The Ethiopian Government has been running posters in the southern part of Ethiopia to warn farmers about the risk of tsetse fly (which kill cattle and cause sleeping sickness).
To reinforce the message, and to make sure that farmers know exactly what they are looking for, they have been using posters with huge images of the tsetse fly itself.*
This has, however, not had the intended effect.
Two farmers were overheard talking to each other in a local dialect in the south, having come in to town on market day and seeing the new poster:
“Thank God we don’t have huge flies like that here.”
* I don’t have a photo of the actual poster – if anyone does, I’d love to have a copy of it.
Here in Ethiopia, 2001 is drawing to a close. Tomorrow is the first day of 2002 in the Ethiopian calendar.
It is a time of renewal and celebration here – perhaps more than in European cultures (something like a cross between Christmas and New Year). The rainy season is coming to an end; the hungry season will soon be behind us. Today in Addis Ababa people are promenading in their traditional white Ethiopian clothes and shawls. The market outside our house is heaving: goats, chickens, lots of fruit and vegetables all crowded into the muddy space. (Though because New Year’s Day is a Friday – which is a fasting day for Orthodox Ethiopians – the big feast will be on Saturday).
Many Ethiopians face huge challenges today. There are many families across the country who will not have enough to eat today or tomorrow. Thanks to the work of the government, supported by foreign donors, about 5 million of the poorest families will get help through the safety net programme; but there are at least as many again who need help. Ethiopia gets more aid now, but nothing like enough for a country of this size and population. Aid to Ethiopia is $25 per person per year, compared to over $100 in Zambia. There is no question that if aid to Ethiopia doubled tomorrow, the government would do an excellent job of using that money to provide food, health, education and infrastructure to its people.
To everyone in this beautiful country, may the coming year bring you joy, may your dreams for you and your children come true. And may the rest of the world stand in solidarity with you, our brothers and sisters.
Tim Harford has an interesting article in this weekend’s Financial Times about private health and education in developing countries:
Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this newspaper. Would you consider buying private education and private healthcare?
Before you make up your mind, here are a few considerations: government healthcare and primary education are free; the private-sector doctors are ignorant quacks and the teachers are poorly qualified; the private schools are cramped and often illegal. It doesn’t sound like a tough decision. Yet millions of very poor people around the world are taking the private-sector option. And, when you look a little closer at the choice, it’s not so hard to see why.
Now there is a dilemma here.
On the one hand, we know that charging even a very small amount massively reduces the take-up and impact of services such as health and education. (This survey by Holla and Kremer summarises the evidence.) So charges excludes many people from access, and it seems likely that the poorest and most vulnerable will be excluded most of all.
On the other hand, we know that public services in developing countries are often poorly managed and badly delivered. That’s why, as Tim points out in his FT article, many of the very poorest people choose to go private instead.
Apologies if this is anecdotal, but I see this dilemma in practice every day. My partner works for Marie Stopes International, which operates 21 clinics for women (providing contraception and abortion) here in Ethiopia. They charge their clients for services – a small amount which is just enough to pay for the cost of running the clinics. The result is that they are very focused on delivering services that will bring their clients into the clinics every day – that is, services that they actually need, at a price they can afford. My feeling is that, as a result, they are more focused on their customers than most public services in developing countries, and indeed in some developed countries, whether financed by aid or by taxation.
So how can we disentagle ourselves from the horns of this dilemma? Here are three thoughts:
- First, we should take seriously Tim’s observation that “a little accountability goes a long way” and think much harder about how we can make public services more acountable. You have probably heard about the way more funding reached Ugandan schools as a result of greater transparency (though the details have been disputed (pdf)). The work of my team on aid transparency is a modest contribution to this effort.
- Second, we should not be ideological about whether the public or private sector actually provides services, as long as the government takes steps to ensure that there is universal access. For example, governments (with the support of donors) might issue vouchers to the poorest, enabling them to choose for themselves whether to use public or private services.
- Third, in the long run this problem will be reduced if and when there is equitably shared economic growth which gives people sufficient incomes for these kinds of choices to be more reasonable.
Scarlett Lion has this list. Her main advice is to keep it to a minimum.
Here is our list, intended for visitors to Ethiopia.
So apparently zip off safari shorts/trousers make you look stupid. I guess I don’t care – I think they are quite a good way to travel light in a country that is hot during the day but cool at night and there are mosquitoes in the evening.
Kudos to the US Government for giving food aid to Ethiopia. This is good:
USAID has provided an additional 87,910 metric tons of emergency food aid, valued at approximately U.S. $50 million, to the Joint Emergency Operational Plan in response to the Ethiopian Government’s January 2009 appeal. This emergency food aid will provide a full ration to 1.18 million beneficiaries for four months in 72 woredas in the most severely impacted regions – Afar, Amhara, Oromiya, Somali, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples, and Tigray Regions and in Dire Dawa Administrative Council.
That’s good, but it could better.
The US imports food aid to Ethiopia. It is bought from American farmers and shipped by boat to Djibouti, then brought by road to where it is needed in Ethiopia. The cost of all this works out at $568 per metric tonne. Here in Addis Ababa, today’s market price of wheat is $489 per metric tonne. It is cheaper out of the capital. So America’s generosity could buy 16% more wheat if it were bought locally. From that difference alone, another 190,000 people could be given a full ration of food for four months. Furthermore, buying the food locally would increase the incomes of farmers either in Ethiopia or in neighbouring countries and the improve livelihoods of other parts of the economy (e.g. haulage companies) needed to make the agriculture market work. Their livelihoods, which are undermined by imported food aid, would be improved if the food were bought locally. If there is sufficient supply response among local farmers (which there probably would be) so it does not have to be imported, then the generous aid would also provide $50 million of much needed foreign currency for Ethiopia.
This is not possible at the moment because American legislation requires that food aid be bought in the US, that 50 percent of commodities be processed and packed in the US before shipment, and that 75 percent of food aid managed by USAID and 50 percent of the food aid managed by the US Department of Agriculture be transported in “flag-carrying” US-registered vessels. The result is that only 40% of money spent on food aid by the US actually goes towards buying food; the rest goes to US transport companies.
Buying the food locally would be better, but best of all might be something even more radical. Why not give the money itself to people who are hungry? Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking study of famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.
People are usually hungry because they are too poor to buy food. (They are often reduced to this poverty by the failure of their own harvest. But that does not mean that there is not enough food for them.) If we give them money (or vouchers, if we really have to) they can buy food locally. Food growers elsewhere will grow food, and traders will bring it to them. It will be the food they prefer and know how to eat (NB this often means not wheat). This will not only help to protect people from starving, it will support local and regional food producers, and other local businesses.
US food aid is all in bags labelled “From the American People”. It is a generous thought, but it might be less misleading if it were labelled “From the American People, mainly to the American People”.
Hurrah! Google Maps have now got more detailed maps of a number of African countries.
Until the last couple of days, Addis Ababa was just a cross-roads. Now look at it. A detailed map at last.
According to White African,
There are now 27 more African countries that now have detailed maps, including:
Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Togo.
BraveNewTraveler describes the six characters you’ll meet at every expat bar.
It’s never hard to find your way there – all you need to do is follow the American music which is old enough to feel stale without being old enough to feel hip and look for a chalkboard sign advertising a European football match.
It is pretty funny (take no notice the censorious commenters who say that it is too cynical). I find it all too easy to recognise (and laugh at) myself:
1. The Overpaid Aid Worker
You can easily pick out this character by the imported beer on his table and the way he litters his speech with acronyms: USAID, NGO, MFI, MPP.
If it’s a weekday night, he might nurse his beer while tapping away on his MacBook, shooting off emails to his friends in D.C., or maybe to the alumni listserve of a bastion of East Coast higher education.
This year he’s empowering women in Latin America, but two years ago he was working on democracy promotion in Bangladesh, and next year it’s off to Thailand to oversee microfinance development.
Is there any world problem this whiz can’t solve on a two-year contract, armed only with his cushy salary, company car, and housing stipend?
Before you get a chance to answer that, though, he will: there’s “real progress” being made at the “grass roots level” with his current initiative. Another European microbrew, please!
Hat tip: @bloodandmilk on Twitter
Our Sunday runs start on Entoto, the mountain to the edge of Addis Ababa. We start and finish at an altitude of about 3,000m. Here are some things we’ve seen on our runs in the last two weeks:
- a leopard, crossing the path about 20 metres in front of us
- about 15 hyenas sunning themselves on rocks
- women and girls carrying firewood up the kill
- herds of donkeys, sheep and goats
- the sun
These are not things we used to see much running in Richmond Park.
Andrew Mueller in this weekend’s FT writes about the Merkato, Addis Ababa’s market district
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).
We went to see Teza last night, a newish film by Haile Gerima which won Best Screenplay and the Special jury prize at the Venice film festival last year. The film is in Amharic with English sub-titles.
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.
In today’s Dubai marathon, Ethiopians had 8 out of the top 10 men, and 8 of the top 10 women. That is a quite extraordinary domination of the sport. Here is Reuters:
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 resultsLeading 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.
The Ethiopian Government passed a new law on Tuesday that limits the activities of foreign-funded organisations. The law prevents organizations that receive more than 10% of their funding from abroad from involvement in human rights, gender equality and conflict resolution. It has been greeted with howls of protest by international organisations.
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.
Spare a thought for those of us trying to use the internet in Ethiopia.
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.
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.
The internet has been running very slowly in Ethiopia for most of the past week. This may be caused by congestion, or possibly by the cable that was severed near Egypt on Thursday.
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.
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:
In a very thought-provoking post, Alanna Shaikh lists four ways that an NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve.
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.
An enquiry has been demanded into the way some UK aid is given directly to the governments of some countries. According to the Daily Telegraph
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:
- 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. - 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.
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Alanna Shaikk writes about the good and bad of working in international development. Here is a big part of the bad:
… 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.
So help me I’ve read some rubbish in the Daily Mail over the years – and I know it to be a potent brew of prejudice and lies. But this article must rank in the top-ten for stupidity.
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.
Today is World Food Day. There are 967 million people living below the hunger line.
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.
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