The annual turnover of cross-border e-commerce exchanges is expected to reach more than a trillion dollars by 2020. Funds available for postal development in developing countries are not even reaching a hundred million dollars today. This means that for every thousand dollars of online sales, less than ten cents of a dollar are today potentially available for funding a much-needed postal development catch-up in many countries. Peanuts for international postal development! This must quickly change.
First, funding postal infrastructure development for least developed postal economies should directly target the international movements of goods bought online, i.e. international ecommerce. There is no way back from the globalization of exchanges in spite of mounting protectionist pressures. Any postal or delivery company should have “delivery to and from any location in the world” at the very heart of its value proposition. Revolutionizing funding of postal development start by “thinking global” and global thinking!
Then the “who is funding”, “who is funded”, “what is funded” and “how is funded” must be totally revisited in the very few international postal development funding programmes, such as the UPU’s Quality of Service Fund (QSF).
So, what should be funded in terms of global postal development? Only the projects with critical collaboration benefits across all sector stakeholders in the current context of the fourth industrial revolution! The era of ever-increasing benefits for those who dare to collaborate, connect and create together!
One lesson can already be learnt from existing postal development funding schemes, such as the UPU’s QSF. Isolated projects, which do not connect with a broader development strategy integrating a wide variety of national and international stakeholders, are most likely to produce little or no results, and this will be even worst in the fourth industrial revolution context that penalize “single agents”. Posts cannot remain the single and disconnected agents of development.
Instead, postal development projects that systematically tie all parties involved in improving the transportation and delivery of e-commerce merchandises should be prioritized. Nobody has the end-the-end solution to global delivery challenges today. Funding truly interoperable operational tracking systems across all delivery, postal and transportation companies, in turn accessible by countries’ official authorities such as customs and security agencies, could be a best practice example of the huge economic and societal value when daring to involve all relevant parties in funding postal and delivery infrastructure development. The response to the first international postal institutional crisis is more inter-sector and stakeholders connectivity rather than less, and this already starts at the “what should be funded” stage!
Setting up the first stage of the postal and delivery infrastructure development in this way would be the best invitation to Jack Ma and other stakeholders to participate in several billion dollars global development projects to effectively and sustainably connect Jack Ma’s products, as well as Jayme Smaldone’s mugs, to any man or woman willing to buy them. We’ll talk more about the new funders in my next article. As always, we’ll keep you posted.
