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.

Economic growth has made the developing world less dependent on aid

A new generation of leaders, business friendly policies, technology, the spread of peace, and strong demand for natural resources have helped Africa to withstand the global downturn.

The Mercato, the commercial hub of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Ethiopia's economy grew by 7.5% in 2011.

I celebrated New Year’s Day 2011 in Ethiopia, where we lived for three years. Ethiopia is humming with the optimism and energy of a fast-growing country, creating more jobs, sending more children to school, expanding healthcare, and providing electricity, clean water, sanitation and roads.

Ethiopia’s economy grew by 7.5% this year, and it is not the only country in Africa to boast a high growth rate. Africa has been the fastest growing continent of the past decade. The emergence of a new generation of leaders, the end of the continent’s debt crisis, business-friendly policies, new technologies, the spread of peace, and strong demand for natural resources have helped Africa withstand the global downturn.

Steve Radelet, a former senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, has documented the emergence of 17 African countries in which total income is growing by more than 5% a year – increasing average incomes by 50% in 13 years. That growth is attracting businesses and investors from Africa and abroad, and the continent’s middle class is expanding. By 2015, about 100m African households will have incomes greater than £2,000 a year, roughly as many as India today.

And as they grow, developing countries are becoming less dependent on aid.

At the start of 2011, we did not expect a year in which so many people would be able to claim their rights and freedom. The Arab spring has moved many of us, but should not have surprised us. Better government has spread across Africa and the Middle East, defying outdated assumptions in the west. Thirteen African countries held national elections in 2011, four leading to a change of government; there will be 13 more in 2012. South Sudan gained its independence after a largely peaceful referendum.

When the year began, we did not know the rains in east Africa would fail. But in contrast to the 1980s, in today’s Ethiopia drought no longer means famine. Unlike its neighbour Somalia, there has been no repeat of the TV images of starving people in Ethiopia. That’s because, with the help of foreign donors, it has put in place early warning, food reserves and distribution systems, and a safety net that supports the poorest families in their own communities.

As developing countries have become more integrated into the world economy, and less dependent on aid, so their interests have changed. The most important international events for developing countries this year were the repeated failures of European leaders to put in place a credible plan to save the euro, the G20′s decision to put the world trade talks out of their misery, and modest progress at the Durban talks on climate change. These will all have more impact on developing countries than gatherings of the “development set” at World Bank meetings, the UN general assembly or the Busan forum on aid effectiveness.

But while progress has been good, it is not yet fast enough. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Horn of Africa will have spent Christmas in refugee camps, and about a billion people will go to bed hungry on New Year’s Eve.

In the years ahead, the Centre for Global Development in Europe will be working with policymakers, researchers and academics to find evidence-based, politically savvy ways for rich countries and powerful institutions to help developing countries lift themselves out of poverty. Our focus is on the world’s efforts to promote shared growth, protect our environment, reinvent our financial system, clamp down on international corruption, encourage and share innovation, reduce inequality and entrench peace.

For affluent and developing countries alike, these are the aspirations for 2012.

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:

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)

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.

The reality

I was a frequent visitor to Ethiopia during the 1980s famine and my father - declaration of interest – was the British Ambassador to Ethiopia a the time. So I saw first hand the difference that the aid effort made.

At the time of the Ethiopian famine in 1984-85, one of the challenges was getting aid safely to people who needed it in the (then) relatively small parts of Ethiopia controlled by the Tigrayan and Eritrean rebel groups.  The UN tried, and failed, to get agreement from the Ethiopian government to safe passage for aid convoys into rebel areas from the government-controlled areas.  Because they could not guarantee that the aid would arrive and would not be diverted, the government donors and most of the NGOS decided not to attempt to bring aid to those areas at all.  In the end most of the people affected by famine in Tigray moved to feeding centres in government-held areas instead.

However, a small number of NGOs, such as War on Want, a UK charity then under the leadership of George Galloway, and perhaps some governments with an eye on the Cold War politics (though not including the UK), did decide to try to get some aid into the rebel-controlled areas, usually by moving aid across the border from Southern Sudan. This aid was mainly channeled through a relief agency called REST (the Relief Society of Tigray) which presented itself as the humanitarian arm of the rebel groups.

The report by the BBC’s Africa Editor, Martin Plaut, alleges that some of this aid may have been diverted to support the Tigrayan and Eritrean fighters. The claim that “95 percent” of the money given to REST was diverted was based on a single uncorroborated claim in an interview with Aregawi Behre, a Tigrayan separatist.  Even if it were true that aid given to REST was diverted on such a substantial scale, it would hardly be news. Kurt Jansson, the Head of the UN Relief Operation in Ethiopia from 1984 to 1986, says in his book published in 1987 about aid given to REST that

“diversion to rebel forces further diminished its value” (p52).

The donors knew all along that there was a risk that money given to REST might be diverted to be used for equipment for the rebel groups.  That’s why very few donors did so.

If you had listened to the BBC report, you’d have got the impression that they had evidence which in some way related to the wider relief effort in Ethiopia.  But the aid given to the government-held parts of Ethiopia by the British Government on behalf of the UK taxpayer, by many other governments, by Band Aid, and the main international NGOs to the majority of Ethiopians was a completely separate aid operation.

Through the window of an RAF Hercules in 1985 The RAF used Hercules to deliver food aid.

To this day there is no suggestion, let alone evidence, that any of the aid provided in government-controlled Ethiopia, by governments, Band Aid and others, was diverted.  Two thirds of this aid was entirely under the control of western NGOs; the rest was subject to rigorous accounting and audit by donors.  On the right is a photo which I took out of the window of one of the Hercules aircraft used to collect food from the ports where it arrived by sea, to deliver it to the large feeding centres where people were gathering, and to drop it from the back of the aircraft to get food to the most remote areas of Ethiopia. I saw food aid being delivered to a large feeding centre in Jijiga where it was used to feed starving people.   Nobody who was here at the time is in any doubt that the aid was arriving, nor is there any doubt that it saved hundreds of thousands, probably millions of lives.

Nothing in the BBC report relates to any of this.

The donors were extremely conscientious about making sure the aid was getting through.  One cause of false stories about aid diversion at the time was that Ethiopians, being poor and thrifty, reused the sacks that were used for food aid, which were stencilled with name and flag of a donor country, so these bags sometimes showed up in local markets full of locally-grown food.

The RAF dropping food from the back of a British Hercules in a remote part of Ethiopia

Kurt Jansson, as Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, and the UN relief coordinator, describes in his book how he ensured that every allegation of diversion of aid was thoroughly investigated.  My father, as British Ambassador, personally investigated several allegations of misuse himself and found no basis for any of them.  The same view was reached by missions from the US General Accountability Office, and auditors from the EEC and Canada.

Everyone involved in the operation at the time believed that there was almost no misuse of the aid, and no evidence has ever been produced which suggests otherwise.  (My father has written about the BBC allegations on his own website here and I’ve drawn on his recollections for this blog post).

Again, the BBC allegations relate to none of this.

The specific claims made by this BBC programme relate only to the tiny amount of aid being smuggled to rebel-controlled Tigray.  How big was that? According to Jansson, REST claimed that it was delivering about 3,000 tonnes of food per month into Tigray – and this could well have been an exaggeration.  By way of comparison, the relief operation in the rest of Ethiopia was delivering more than 70,000 tonnes a month – peaking at 82,000 tonnes in September 1985.  So of the total aid arriving in Ethiopia, the aid coming in to the areas under rebel control was about 3-4% of the total aid going to Ethiopia.  Even if half of this was diverted (which seems very unlikely) that would still mean that 98% of aid to the whole of Ethiopia was being delivered as intended.

Was the programme sexed up?

To be fair, the BBC World Service programme by Martin Plaut broadcast on 4 March does not explicitly make any specific allegations about the 96% of aid to Ethiopia which was provided in government-held areas of Ethiopia.  But the programme was edited and publicised in a way that gave the impression that the story was about this broader relief effort.  It would have been possible for the BBC to have set the context for its story by reminding the audience of the famine, and the wider relief effort, including Band Aid, and for them to have made it clear that their allegations were about a completely separate, much smaller, relief effort in Tigray.  But not only did they not do this, they did the opposite. They juxtaposed their story with the main relief effort, so giving the false impression that this is what the story is about.  The first two minutes of the programme are entirely about Band Aid and Live Aid, complete with recordings of Bob Geldof and “Do They Know It’s Christmas”.   There are references to Geldof throughout the programme, and the  programme closes with an extract from  “We Are The World”. At no point does the programme distinguish the main relief effort in the parts of Ethiopia under government control from the much smaller amounts of aid being channeled into the parts of the country held by rebels.  So the listener is given the impression that the allegations relate to the money being raised by Band Aid and Live Aid, and the relief provided by the British government, other donors and charities.

The accompanying publicity compounded this false impression.  The article on the BBC News website says:

The crisis in 1984 prompted a huge Western relief effort, spearheaded by pop star Bob Geldof’s Band Aid campaign and Live Aid concerts. Although millions of people were saved by the aid that poured into the country, evidence suggests not all of the aid went to the most needy.

Although neither of these sentences is false, the way they are juxtaposed gives the false impression that the BBC had evidence of diversion of the money from Band Aid and Live Aid, and the Western relief effort.  The person who wrote them either did not understand the evidence reported in Martin Plaut’s programme, or wanted the audience to reach a conclusion that was not supported by the evidence.

The introduction to the programme on the BBC World Service website is worse:

It was a charity appeal on a global scale. In 1985, an unprecedented array of performers took part in two marathon televised concerts in Britain and the United States – all to raise money for a terrible famine in Ethiopia, and it worked. It is thought the concerts eventually generated about $250m in donations from the public.  But now, evidence has emerged that the aid agencies charged with distributing that money were hoodwinked: that millions of dollars were diverted to buy weapons for rebels in Ethiopia – and that the United States knew this was going on. [My emphasis]

This is not just misleading, it is false: the evidence that Martin Plaut gathered has nothing at all  to do with “that money”.

So the programme itself, and the surrounding publicity, created the impression that the BBC had uncovered evidence a substantial part of the wider relief effort in Ethiopia had been diverted.  As a result of this misrepresentation, the story was picked up around the world.  An article in The Times of 4 March by Catherine Philp reported (incorrectly) that -

The allegations that 95 per cent of aid money donated to help victims of the 1985 Ethiopian famine were siphoned off were made in a BBC radio programme broadcast yesterday.

As a result, it is now widely believed that a large part of the relief effort in Ethiopia was siphoned off.   The reality is the opposite – the Ethiopian relief effort of the 1980s was a huge success.  But the lie is now half way round the world.

The BBC says today:

“We note that the ruling validates the main thrust of the programme’s journalism; that there was evidence from a number of sources that the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front had diverted money intended for famine relief and that some of this was spent on weapons.

But that wasn’t the “thrust” of the programme’s journalism.  The main message received by anyone who listened to the programme or encountered the surrounding publicity was that a substantial part of the money for Ethiopia as a whole (rather the separate relief effort in Tigray) was diverted.  None of the evidence presented in the programme, and no part of the Complaints Unit’s ruling, validates the main thrust of the programme nor the way it was promoted.

The BBC is a media organisation and its journalists are paid to communicate complicated ideas clearly and accurately to the audience. The BBC in general, and the World Service in particular, has a reputation beyond price for accuracy and reliability.  As Bob Geldof says, this is an unusual lapse in standards. In this case, most of the audience has been led to believe something that is not true, and which the BBC knows to be untrue.

Either the BBC gave this false impression deliberately, because it made a boring story more interesting; or it gave this false impression inadvertently, in which case this was an incompetent and negligent failure of editorial control.

Whatever the reasons, this was a profoundly irresponsible piece of journalism.  The BBC has today apologised to the Band Aid Trust, and rightly so.  But there is nobody to complain on behalf of the broader relief effort in Ethiopia, which the BBC has also smeared. By sexing up a dull story, the BBC will unfortunately have made it more difficult to raise money for future humanitarian relief efforts.  If the public believe that this kind of aid can be siphoned off on a huge scale for buying weapons and ammunition, they will be far less likely to give in future.  That in turn could lead to the unnecessary deaths of vulnerable people.

(Update: see my father’s blog post here.)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 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?

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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).

The film is about Anberber (played by Aaron Arefe – shown left) who returns to his village in Gondar after years spent studying medicine in Germany.  But he returns at the time of the Derg, led by Haile Mariam Mengistu, and in Anberber’s village, young men have to hide in the hills to avoid being conscripted.

Much of the film is in flashback as Anberber looks back on his experiences.

We thought this was an entertaining and moving account of Ethiopia’s history, and especially the time of the Derg.  It was well scripted and acted, and beautifully filmed.  For those of us who love the Ethiopian countryside, people and culture, there was much to revel in.

Gebrselassie wins wet Dubai Marathon (Reuters)

DUBAI- Haile Gebrselassie produced a classic performance to win the rain-hit Dubai Marathon on Friday, though well outside his own world best time.

The Ethiopian missed out on a million dollar jackpot for breaking the world record, finishing in two hours, five minutes and 29 seconds.

Gebrselassie set the world’s quickest time of 2:03:59 in Berlin last year after opting out of the Beijing Olympics but wet conditions ruined any hopes of a repeat.

He earned $250,000 for his latest victory, leading an Ethiopian sweep of the podium with Deressa Chimsa (2:07:54) and Eshetu Wendimu Tsige (2:08:41) trailing him in Dubai.

“That’s one of the best races I’ve run in such weather conditions,” Gebrselassie told reporters after retaining his Dubai title. “I was doing pretty well until the 30km mark.

“But then things became a little bit difficult because of the rain and that made the difference. But it was wonderful to clock this time in such conditions.”
Dubai Marathon results

Leading results from Friday’s Dubai Marathon: Men

1.   Haile Gebrselassie, Ethiopia, 2 hours, 5 minutes, 29 seconds.

2.   Deressa Edae Chimsa, Ethiopia, 2:07:54.

3.   Eshetu Wendimu Tsige, Ethiopia, 2:08:41.

4.   Gashaw Melese Asfaw, Ethiopia, 2:10:59.

5.   Dereje Tesfaye Gebrehiwot, Ethiopia, 2:11:42.

6.   David Kemboi Murkomen, Kenya, 2:12:14.

7.   Mesfin Admasu Abebe, Ethiopia, 2:12:.23.

8.   Tesfaye Tola, Ethiopia, 2:12:56.

9.   Asnake Fikadu Roro, Ethiopia, 2:15:01.

10.  Nephat Ngotho Kinyanjui, Kenya, 2:15:23.

Women

1.   Bezunesh Bekele Sertsu, Ethiopia, 2:24:02.

2.   Atsede Habtamu Besuye, Ethiopia, 2:25:17.

3.   Helena Loshanyang Kirop, Kenya, 2:25:35.

4.   Tatyana Petrova, Russia, 2:25:53.

5.   Genet Getaneh Wendimagegnehu, Ethiopia, 2:26:37.

6.   Eyerusalem Kuma Mutal, Ethiopia, 2:26:51.

7.   Berhane Adere Debela, Ethiopia, 2:27:47.

8.   Shuru Diriba Dulume, Ethiopia, 2:28:26.

9.   Atsede Baysa Tesema, Ethiopia, 2:29:13.

10.  Mulu Seboka Seyfu, Ethiopia, 2:30:10.

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.

But I’ve been able to get online this morning, so I took the opportunity to upgrade my website. I’m now using WordPress 2.7 for all the pages (instead of using PHP pages for static pages and WordPress for this blog).  That means, for example, that it is possible to add comments to almost any page on the website, and that site-wide search works.

I’ve also changed the design of the site in the hope that it looks more modern.  (I see now that the graphics which look good in Firefox look pretty ropey in Internet Explorer, so I’ll try to fix that later).

I encountered one technical problem during the updated.  When I tried to log in to the upgraded site, I got this message:

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

If you get this problem, the solution is below the fold.

This problem seems to occur if you change the prefix of your table names in WordPress. The problem is that the database stores the table prefix and this means that your admin user does not get sufficient rights to access the administration panel.

The solution is to run the following two MySQL commands on your database (where ‘new’ is the new prefix and ‘old’ is the old prefix).

UPDATE `prefix_usermeta` SET `meta_key` = REPLACE( `meta_key` , 'old_', 'new_' );

UPDATE `prefix_options` SET `option_name` = 'new_user_roles' WHERE `option_name` ='old_user_roles' AND `blog_id` =0;

Hat tip.

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.