"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons ...Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. "
-Havel
Thoughts from the Shambhala Tibetan Winter Retreat I have been attending here in London...
The way of the warrior; fierce grace. There are few things challenging as sitting for 8 hours every day, no distractions, only a simple cushion, a bell, and your mind. Our society has conditioned us our entire lives for distraction, for multi-tasking, for clouding over our minds with the busyness of the world; what a challenge, then, to simply sit, to uncover, to unwrap, to spend all day looking directly at your own mind. To uncover what we hide from; to sit with pain, to sit with difficult emotions, with nowhere to run, nowhere to distract; simply to sit with what is. Having the dignity, the courage, to stop running. Waking up. Crazy Wisdom. This is the journey.
I thought of a night, recently, caught out in the cold of a trendy part of London, walking to meet friends, marveling at the huge lines of people, waiting to get into clubs, bars; the effort, the energy; driving, planning, waiting, working, and I wondered for what; for what where all these people looking for? They were chasing something, looking for something in those lines, standing out in the cold December air; looking for happiness, contentment, perhaps? Do we really know what we are seeking?
"We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end, it's always the mind that creates our experience of the world, and translates that experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by mind training."
When asked by his disciple, studying tea ceremony under him for 10 years, what the reason for the practice was, Sen no Rikyu, the great, ancient, master of the art, replied:
"The reason for Chanoyu (tea ceremony) is simple. First you boil the water. Then you prepare the tea. And then you drink it. Thats all.
Sensing his student's disappointment, at learning that this was what he had spent his last 10 years doing, Rikyu replied: Show me someone who truly understands these things, then I will become that person's disciple."
The challenge in making tea, as in everything in life, is to do it with attention undivided, so we are not running through our day while making tea. Beautiful simplicity in this ancient anecdote.
"Sub-Saharan Africa's economic gains came under threat this year, but public demands for good governance to address the continent's problems holds promise for the future"
-Shanta Devarajan, The Guardian, Dec 25, 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/dec/21/africa-economic-year-living-dangerously
Yet another insightful article on from the folks at The Guardian's Development Blog. The crux of the argument here: key progress has been made in macroeconomic policy in many African nations, the case in point being the tightening of monetary policy in response to inflationary pressures across East Africa this year (politically difficult); the ability to make a politically difficult decision amidst global economic downturns can be a sentiment to a number of factors: growing authoritarianism and a lack of concern of popular discontent (as can certainly be the case in Ethiopia) or a general delinking and independent growth cycle (as can certainly be the case both in Ethiopia as well as Kenya and Tanzania); but moreover, a sense of optimism for the future, of a longer-term time horizon being used by the leadership and planners in these nations. Time horizons are the critical element here that will differentiate ruinous, short-sighted policy, with sensible, growth-oriented, progressive policy that will gradually impact the majority of a society over the short term elite vested interest drives (that we have seen in the US, for example). These factors breed optimism in the growth trajectories for many African nations. A main point made by Devarajan has been the impact of cash transfers to the poor as a key method for weathering the global financial turmoils and domestic economic and agricultural crises. These direct cash transfers, though they necessitate a certain level of technological and bureaucratic infrastructure to enable transmission, as well as the concern for graft and opportunities for graft they might introduce, have been seen as more effective in introducing personal empowerment into these situations. This harkens back to Amartya Sens' entitlements and empowerments arguments; if people have the economic and social ability to obtain entitlements, famine and destitution can be averted (subsequently, most famines are not due to lack of food, they are market failures caused by a lack of these entitlements). Thus, the combination of macroeconomic foresight and long-term stable planning with short term entitlement distribution might be the key recipe for many moving forward.
listening to cries of the geese, their patterns strung out, oblique, obtuse, flying into the frigid early morning sun, their wings ablaze in golden light,
the pale blue sky,
the sound of snow crunching under my boot amplified by the silence, the utter silence.
"The problem isn't change. All cultures, through time have constantly been engaged with a dance of new possibilities about life. Its not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of political domination...Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned, but it is universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. You cannot understand the pain of Tibet unless you move across it, at ground level...
In the end, it comes down to a choice. Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony, or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?"
The natural resource curse, aka: Dutch Disease, combined with a historical degree of plunder by successive, misdirected, and tainted leaders, both military and civilian, have left the citizens of Nigeria
in worse living conditions than 40 years ago, despite many hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue accruing to the federal state. This looting and mismanagement has been well-documented, and there is no need to reiterate points already made clear on the misuse of natural resource revenue; however, in looking at the increasing environmental damage, the recent Shell oil spill that is now covering 350 square miles and approaching the fragile, mangrove shores filled with subservience fisherman, one can not ruminate on how much better off these people would have been had oil never been discovered within their territorial borders. The press coverage of this newest environmental catastrophe has been minimal; I think back to the Gulf of Mexico spill dominating world press for months and it paints a pale comparison to this newest spill. The story did not register in a roll call of world news on Google. Another environmental catastrophe bestowed upon some of the world's most vulnerable and underserved citizens by large, Western, multinational chemical companies. Certainly not the first time, and with increased drives for energy exploration and globalization, this will not be the last. Are these people's lives and livelihoods somehow worth less than those of the citizens of the Gulf coast of America? Are their lives not worth the same level of regulations and press coverage that lives in the West take for granted? Despite the common multitude of statements to the contrary, this certainly seems to be the case, reinforced, once again.
"What is the worth of family bonds that mitigate poverty and insulate individuals from loneliness? What is the value of diverse intuitions about the cosmos, the realms of the spirit, the meaning and practice of faith? What is the economic measure of a ritual practice that results in the protection of a river or a forest?"
-Wade Davis, The Light at the Edge of the World
The idea of tradition gets trampled like a leaf under the foot of an elephant in the modern discourse of development. China is seen as the model for the rest of the world; the lifting of 600 million out of poverty in 30 years, surely a remarkable feat, deserving of emulation and praise; however, one might ask, what is the price that has been paid by the Chinese people in their drive for economic prosperity? What has been the cost to family bonds, to the traditional culture and languages that have held this most ancient of cultures together over the many centuries? What has been the cost to the thousand year old traditions of the Tibetans, no longer able to practice traditional culture and religion in the land of their birth? What is the cost of the relentless drive for development, for material prosperity? Can we tell a hunter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, sustained by the land, nourished by family, that he is impoverished? Is he any poorer than a banker working 80 hour weeks for money he cannot every possibly spend?
"More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature...each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of thought, an old growth forest of the mind. Each is a window into a world, a monument to the culture that gave birth to it, and whose spirit it expresses."
-Wade Davis, The Wonder of the Ethnosphere, The Light at the Edge of the World
The first headline: the old goad of Africa, of the developing world, of transparency, of a relatively stable government, that has been held up as a model of good governance and lauded in the West (albeit with many personal reservations, but still, an improvement over Amin!) now facing a rapid influx of cash as the result of natural resource discovery. How will these resources be managed in a state with weak democratic institutions? This headline does not bode well for the impact of natural resource revenues on governments (aka the Nigeria Syndrome vis a vis Dutch Disease).
And the Second: The promise of true, peaceful, meaningful democratic transition in a post-conflict society. In what was, only a short decade ago, a war-ravaged derelict state, a chance of following the Ghana model, of pure and peaceful African democratic transition. The real test will yet to be seen: If Sirleaf will accept defeat and pass power peacefully if defeated by Tubman. All hope for African democracy can be boiled down to this particular moment in time.
"We need to shift perspectives, leave the large question aside, and focus on the lives and choices of poor people-if we want to have any hope of making progress on this issue." "Saving behavior crucially depends on what people expect will happen in the future. Poor people who feel that they will have opportunities to realize their aspirations will have strong reasons to cut down on their 'frivolous' consumption and invest in that future...the bigger point is that a little bit of hope and some reassurance and comfort can be a powerful incentive."
-Duflo and Banerjee, Poor Economics
Collecting thoughts and ideas from a recent book, "The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa." Having a discussion about development in the modern age without discussing the impact of China on the Global South is plain ignorance; the role of the world's rising superpower cannot be overstated in the developing world over the last decade, and even, the last 60 years. The decline of the West and the rise of Asia is the great movement of the modern age; what will this enormous shift mean for global poverty alleviation and humanitarian response, moving into the near future?
What path will China walk moving forward in both internal and external development? Will increased global power bring increased global commitments and responsibility? Will the dragon focus within? Will non-intervention, supremacy of sovereignty, and resources-for-infrastructure rule the day? And what are the ramifications for this in the lives of the citizens of the bottom billion?
"If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow a seed, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests."
-Confucius
Paul Collier recently wrote an excellent review of Paul Farmer's new book on reconstruction in Haiti, entitled, 'Haiti After the Earthquake' with some salient points about Farmer's approach to reconstruction and redevelopment. Farmer, whose work in health has been truly monumental (and will, most certainly, lead to a Nobel Prize at some point in his career), and has been well documented in Tracy Kidder's beautiful tome, "Mountains Beyond Mountains," does not, it seems, play the role of development expert as well as he does health expert. Farmer's recommendations involve the heavy reliance on a national government that was both unable and unwilling to provide services BEFORE the disaster struck; granted, which local ownership of the reconstruction process is a vital component in the medium-to-long term, the immediacy of the impact of the earthquake and the as-of-yet inadequate governmental response to the calamity demands innovative thinking. Thus, the "Interim Haiti Recovery Commission," described by Collier as, "...a potentially far-reaching innovation, one that could serve as a prototype for for aid in fragile states." The biggest challenge since the disaster has been the coordination of the NGO's that have sprung up in its wake; the dissonance caused by too many organizations working in too small of a space has inhibited progress instead of serving to propel reconstruction. Thus, the Commission: "The commission was set up to break the logjam of dysfunction, tell donors what to fund, tell NGOs what to do, and provide the necessary authorizations on behalf of the government. In the longer term, it will need to evolve into something fully Haitian that can supersede those parts of the state that are essential yet, realistically, beyond reform."
Collier had touched on this point in his book, "The Bottom Billion," with his Independent Service Authorities, set up as extra-governmental bodies to, in essence, get the job done on crucial tasks of governance. Thus, there is something to these external-bodies; and in meeting the largest critique, that of the vested interests enjoying the low-hanging pickings of corruption, milking on fickle, external development and humanitarian funds for personal gain, inside the status-quo, Collier answers sagely, "...prickly assertions of soverignty are an inadequate response to reasonable concerns."
“Poverty is not just a lack of money. It’s not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.”-Amartya Sen
“Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralyze rather than progress.”(15)
“The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim.” (40)
“Generally, its clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor…the basic human need for a pleasant life might explain why food spending has been declining in India (with increased prosperity). Today, television signals reach into remote regions, and there are more things to buy, even in remote villages.” (42)
Childhood nutrition programs, such as deworming and micronutrient fortification will lead to significant lifetime income gains-these should be an integral part of post-conflict/poverty trapped education development programs; both the awareness and distribution should be hubbed out of local educational establishments, using teachers as the front line combatants against malnutrition. “The social returns of directly investing in children and pregnant mother nutrition are tremendous. The rich world is still caught in the wrong thinking that the poor need more cheap grain-this is not the case-they need more nutrients.” (44)
When one has been continually let down, or failed by the state charged with providing for their wellbeing and security and provision of public goods, how do we expect that person to then turn around with open arms when the state suddenly decides to “act” in the public good, often at the pressuring of outside organizations or nations? If this is not intrinsic to governance, it is very hard to turn around. There is an embedded complacency and a sense of low expectation, which spreads like ripples through a society in the converse of ripples of hope, as the result of the non-functioning or vampire state. This will parlay into what Richard Kapuscinski calls “moribound waiting” as the default physical response to many social situations.
I had the opportunity this evening to hear Esther Duflo, MIT development economics professor and the founder of the Poverty Action Lab, speak tonight in London. It was great to put a face to the words that I have been reading in her recent book, "Poor Economics." Here is a rough transcript of her speech tonite:
Big world events seem to have more to do with politics than with policies; in the West, enough Aid was given to Egypt every year to give every child in Africa $20; the aid in Egypt was not about reducing poverty; in the South, we need to look at questions like what encourages mothers to immunize their children in the DRC? This comes down to politics, to the governments in disarray.
A growing number of academics are saying that we are wasting time in designing policies, as we are missing the elephant in the room, what determines whether policies will be implemented or not, is politics;
Institutionalist View: the main question of development is to figure out how to solve the political process; from a good political process will emerge good policies; without the political process, policy will not be implemented.
INSTITUTIONS are the main driver of success in a country (Acemoglu-Robinson); unfortunately, they are also very hard to change; they have a large shadow of history; in the areas in West Africa where the colonial powers spent more on education, there is still better education today; in India, places where more egalitarian tax collection are still doing better today.
Does this mean that we are stuck where we are? Institutional change cannot be easily engineered or imposed from the outside (see: Collier vs. Easterly-we cannot import freedom by force, this is an impossibility); Thus, can anything be done? Institutions, and hence history, clearly matter and define the broad constraints; To what extent is there slack for better policy? Is there a chance of improving policies can improve politics?
Progress with bad Institutions
One rarely sees wholesale institutional change, and these are very hard to predict or provoke; but incremental democratic changes do happen at the margin, even with fairly autocratic regimes, such as Indonesia, Brazil, China, Mexico;looking at fixing corruption at the margins is also seen as fruitless; however, this is not always the case; in Indonesia, the threat of audits on road construction projects was enough to decrease the theft level from 27 cents to 18 cents on the dollar; this shows that something can be done, that change at the margins is possible in imperfect systems
Even good institutions are not a guarantee for a good functioning of the institutions;
Many people believe that even democracy is bound to fail in many African countries because of the importance of ethnic voting; in Benin, a study was randomized in which the voters were given different messages in different areas of the country, with different degrees of ethnic appeal and clientism vs: messages of nationalism and national peace; the result was that the client/ethnic message won hands down in the nation, by over 20%. In Uttar Pradesh, Banarjee ran a randomized trial where an NGO went village to village and told the villagers to not vote on caste, but on the issues, and ethnic voting went down from 25% to 18%; these trials show that voters may simply not know enough to vote for competence providing that information matters.
Ideology, Ignorance, and Inertia
There can be good politics in even in bad environments; see: education in Suharto’s Indonesia; moreover, there is plenty of bad policies within generally good policy environment; corruption and inefficiencies are more likely to be due to the lack of understanding and attention to details then to a conspiracy against the poor; Ideology, Ignorance, Inertia (the three I problem)
Example of the Three I’s: school committers in Uttar Pradesh (poor should be involved in the public service)-this was a product of World Bank consensus; thus, the Indian government decided that every village would have a village education committee; after surveying, only 8% even knew these existed, 2% knew what they were supposed to do, and 25% of the members didn’t know they were members. Efforts to re-invigorate these has proved fruitless. This defunct scheme is a pure 3i example. Its not that people don’t want to do something ,its just that the system was defunct-the implementation was completely disastrous.
From Good Policies to Good Politics
Voters adjust their views based on what they see on the ground; we can look at the attitude towards women in India; there has been a quota system in the village level Panchayat elections-women tend to be at least as good leaders as men. Randomized trials were held, in which respondents listened to speeches by either male or female; the villagers were then asked questions about the same speech; in the villages where there had been quotas for women, they fared much better in the results than in villages where there had been no quotas; the quotas showed to reduce prejudice in these villagers and respondents, and added to the chances of women being elected in the future.
Another example is in Benin; there was an expert conference held in Benin on the problems on the country, and the experts came up with policies and platforms based on it. In some villagers, the traditional method of campaigning was replaced by town meetings based on these concrete policies that had been formulated. In the villagers where there had been the meetings, the experimental candidate got a much higher level percent of the vote than in the control villages. This shows if you want good politics you must have good policies, to give people something to discuss in making their decisions.
Conclusion
Many in the West are pessimistic about the institutions of the developing world. Political constraints exist-and hard to predict political events have important impacts; however, there is a lot of scope for better policies, perhaps particularly in regimes that are not completely locked or at war; there are a lot of very bad politics for no good reason.
Nothing will come out of just one RCT; but at the same time, it is ridiculous to say that these experiments do not matter when used to establish patterns, to trace a story about what is going on in a particular domain. What matters at the end of the day is not the multilateral organizations, but the policies of the countries themselves-this is where most of the money is, not in the aid dollars, which are quite marginal. Once we recognize that aid money is marginal, this can liberate, and create the understanding of leverage for the money in the most effective way. Thus, some of the money should be used to find out what works best, through trials and experimentation. There is room for this with development policies. This will maintain relevance in a way that is more useful than today in the development world. Lack of change is more due to inertia than to resistance. Thus, change is often identifying opportunities.
More from Richard Dowden, from his great work, "Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles" :
"...when the 'right answers' are found by the Africans themselves, moderate amounts of external funding can help speed up the process of development. But when outsiders decree the solution and pour in money, most aid is wasted. In some places it has destroyed local initiative and held Africa back."
"Aid can speed up development that people have already decided to carry out for themselves and have the capacity to do...but aid from the outside cannot transform whole societies, who countries. That can only come about through producing things and trading them, or doing something that someone else wants to pay for."
"Real change must come from within. African countries will be better places to live and work in when Africans in positions of power and influence begin to invest their futures, energy, and money in the continent...If Africans move their own wealth out of the continent, how can Africa ask outsiders to invest there?"
Paul Collier: Pseudo-Democracies and Solutions: Foreign Exchange 522
Why are elections meaningless for the countries of the bottom billion?
Elections depend on being well conducted; they are only well-conducted when there are institutions already in place that force the politicians to stick by their honest roots; if these institutions are not in place, elections are easy to circumvent by corrupted leaders.
If the first wave of democracy is to hold elections, we will never get to institutions that are needed for effective democracy.
In our own democracies, this mean much more than just elections; there are lots of checks and balances in our systems that prevent cheating; however, we have not translated this to the nations of the bottom billion. These institutions take time to build, and governments resist building them. The only people that cheating elections fool are the west, not the citizens of the nations; ordinary citizens simply get infuriated by the entire process and blame the west for the continued failings.
There are many aspects to accountable government; the first is the amount of money that is raised; conditioning aid to policies does not work; governments need to be accountable to their own citizens, and not to donors. Aid needs to be tied to governance. The alternative to money being well spent is to further empower the crooks stealing it, creating a vicious cycle.
In low income countries, democracy is seen to be linked with an increase in societal violence. Thus, we should not abandon democracy, but we need to make security a strategic priority in addition to democracy. This can be done through security guarantees through coups and western nations guaranteeing true democracies intervention from coups. This is already happening with Australia, as can be seen with East Timor; if the Australians had guaranteed that if there wasa coup the Aussies would put it down, they would not of had to actually do it a few years back. In Africa, as long as the elections were well conducted, they could be protected.
Smart power needs to be used; a small amount of hard power combined with more soft power is the necessary combination if used intelligently.
Looking the Other Way
The Economist recently published a short article entitled "Looking the Other Way," following up on a theme that I had touched on awhile back at the onset of the brutal Somali famine. The biggest question that I raised initially was why is the West and the African public bearing the brunt of the fund-raising and donation efforts being undertaken to help alleviate the suffering in the Horn of Africa, while the most obvious partners, the neighboring countries and the countries of the broader AU, are providing a pittance? Fundamentally, one would expect a country such as Kenya, which shares a long and porous border with Somalia, to be stumping up funds for humanitarian aid, as they are most subject to bearing the brunt of the cross-border ramifications; a nation such as Uganda, which has provided troops for the AU mission in Mogadishu (funded by the UN/West through its peacekeeping initiatives) will provide men, but not food aid (there are no reimbursements from the international community for food aid, I suppose). Thus, the famine continues, as many as 3/4 of a million people at risk of eminent starvation, and 4 heads of state from Africa actually showed up for the pledging conference in Addis Ababa; could Jacob Zuma not spare a day, and could his country, South Africa, which makes up 1/3 of the GDP of the continent, spare more than the measly $1million dollars pledged? Zuma, staunch advocate of "African Solutions to African Problems...." This figure is simply an affront to collective humanity, to the dreams of the Pan-African statesman of the past. Zuma sent $250million to diminutive, autocratic Swaziland to help them fend off default and the subsequent democratic reform demanded by the international community. African solutions to African problems? Is the famine in the Horn not an African problem? Is this not a dangerous game of lethal hypocrisy? Criticism alone cannot provoke action; the action must be collective and intrinsic. If the entire African Union cannot pledge more than the $50 million already committed for the calamity unfolding on the continent, one must question the basic governmental impetuses of the nations of this land, the shared bonds and collective humanity present, or so seemingly deficient. How can true development take place in states that show little interest in actual altruism towards neighbors, and thus, their own citizens? Have the leaders been simply more frugal than the international community because they understand the realities of aid on the ground more than those in the developed world? Is this, in itself, a wake up call? Or is it simply the reinforced understanding that the international community will share the brunt of the burden, as they have done since independence for many of the aid-reliant states on the continent. This entire humanitarian catastrophe has shown down like a magnifying glass on the motivations and predispositions of the governments of the region, and it has not been a pretty sight.
"Human well-being cannot be measured solely by wealth"
Paraphrasing the brilliant Amartya Sen in his behind-the-scenes comments on PBS's "Good Fortune" documentary:
On "Development" Development is quite simple; it aims to remove the deprivations that plague human life; we need to look at the freedoms that people have in control over their lives to do the things that they wish to do; it is this extension of human freedom that is the central issue of development.
On "The Solution" We can do an enormous amount to make the lives of each other better; we live in a very interdependent world, and some of us are more fortunate to have more control over our lives compared with others that don't; we have to emphasize the development of human capabilities; not that you bestow development on people, but that you actually make people more enabled. Once one acquires knowledge on how to deal with a deprivation, then they are in a position to help others. This is a unique approach. The way to get things right is to put them under public scrutiny. I am a great believer in public reasoning; this is the most important freedom that human beings have in terms of consequences. Support, sympathy, and communication and more cooperative action are essential to making eachother's lives better.
I was fortunate enough to catch a fantastic, thought provoking documentary courtesy of PBS and POV, entitled, "Good Fortune," which traces two examples of "development" in Kenya through the eyes of both the "developers" and the "developees." The film brought to light many of the moral and political issues involved with poverty alleviation; seldom are there black and white, cut and dry issues when dealing with the human condition and human variables; this film shed some brilliant light onto some of these human predicaments.
In reading this article this morning, I was struck by the deeper message of this story on Oxfam's work shaming African governments into contributing more to famine relief in Somalia. Why are African governments not leading this charge, why are the governments of the region, the nations with the most at stake, in terms of regional stability and development, not at the vanguard of this push to save fellow African lives? Where is the leadership of the great African democracies, shaming the rest of the world for inaction? How is the current situation, in which governments from the other side of the world, with little actual tangible economic and political interest in what is occurring on the horn of Africa, are leading the charge, plausible? It was reported that South Africa, the superpower of the continent, had recently upped its contribution to $1million. And the African Union, the pillar of the continental, pan-African vision? $500,000. That is a shameful, paltry sum, offensive in its meagerness. This great pan-African congress can surely muster more than half a million dollars. Why is this charge being led by Oxfam and not the African Union? The meaning here is much deeper than simple initial inspection allows. The situation is indicative of a larger mindset, which is at the least troubling, in an age in which the nations of the developing world, and Africa specifically, are to be taking the charge of their own destinies, competing in the global marketplaces through deregulation, and becoming responsible global voices. And where are these voices? Where is the governmental leadership? Where is the responsibility to take charge and act? Where is the great mutual and community regard that has carried through the ages on the continent? It again turns to the West, turns to China, for relief, for aid, for help. The domestic leadership so sorely needed, missing, desperately, sorely, missing.
Oxfam Urges African Governments to Give More to Famine Relief
Michael Onyiego | Nairobi
Photo: AP
Children from southern Somalia, receive food in Mogadishu, Aug 15, 2011
As calls for assistance to fight the famine in Somalia increase, aid group Oxfam says African countries must also do their part to alleviate the suffering.
Following a declaration by the African Union, countries around the continent are observing a day of solidarity and awareness with the victims of the ongoing famine in Somalia. But at the same time, a coalition of civil society and relief organizations gathered to criticize the African response to the food crisis sweeping across the Horn of Africa.
Since bursting into the public eye just over a month ago, response to the drought and subsequent famine has largely been led by humanitarian groups and the United Nations. Western nations, particularly in Europe and North America, have pledged significant funds to relief efforts, but Oxfam International spokesperson Anne Mitaru says African leaders have not played a large enough role in addressing the crisis.
“There is general disappointment that can be felt across the continent. What was missing is the African voice. The bold African voice, the bold African face of leadership on this matter,” said Mitaru.
And beyond leadership, Africans Act 4 Africa, known simply as AA4A, says the continent is not pulling its financial weight. People in countries like Kenya and South Africa have organized donation drives to contribute to famine relief, but with aid efforts facing a $1.3 billion shortfall, AA4A says the governments will need to get involved.
The African Union initially announced a contribution of around $500,000. South Africa also announced an initial contribution of more than $150,000. But Oxfam’s Mitaru says such contributions are unacceptable.
“When you look at the South African economy, one of the largest, actually the leading, biggest economy on the continent, $150,000 is a poor show," said Mitaru. African governments may not have the resources to entirely meet the funding gap, but they cannot not be part of the solution.”
South Africa has since upped its pledge to around $1 million, and Botswana, Sudan and other countries have pledged money. But Africans Act 4 Africa says the continent’s governments can do better. In just more than a week, the Kenyans for Kenya campaign has already generated over $2 million from private and public donations.
Oxfam and the AA4A coalition are calling for African governments to raise at least $50 million towards famine relief in Somalia. The groups released a report that breaks down how much each government can allegedly afford to contribute. The report says South Africa, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt and Algeria should donate more than $5 million each.
Paul Collier and Dambisa Moyo on Africa Allan Gregg Conversations
Collier-The Plundered Planet –(notes/quotes)
“Natural resources can transform the developing world or tear it apart. They are potentially a huge opportunity to help, and also a huge possibility to destroy. Natural assets have no natural owners. The contest that can ensue in the scramble for these natural resources can tear a country apart, and it had. Because there are no owners, a contest for these assets controls the very poorest societies. This scramble turns crooked and violent. The normal business of government, to provide public goods, is abandoned for the patronage systems that are needed to maintain power in these countries, such as Nigeria under Sani Abacha. There are two types of plunder-the few stealing what should belong to all citizens, and the present generation burning up assets that should belong to the future. The ethical responsibility is to harness nature to reduce poverty.
There are two huge holes in governance; the first is huge amounts of natural resources facing weak governments, and the second being the natural resources that transcend governments, ie: migratory fish stocks.
What is to be done? First, the natural assets need to be priced, and the value needs to be captured by the government. Now, the typical way that an asset is sold by a government is under the table, or undervalued, or given away on an undervalued basis as a result of the lack of information. Auctions need to be run to combat this problem. The genius of auctions is that the market values the assets. It is vital that governments have geological information to be able to have an idea of the assets under their soils before these auctions, however.
The revenues that come out of natural resource depletion are not sustainable. As you run down these assets, you need to build up other assets, such as schools, roads, ports, etc, or you are cheating the future generations on a rate of return.
Dambisa Moyo Dead Aid –notes/quotes
The premise: foreign aid has been a disaster for Africa, and must stop.
Why is aid part of the problem? There is a completely different model of growth and development for the industrializing nations such as China and African nations. Africa has become addicted to aid. In some countries, over 70% of the budget is aid sourced. From this, the incentives for alternative economic development are reduced. In addition, there is outright theft and corruption that is accepted. The real source of cash in these governments comes from controlling the state; when you control the state, you control the cash. This creates a destabilizing issue. The image that is perpetuated by the western aid agencies is self-perpetuating and negative. By giving free mosquito nets to the continent, we are breaking local manufacturers of mosquito nets. This is the example of the big problem in today’s aid business. What the Chinese have done in Africa is tremendous, in terms of infrastructure development. Their approach is an equal approach. They are coming to do business, unlike the auspices of pity of the aid industry. African governments need to act on behalf of the interests of the people.
Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
LSE Lecture Notes
The Bottom Billion was about poverty, looking at the poverty problem differently; 60 countries, with about a billion people, have diverged from the rest of the world, and we need to, as a result, rethink poverty in addressing these people
Paraphrasing Collier:
Wars, Guns, and Votes is about power. Weaknesses, insecurity, and the abuse of political power in these nations. The book starts with the proposition that the international community is in a phase of denying reality. We then need to face reality, in order to effectively change reality. The purpose of the book is getting realistic strategies for change.
“The countries in the bottom billion are in the paradoxical situation of being too large to be nations, but too small to be states.”
The states that we see in Europe emerged as solutions to problems. The boundaries are not intrinsic, they are solutions to problems, the biggest of these being security. Going back in history, proto-states existed in Europe, were tiny, and ruled by thugs. There was then an arms race by these thugs to get the bigger army, in order to expand against their neighbors. The bigger militarized states swallowed up the smaller, and these states were able to provide internal and external security, as a result. This resolution also solves the problems of nationalism, or forging a common sense of national identity, which has been forged so well in Europe, this myth of common identity, as well as the problem of building accountable states. The ones who can spend most on the military as the ones who won the arms race, and these were the ones who were able to build the best taxation to fund their armies, and thus, a degree of good governance as a result, as their taxation relied on the citizens of their states. Thus, the result of the militaristic conquests by early European states is good governance, accountability, and security.
In the bottom billion, the situation was completely different. They were suddenly colonized and broken up into colonial groupings that were split and split and split again into 54 countries, usually very small. These little countries are too large to be nations because there is no process for building a common sense of identity; there is no equivalent to the warfare in Europe that build nationalism; as a result, there is a weak sense of national identity, but a strong sense of sub-national, normally ethnic, identity. This brings a lack of compliance in providing public goods as a result. National identity brings the delivery of public goods. And yet, too small to be states. Looking at where size matters, economic activity is what needs to be measured, and the typical African nation of the bottom billion is tiny. They cannot reap the scale economies that are intrinsic to effective public goods. Thus, supply is inadequate in the provision of public goods, most especially being security and accountability, is sorely lacking.
Looking at the standard public good of defense, providing against external and internal threats, normally internal threats in Africa, as a result of the geo-political consequences of non-interference and sovereignty. Internal insecurity is the biggest issue with these states; the level of the public good of security is not high enough to maintain internal peace. Rebellion is quite rampant and easy in these nations as a result of low income, low growth, dependence on primary commodities, and small economic size-these are all structural features of the bottom billion. If rebellion is so easy, the dilemma is how to secure the state, as the other challenge to the state is from the coup de etat. So, they need a strong military to defend from rebellion, but a weak military to defend from a coup. See: Mobutu’s Zaire-he emasculated his army completely to lessen the feared risk of a coup; as a result, when a tiny rebel group from Rwanda invaded the country and took power in a rebellion. This is a dilemma that leads to no effective way to provide for security in these nations. The risk of conflict is a major deterrent to private investment, and also spill over, cost-wise, to the neighborhood.
Looking at the public supply of accountability, which is not the textbook public good like security, we face another dilemma. First, we need to look at the false goal of the China Model in this argument, as they lack accountability and have grown dramatically; to address this issue, there is a huge dispersion in the success of this model; China is very big, relatively, but also very cohesive, with a strong sense of national identity; thus, there is not a massive divergence in terms of goals between the elite and the masses-both want a strong China; however, in other fractured bottom billion nations, there is a huge gulf in these interests between the autocratic elite and the masses, which is seen again and again. Thus, democracy and accountability is not necessary for China, but it is for the small, fractured nations of the bottom billion.
Accountability comes from the government providing the institutions, and citizens having the freedom to make these work, and also citizens being provoked to scrutinize accountability. The provocation in Europe was taxation and representation; in the bottom billion, taxation is low because of aid and resource rents; the institution that has been promoted in the last 15 years has been elections. Elections force the government to improve economic policies. But only if the elections are properly conducted. Where elections are not properly held, there is, at best, no effect on economic policy, and usually a worsening of economic conditions, as a result.
Bribery, intimidation, and ballot fraud are the three tactics that boost incumbents in elections. In elections that are not properly conducted, the incumbent is only worrying about how long they can stay in office, and they rely on these three variables to both increase their terms and get them off the hook for providing good economic management. If there is a valid election, good economic performance adds to the chances that you will be re-elected. If you resort to bribery and corruption, good economic governance is actually a hindrance to your power consolidation.
Small states are much more prone to these problems-power is very easily personalized in these small societies; in larger societies, you need to quickly institutionalize power. Personalized power often goes very wrong. Poor, small, and dependent on natural elections are the biggest three features that drive crooked elections. These are all features of the bottom billion.
What is to be done?
Above a certain threshold, democracy makes a society safer (2500$). Below that threshold, it makes the society more dangerous. If nations democratize below this level, they still have security issues.
Regional solutions to public supply deficits: spillover is great to neighborhoods from conflict, so it makes sense to pool resources; however, neighbors have illegitimate interests in this issue, such as with Ethiopia trying to bring security to Somalia. The dilemma for the regional supply is the only countries with a real interest in supplying security are often debarred. In terms of regional accountability solutions, efforts have not been impressive (look at Zimbabwe). The Presidents of the bottom billion are sovereignty-retentive and are not willing to share sovereignty. Look at successful models such as the USA, in which states learned to share sovereignty, or the EU. Bottom billion nations need shared sovereignty much more than developed entities such as Germany and California, but they refuse to budge on this issue. In these nations, power is massively centralized in the Presidency, and they will not share this power.
International Solutions to public supply deficits: Why should there be “African solutions to African problems?” They are living in entities that cannot solve the problem of public good supply, and we are. This is not colonialism, mark two. The international supply means: Security-post conflict peace keeping-this is effective-these environments are very risky (40% chance of recidivism); peacekeepers are needed for the first decade to bring the risks down for relapse. It is expensive, but much more cost effective than the cost of conflict. Peacekeeping is a good use of international resources, and is a good value for the money; however, we do not look at it in this light. Aid is looked at as good value, but not peacekeeping. Peacekeeping expenditures should be included in the envelope of overall development. Accountability should be looked at through the prism of money. However, the accountability of governments to their own citizens is what is the problem. Providing money without questions creates problems with corruption through capture; it is empowering the very people who are driving the bottom billion into the ground. Independent verification of budget systems warranting budget support needs to be implemented; in countries that are not fit for budget support, it is irresponsible to provide this support. There needs to be capacity building support to bring these economies up to speed for budget support.
Illicit conduct in elections: how can we make accountability to citizens effective by discouraging cheating in elections? Aid is not sufficient to make Presidents want to cut short their terms. What are Presidents really scared about? Coups. In Africa there has been over 90 coups. They are condemned by the International Community, but we do nothing. So, what can we do? These militaries are relatively feeble, and these coups can be put down relatively easily. This should be offered to democratically elected governments. Any government that undertakes a democratic election should be given a warranty against coups. This would make the cost too high to the internal militaries. This carrot inadvertently turns into a very large stick; suppose a President cheats in an election; when the international community scrutinizes the election, and the president cheats, the guarantee against coups is repealed; this is an invitation to Presidents not to steal elections out of fear of coups, as an inadvertent result.
Look at Senegal: the President-for-life had huge support in the rural areas, and the opposition in the urban areas. When the results came in, the opposition started to pull ahead; then, the President accepted defeat even before the results were counted in the rural areas. A few months earlier there had been a coup in Ivory Coast that was not put down by the French, and this scared the Senegalese President, as the army came in and told him that if he stole the election, they would hold a coup. The President had the option of stepping down honorably, or being displaced in a coup. This is the power of the threat of a coup and shows the value of this warranty.
A great bit of research courtesy of the MIT Poverty Action lab on the effectiveness of technology training on primary school students in India. Students were tested with both after school, additional computing classes, a pull-out model of during-school classes, and no extra computer classes at all; the results were quite interesting....Niranjan Rajadhyaksha reported on the findings in the Wall Street Journal:
Computers or classrooms?
The role of the teacher is restricted to switching on the computers and allocating them to different batches of children
Cafe Economics | Niranjan Rajadhyaksha
Ever since fears erupted about a decade ago that the world could be divided into digital haves and have-nots, policymakers and do-gooders have assumed quite correctly that this digital divide needs to be bridged. The most obvious first step was to give children from poor families access to computers, in school and at home. From that followed ambitious programmes as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which is funded by some of the world’s best firms such as Google. Some visionaries even dream of an education system where the teacher is replaced by a computer programme.
Does this plug-and-study idea really work in poor neighbourhoods? Not necessarily, it seems.
True, the initial findings were encouraging. Many studies showed that poor kids improved their exam scores when they had access to computers. But more recent studies cast some doubts on the assumption that the academic performance of children from poor families improves with access to computers. In other words, plonking a computer in front of a kid does not necessarily do the trick.
In one recent study in Gujarat, Leigh Linden, an economist with Columbia University, and the MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab evaluated how academic performance changed when computers were introduced in classrooms. The data was collected from schools in the slums of Ahmedabad and some other towns and villages in Gujarat that are run by Gyan Shala, an NGO. Children in these schools get one hour of computer time each day. The role of the teacher is restricted to switching on the computers and allocating them to different batches of children.
Linden found that a lot depends on how the computers are used — as complements or substitutes for the teacher and the regular curriculum. The programme of computerized learning does not work too well when it is used to substitute the teacher in the normal school day. Math scores actually dropped in schools that took this path. The “out-of-school” alternative — when students sat at the computers either before or after school — showed better, though modest, improvements in academic performance. Here, the learning software is a complement rather than a substitute for the usual curriculum. Further, Linden says the worst students benefited the most in this case.
The Gujarat study shows that merely providing computers in schools is not much of an answer. A lot depends on how they are used, when they are used, and who uses them.
Another study from across the world has an even more sobering lesson. Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches turned their eyes on what happens when poor children in Romania get computers at home. As part of a programme, called Euro 200, some poor Romanian families were given euro 200 to buy computers for their children. Other families with similar income levels did not get this subsidy because of budget constraints. The two economists compared what happened in the two groups of families which were alike in almost every other respect.
There is much to be learnt: Kids with computers saw less television, but they also had less time for their homework. Grades dropped. “The lesson from Romania’s voucher experiment is not that computers aren’t useful learning tools, but that their usefulness relies on parents being around to assure they don’t simply become a very tempting distraction from the unpleasantness of trigonometry homework. But this is a crucial insight for those tasked with designing policies to bridge the digital divide,” writes Ray Fisman, in a June article for online magazine Slate, where Malamud and Pop-Eleches’ research was cited.
Does this mean that computers have no role in classrooms? Does this mean that the age-old talk and chalk teaching routine is irreplaceable? There is no need to draw such dark conclusions. (And these are dark conclusions, since schools do need reform. Peter Drucker once pointed out that our schools are the only social institutions around us that have not changed at all since the Industrial Revolution. Everything else — from governments to workplaces to families — has been radically transformed.)
The more limited point is that it’s not just an issue of lavish funding and putting computers in classrooms. The OLPC mission statement reflects this belief: “To eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education to the poorest and most remote children on the planet by making them more active in their own learning, through collaborative and creative activities, connected to the Internet, with their own laptop, as a human right and cost free to them.”
In the Gujarat study, Linden draws attention to several more cost-effective ways to improve the academic performance of children from poor families — cash incentives for teachers, scholarships for girls and access to textbooks. And good libraries, too. Computers are part of the answer — but perhaps not the most important part.
David Reiff: To paraphrase his statements: On balance, aid has done more harm than good…The problem, I think, is that the whole discussion of aid avoids the problem of politics. People are not saved from outside-people rescue themselves. They can be helped at the margins. If aid was less ambitious, I would support it, such as emergency relief. If it does as its meant to do, to offer a bed for a night, but not to hope to transform society, then the value of aid is indisputable. What is not indisputable is the idea that foreign institutions and governments know how to fox other people’s difficulties. The problem with aid is that it sets itself as the be-all and end-all. “The man with the gold makes the rules”…What you have, by definition, is outsiders telling people how to behave satisfactorily, then the aid will be withdrawn. By depriving people of their agents, aid does more harm than good. Moreover, the emphasis on aid is misdirected. We should be talking more about fair trade than about aid. What is impossible is the notion of aid as the centerpiece of development.
Gayle Smith: Aid is a very complex instrument that cannot be categorized together. There have been many successes, especially in health and education. Wireless access in Africa has had a huge impact on the local markets-this has come in part from aid. Microfinance has changed many lives, and a lot has come from aid. There is no question that politics has affected aid and has often been driven by politics. Aid needs to be elevated so it is on par with other institutions and protected from politics, ring-fenced against use for reasons other than development. At the end of the day, development matters. Development is a moral, economic, and security interest. What is the alternative? The military as our primary means to contributing to development?
William Easterly: There are two tragedies in this debate. The first is the unnecessary suffering in Africa-lives can be saved by a 12 cent dose of malaria medicine which is not being done. The second tragedy that we hear a lot less about is that we have already spent 600$ billion in the last 45 years, and children are still not getting those 12cent medicines. Aid would be great if it worked, but the sad tragedy is that money meant for the most desperate people in the world is not reaching them. Over the 45 years of aid, there has basically been a zero rise in living standards in Africa. Every generation calls for an increase in aid to solve the issues of their generation. Everybody calls for the doubling of aid to Africa, but what good does it do to focus on amounts when most of the money is not being used correctly. Most of it goes to corrupt and autocratic rulers. 2/3 of aid today still goes to corrupt rulers (see: Meles in Ethiopia). A lot of aid went into countries that have collapsed into anarchy, such as Rwanda, Congo, Somalia. Thus, aid worsens corruption, blocks democracy, and is an obstacle to getting rid of corrupt rulers. We must condemn the sorry record of aid as simply unacceptable, as making things worse rather than better.
John McArthur: If we think about what aid achieves and doesn’t achieve, we must caution against random correlations. When we look at statistical evidence, Africa grows on average 2% slower than other developing countries in the world, even with lower standards of governance and higher levels of corruption. Why do Ghana and Senegal, with higher Transparency International ratings, grow slower than China and India? This is because of disease, infrastructure, and lack of education that is a legacy of history. It is about much more than bad governance. Aid is about tackling the challenges of health, education, and infrastructure effectively. There has been successes. The eradication of smallpox by the UN. The fight against AIDS has brought retroviral medications to more than a million people which was considered impossible. Primary school enrollment rates are up 20%. Measles has been cut 90% in Africa. This has all been backed by aid. In Malawi aid has supported the national plan to get seed and fertilizer to farmers and the country has doubled its food production. Aid needs to build on success.
George Ayittey: The record of aid has been a disaster. If you want to better help the African people, you need to ask them what they want. Africans are interested in reform, not aid. Economic reform, political reform, and social reform. Corruption costs the continent over 140$billion per year.
I have been reading into the MIT Poverty Action Lab's work since seeing their test results published in the book Economic Gangsters. In looking specifically at their randomized trials in the educational setting, I was drawn to recent work done in Madagascar, which looked at the effects of both a "top down" and a "bottom up" approach to school interventions. Madagascar is filled with the same issues as most of the developing world in terms of lack of truly progressive educational policy and a stagnant public education system riddled with huge systemic problems. The details are as followed for the "intervention:"
Researchers, in collaboration with The Ministry of Education in Madagascar, ran a randomized experiment in 3,774 primary schools in 30 public school districts. These districts represented all geographic areas in the country, but were focused on schools with the higher rates of grade repetition.
All district administrators in treatment districts received operational tools and training that included forms for supervision visits to schools, and procurement sheets for school supplies and grants (district-level intervention). In some of these schools, the subdistrict head was also trained and provided with tools to supervise school visits, as well as information on the performance and resource level at each school (subdistrict-level intervention).
Lastly, several districts also introduced a school level intervention which involved parental monitoring through school meetings. Field workers distributed a ‘report card’ to schools, which included the previous year’s dropout rate, exam pass rate, and repetition rate. Two community meetings were then held, and the first meeting resulted in an action plan based on the report card. One example of the goals specified in the action plans was to increase the school exam pass rate by 5 percentage points by the end of the academic year. Common tasks specified for teachers included lesson planning and student evaluation every few weeks. The parent’s association was expected to monitor the student evaluation reports which the teachers were supposed to communicate to them. These tools allowed parents to coordinate on taking actions to monitor service quality and exercise social pressure on the teachers.
What is so interesting about the results is that the top-down approach, which is the traditional development approach of dealing with school reform, did practically nothing to actually improve the conditions on the ground. What showed large results were the "bottom up" trials, in which parental monitoring, field workers, and community meetings following specific action plans. Here are the details from the MIT site:
Impact from Bottom-Up Approach: The interventions at the school level led to significantly improved teacher behavior. Teachers were on average 0.26 standard deviations more likely to create daily and weekly lesson plans and to have discussed them with their director. Test scores were 0.1 standard deviations higher than those in the comparison group two years after the implementation of the program. Additionally, student attendance increased by 4.3 percentage points compared to the comparison group average of 87%, though teacher attendance and communication with parents did not improve.
This is a great talk by Sheeran on the realities of hunger in the developing world.
Every day, 1/7th of humanity, about a billion people, wakes up hungry and does not know
how they are going to get their daily meal. This figure (though im sure disputable) is simply staggering.
Every ten second, a child is lost to hunger. There is enough food on the earth to provide nutrition
to every man, woman, and child. The problem is greed. Hoarding. Distribution. Commodity speculation. "80% of the people in the world have no food safety net."
Introducing food into schools is an extremely effective way of both combating hunger and increasing school enrollment, especially amongst girls, as well as supporting local farmers if the food is locally mandated.
"To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of god."
-Gandhi
"Famines happen in the presence of food people have no ability to buy it."
-Amartya Sen
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