ABSTRACT
Suame Magazine, a sprawling community of over 150,000 salespeople, artisans, and auto-mechanics in ramshackle workshops, declares itself “the center of indigenous African creativity”. Many of the Magazine’s largest companies started with the Suame Intermediate Technology Transfer Unit (ITTU), an initiative between engineering professors at the nearby Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and highly skilled but undereducated artisans. The elegance of the ITTU model lies in its ability to disaggregate the scale of production from the scale of overall impact. Networks of ramshackle firms may never substitute for large-scale industrialization—but informal artisans like those in Suame Magazine could play a key role in creating a more inclusive model for global development. New opportunities may emerge for development strategies that value local jobs and local value-creation over dramatic increases in GDP, especially as the informal sector tends to build its own infrastructure rather than waiting for government or industrial support.
