Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Ethiopia’ Category

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.

Read the full article here.

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.

The Ethiopian Government has been running posters in the southern part of Ethiopia to warn farmers about the risk of tsetse fly (which kill cattle and cause sleeping sickness).

To reinforce the message, and to make sure that farmers know exactly what they are looking for, they have been using posters with huge images of the tsetse fly itself.*

This has, however, not had the intended effect.

Two farmers were overheard talking to each other in a local dialect in the south, having come in to town on market day and seeing the new poster:

“Thank God we don’t have huge flies like that here.”

* I don’t have a photo of the actual poster – if anyone does, I’d love to have a copy of it.

Here in Ethiopia, 2001 is drawing to a close.  Tomorrow is the first day of 2002 in the Ethiopian calendar.

It is a time of renewal and celebration here – perhaps more than in European cultures (something like a cross between Christmas and New Year).  The rainy season is coming to an end; the hungry season will soon be behind us.  Today in Addis Ababa people are promenading in their traditional white Ethiopian clothes and shawls. The market outside our house is heaving: goats, chickens, lots of fruit and vegetables all crowded into the muddy space.  (Though because New Year’s Day is a Friday – which is a fasting day for Orthodox Ethiopians – the big feast will be on Saturday).

Many Ethiopians face huge challenges today. There are many families across the country who will not have enough to eat today or tomorrow.  Thanks to the work of the government, supported by foreign donors, about 5 million of the poorest families will get help through the safety net programme; but there are at least as many again who need help.  Ethiopia gets more aid now, but nothing like enough for a country of this size and population.  Aid to Ethiopia is $25 per person per year, compared to over $100 in Zambia.  There is no question that if aid to Ethiopia doubled tomorrow, the government would do an excellent job of using that money to provide food, health, education and infrastructure to its people.

To everyone in this beautiful country, may the coming year bring you joy, may your dreams for you and your children come true.   And may the rest of the world stand in solidarity with you, our brothers and sisters.

Tim Harford has an interesting article in this weekend’s Financial Times about private health and education in developing countries:

Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this newspaper. Would you consider buying private education and private healthcare?

Before you make up your mind, here are a few considerations: government healthcare and primary education are free; the private-sector doctors are ignorant quacks and the teachers are poorly qualified; the private schools are cramped and often illegal. It doesn’t sound like a tough decision. Yet millions of very poor people around the world are taking the private-sector option. And, when you look a little closer at the choice, it’s not so hard to see why.

Now there is a dilemma here.

On the one hand, we know that charging even a very small amount massively reduces the take-up and impact of services such as health and education. (This survey by Holla and Kremer summarises the evidence.)  So charges excludes many people from access, and it seems likely that the poorest and most vulnerable will be excluded most of all.

On the other hand, we know that public services in developing countries are often poorly managed and badly delivered. That’s why, as Tim points out in his FT article, many of the very poorest people choose to go private instead.

Apologies if this is anecdotal, but I see this dilemma in practice every day. My partner works for Marie Stopes International, which operates 21 clinics for women (providing contraception and abortion) here in Ethiopia.  They charge their clients for services – a small amount which is just enough to pay for the cost of running the clinics.   The result is that they are very focused on delivering services that will bring their clients into the clinics every day – that is, services that they actually need, at a price they can afford.  My feeling is that, as a result, they are more focused on their customers than most public services in developing countries, and indeed in some developed countries, whether financed by aid or by taxation.

So how can we disentagle ourselves from the horns of this dilemma?  Here are three thoughts:

• First, we should take seriously Tim’s observation that “a little accountability goes a long way” and think  much harder about how we can make public services more acountable.  You have probably heard about the way more funding reached Ugandan schools as a result of greater transparency (though the details have been disputed (pdf)). The work of my team on aid transparency is a modest contribution to this effort.
   
• Second, we should not be ideological about whether the public or private sector actually provides services, as long as the government takes steps to ensure that there is universal access. For example, governments (with the support of donors) might issue vouchers to the poorest, enabling them to choose for themselves whether to use public or private services.
   
• Third, in the long run this problem will be reduced if and when there is equitably shared economic growth which gives people sufficient incomes for these kinds of choices to be more reasonable.

Scarlett Lion has this list.  Her main advice is to keep it to a minimum.

Here is our list, intended for visitors to Ethiopia.

So apparently zip off safari shorts/trousers make you look stupid. I guess I don’t care – I think they are quite a good way to travel light in a country that is hot during the day but cool at night and there are mosquitoes in the evening.

Kudos to the US Government for giving food aid to Ethiopia. This is good:

USAID has provided an additional 87,910 metric tons of emergency food aid, valued at approximately U.S. $50 million, to the Joint Emergency Operational Plan in response to the Ethiopian Government’s January 2009 appeal. This emergency food aid will provide a full ration to 1.18 million beneficiaries for four months in 72 woredas in the most severely impacted regions – Afar, Amhara, Oromiya, Somali, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples, and Tigray Regions and in Dire Dawa Administrative Council.

That’s good, but it could better.

The US imports food aid to Ethiopia.  It is bought from American farmers and shipped by boat to Djibouti, then brought by road to where it is needed in Ethiopia.  The cost of all this works out at $568 per metric tonne.  Here in Addis Ababa, today’s market price of wheat is $489 per metric tonne.  It is cheaper out of the capital.  So America’s generosity could buy 16% more wheat if it were bought locally.  From that difference alone, another 190,000 people could be given a full ration of food for four months.  Furthermore, buying the food locally would increase the incomes of farmers either in Ethiopia or in neighbouring countries and the improve livelihoods of other parts of the economy (e.g. haulage companies) needed to make the agriculture market work.  Their livelihoods, which are undermined by imported food aid, would be improved if the food were bought locally.  If there is sufficient supply response among local farmers (which there probably would be) so it does not have to be imported, then the generous aid would also provide $50 million of much needed foreign currency for Ethiopia.

This is not possible at the moment because American legislation requires that food aid be bought in the US, that  50 percent of commodities be processed and packed in the US before shipment, and that 75 percent of food aid managed by USAID and 50 percent of the food aid managed by the US Department of Agriculture be transported in “flag-carrying” US-registered vessels. The result is that only 40% of money spent on food aid by the US actually goes towards buying food; the rest goes to US transport companies.

Buying the food locally would be better, but best of all might be something even more radical.  Why not give the money itself to people who are hungry? Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking study of famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, published in 1981, which included analysis of the famine in Wollo, Ethiopia, in 1973, begins with these words:

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

People are usually hungry because they are too poor to buy food. (They are often reduced to this poverty by the failure of their own harvest. But that does not mean that there is not enough food for them.) If we give them money (or vouchers, if we really have to) they can buy food locally. Food growers elsewhere will grow food, and traders will bring it to them. It will be the food they prefer and know how to eat (NB this often means not wheat).  This will not only help to protect people from starving, it will support local and regional food producers, and other local businesses.

US food aid is all in bags labelled “From the American People”.  It is a generous thought, but it might be less misleading if it were labelled “From the American People, mainly to the American People”.

Hurrah!  Google Maps have now got more detailed maps of a number of African countries.

Until the last couple of days, Addis Ababa was just a cross-roads.  Now look at it.  A detailed map at last.

According to White African,

There are now 27 more African countries that now have detailed maps, including:

Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Togo.

BraveNewTraveler describes the six characters you’ll meet at every expat bar.

It’s never hard to find your way there – all you need to do is follow the American music which is old enough to feel stale without being old enough to feel hip and look for a chalkboard sign advertising a European football match.

It is pretty funny (take no notice the censorious commenters who say that it is too cynical). I find it all too easy to recognise (and laugh at) myself:

1. The Overpaid Aid Worker

You can easily pick out this character by the imported beer on his table and the way he litters his speech with acronyms: USAID, NGO, MFI, MPP.

If it’s a weekday night, he might nurse his beer while tapping away on his MacBook, shooting off emails to his friends in D.C., or maybe to the alumni listserve of a bastion of East Coast higher education.

This year he’s empowering women in Latin America, but two years ago he was working on democracy promotion in Bangladesh, and next year it’s off to Thailand to oversee microfinance development.

Is there any world problem this whiz can’t solve on a two-year contract, armed only with his cushy salary, company car, and housing stipend?

Before you get a chance to answer that, though, he will: there’s “real progress” being made at the “grass roots level” with his current initiative. Another European microbrew, please!

Hat tip: @bloodandmilk on Twitter

Our Sunday runs start on Entoto, the mountain to the edge of Addis Ababa.  We start and finish at an altitude of about  3,000m.  Here are some things we’ve seen on our runs in the last two weeks:

• a leopard, crossing the path about 20 metres in front of us
• about 15 hyenas sunning themselves on rocks
• women and girls carrying firewood up the kill
• herds of donkeys, sheep and goats
• the sun

These are not things we used to see much running in Richmond Park.