In August 2008, the impoverished urban townships in Harare’s metropolitan area were engulfed by a devastating cholera outbreak. The disease rapidly spread into peri-urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe before crossing the country’s borders into South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique.

The main theories of oil conflicts, defined by Martinez-Alier (2002) and Escobar (2008) as ecological and cultural distribution conflicts, and influential in the study of Latin American indigenous movements (Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010), postulate that indigenous people, because of their ecological and cultural ‘difference’ (Escobar 2008) – a special attachment to the environment as a provider of livelihood or cultural identity – oppose oil extraction projects which threaten these environments.

The Valuation of Early Stage Technology (VEST) research project is an effort to develop a contemporary theory and an empirical and practically applicable model for appraising the value of early-stage technology in the information and communication industry based on large firm-level data.