Poor People's Knowledge : Helping Poor People to Earn from Their Knowledge
How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge rather than from their sweat and muscle? This paper draws lessons from projects intended to promote and protect the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor coun...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/01/3169235/poor-peoples-knowledge-helping-poor-people-earn-knowledge http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15626 |
| Summary: | How can we help poor people to earn more
from their knowledge rather than from their sweat and
muscle? This paper draws lessons from projects intended to
promote and protect the innovation, knowledge, and creative
skills of poor people in poor countries, particularly to
improve the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and
skills. The international community has paid considerable
attention to problems associated with intellectual property
that poor countries buy-such as the increased cost of
pharmaceuticals brought on by the WTO's agreement on
the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).
This paper is about the other half of the
development-intellectual property link. It is about the
knowledge poor people own, create, and sell rather than
about what they buy. The paper calls attention to a broad
range of poor people's knowledge that has commercial
potential. It highlights the incentives for and concerns of
poor people-which may be different from those of corporate
research, northern nongovernmental organizations, or even
entertainment stars from developing countries who already
enjoy an international audience. The studies find that
increased earnings is sometimes a matter of poor people
acquiring commercial skills. Legal reform, though often
necessary, is frequently not sufficient. Moreover, the paper
concludes that the need for novel legal approaches to
protect traditional knowledge has been overemphasized.
Standard instruments such as patents and copyrights are
often effective. Rather than legal innovation, there is a
need for economic and political empowerment of poor people
so that they have the skills to use such instruments and the
influence to insist that institutional structures respond to
their interests. Finally, the paper concludes that there is
minimal conflict between culture and commerce. There are
many income-earning expressions of culture, and it is
incorrect to presume that expressions of culture must always
be income-using. |
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