Title image CC innamoo@Flickr

Until last week, I could not remember ever hearing of the nation of Sao Tome and Principe. Then I got a free lunch out of it.

Wannalunch is an Estonian company that’s actually younger than Th!nk3 – it was created during a Garage48 event, where a group of IT people lock themselves into a room for a weekend and come up with a viable service. The point of Wannalunch is to help people socialize; you propose a topic, and others sign up to have lunch with you on a specific day to talk about it.

Since a bit of time had passed from my last Th!nk3 post, I decided to use this new service. When the Wannalunch website got a new section for my home town, they offered to pay for the most creative and interesting lunch. My suggestion – to talk about developing countries and eventually turn it into a Th!nk3 article – won the competition.

Unfortunately, I live in Estonia, where people are notoriously unwilling to acknowledge each other’s existence; nobody signed up. Since the Wannalunch team was paying anyway, my guest was Kris Haamer, one of the website’s creators. And after I told him a little about what Th!nk3 was doing, it turned out that he had something interesting for me. Among his other projects, Kris manages the world’s only English-language blog on the microscopic island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.

Like most of Africa, this country has major problems: corruption, inflation, poor infrastructure and debt. But there is something about this former Portuguese outpost that makes it very near to the hearts of Estonians. STP was one of the first countries in Africa to become truly democratic; despite a few military coups and an ousted president or two, it continues to have one of the best political systems in Africa. I would like to believe that this is due to its tiny size; it has always struck me that small countries have more politically aware and engaged populations. It is a lot easier to participate in your country’s future when you are one of only 168,000 citizens.

And as we try to promote Estonia as a kind of prototype market, a place where good infrastructure combines with a technologically curious and pragmatic population to make for ideal conditions to develop and debug new solutions that can later be deployed elsewhere, so perhaps Sao Tome and Principe can serve as a testbed for good governance and efficient aid in Africa. These two islands are part of the ACP – discussed on Th!nk3 before as part of the EU-WTO banana dispute. While the European Union does provide direct aid to STP, mostly focused on road construction (which is the kind of fundamental effort that gets force-multiplied into a huge impact on a developing economy), the more interesting part is the trade preferences granted to ACP members.

As of 2008, the EU has unilaterally dropped all import tariffs on exports from Sao Tome and Principe (while allowing the local government to keep taxes on European imports, to get revenue and protect the local manufacturers). The country’s farmers can sell their goods in Europe without paying import taxes. That is the sort of aid that can make a real, long-term difference, allowing the local economies to grow and thrive without becoming dependent on foreign sponsors.

It took a while to get past the bureaucracy, but Santomean vanilla and guinea peppers are going on sale in France – and as the BBC’s African service reports, the locals are very happy indeed:

“It was worth it, and everybody who believed and took the bet, will be a rich farmer in Sao Tome”, assured António Pinto.

As a European citizen, I’d just like to say to the Commission: more of this, please. I’d love some freely imported African spices with my next lunch!