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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• 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.

To wander (and flinch, and wince, and boggle, and marvel) within its limits is to acquire the quickest and most bracing imaginable appreciation of Africa’s industry, its possibility, its genius for improvisation, its insuperable will, despite everything, to live.

Dead right. The Merkato is said to be Africa’s largest outdoor market; and people here in Addis say you can buy absolutely anything there (the British used to say the same about Harrods).

I’m going to make myself very unpopular with  lots of the ferenj here in Addis Ababa, many of whom make a good living working for NGOs with foreign funding and are up in arms about this. But I see where the Ethiopian Government is coming from, and I don’t think the law is completely unreasonable.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I would not have brought in this law. I think 15 years imprisonment (that was in the draft bill) for breaking this law is draconian. I do not think that government officials should have the right to attend internal meetings of civil society organisations.

But it is not unreasonable for the Ethiopian Government to say that foreign-funded organisations should not be able to use their funding to buy political influence and change in Ethiopia. Foreign donations to political parties are illegal in the UK – that is why there has been such a fuss about the allegations that George Osborne may have solicited donations from Russian oligarchs on a yacht. We are uncomfortable with the idea that very wealthy people should buy political power – that is why we have spending limits and caps on political donations – and in the UK we look rather pityingly at the United States, where funding by rich companies and individuals seems to dominate political life.  Think what this must feel like in a very poor country, where even quite modestly wealthy organisations and individuals overseas have undreamt of wealth by comparison with Ethiopians, and try to use that disparity of wealth to buy change.

So why shouldn’t a very poor country be concerned to avoid having its politics shaped by foreign funding?

There are about 3,800 NGOs here in Addis, with a total budget of $1.5 billion a year. (That is a lot of money in a country in which the annual government budget is about $4 billion a year. The government health budget is less than $300 million a year.) The money going to NGOs could make a huge difference if it were used to improve government services directly, rather that to fund a motley collection of advocacy organisations and fragmented small scale delivery organisations.

It is important to note that the new law does not forbid civil society organisations from being involved in advocacy for human rights. It forbids organisations from being involved in political advocacy if they get more than 10% of their funding from abroad.

So while this law isn’t one that I would have introduced myself, I see where the Government is coming from. It is not completely mad. The hysterical over-reaction from donors, often under political pressure from international NGOs at home, is out of all proportion.

It isn’t great at the best of times.  When it went down during the rainy season I rang technical support and was told that “the firewall has flooded”.  Apparently there is a single computer through which the entire nation’s traffic passes (or, that day, doesn’t pass).  The authorities block some websites (including blogspot.com, nazret.com, and skype.com) though they say they don’t, and they block Skype.  The bandwidth is always limited, but it is also frustrtingly unpredictable. Some days it will be OK, others terrible.  

According to internet world statistics, there are just 300 broadband internet users (as of March 2008) in Ethiopia; and fewer than 300,000 internet subscribers in total.

And now this:

Internet and telephone traffic between the Middle East and Europe will continue to be disrupted until Jan. 4 after a repaired submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea suffered more damage, France Telecom SA said.

We’ve had very limited internet since December 19th, when the three underwater cables linking Egypt to Europe were cut by an ship’s anchor.  Apparently it was working on December 24th and 25th (I was away from Addis) when it was damaged again by an underwater earthquake.  

Let’s hope that things get better from January 4th.

Tom (second from the left) visiting from the UK ran for the first time at altitude (his usual run is along the waterfront in Ayr).

More photos here.

Here’s the elevation graph:

1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by initiating projects which have little chance of success. It’s hard to identify a good project for a small community. Community buy-in is no guarantee of success; possessing deep local knowledge doesn’t make a person omniscient. Projects that have little chance of success include vocational training in sewing and handicrafts, beekeeping, and raising chickens. If you waste a year of the community’s time on a broiler chicken project that never makes a profit, that’s a year of time and effort which could have gone to real income generation or looking after children.

2) You can leave communities convinced that they need outsiders to solve their problems. If you raise $3000 for a backhoe to clear irrigation ditches, then what happens next time the ditches silt up? The farmers’ cooperative will never realize they could have cleared it with hand shovels, or raised the money by charging a membership fee.

3) You can damage beneficial community structures, or solidify harmful structures. Your choice of community intermediary elevates that person or group, by putting them in control (real or perceived control) of valuable assets. If you work with existing power structures, you can support and entrench inequalities, such as sexism or racism, which are already present. If you chose partners who are not part of the current elite, you can destabilize delicate community balances, and erode resilience.

4) You can construct a building and then not provide funds for maintenance or staffing. A school needs a teacher. A clinic needs a doctor or nurse. All buildings need upkeep – painting and repairs at the very least. A building with not funds for maintenance is a drain on community resources in perpetuity, or an eyesore.

Those are all serious risks.  I can think of two more:

5)  You hire good people to deliver the best service you can. But those people would otherwise have been working for government or another local organisation.  The good they could have done in government might far exceed the good they can do in your organisation.  There are donors here in Addis Ababa who pay their drivers more than twice what an experienced doctor will get paid in a government hospital. Where do you think the doctors want to work?  Reckless hiring by donors can create skills shortages in key institutions and drive up wages so that provision of services becomes less affordable.

6)  You establish yourself as an influential player in the sector you work in; you become friendly with Ministers and senior officials; you are invited to key meetings.  This is good: you can help to push things in the right direction. But the people you are influencing should be accountable to their own citizens, not to you.  And there are three more like you, all pushing in slightly different directions, making it very difficult for any government to maintain a common sense of purpose.  And who are you accountable to?  With the aim of doing the right thing, you are undermining the legitimate accountability of the system you are influencing.

These risks apply to official government donors and multilateral organistions as much as they do to NGOs.

Figures from the Department for International Development show that over the past five years the UK has handed £1.6 billion to 15 of the world’s poorest countries. But research from campaigning group Transparency International shows that many of these rank highly in its corruption index of 180 countries.

There are several points to make about this:

1. There is no evidence that aid has been subject to corruption
   Transparency International does not claim (pdf) to have found any evidence of corruption in the use of UK aid. The Daily Telegraph report says that that some countries to which the UK gives budget support score poorly on the TI corruption index. But it does not follow that any of that aid is being corrupted and there is no evidence in the TI report that it is.
2. Budget support is no more likely to be subject to corruption than other forms of aid
   A major, multi-donor review of budget support found

   “Corruption is a serious problem in all the study countries, but the country study teams found no clear evidence that budget support funds were, in practice, more affected by corruption than other forms of aid.

   Indeed, the Conservative Party policy review on Globalisation and Global Poverty notes:

   Many oppose Programme Support, and particularly General Budget Support, because of worries about corruption. However, other modes of delivering aid are also prone to corruption.

   The same TI report hightlights extensive corruption in conflict, reconstruction and post-conflict contexts (which are not typically the places to which the UK gives budget support). The report highlights the risk of corruption in tied aid and the risk of bidder collusion in aid tenders (both of which are reduced by budget support).  In other words, in countries in which corruption is high, all aid will be at risk of corruption.  Moving aid from budget support to other forms of aid does not reduce that risk.

3. Giving budget support enables donors to tackle corruption
   Corruption is very bad for a country, especially for the poor.  If donors are serious about corruption, they should be trying to reduce corruption as a whole, and not just protecting their own money. Experience suggests that when donors bypass a country’s budget, procument and auditing processes they are less likely to take an interest in tackling broader corruption. When they are interested, they have no basis on which to get involved, since none of their money is at stake.  If donors want to help to reduce corruption they have to engage with the country’s processes. Budget support not only forces donors to do so, it turns them into legitimate stakeholders in helping to improve those systems.  This engagement helps address corruption in the whole of the government budget, and not just that part financed by foreign aid.
4. Using other forms of aid is a less effective way to reduce corruption
   Again in the same report, Transparency International say that making aid more accountable to donors is less effective at reducing corruption than steps to increase domestic accountability:

   Upward accountability by recipient countries to donors has demonstrated its serious limitations in terms of relevance as well as in its ability to detect corruption. Rather strengthening the accountability of aid toward intended beneficiaries is the most effective way of limiting abuses.

   In other words, Transparency International itself does not believe that replacing aid that is locally accountable with aid that is accountable to donors is a good way to reduce corruption.

5. Budget support improves local accountability and so tackles the broader problem of corruption and financial management
   The Conservative Party policy review observes:

   “if aid is channelled through the government budget and is accompanied by steps to strengthen public financial management, the handling not only of donor funds but of tax revenues is improved. In addition, Budget and Programme Support make it easier for parliaments, the media and electorates to hold government accountable for how aid money alongside tax revenues are spent.”

   Because budget support provides donors with an opportunity to engage in reform of the public finances as a whole, and because it increases rather than reduces local accountability, it is likely that  budget support will result in less corruption in the long run than alternative forms of aid.

6. There is a cost to switching away from budget support
   Switching aid away from budget support to other forms of aid comes at a cost: on balance it reduces the effectiveness of that aid, so reducing the the overall impact on development; and it may reduce the ability of the country concerned to tackle the very problem of corruption that we profess to be concerned about.  The Conservative Party policy review said that:

When donors create parallel structures to deliver aid they can undermine both government ownership of policy and its ability to deliver (by recruiting scarce talent). So where aid can be effectively delivered through government or departmental budgets that is desirable.

In conclusion: donors are right to be concerned about corruption, but there is no reason to think that corruption is reduced, either in aid or in the country as a whole, if donors switch their aid from budget support to other forms of aid. On the other hand there are costs to doing so – in the form of reduced aid effectiveness, which means more people dying, as well as slower progress towards systems that are more accountable and less susceptible to corruption in the future.

So it does not follow that because some countries perform badly on the TI corruption perceptions index, that it is a bad idea to give those countries aid in the form of budget support.  Perhaps that is why the TI report itself explicitly counsels against that kind of reasoning:

Some governments have sought to use corruption scores to determine which countries receive aid and which do not. TI does not encourage the use of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in this way.

… You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

This is a very acute observation, and it is confirmed by what I see here in Addis every day.

It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development.

There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending.  But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself. 

Akvo is promoting “Really Simple Reporting (RSR)” which is intended to simplify reporting.

The Skoll Foundation is also apparently working on a common reporting format to simplify the paperwork for grantees of US foundations. (I can’t find anything about this project online.)

I think the time has come for all donors – government agencies, international organisations, private foundations, and NGOs – to adopt a common reporting format for their grantees, so that each organisation can provide information about finances and performance in a single report – possibly provided online – on which all their funders can rely. 

The people whose money we are spending – taxpayers and individual givers – don’t want to pay people to fill in forms; and the people who work in development don’t want to do it either.  A common reporting format would also make the information more comparable and useful.

The headline – “A heart rending dispatch from Ethiopia” – seemed promising.  Could it be that the Daily Mail is taking an interest in the challenges being faced by 80 million people here in Ethiopia?   Heaven knows, it would be about time.  About 5 million people here need emergency assistance, and about 75,000 children are suffering with severe acute malnutrition.  Approximately 73% of the female population undergoes female genital mutilation. Only 22% of the population has access to an improved water supply, and only 13% of the population has access to adequate sanitation services (less in rural areas).  Only 46% of girls in Ethiopia go to primary school, and fewer than 25% go to secondary school (these numbers are a huge improvement on the figures only a few years ago).

And the situation today is dire. Less than a year ago, a quintal of teff (a type of grain from which people make injera, a staple food) cost about 350 birr; today it has spiralled to to over 1,100 birr for the same amount, which is about what you need to feed a family for a month.

But none of that worries Liz Jones of the Daily Mail:

What I will remember most about my trip to Ethiopia is the sight of the grain market, held just outside the small town of Hossana – human population 70,000; equine population 91,040.  Mules – half donkey, half horse – are used for the terrible task of carrying grain because they are bigger and stronger than donkeys.

She is in a country in which children are dying of malnutrition and what she will remember most is the mules?

I’ve been vegetarian since I was a teenager,  so I count myself as someone who takes the rights of animals seriously, but I cannot begin to understand how Ms Jones can think that, of all the insults to dignity and humanity facing this country, the plight of donkeys could feature anywhere in the top ten.  But Ms Jones ranks donkeys right up there with Ethiopian children:

I tried to imagine how I would treat a donkey if I had seven mouths to feed, and I hope I would still have a vestige of compassion. But if my children were starving, I cannot be sure that that would be the case. No one can.

I don’t have children or a mule, but I am pretty sure that if I did, I’d put my children first. And I’d be keen to prosecute anyone who took a different view.

Almost every day here, I see women hauling huge loads of firewood on their backs from the outskirts of the city, to bring fuel for their family. A few are lucky enough to have a donkey to bear the load.  Ms Jones of the Daily Mail does not approve:

The owner explains that she has been walking with her donkey since 7am; it is nearly 5pm, and the sun is still beating down relentlessly. I ask why she has not taken the load from her donkey’s back, and she replies that she would not have the strength to lift the sacks back on to her donkey again.  Can she not let the donkey rest? The woman shakes her head. She has to hurry, to be home before 6.30pm, so that she can take part in a religious feast.

Ms Jones suggests you might want to give money to a charity to help the mules (and, almost unbelievably, to “educate owners in better animal care,
preventing problems from reoccurring”).

Alternatively, you might want to give money to a charity to help the people. You can donate to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) here, or Save the Children here.

In one of DFID’s splendid new blogs, Howard Taylor, Head of DFID Ethiopia , emphasizes the need for greater agricultural production:

In the long-term, development assistance needs to prioritise agricultural growth and productivty, if we’re to make sure that in years to come everyone, no matter where they live, has enough to eat. In a nutshell, that’s what World Food Day is all about.

Today is a good day to remember Amartya Sen’s book Poverty and Famines, which was written partly about the the Ethiopian famine of 1972-74, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.  It begins with this profound observation:

Starvation is characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes.

This is a thought of enormous importance.  For most of the 967 million people who are hungry, the problem is NOT that there is not enough food, it is that they are too poor to buy it.

We should be cautious about pursuing a policy focused on increasing food production.  Our goal should be to increase the incomes and wealth of those who currently live in hunger and other forms of extreme poverty, so that they can exercise entitlement to the food and other things they need.  Increasing agricultural productivity is one way to improve the incomes of the rural poor, but it is not necessarily the best way, and so it may not be the way of reducing hunger.

Update: more here.

We ran ten miles this morning at the top of Entoto with a great group of runners.  The Entoto national park is a beautiful place to run, with views across Addis Ababa.

As the elevation chart below shows (full size), it is at over 10,000 feet, so you feel the lack of oxygen.

All the photos from this morning are here, or as a slideshow. If you have been running somewhere more beautiful this morning, I’d like to hear about it.

Yesterday was New Year’s Day here in Ethiopia – it was the first day of 2001 on the Ethiopian Calendar. Grethe and I celebrated by going for a run in the hills overlooking the city.

I have to say it isn’t easy to run a kilometre anyway – it is a lung-busting, all out effort – but it is harder still with the heat and pollution of the Addis ring road.

And this is what power-athletes have for breakfast.

The golden age of Ethiopian music ran from 1969 to 1978. In the last years of Haile Selassie’s reign, censorship relaxed sufficiently for an outpouring of musical creativity. Musicians thronged the nightclubs of Addis Ababa and about 500 singles and 30 albums were recorded in that period. …

Ethiopian musicians, who had remained aloof from musical developments in the rest of Africa, mixed these influences from American R&B with their own music into something distinctive and strange. At the time, it was denounced. “When you read the press of the time”, says Falceto, “there are polemics against abandoning the culture and so on.” …

Many of the musicians whose 1970s heydays are captured on the Ethiopiques series are still working, mostly playing for the vast Ethiopian diaspora, more than 1m-strong in the US alone. Ahmed and the influential arranger and keyboard player Mulatu Astatké both live there, working largely with American bands. At the Barbican, they will be joined by Alèmayèhu Eshèté, who channels the spirit of James Brown, and by the saxophonist Gétachèw Mèkurya. Instrumental support will come from the Either/Orchestra, a Boston-based group.

(Hat tip to my Mum for spotting the article and sending me the link.)

Their food is provided by Our Father’s Kitchen, set up a year ago by Yasser and Manal Bagersh who own a couple of restaurants here in Addis. Their kitchens provide food every day for these children, most of whom are living with HIV.

It costs 217.20 birr (about $20) a month to feed a child every day. A decent meal is an essential part of staying healthy for a child living with AIDS – the drugs make you sick on an empty stomach – and the simple provision of this meal enables these children to go to school. With this simple investment, Yasser and Manal are transforming the lives of these children.

They want to expand the programme and they are launching a pledge campaign. Yasser is setting up a website for people to donate; until then you can pick up a sponsorship form at The Lime Tree Cafe or email ourfatherskitchen@yahoo.com.

First, eat or drink something that does not completely agree with you, in a tropical country like Ethiopia.

Then spend three days as fluids gush from every orifice, like a three-cornered fountain in a town square.  The fever flushes and shivers last only a day, and the headaches only for two.

(It seems to defy the laws of physics that you can lose more than your own body-weight in water, but I never understood the thing about which way water swirls down a plughole at the Equator either.)

By the third day, your throat may be sore from the acidic vomit, and you may not have regained your appetite, but you’ll be a lot lighter than you were on Thursday afternoon.

We are still in a hotel, so I don’t have bathroom scales to measure the effect. But I estimate that my weight must now be slightly less than zero.

I’ll keep taking sachets of oral dehydration salts in the hope that my equilibrium will be restored.

Addis has always benefited from having plenty of great coffee shops (coffee did, by some accounts, originate in Ethiopia).  Now many of them have free wireless internet too – like the Swiss Cafe, which has this splendid sculpture outside its door.

With the traffic and pollution, this part of Addis feels more like Los Angeles than Berkeley.  But inside the coffee shop – paying about 20p for an excellent cappucino and free wireless – you could almost be in the Bay Area.

Addis is a huge building site.  From the air you can see the impressive scale of the new buildings and roads that are springing up over this growing city (5 million people and growing).   I’ve been told be an infrastructure expert that the Ethiopians are managing this construction well, which is consistent with my impression of the government as well-organized, if a bit over-controlling.

Less reassuring is the thick layer smog (or is it just the dust of construction?) all over the lower parts of the city.  The air looks clearer in the surrounding hills.

And Addis is bustling. We ate last night in a restaurant filled with affluent Ethiopians. The man at the next table was using is Apple iPhone.  But the urban poor are being hard hit by the sharp rise in food prices, including Teff (the grain which is Ethiopia’s staple) – one friend noticed that the little group of people who meet on the street near our hotel to share a meagre breakfast has risen from about 5 people to about 15 in the last few weeks.