The Guardian development blog is running a series of end of year reflections on development, including one by me. Many of the articles are upbeat about progress in developing countries, but pessimistic about the short term economic prospects for the industrialised world and for global cooperation to tackle shared global problems.
The series so far includes:
- Duncan Green from Oxfam, who contrasts progress in developing countries over the last year with the gloom of the ‘formerly rich’ countries of the G-8.
- Calestous Juma from Harvard, who identifies regional integration and better links with the diaspora as key drivers of Africa’s growth.
- Shanta Devarajan from the World Bank, who is cautiously optimistic, especially in the light of increased demand by Africans for their governments to be accountable.
- Linda Raftree from Plan, who also emphasizes progress towards more inclusive and open societies.
- Kevin Watkins from Brookings and UNESCO, calling for “a properly financed global fund for education like those that have delivered such striking results in the health sector“.
- Jonathan Glennie from ODI and the Guardian, who is pessimistic about the prospects for international cooperation in the face of rising protectionism and nationalism as a result of poor economic prospects in the US and Europe.
- and my contribution, reproduced below, which gives a positive account of progress in many countries in Africa over the past year, and emphasizes the importance for developing countries of better global decision-making.
Bart (eating injera and wot): “I wish I lived in Ethiopia”. Lisa: “Exotic. Vegetarian. I can mention it in a college essay. Mom: this is amazing!”.
Suppose you had $1 million to spend on tackling climate change. How would you spend it to get the best bang for your million bucks?
Would you spend it on stopping the slash-and-burn of forests? Perhaps on switching to nuclear energy? More energy-efficient buildings? Building cleaner power stations?
According to a recent paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, climate change experts at the Center for Global Development, the answer is (drum roll): you would do much, much better to spend your money on a combination of family planning and girls’ education in developing countries.
This table, based on data in their paper, shows how many tonnes of CO2 would be abated for your $1m:
| Intervention | Tonnes of CO2 saved |
| Family planning & girls’ education combined | 250,000 |
| Family planning alone | 222,222 |
| Girls education alone | 100,000 |
| Reduce slash and burn of forests | 66,667 |
| Pasture management | 50,000 |
| Geothermal energy | 50,000 |
| Energy efficient buildings | 50,000 |
| Pastureland afforestation | 40,000 |
| Nuclear energy | 40,000 |
| Reforestation of degraded forests | 40,000 |
| Plug-in hybrid cars | 33,333 |
| Solar | 33,333 |
| Power plant biomass co-firing | 28,571 |
| Carbon Capture and Storage (new) | 28,571 |
| Carbon Capture and Storage (retrofit) | 26,316 |
The logic, of course, is that if there are fewer people on the planet, then we will generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Population policies are important because there are many people in developing countries who want smaller families, but don’t have access to the family planning services they need to achieve this. Education is important because educated girls want (and are more able to insist on) smaller families. That’s why these interventions are important and cost effective, both individually and especially when done together.
Win – win
This approach is particularly attractive because, in addition to helping to slow global warming, there are other, very significant benefits for the citizens of developing countries of access to family planning and to education for girls.
The other day I reported here that if donors invested about $180 million a year to provide modern contraception to every Ethiopian woman who wants it, this could set off a virtuous circle of rising income per capita, lower desired family size, greater use of contraception, lower numbers of children, and so rising income per capita. My back of an envelope calculation found that a decade of access to modern family planning would have roughly the same effect on incomes in Ethiopia as the entire international aid programme in Ethiopia does today.
As well as environmental and economic benefits, there are important social and health benefits for women and their families, which strengthen the case for these investments over and above the cost-effectiveness figures shown above.
Making choices
Of course in an ideal world we would do all of these things. But although it is inconvenient to acknowledge it when you are busy trying to save the world, resources for averting climate change are limited. We should make informed choices to reduce carbon emissions in the most cost-effective and sustainable way we can with the resources available, to secure the biggest and broadest benefits. These figures from the Center for Global Development imply that investment in family planning and girls’ education would be a far better investment than the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), which aims to spend $30 billion a year on incentives for developing countries to reduce deforestation and forest degradation.
We would get three or four times as much bang for our buck – in terms of climate change benefits – from population policies and girls’ education as we would from even the most cost-effective investments in forestry (stopping slash-and-burn), and in addition we’d get the broader economic and social benefits for the people of developing countries.
So why isn’t this, in fact, where we are spending the climate change money? Something to do with the power of industry in the environmental lobby? (Update: See Eliot’s comment below)
(The figures in the table above are calculated from Table 2 and and Table 5 of The Economics of Population Policy for Carbon Emissions Reduction in Developing Countries, David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, Center for Global Development Working Paper 229)
It has entered our collective consciousness that a large part – perhaps as much as 95 per cent – of the aid given to Ethiopia during the 1980s famine was diverted for military use. This misapprehension was caused by a misleading programme on 4th March, compounded by the BBC’s publicity for the programme on television and radio and online.
As Mark Twain remarked, “a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on”.
Today the BBC has apologised. The apology is abject, and rightly so:
… the programme gave the impression that large amounts of Band Aid and live Aid money had been diverted. The BBC wishes to apologise unreservedly to the Band Aid Trust for this misleading and unfair impression. The BBC also wishes to apologise unreservedly to the Band Aid Trust for a number of reports on television, radio and online which went further than the programme itself in stating that millions of pounds raised by Band Aid and Live Aid had been diverted to buy arms. The BBC had no evidence for these statements, and they shouldn’t have been broadcast. [my emphasis]
On the World Service and BBC Radio 4 this morning the director of the BBC World Service, Peter Horrocks, made matters worse by trying to limit the scope of the BBC’s apology. The BBC “had no evidence” that money from Band Aid had been diverted, he said, and he apologised for the fact that the report implied otherwise, but he said that the BBC stands by the rest of the report. Yet the impression that the programme gave – that a substantial part of the aid given to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted to rebels – is false.
It isn’t just Band Aid to whom the BBC owes an apology, but to the British Government, other donors, a vast number of charities, and the public who gave so generously. There is no evidence that any of the aid effort in the government-held areas of Ethiopia – the vast majority of the aid to Ethiopia – was diverted. The BBC programme was about a completely distinct, and very much smaller, relief effort in rebel-held areas. Either deliberately or accidentally the BBC sexed up their report in a way that smeared an extremely successful effort to save lives and an operation of which those involved are rightly proud.
This was, I suspect, a cock-up rather than a conspiracy. The BBC took a dull, already well-known story about a small, distinct aid programme in Eritrea and Tigray, and sexed it up into something more interesting, but completely false, about aid to Ethiopia as a whole. It is understandable that BBC is trying to limit the damage today by apologising only to the Band Aid Trust – to whom they have to apologise as it was they who made the complaint – but the BBC should now accept that the entire report was misleading.
There was a memorial service this morning for Sylvia Pankhurst at the Holy Trinity cathedral (or Haile Selassie cathedral) in Addis Ababa, presided over by the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Sylvia Pankhurst's grave at Haile Selassie Cathedral in Addis Ababa
The Pankhurst name is familiar in Britain because of leading role of the family in the suffragette movement which campaigned for women to the United Kingdom. Along with her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst worked before the first world war as a full time campaigner for votes for women.
Sylvia Pankhurst’s connection with Ethiopia began when she campaigned against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. She went to Geneva to appeal – in vain – for the League of Nations to take action against an act of agression. She wrote numerous letters both to the Government and to the newspapers to draw attention to the plight of Abyssinia under Italian rule. (The Daily Mail, of course, was an enthusiastic supporter of the fascist occupation.)
In May 1936 she founded the New Times and Ethiopia News, on the same day that the Italians, under the command of Pietro Badoglio, marched into Addis Ababa. The paper campaigned – also in vain – for the League of Nations to impose economic sanctions on Italy, and for Britain to step up aid to Ethiopia. (Instead , the British and French governments shamefully allowed the Italians to use the Suez canal, which Britain and France controlled, to supply their troops in Ethiopia.) By the end of the year, the weekly paper had a circulation of 40, 000, and she continued to publish it for 20 years.
The crowd for the Sylvia Pankhurst memorial service
In 1956, Sylvia Pankhurst moved to Addis Ababa at Haile Selassie’s invitation, where at the age of 74 she founded a monthly journal, Ethiopia Observer, for which she travelled around the country reporting on many different aspects of Ethiopia life. She died four years later, in September 1960, and was given a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her ‘an honorary Ethiopian’. She is the only foreigner buried in the space at the front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in the area reserved for patriots of the Italian war.
Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia’s son, moved to Ethiopia with her in 1956 and lives here still. He is a very well known historian specialising in the history of Ethiopia.
Priests at the service for Sylvia Pankhurst
Richard Pankhurst wrote a tribute to his mother, which was read out on his behalf this morning, by his wife Rita Pankhurst, herself a notable academic and campaigner. (I didn’t gather why Richard was not able to deliver this himself.) Alula Pankhurst, Sylvia’s grandson, a social anthropologist who lives in Ethiopia, made a speech about her in Amharic.
As you’ll see from the photos, there was a large crowd at the memorial service. As well as the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, there were a substantial number of clergy, Ethiopian and foreign dignitaries, and large numbers of ordinary Ethiopians there to pay their respects to the British woman who had done so much to stand up for the freedom of their country.
Here are some photos taken as we travelled around Ethiopia last week.
Social media
I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this:
New aidinfo website
In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.)
The internet in Ethiopia
If you live in Ethiopia, you’ll have noticed that the internet got a lot faster from the second week of July this year. I wondered at first if this was for the same reason that the Addis roads are relatively clear of white 4x4s at this time of year: all the ferenjis go on an extended holiday to avoid the rainy season. But I now know that there is a better, and more long-lasting reason: there is now a fibre-optic cable to Djibouti, connecting Ethiopia to the Seacom submarine fibre optic cable for the internet. This has completely transformed internet speeds in Ethiopia (I can now stream BBC Radio 4 on our home broadband connection).
Shared items
If you read things on the internet via an RSS feed reader (if you don’t, see here for an explanation of what you are missing) then you may be interested to know about shared items feeds. These are RSS feeds containing items that someone has tagged as interesting (that is, not articles that the person has written, but articles that they are recommending).
My shared items feed is here. Chris Blattman’s shared items feed is here.
Guardian Development Pages
Let me be the thousand and first person to point you towards the new development section of the Guardian online. I admire the Guardian for putting so much effort into this, and giving it so much prominence. But so far it feels a lot like white middle class people, mainly men, talking about development. I’d like to hear more from the citizens of developing countries.
This week I attended the inauguration of a new Marie Stopes family planning clinic in Woldia in northern Ethiopia. Together with yesterdays announcement by the UN of a new “Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health”, Every Woman, Every Child, this has led me to reflect on the importance of family planning and maternal health in Ethiopia and in other developing countries. (Disclosure: my partner works for Marie Stopes International.)
The inauguration of MSI Ethiopia's Woldia clinic
Access to family planning and safe abortion is an important challenge in Ethiopia. With better primary health care and childhood immunization, infant mortality is falling, so families increasingly want to limit the number of children they have. The shift to smaller family sizes is a hugely important driver of development, known as the demographic transition. When a family has two or three children, all of whom are likely to survive, they are able to invest in the children’s nutrition, health and education, in a way that is impossible for most families with nine or ten children. This investment in each person then leads to higher incomes and better standards of living.
The desire to have smaller families is driven by a combination of rising incomes, improved life expectancy, lower infant mortality, better education and increased savings, as well as changing cultural and social norms. It is not clear whether it is possible to influence from the outside the rising demand for smaller families, and I personally have reservations about whether we should attempt to do so. But in Ethiopia, people want smaller families yet cannot access the services they need to achieve this.
Today Ethiopia and Germany have roughly the same number of people (around 82 million). But unless something changes, by 2050 Ethiopia is projected to more than double its population to 174 million, while over the same period Germany’s population is likely to decline to 72 million. The cause is simple: Ethiopia’s total fertility rate of 5.4 is four times greater than Germany’s rate of 1.3.
According to the Guttmacher Institute Ethiopia’s average family size is slowly declining, from 6.4 children per woman in 1990, to 5.9 in 2000, to 5.4 in 2005. Yet this fertility rate is still much higher than the average of four children per woman that people actually want to have. Many Ethiopian families want to reduce the number of children they have, but do not have access to the basic family planning services they need to do so. The study finds that 68% of sexually active women in Ethiopia have unmet need for contraception.
Hiwot Melk Tesdik, the new lab technician at Marie Stopes in Woldia
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that would it cost about $180 million a year to provide modern contraception to every Ethiopian woman who wants it (that’s the all in cost, including supplies, logistics, systems, and training). They estimate that there would be direct savings to the health service as a consequence of reduced pregnancies and unsafe abortions which would more than cover the costs.
And the results would be striking. If every woman who wanted to use family planning had access to modern contraception, each year in Ethiopia there would be 1 million fewer unwanted pregnancies, 340 thousand fewer abortions (a reduction of more than 80%), 130,000 fewer infant deaths and 6,500 fewer women dying in childbirth.
These benefits for individuals and families are compelling enough. But there would also be substantial benefits for the economy as a whole. As a rule of thumb a reduction in fertility of one child per family increases annual per capita GDP growth by a quarter of a per cent a year. Hence if Ethiopian women could achieve the reduction in family size they currently want, from 5.4 to 4.0, this would increase growth of GDP per capita by approximately 0.35% a year. Over a decade of sustained access to contraception, the effect would be higher incomes worth approximately the same as a 60% increase in today’s level of foreign aid. And because population growth would be slower, it would achieve the rare double benefit of increasing standards of living while reducing the pressure on natural resources and the environment.
The economic effect of access to family planning could be even greater because it enables a virtuous circle which plays an important part in the development process. As incomes rise, and education and health improve, families tend to want fewer children. For example, in Ethiopia over the next decade incomes per head may rise by more than 50%, which is likely to lead to a further fall in the number of children that Ethiopians want to have. But to meet this desire for smaller families, people need access to family planning. By setting off a virtuous circle of rising income per capita, lower desired family size, greater use of contraception, lower numbers of children, and so rising income per capita, a decade of access to modern family planning could have roughly the same effect on incomes in Ethiopia as the entire international aid programme does today.
As well as family planning, Marie Stopes also provides access to safe abortions under the provisions of the Ethiopian law. Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of maternal deaths in the world and about a third of these deaths are the result of an unsafe, back-street abortions. This means that about twenty Ethiopian women will die in agony today as a result of lack of access to a safe abortion; and twenty more will die tomorrow, and every day until women have the services they need. Despite being a very religious society, there is almost no political or opposition to abortion here, perhaps because almost everybody has had a family member, or knows somebody close to them, who has died of an unsafe abortion.
Some aid agencies who profess to care about reducing maternal mortality remain studiously silent about this avoidable slaughter. It is alarming that in yesterday’s UN strategy, Every Woman, Every Child, abortion is mentioned by none of the donors, NGOs or business organisations, and among developing countries only by Cambodia and Zambia. If we don’t provide access to safe abortions, we cannot credibly say we are making a commitment to “every woman, every child”. To its credit, the new UK government has said that it will focus on family planning and reducing maternal deaths, and it has launched a public consultation about how to achieve its goal of doubling the number of maternal and infant lives saved. And it is heartening to see that they explicitly talksabout the need to address unsafe abortion as part of this strategy.
Dancers at the inauguration of a new Marie Stopes clinic in Woldia
The manager of the Marie Stopes clinic in Dessie told me some distressing stories about the women that go to the Dessie clinic for an abortion. Some of the most difficult cases are women working as maids in other people’s houses, who have been raped by their employer. By the time they have saved up enough to afford an abortion, it is often too late in their pregnancy.
Which brings us back to opening this week of the new Marie Stopes clinic in Woldia. This hillside market town expanded rapidly in the 1980s after the completion of the “China Road” west to Lalibela and Bahir Dar, which meets the road between Dessie and Korem at Woldia. (This is a useful reminder that Chinese involvement in infrastructure in Africa is not an entirely new phenomenon). Woldia is still growing rapidly, and today resembles a huge construction site. It is a key transport junction and truck stop, and there is a lot of demand for sexual and reproductive health services. Woldia has a hospital and a health centre, but until this week many women had to go to Dessie (about 3 hours by road) to get access to family planning and safe abortions.
Marie Stopes works closly with the government, complementing the government’s own provision of health services (as it does in the UK, where Marie Stopes provides about a third of the abortions performed on the National Health Service.) Many of the town’s key government officials came for the opening of the new clinic, and the ribbon was cut by Ato Shemeles Belachew, the administrator of North Wollo Zone, a region of 1.6 million people.
It is trite to say that the new Marie Stopes clinic in Woldia will help women more directly than a UN Global Strategy. If the strategy helps bring more attention to the neglected issues of the health of women and children, it may help to create the conditions in which organisations like Marie Stopes can get government support and funding to continue to expand their services. These high level international agreements can, in principle, play a useful role, by drawing attention to key issues. This is especially true of issues, like family planning and women’s health, which tend to be ignored by male-dominated political discourse.
Ato Shemeles Belachew, Administrator of North Wollo Zone cuts the ribbon on the new Marie Stopes Clinic in Woldia
Though it calls itself a global strategy, yesterday’s UN press release Every Woman Every Child does not constitute a global strategy. It is a list of activities by a good number of developing countries, donors, NGOs and businesses. That is not meant as a criticism: unlike other issues which are genuinely global (like climate change or tax cooperation), access to family planning is an issue that will have to be sorted out country by country, so a global strategy is unlikely to be either helpful or necessary.
Many NGOs are obsessed with input commitments and whether this is “new money” – if one were uncharitable one might think that this is because they expect some of the money might flow through their own organisation. Patrick Watt from Save the Children UK was on the BBC World Service this morning saying that they would be looking carefully at the commitments to see what is new. A press release from Oxfam calls for donors to “put their money where their mouth is” and provide “answers on where this new money will come from.” None of this is the point. A lot of what is in the paper is evidently a restatement of existing commitments, both by donors and by developing countries. Perhaps in the course of compiling the list there has been some arm-twisting to get some countries to beef up their existing plans, and to the extent that this arm-twisting was successful, more money will be allocated to maternal and child health. In almost all cases this will have been diverted from elsewhere in that country’s aid budget: whether or not that’s a good thing depends on which other parts of the aid budgets will get less money as a result.
What matters about the UN announcement is not the inputs, but that it draws attention to the importance of doing more to improve the health of women and children, including family planning, for the well-being of families in developing countries and for economic development. Because the main value of the UN announcement is the signal it sends, rather than the inputs it commits, it is hugely depressing and potentially rather damaging that it contributes to the conspiracy of silence on the need for access to safe abortion.
Long story short: it is great that there is renewed interest in the health of women and children. Family planning not only improves the lives of individual families, it has the potential to enable a country to move onto a virtuous circle of development and demographic change. The UN strategy isn’t really a strategy, which is fine; and it is important not for new input pledges but because it highlights the importance of the health of women and children. Because it is the signal that matters, it is depressing that the strategy does not talk about the need to end unsafe abortion. And I’m insanely proud of what my partner does to make the world a better place.
(My partner works for Marie Stopes International which provides family planning and sexual health services in over forty countries around the world.)
Will Ross has a nice piece on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning in which he goes to Lalibela, a small, quite remote, mountain-top town in Northern Ethiopia, and interviews the kids there about the World Cup. They know all about the players and are so excited about the World Cup.
The developing world may seem far away (I’m in a very modern hotel in Madrid at the moment) so I was glad to be reminded that people all over the world have much more in common than our differences – we all share very similar worries, loves, interests and excitement.
People sometimes ask me to write more about political situation in Ethiopia (eg in a comment yesterday on my website).
This has caused me to consider why I don’t write much about Ethiopian politics. I decided that there are two reasons, which shed a little light on my attitude to our relationship with developing countries, so I thought I would share my thinking here.
First, why would anyone be interested in my opinions about Ethiopian politics?
Suppose a recent immigrant to your country, who barely spoke your language, had visited only some of your towns, and knew well only a few of your fellow citizens, were to position himself as an expert in your political system. How much notice would you take?
Why do you want your analysis of Ethiopian politics to be intermediated by a European? Isn’t that a little bit, well, racist?
Ethiopians have a sophisticated political culture. They are justly proud of their long and deep social and religious traditions. Here in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia gather in coffee shops or bars and talk endlessly about politics, culture and society. They consume a vast array of newspapers, some of which are openly critical of the government, with their machiatos. There is a lively debate online, both among resident Ethiopians and the diaspora.
The discourse among “ordinary” Ethiopians about politics, history, and human rights is far more sophisticated and well-informed than you would hear in a London pub about British politics. (With the possible exception of the Red Lion on Whitehall …)
I first came to Ethiopia 28 years ago (extraordinary as that seems) and I have seen many changes in this country, almost all for the better, some of which I try to chronicle here. But my Amharic is limited – certainly not good enough to have a conversation about political rights or ethnic diversity. I have good Ethiopian friends, but I don’t think their views are representative of anything other than a small urban elite.
If people were really interested in Ethiopian politics, they could easily find out more from the real experts by listening to Ethiopians themselves. There is a huge range of opinion, grounded in a strong sense of history and a much more profound understand the nuances and the diversity in this enormous country.
People who want to know what western observers think are not giving enough weight to the views of Ethiopians themselves. I think that is unconscious racism. Just because I’m a white guy with a laptop should not privilege my opinion over that of Ethiopians themselves.
So the first reason I don’t write about Ethiopian politics is that Ethiopians can, and do, speak for themselves, and with much more knowledge, and much more at stake, than me. They don’t need me to act as an intermediary.
You are probably thinking: since when did not knowing anything about a subject prevent this guy from expressing an opinion about it? That can’t be what holds him back.
There is a second reason I don’t write much about Ethiopian politics. I want to focus mainly on holding my own government and society to account for our impact on the world.
Our choices make a huge difference to the lives of people in developing countries. Our policies on trade and corruption affect their economic development; our approach to financial markets and the environment spill over into the lives of people we have never met. If we choose to use it, we have the power to lift people out of poverty by giving more aid, and managing it better.
These issues interest me most because they are properly mine to help fix. As a citizen of Europe, it is my responsibility to demand that we open our markets to trade from developing countries; that we stop our firms paying bribes and selling weapons to corrupt governments; that we share our technologies; that we stop polluting the planet and compensate the world’s poor for the damage we have already done to their livelihoods; and that we restore stability to financial markets. It is my responsibility to argue that we should increase our aid programme from tiny levels today and that we spend that money better.
What the Ethiopian government does is hugely important for the future of Ethiopia. Of course I have opinions about the choices they are making. But I do not want to spend my time complaining about someone else’s government when there is so much to fix about my own. It is too tempting to blame the victims, instead of getting our own house in order.
So there are two reasons why I don’t talk much about Ethiopian politics. First, I think we should pay more attention to Ethiopians, and not require their politics to be intermediated by privileged but ignorant outsiders. Second, while industrialized countries continue to make choices which help to consign a billion people to deep and grinding poverty, my priority is to try to sort that out.
That said, if anyone wants to buy me a beer here in Addis, I’ll be happy to spend the night shooting the breeze about what is going on in Ethiopia and the wider world. Let’s put the world to rights.
The Donors’ Assistance Group in Ethiopia (the country heads of 26 aid agencies working in Ethiopia) had an awayday yesterday, and I was invited to speak to them about the future of aid effectiveness.
The Deputy Finance Minister addressed the donor heads before me. In a very dignified way, he delivered the blunt message that the donors are not living up to their commitments in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. That was the perfect platform for my presentation which argued that aid effectiveness matters, that there are good reasons why the Paris Declaration is not going to bring about more effective aid, and that the donors in Ethiopia should work differently to improve aid effectiveness.
You can view and listen to my presentation by clicking the image below. This narrated presentation lasts 20 minutes (beware: when you click you’ll start to hear my voice, so don’t do this if you are in a meeting!).
Alternatively you can download the presentation as a pdf here.
The donors seemed to find the ideas in the presentation interesting. There was little dispute with the analysis that it is very hard to make progress on the Paris agenda as it is currently conceived, though some scepticism that it would be possible, in practice, to change the incentives enough to change behaviour. There was also some instinct to blame the Ethiopian government for things that don’t work very well. I didn’t really get the sense that they had taken to heart just how bad things are at the moment.
Please let me know in the comments what you think. Is Paris going to work?
In among the many problems caused by the decision not to fly in the ash-cloud, spare a thought for several very poor African countries who earn important foreign exchange by selling fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers to European markets and depend on air cargo to do so.
This evening here in Addis Ababa I bumped into the owner of one of the big flower-exporting businesses. He was looking pensive. Unseasonal rain had damaged part of his crop, and now he is unable to get his roses into European markets. A whole container had had to be destroyed because there was nowhere for them to go. On the back of an envelope, he calculated that the blockage of rose exports is costing Ethiopia about €200k a day. This may not sound very much but it is a big chunk of the export earnings of a poor nation.
The satirical aid blog (“Hand Relief International“) is clearly written by someone who knows the aid system pretty well. Their description of aid workers at the Addis Ababa Sheraton is pretty much spot on:
One of the meetings I attended last week was in Addis Ababa where my stay in the dignified Sheraton Hotel was slightly spoiled by the vista behind the reassuring fence, where people in rags seemed in general to be enjoying slightly less comfort … Thankfully, the local draught did not affect the water pressure at the fountain systems around the hotel where we took the edge off with regular dips in the heated pool, usually before high tea. The theme of the meeting was “Draught and Famine – HRI opportunities for 2010” but it was naturally also a welcome occasion to catch up with my trusty colleagues as well as with other dignified HRI consultants, who always stay at the Sheraton (the Hilton nearby has lost much of its dignified air and remains unreasonably crowded).
That really is a photograph from the window of the Addis Sheraton too:
(Hat tip: Bill Easterly)
I was very upset to hear of the loss of an Ethiopian Airlines plane from Lebanon to Addis Ababa this morning.
Many Ethiopian and Lebanese families will be grieving.
Ethiopian Airlines has an outstanding safety record. The staff are professional, courteous and efficient. I will be flying from the UK to Addis on Friday on Ethiopian Airlines and, despite today’s tragedy, I am looking forward to it.
My article on OpenDemocracy today discusses whether aid works.
Some supporters of aid have made what seem to me to be extravagant claims that aid should aim to bring about economic and social transformation of developing countries, so accelerating economic growth and industrialisation. But this is a very high bar to set. Aid may well help to increase the probability of economic take-off but there are lots of other conditions that need to be in place for the transition to an industrialised market economy to happen, and aid is not a sufficient condition (nor, probably, a necessary condition) for it to occur. Even if aid does play an important contributory role, it would be statistically very hard to demonstrate a link between aid and economic growth.
Although the effect of aid on economic growth is uncertain, there can be no doubt that aid makes a huge difference to people’s lives. Aid provides food, health care, education, clean water, financial services, and modest incomes which transform the lives of the people who receive them. You can see this both in individual families – like the girl I met in northern Amhara, pictured here, who has health care and education because of aid – and in the overall statistics, which show that there has been a vast improvement in the quality of life on almost every measure other than income.
Aid may not always transform societies, but it does enable people to live much better lives while those transformations are taking place. And that represents a huge increase in the sum of human welfare.
I believe aid could and should work much better. Living in a developing country, I see all kinds of waste and inefficiency in the aid system that makes me angry. But it makes me angry because I also see how much difference aid makes when it is used well. I would like to see aid becoming much more transparent and accountable, so that it becomes subject to evolutionary pressures to improve.
This means, by the way, that I do not subscribe to the view that the aid system should be regarded as temporary. In the UK we hope that people will be on unemployment benefit temporarily before they are able to get back to work, but we don’t expect the system as a whole to come to an end. So I think that we should expect that at least for our lifetimes, it will be right and necessary that we transfer income from the richest people in the world to the poorest people in the world. I do not know which countries will be rich, on average, in fifty years time, and which will be poor; but I expect that the world will still need, and I hope it will still have, a permanent system to help those temporarily in need wherever they happen to be.
Aid would work better in future if we accept that we will need a permanent system to provide temporary help to those who need it, and set about designing a better system to do that.
Related reading:
- Phil Vernon at openDemocracy (to which my article was a reply)
- Roger Riddell at openDemocracy
- Ranil at AidThoughts
- Chris Blattman – Could Aid Slow Growth
The Independent reports Bob Geldof’s recent trip to Ethiopia:
Though 35 per cent of Ethiopian children are malnourished, and 40 per cent are stunted when they start school, the number who die below the age of 5 is down 40 per cent on what it was 15 years ago. A shocking 381,000 children died from preventable causes last year but there is clear progress. Cases of malaria have been reduced by two-third since 2006, with the number of deaths halved thanks to the government spraying a million houses and the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation distributing a massive 20 million bednets.“Who says aid doesn’t work,” spluttered Geldof as he leaves the clinic.
Over the weekend we were trekking in the north of Ethiopia. The fields were full of wheat and barley, looking (to my inexpert eye) about 3 weeks from harvest (see the picture, right, taken on 29th November). The farmers all said they were looking forward to a good harvest this year.
Then last night, we woke up to torrential rain. I gather it was raining in Addis Ababa too. It doesn’t normally rain at this time of year in Ethiopia. If this continues for another day or two, the crop will be ruined.
The rain today is an unwelcome reminder of how precarious is the livelihoods of millions of people who are dependent on rain coming at the right time (and not at the wrong time). It can turn a good harvest into a bad one, or into no harvest at all. Affected families may be forced to sell their meagre assets, pushing not only them but their children into another generation of chronic poverty.
Our thoughts today are with the millions of farmers of Ethiopia and their families.
UPDATE: (2nd December) – It has been cloudy, but not raining, here in Addis. Fingers crossed.
I was fascinated to read remarks by the President of Israel, Shimon Peres on the efficiency of milk production in Ethiopia:
In Israel, we have 100,000 cows that produce the same amount of milk as the 4 million cows in Ethiopia. I’m urging them to work together to increase yields.
It is an interesting observation about how much further there is to go to make agriculture more productive in Ethiopia.
Reading the article as someone who occasionally earns a living by facilitating workshops I wonder how President Peres is encouraging the cows to work together?
Thirty four thousand runners gathered today in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, for Africa’s biggest road race, the Great Ethiopian Run.
Koreni Jelila and Tilahun Regassa won the women’s and men’s races respectively, both with new course records.
The world record holders for the marathon, Paula Radcliffe and Haile Gebreselassie started the race and gave the awards. (For Ethiopians, that’s like saying that David Beckham was there with Pele).
Thirty four thousand Ethiopians enjoyed their national sport, running, jogging and walking the 10km route through the nation’s capital. Bands played, and fire hoses provided welcome relief from the warm sun.
Several hundred foreign runners came especially for the event, many of them raising thousands of dollars for Ethiopian charities and causes. There were more than 70 runners from Ireland, raising money for Orbis, and runners from Leipzig (which is twinned with Addis Ababa) and from our own Serpentine Running Club in London, raising money for the prevention and treatment of Mossy Foot.
And G and I managed to get our photo taken with Haile Gebreselassie.
G and I went to Shashemane and Awassa this weekend.
I wanted to see how things are looking in the (usually quite fertile) south towards the end of the growing season. As you can see from this photo (right) taken on our morning run, things seemed pretty green. The anecdotal view from locals was that this year will be pretty much like last year: not great, but not catastrophic either, provided the government systems such as the safety net programme continue to operate.
People say that the situation further east, over in Somali region, is more worrying. If a problem does unfold there, it could be exacerbated by the obstacles to people travelling there and monitoring carefully what is happening.
We stayed in a guest lodge run by French Rastafarians, in Shashemane. It felt a bit basic because the water was not working and the electricity was at very low power, but it was very relaxing and friendly. But if you want something a bit more homely than Wondo Genet or Aregash Lodge, this is a good resting point.
One other thing. My mobile internet dongle worked fine in both Shashemane and in Awassa. So ETC is rolling out CDMA internet outside Addis.
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