Abhijit Banerjee on Doing Better Through Randomized Evaluations

"We are at a starting point, rather than at the end. We are at a point where we can do better...."

The Conflict Trap

Drawing parallels between the book I am currently reading, (well, re-reading), Paul Collier's wonderful "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It," and today's news streaming down my computer screen courtesy of the BBC. Collier laments constantly about the "Traps:" those conditions which hold the poorest nations in a cycle of instability and economic malaise; looking at the news today about famine being declared in Somalia, already a failed state, I think of the regional ramifications for this newest humanitarian disaster. Collier states, "Many of the costs are borne by neighboring countries...Since most countries are bordered by several others, the overall cost to neighbors can easily exceed the cost to the country itself." And while it is calloused to think of a newly declared famine in the terms of "costs," the spiraling effects of these regional calamities are hard to understate.  Reading further in the news: riots in Malawi, an attempted assasination in Guinea; just when the "bad old days" seemed to be over, the fractures reappear so easily in the poorest nations in the world; the image band-aids are so easily peeled away by the softest of breezes.   

Collier on "The Bottom Billion:" The countries at the bottom coexist with the twenty-first century, but their reality is fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance. They are concentrated in Africa and Central Asia, with a scattering elsewhere. Even during the 1990's, in retrospect the golden decade between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, incomes in this group declined by 5 percent. We must learn to turn the familiar numbers upside down: a total of five billion people who are already prosperous, or at least on track to be so, and the one billion who are stuck at the bottom."

Famine or Plenty?

Reading of the newest round of desperation in the Horn of Africa, the failed rains of Somalia, the floods of refugees pouring into Kenya, threatening to destabilize, once again, an unimaginably fragile region, I am brought to the words of Richard Kapucinski, and others who have preached the same lessons about the way things are. Can we ever learn from the past if the present is so powerfully blinding?

“People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and te bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics...Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.” The Shadow of the Sun

Economic Gangsters

Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel on the fundamental question, the fundamental divide facing development economics, ie: the Sachs Vs Easterly divide: 

"Fundamentally, it boils down to whether rich countries have already provided to much money to help Kenya and others out of poverty-or not nearly enough. Leading academic researchers have lined up on both sides. The answer turns out to hinge critically on one's own views of the role that corruption and violence play in the impoverishment of nations. Maybe corruption and violence are mainly just the symptoms of poverty. If this is the case, once rich donor-countries send enough money to Kenya to jump-start economic growth, its citizens will no longer have to fight one another to survive. On the other hand, if most foreign aid is lost to the grabbing hands of corrupt officials or destroyed in civil strife, then how could aid dollars ever lift countries like Kenya out of poverty? More aid would just enrich an already corrupt elite, and could even make the twin problems of corruption and violence worse by giving people even more money to fight over."

LSE 2011-12 and the Poverty of Nations

As of now, it looks like I will be attending The London School of Economic's Masters in International Development Management program for the 2011-12 academic year. I am very excited for the intellectual and professional challenge of this program, and have begun to read through some of the required reading. Thus, in correlation with my Schools Project website (www.theschoolsproject.org) I will be posting on different readings and findings in my own academic research and others published works. While I have still to iron out the financial and visa issues concerning my attendance at the LSE, I hold an unconditional offer, and thus, have begun the intellectual journey a bit early.

“Understanding the incentives behind economically motivated acts of violence helped us to develop new schemes to break the cycle of violence and poverty by using aid to stop violence before it starts.”

 -Fisman and Miguel

I have almost completed reading Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel's book, "Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations." Fisman and Miguel are Columbia and Berkeley professors and have taken a great approach, ala Freakonomics, to uncovering some of the lingering issues of developmental economics.  They attempt to track the trail of global economic gangsters, those who stymie the development of nations in their individual pursuit of gain, through development issues such as life under Suharto in Indonesia, smuggling and the loss of tariffs in Hong Kong and China, post-conflict economic recovery in Vietnam, and also the impact of fragile environmental/agricultural production on developing nations. All in all a very interesting read. In looking at my particular interest of educational development, I want to specifically focus on a few sections of the book. The first concerns the randomized trials that have become the norm in the health field, when conducting field trials for new medicines before they can be approved by the FDA. The implementation of these randomized trials into all realms of development will be a crucial measure of success moving forward:

“There isn’t any conceptual reason why economists cant harness the power of randomization, by picking villagers-or even entire villages-to receive an economic treatment, and compare these changes to control villages. Armed with these ideas, we hope economists can generate similar breakthroughs in tackling the challenges of global poverty...In collaboration with NGO's, and the MIT Poverty Action Lab, the academic researchers working in Busia (Kenya) have already used randomized evaluations to show that providing anti-parasitic drugs for intestinal worms-a major scourge affecting over 90 percent of Busia's kids-can boost children's school attendance and may have longer term effects on students health...Information on failures is just as useful as successes, since it allows policymakers to shift funding away from the projects that don’t work and towards expanding those that do...

In Busia, for every success there has been two or three development projects that didn't have any meaningful impacts. For example, given the scarcity of textbooks in Busia's schools, it seemed natural to expect that providing more books would produce better student test scores. (However, the successes of literacy and book campaigns need to be measured with more metrics than only standardized test scores, which can be a poor indicator, and can themselves be plagued with problems). It turns out though, that students in classrooms randomly assigned to receive extra books didnt do any better on average than their counterparts in control schools. Maybe other educational expenditures like higher teacher salaries would be more effective, or maybe Kenyan school textbooks just arent any good. Paul Glewwe and coauthors find that standard school texts are written at too high a level of difficulty for most rural Kenyan students, probably because they were written to cater to the needs of the high-achieving children of the country's Nairobi elite. Whatever the reason, we've learned that resources need to be redirected away from programs such like these that, however well-intentioned, don't have any impact.”

The Shadow of the Sun

Reading Richard Kapuscinski's beautiful memoirs on his decades reporting on Africa as a foreign correspondent...some of his striking words....

"The population of Africa was a gigantic, matted, crisscrossing web, spanning the entire continent and in constant motion, endlessly undulating, bunching up in one place and spreading out in another, a rich fabric, a colorful array."

"More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun...from the morning's earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight."

"The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa.' In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist." 

Tanzania. Leaving.

"But did nobody realize that an improvement in economic activity would reveal a shortage of power? Didn't anyone believe that Africa's economies would start to grow? Power-or lack of it-is becoming a problem all over the continent. Africa did not plan for success."
-Richard Dowden
A quote made especially relevant in the 12-15 hours a day of power cuts facing Dar Es Salaam, the engine of the Tanzanian economy, and a mirror of the issues I lived through this year in Nepal



Last morning waking up in Sub-Saharan Africa...the bells, the light, the birds, clashing of metal trays.
It certainly has been an experience, another experience in the long chain of them, exhilerating and exhausting,
a time for learning, technical matters and the common themes of this world, the threads that bind, for both
good and for bad.,
Time for rollcall of highlights and lowlights for this trip in full, as all things in my life need to be itemized (all non-schoolsproject.org related stuff, here):

The Good.
1. Africa. In General. In extreme generality. As this continent is no more "African" than any dissonant, vast continents can be defined in a single word. It beats you up, is hard-as-hell to travel, but at the end of the day, there are few places as rewarding and truly different.

"The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa." In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."

-Richard Kapucinski

2. Ihla de Mozambique. Hands down amazing. Still entranced. Magic.
3. Rocklands. The scene. The Camping. The climbing.
4. Cape Town Climbers. Some great, accomodating folks. Really made the time spent great.
5. Maputo. My new favorite African city.
6. Bread in Mozambique. (Pao)...one of the positive aspects of the Portuguese Empire....got me through many a day.
7. The Night Market in Ihla: $1 for 2 lbs of fish, taro, bread, rice, and beans. Nuff said.
8. INES Guesthouse, Pemba.. Despite no water and still costing $20 a nite
9. Mozambique Locals: most friendly African country I've visited (Sub-Saharan)
10. Cheap and Easy Sim Cards: a lesson that the US could pick up from the developing world.
11. Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. A fantastic travel companion.

The Bad
1. Malaria-prophalaxis-induced-hair-loss: Flaking Scalp Mess! Praying that the malaria doesnt decide to come on now....
2. Nampula, Moz: an armpit. The place still haunts me.
3. Prices-in-general: sure is not Asia in the get-what-you-pay-for category.
4. Chapas. Insanity.
5. Horribly terrible power in Dar. See above quote. Worse than Kathmandu. Not easy to do that.
6. S. Africa Vibe-in-General: lacking, lackluster, no smiles, too many bars and elecrtrified wires and fences and supermarkets closing at 530pm for my taste.
7. The heat. Even in the "winter" one can never get used to simply being hot all the time. See: Pemba.
8. The Internet: What I would give for 30 minutes of actual broadband.
9. The number of church-based-missionaries encountered: they literally swarm through towns like locusts: for the love of god.
10. Cost of Flying: As I have developed a phobia to days-on-end-local-transport, the state mafia monopolist African airlines have been the only game in town: And they know they have you by the balls come payment time.

House of Peace

6.28.2011 Dar Es Salaam (“House of Peace”), Tanzania

The days and nights, though tedious and tending towards loneliness, pass relentlessly.
As my time in Africa winds down, the memories flash in mind, which remains cognizant
of this essential truth: now, they are just memories, just quick glimpses of the past, of the ups and down, the tedium tends to dissipate quickly in the mind, and that is all.
Trying to accumulate these glimpses is like building a house on a foundation of sand; it will not hold. It will slowly slip away, recede back into the ocean of life.
Simply move forward, move on; unceasingly, unnervingly, there is no other way.
The housemaid, clad in baby blue, sweeps the dust from the top layer of the dirt courtyard,
her wooden broom rhythmically sweeping, playing a soothing melody for my tired mind.
The generator, big, nasty, in its tin roofed shed like an angry attack dog growling at the moon, finally turned off at 7:15am after a long night of rumbling underneath my pillow.
The morning tables filled; where these folks all come from, always dressed in collared shirts, starched dresses, I haven't a clue, but the tables are always full when I stumble downstairs for my coffee, confident in my early morning prowess, always to be deflated upon entering the open canteen, the golden African dawn creeping in through the hazy courtyard.
The more time I spend here in Dar, the more aware I come of exactly how little there is to do in Dar. Yesterday, Sunday, was the most closed-up I have ever seen a major city on a weekend, weekday, or even major holiday. Other than the incessant ringing of the church bells at 6am, everything was closed, silent, shuttered, gated, people nowhere, a ghost town to behold. Could one imagine New York simply closing up shop one day a week? What is the simple cost to business? 1/7 gross profit, I would assume. I suppose the equation is simply illogical in this place, its veneer of modernity, its new glass and steel buildings being slowly unwrapped from their giant scaffolded bows, often simply a facade for very different underpinnings of life. Different realities. Different priorities. Altered states.

Mozambique Reflections

 Bouldering the old Portuguese lighthouse, Goa Island, Mozambique

 Burundian Barber

 Sitting in the dust on the side of the road

June 22, 2011: Leaving Mozambique....plane reflections.....

As the LAM flight parts through the low-lying clouds blanketing the east coast of Africa, I am given a quick period for reflections on the last 2.5 weeks of life here in Mozambique, a destination that has been intended for awhile, and finally encountered...the passport stamp said June 4^th, which would make this departure exactly 18 days after arriving, sleep deprived and weary at the great lines of the South Africa-Mozambique border, at 6am with the rest of the overnight bus passengers. What an 18 days is has been; travel, education, research, relaxation, photography, writing, reflection; Maputo, the vibrant capital city that quickly won my affections with its warmth, smiles, and general, flavorful ease; Nampula, the dump of the central, the one night at the pensao expensivo, the $30 hotel room, cheapest in town, with a bathroom that I could not enter for fear of biological contamination and a bed that, even lying on top of my old sleep sheet, still made my skin crawl with imagined bedbugs; Ihla de Mozambique, one of the finest places I have laid my head in my years of travel, a true wonderland; hard chapa travel, hitchhiking from the side of the dusty road junction of Namialo, breaking down after 4 hours of roadside dust and heat imbibing, and finally, Pemba, the provincial capital, the sleepy backwater that brought to mind many reflections of the Pacific, of the sleepy backwater capital cities of my island home.

Only 2 hours ago I was running around with Mr. Nando, my guardian, evangelical spiritual savior, host at INAS, and money changing fixer; frantically going from one bank to another (which are luckily located 5 minutes from each other as the town center is about that large in diameter), getting rejected in pleas to exchange the soon-to-be-worthless Mozambiquan Mecticals for US dollars or Tanzanian Shillings, anything that would be worth something after leaving this place; the amount, about $30 USD worth; the result; a shady drive-by fixer arranging the transaction with the Somali Lady in the market, the only place for such an exchange in this city; and $30 crisp US dollars in my pocket, enough local change to buy a fruit drink in the airport shop and a chocolate Bon Bon to spare, and a smile on my face after being driven to the airport by Nando's secretary at INAS, at 5mph, the trunk swinging open, no door handles on the inside or out of the beat up old sedan...TIA....

Research-wise, a bit of frustration, mainly stemming from the strong language barriers and the lack of anything resembling help from some of the “great NGO's of the area” such as the one that passed me in the dust yesterday while walking in a desert wasteland, emblazoned with the logo that made me laugh, “Helping Africa to Help Itself.” A bit pandering. I did get to spend some time with a local Peace Corps couple doing teacher training work, which was great to hear some stories and struggles, both for my research and for my own experiences, painting them against my own service, sharing the ups and downs, wishing them the best of luck as they wrap up a long, hard, and wonderful period in their lives here in Northern Mozambique. Hanging out at Russel's Place, a refuge for them, an interesting spot for me, the local expat hangout, the South African drinking hole of choice, happy to spend a few hours on their free wireless, but happy also to leave that place....and back to INAS....ah, INAS...where to begin...

Ill never quite figure out what the acronym actually stood for, the first time I heard it muttered from the mouth of Christina, a new friend who took me exploring the night markets in Ihla told me I had to at least try to get in there, gave me the number of Mr. Nando, and told me to make a good story and drop her name....and there I was, standing in the doorway, explaining myself to some FRELIMO (the powerful national political party of Moz) bigwig that I did, indeed, belong staying at their government guesthouse, complete with aircon, stately beds, mini-fridges, huge leather arms chairs, and random FRELIMO party officials staying the night after official jaunts from Maputo....certainly an interesting place to crash, and it made the whole Pemba scene much more bearable, especially when confronted with the other guesthouses in town, either comparable in quality to the digs in Nampula, or of slightly higher quality for $100/night....and sweet Mr. Nando, sending me biblical text messages, constantly trying to get me to come to meet his Brazilian pastor (I was VERY busy), and arranging my Somali black market money deals, in addition to fetching buckets of water, as even though this place had ice cold ac and mini fridges, the water had broken at some point, and being Mozambique, it was just a symptom of the terminal decline of things, and would not be fixed in the forseeable future...water came from a bucket and a well in the courtyard, a nice contrast to the high-life being lived inside...My last evening, sipping a nice, cold 2M local beer in my shorts, reclining on the plush leather chair in the living room, watching a badly pirated copy of The A Team on the national television channel (one of 3 available in the country)....ah, Mozambique....incredibly terrible local travel, expensive and shit hotels, wonderfully friendly locals, and a beautiful 18 days.....onto Tanzania and beyond!!

Mozambique Diary. Ihla to Pemba

 (Im the guy on the left)

Pemba, Mozambiaque...19.June.2011

“Its because this is Africa. We are poor.”

The government telecom manager's explanation for the fact that his office could not give me .60$ change for a dollar (on a .40$ transaction), despite the fact that we were sitting in an air conditioned computer lab inside of a million-dollar building. I was absolutely stunned by this lame-ass rationale employed to excuse bad business practices and a simple laziness (he had change in his pocket the entire time) and was very vocal in my response.

“Life has been very hard here.”

Burundian refugee who cut my hair in Ihla de Mozambique, explaining his plight over the last 14 years, which has led him from Burundi>Rwanda>Congo>Tanzania>Malawi>Mozambique, symbolic of the plight of the victims of Central Africa's multitudes of conflicts and governmental manipulations of refugees for financial and political gain.

The day begins with a restless sleep, usually the case when I am taxed with an early-morning wakeup; and today's, at 4:03am, certainly fit the bill. For some reason here in Mozambique, the public transportation options (chapas, already explained), tend to pick an ungodly hour to depart in the morning for their daily transit runs; usually done so they can get to the destination, shop, relax, and then turn around and come back for the late afternoon run....Accidentally slamming the door to Ruby's behind me, sealing the last 9 days in a cloak of positive memory, setting out, once again, for the utter unknown of Northern Mozambique travel. The dark early hours passed in a sleepy blur; sliding in the mud, covering one knee with muck, cursing the timing, why could this not have happened in the last 9 days instead of on a day where a shower was many many hours distant?? Walking the length of the island, streetlights illuminating the way, the early morning muzzein's call to prayer, witnessing the faithful stepping out for their early-morning ritual. The first attempted extortion, 4:30am, a new personal record: the driver of the truck over the causeway, seizing his monopoly on the route at the hour and the fact that my disheveled, bag loaded self obviously had no other choice other than to walk the 1.5 mile causeway, trying to charge me at the very least 3x the going rate (I settled at 2x and some harsh words); arriving at the ramshackle coastal village, back on the African continent, a renewed taste of the roughness from which Ihla was such a refuge. Children waking up behind a tattered white tarp, on the ground, crowded on the bare concrete slab, in the early morning chill, as I stand, always trying appear non-chalant, obviously a stranger in a strange land, a role played all too often in this life. Yet another attempted extortion, by the same driver, who almost drives off with me half hanging out of the back of the truck after some shady dealing and a wrong destination to which I would have backtracked considerably and paid considerably more; jumping off the back, in the still dark morning, somehow getting my bags to follow along with some choice words for this lovely early morning compadre, and into the passenger seat of another waiting chapa, estatic at my timing, not yet knowing that I would be sitting in this lucky position for 2 hours before finally departing for a 40 minute ride, to be dumped into a pickup for another 45 minute ride, to be left on the side of the road in Nimiala, the stereotypically terrible armpit of African travel, a filthy, dusty, hot road-junction-cum-town. Heat, dust, dirt, frantic coke and banana sellers chasing down trucks and anything else that moved, the vehicles passing all outrageously overpacked with bodies, in this I stood, trying to keep composure, trying not to lose heart and car and truck passed by, not one for hours heading even in the direction that I needed to go, after being promised busses and cars would be coming in “10, maybe 15 minutes, of course!” Trying to hitch, trying to score a badly needed ride, which simply did not happen as the hours rolled past, my legs grew numb, my mind weary from being gang-laughed-at (as one writer said, every country has its assholes). Finally succumbing, sitting down on my dusty pack in the dirt, defeated, deflated, and then the smiles of some strangers, empathy for the plight of a fellow traveler, those who would only know this place, a perspective wedged into my weary mind. A young boy, quite ragged, sat down on the dirt a few feet away just to look at me; at first I looked away, but then over to him, and he gave a simple smile, which opened my heart, made me forget for a minute the hours of hard travel yet to come, the lack of coffee that was making my mind hurt, the dust that had coated every crevice of my being. And finally, right then, an absolute strike of brilliance: not an overloaded, death-trap flatbed; not a packed, cracked-windshield, stereo blaring chapa; but a Mercedes Benz mini bus, 4 passengers total in a 15 seat van, Pemba Dive Lodge logo emblazoned on the side, a vehicle that would not be stopping ever 15 ft to Pemba to drop off and pick up, a complete floating oasis...What luck...4 brilliant, fast, music-filled hours later, and im back in the dust, on the side of the road once again, in the end-of-the-road town of Pemba, Northern Mozambique's answer to Hong Kong, a city in name only, a provincial backwater of the first degree. Trying to smooth-talk my way into the government guesthouse, the governor's friend's pad, reserved for the Frelimo (the ruling party) hotshots who fly in from Maputo for the night. And here I am, ensconced in the finest 4^th rate craftsmanship possible; air-con but no working water; leather armchairs and gaudy headboards but windows that dont shut; a bucket bath and a bathroom door that won't close; a manager trying to convert me to his Evangelical church, and a locked door, a bed, a book, and my pen....another day in Africa....

20.June.2011 Pemba, Mozambique's

A soft breeze breaks through the already searing, sweat inducing breeze; it is 730am, but the sun already feels like mid-day here in Northern Mozambique's provincial capital city, the sleepy backwater of Pemba, town on the sea. It took an hour to find a coffee this morning; walking the broken sidewalks, “Buen Dia” as frequently encountered as the holes in the pavement, the smiling, laid back locals exuding a great warmth, unexpected, but much welcomed. A benefit of being in such a backwater town where only one real intersection exists is that everything of note lies within a 50ft radius; the airline office (check), the pharmacy (next), the internet cafe (still closed), the Frelimo office for some free political posters (ditto, come on), and the Pao Shop (bread in Portuguese), where I just scored my first coffee in 2 days, a taste of heaven. Yesterday I was forced to resort to the only source of caffeine available universally in the world, Coke, for my caffeine kick, a barely suitable substitute that left me cranky until bedtime. The little thing, the details...like the guy who installed the window bar right in front of the window hinge, so the window will have no chance of ever closing, despite that tropical heat and the air conditioner. Two days, and then my time here in Mozambique will be up, onto Dar....