Introduction

In this chapter, I attempt to illustrate and examine a plausible development strategy for Africa with the novel integration of discrete literatures that have not received much scholarly articulation. These literatures focus on renewable energy, the migration-development model, and sustainability entrepreneurship. There are multiple reasons why the global economy needs to move from use of fossil fuels to embrace renewable energy sources, but the importance of this move is even greater for Africans. This chapter focuses on the innovation and commercialization of renewable energy sources in Africa as a strategic means of protecting the environment and transforming the economy. Since innovating and commercializing renewable energy is far easier said than done, a concrete strategy is needed to help pioneer a new paradigm of energizing economies, particularly for nations as poor as those on the African continent. The strategy formulated below, which is intended to help Africa lead the way with targeted renewable energy innovation, involves the migration-development model (MDM). This model was utilized by European nations early in the twentieth century and by Asian nations in the later 1900s around different industrial endeavors. I argue that Africans can begin to apply this model around renewable energy and other green or eco-industries. Finally, I contend that sustainability entrepreneurship should be the thrust behind the migration-development model in the African context today. Sustainability entrepreneurship is a concept whereby Africans in the diaspora who have amassed human, economic, and social capital can invest some of it back into the continent in support of green economic activities. Such a strategy allows diasporic Africans to “do well by doing good.”

All nations place stress on environmental protection just as all nations are affected by climate change. However, the people who have contributed the least to climate change suffer more from its ill effects, while those who have had the most anthropogenic impact on the climate suffer the least due to their higher level of infrastructural development. For this reason alone, Africans have an incentive to support a global shift toward renewable energy sources in order to lessen the droughts, floods, reduced agricultural yields and seasonal declines, and increased diseases that all are intensified on the continent in large part by fossil-fuel-induced changes to the environment. In addition to this, major economic gains will accrue to those nations that pioneer the new renewable energy technologies.