Brown说道，“2015年，我们持继扩大规模，在约翰内斯堡也设立了办公点。至此，为非洲带来了数以百计的工作岗位，来支持亚马逊云服务在非洲乃至全球的增长。”
Such businesses employ only a minuscule share of the local workforce, so their direct impact is small, but the indirect effect will be significant. Andela takes about 40 people a month into its four-year work-and-training programme. Its first graduates are due to finish soon, having worked with startups across America. Many of them want to found their own technology firms, bringing to bear not just their newly acquired skills but also a Silicon Valley mindset that embraces entrepreneurialism and a willingness to experiment. “We are hoping that the people we are training in Andela today will become the founders of the next Andela in five years’ time,” says Seni Sulyman, who runs the Nigeria operation. In that sense, firms such as Andela may be helping to deal with the real deficit in Africa, which is not a shortage of technology but of people willing and able to adopt and adapt it.
这一类企业极少雇佣当地劳动力，因此产生直接影响很小，但间接影响却很大。Andela公司每个月会选取40个人参加公司为期四年的岗位培训项目。第一批人员将要结业，都已在为美国创业企业工作。他们当中的许多人想要创立自己的科技公司，不仅能是带着自己新学到的技能，也带着硅谷的理念——创业精神和勇于实验精神。负责尼日尼亚事务的Seni Sulyman说：“我们希望如今正在Andela接受培训的人能在未来的五年时间里创建下一个Andela。”从这个意义上说，像Andela的这一类公司就能真正地帮助解决非洲的赤字问题。因为这个问题不在于缺少专业技术，而是缺少愿意并能够接受和适应它的人。
“There is lots of tech already out there in the world. When we go looking for it we can find it,” says David Kelly, who runs a venture-capital firm that starts greenfield businesses in agriculture and food processing throughout Africa. “It is the tech-adopters who are missing.”
“世界上已经有很多科技。只要去寻找时，就可以找到。”以投资非洲乡村企业的农产品和食物加工业起家的风投机构创建人David Kelly说，“很多科技使用者正在流失。”
编译：刘莉华
审校：党利娜
编辑：翻吧君
来源：经济学人