Owen abroad

Archive for July, 2006

David Loyn, the BBC Developing World Correspondent (is there really only one?) is extremely sensible and balanced writing about the politics of aid in Ethiopia today on the BBC News site:

Aid thinking moves in policy cycles, and the dogma for now, at least for the big European donors, is to give aid directly to governments. Army in Addis Ababa Violence during last year's elections set back the aid process.

It is not given completely blindly, of course, and developing countries have to put in place poverty reduction strategies that add up. But once they do, they are likely to get direct budget support to allocate funds as they see fit. The idea has many advantages – ticking a lot of the necessary policy boxes. …

Ethiopia was to be a test case for democracy, but instead has turned into a test of how to manage the relationship when things go wrong.

I wrote about the policy of giving aid to government budgets here. In short, an independent evaluation found that it can be a more effective way to give aid than projects.

In Ghana, the primary school gross enrolment rate has risen steadily from 80% in 2002 to 92% in 2005. 

The abolition of user fees in 2005 – which the government could afford because of debt relief and additional aid – is estimated to have boosted the primary gross enrolment rate by 14 percentage points.

Even so, there are about 700,000 children in Ghana aged 6-11 who do not go to school.  The Accra Mail reports the announcement last week of additional UK funding to help Ghana to reach the target of getting every kid to school:

DFID will disburse £10m each year until 2015, subject to satisfactory performance on agreed sector outputs and MDG targets.

In all our clever intellectual discussions about how we can improve the way we give aid, it is worth remembering the most obvious and practical truths.  When we give aid to governments that use money well, it can make a huge difference to the lives of the poor.

Santigie Kamara writing in allAfrica.com yesterday may be overstating the case, but only a little:

Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.

The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal.  Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate  technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money.  In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses.  So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?

A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance).  About 40% of US aid is spent this way.  Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted.  We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop. 

The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development.  Technical cooperation has an important role to play.  But we need to do it much better.

Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years.  I know of what I speak. 

The Times of India reports that the Human Resources Department of the Indian Government is opposed to the proposed $100 laptop

HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.

It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.

And The Register reports that  the education ministry is far from convinced that this is a good use of funds:

The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "paedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

The Indian Government is asking the right questions: Is this really the best use of $100 per child? Why is this right for developing countries, but not being rolled out in industrialized countries?

Like many others, I am perplexed by the determination of Nicholas Negroponte, whom I admire, to make this new laptop only available to large-scale government purchasers.

According to The World of Shez

Today there is a second wind of change blowing across Africa, a trend towards greater democracy and a growing confidence that goes uncovered by the media. Disasters in Somalia, Darfur and West Africa dominate, while transitions to democracy in Kenya, Botswana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Namibia, and elsewhere are ignored. Understanding the day-to-day stories of Africa means abandoning preconceived notions. Reporters should try to portray people in ways that are recognizable to Africans. With better media coverage, the United States and the world would realize that there is more to Africa than death, disease, disaster, and despair.

Hat tip: Trade Diversion

A Primer on Foreign Aid by Steve Radelet, my colleague at the Center for Global Development:

Controversies about aid effectiveness go back decades. Some experts charge that aid has enlarged government bureaucracies, perpetuated bad governments, enriched the elite in poor countries, or just been wasted. Others argue that although aid has sometimes failed, it has supported poverty reduction and growth in some countries and prevented worse performance in others.

This new working paper by senior fellow Steve Radelet explores trends in aid, the motivations for aid, its impacts, and debates about reforming aid. It begins by examining aid magnitudes and who gives and receives aid. It discusses the multiple motivations and objectives of aid, some of which conflict with each other. It then explores the empirical evidence on the relationship between aid and growth, which is divided between research that finds no relationship and research that finds a positive relationship (at least under certain circumstances).

It also examines some of the key challenges in making aid more effective, including the principal-agent problem and the related issue of conditionality, and concludes by examining some of the main proposals for improving aid effectiveness.

Google hails 'impressive' growth

Google more than doubled its profits in the second quarter, beating the expectations of analysts. The search giant generated net income of $721m (£390m) in the three months to the end of June, compared with $342m for the corresponding period last year. Google said the "impressive" result was driven by the launch of new products and services across various markets.

Meanwhile, according to the respected human rights organisation, Amnesty International:

Google is aiding the repression of freedom of information and expression in China. Under threat is the right to freedom of information and the free flow of ideas across borders, guaranteed by international human rights law.

I would not bother to comment on a company putting profits before human rights if it wasn't for their hypocritical cant about "don't be evil".  I reckon being named and shamed in an Amnesty International report is pretty close to being evil.

I was amazed by the statistic in the BBC report that Google has only 44% of the US search market. Is that all? What  other search engines are people using and why?.

<geek>

You may not have heard of service oriented architecture yet; and if you have have, you may think it is just a lot of hype.

But if you believe in SOA, you will have noticed that it could be the foundation of a solution to the UK Government's woes in the use of information technology.  I have written before here about the potential for a service-oriented architecture to enable government to deliver the benefits of integrated information systems while limiting the civil liberties risks of a large identity database.  And in a chapter in a new IBM book about transformation of government services, Capability, Capacity and Reform, I argue that instead of the government's vision of  data processing warehouses, the way to create more efficient and customer-oriented public services is to build smaller and more flexible shared service modules based on a common, cross-government IT architecture.

So I was interested to see that Accenture has bet $450 million of its own money over the next three years in developing new service-oriented architecture functionality.  That suggests that Accenture agrees that this is more than just hype.

Hat tip: Enterprise Web 2.0

</geek> 

The Wasington Post reports on a federal program to support cattle farmers:

At first, livestock owners were required to be in a county officially suffering a drought to collect the money. But ranchers who weren't eligible complained to their representatives in Washington, and in 2003 Congress dropped that requirement. Ranchers could then get payments for any type of federally declared "disaster." In some cases, USDA administrators prodded employees in the agency's county offices to find qualifying disasters, even if they were two years old or had nothing to do with ranching or farming.

If this were happening in an African country, there would be all kinds of complaints about corruption and poor governance.  There would be demands that we cut off aid until this kind of corruption be ended.

Contrary to popular belief, agricultural subsidies in OECD countries are not the most damaging part of the rigged international market for agriculture – that honour goes to import tariffs.  But they are a colossal waste of taxpayer money, and they contribute to the difficulties faced by agricultural producers in poor countries to make a living.  It is hard to understand why voters in developed countries put up with it.

G and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, which is a documentary about Al Gore's efforts to increase awareness of the threat of climate change.

I thought that I was pretty well informed about climate change, and frankly expected to be a bit bored. I did not really see how a film of somebody giving a powerpoint presentation was going to be all that interesting.   Boy, was that wrong. I found the film informative, gripping, even entertaining in places. I learned a lot, and the film increased my (inexpert) opinion that climate change is one of the most serious challenges facing the planet.

The film is more than just a presentation of charts and figures.  It cleverly weaves in Al Gore's personal narrative: the journey he made, as a student, as a Congressman, a Senator, as Vice President and as a Presidential candidate.  He comes across as smart, funny, likeable and utterly sincere. His story, and his insights into how public opinion gradually understands serious social challenges of this sort, give the film a liveliness, pace and emotion, instead of just a worthy-but-dull recital of the science.

The film finishes with an upbeat message: there is much that we can and should do to address global warming but we are fast running out of time.

Even if you think you know all about climate change, and are already committed to doing something about it, please go to see this film. Take a friend. You will enjoy it much more than you expect, and you will learn something. 

I wrote here in June about the need for the UK government to work towards decentralized government databases using shared data schemas to allow information exchange between them in a secure, auditable system of information exchange.  This would allow us to obtain the benefits of joined-up government systems, while protecting us (at least to some extent) from the risks to civil liberties of allowing the government to build a single 'Big Brother' database which stores all your personal information and to which government employees would have access.

I discovered today that the US government is developing a National Information Exchange Model. This is precisely the sort of XML schema for data exchange betwen government systems that I had in mind.  

Such an information exchange schema would need to be accompanied by the other components of the system recommended in my earlier post – particularly a secure message layer, auditing of information exchanged across systems, and the right of all citizens to see all information held about them and a log of all accesses to that information by government systems.

The US effort is, rather chillingly, a collaborative effort by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.  But since they are some way down the road (they have recently released a beta of the standard, including no fewer than nine proposed namespaces) it would make sense for this to form the basis of an international effort to develop a shared information scheme.  After all, the information needs of governments cannot vary all that much between countries, and such a shared system would facilitate international cooperation (for example, for cooperation in criminal investigations, tax and immigration).  

At risk of upsetting the anti-Tranzi brigade, it seems to me that an international system, agreed transparently and using open standards for information schema and messaging, could in principle be more likely to protect civil liberties and be more efficient than a series of unconnected information sharing systems developed by national governments. 

The benefits of free trade are hard to explain. Here is a characteristically clear and concise explanation from Chris over at Stumbling and Mumbling.

Human Rights Watch says that the G8 must act on Darfur:

“For the third year in a row, Darfur will be on the agenda at the G8 meeting,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This year, the G8 must make a decisive public statement. As the killings continue, G8 leaders need to tell Khartoum that it has no alternative but to accept the deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur.”

Take a look at this BBC photoset to see what life is like in a camp in Darfur.

I wrote about the US-UK extradition treaty on seven months ago. 

Now that it is in the news again, I want to to be very clear about the problem with this treaty. The problem is not that the US Senate has not ratified the treaty, nor is that the treaty lacks reciprocity.  Those are both red herrings.

The problem with this treaty – whether or not the Senate ratifies it – is that it allows a person to be extradited from the UK without presentation of prima facie evidence against them. 

The reason that the treaty cannot be reciprocal is that American courts, quite rightly, would not permit their citizens to be treated this way.  It would breach the US Bill of Rights to extradite citizens without evidence.

So the problem will not be solved by having the treaty ratified by the Senate, as the UK Government seems to think.  Even if it were ratified, it would still not be symmetrical. Nor is the lack of reciprocity the problem in itself, though it is a clue to what is wrong. The problem is that the treaty obliges the UK government to violate a person's rights without the presentation of evidence against them.  Even if the US Government could reciprocally abrogate the rights of its citizens in the same way – and we should be thankful that they cannot – it would still be wrong.

Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, has died.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd's first album, must rank as one of the finest debut albums of all time, and it is a testament to Barrett's genius.

As Barrett became more unreliable, possibly because of his use of drugs, the group hired Dave Gilmour so that there would be somebody playing the guitar when Barrett stopped.

When Barrett left the band (they simply decided not to pick him up in the tour bus on the way to a gig in Southampton), he had a wholly unsuccessful solo career, and ended up a recluse, living with his mother in Cambridge.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond was recorded by Pink Floyd in 1975, on the album Wish You Were Here, as a tribute to their lost friend, Syd Barrett.   

Remember when you were young
You shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom
blown on the steel breeze
Come you target for faraway laughter
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!

Coincidentally Barrett made an unannounced appearance at the recording studio while the band was recording this track. They didn't even recognise him. 

From the Center for Global Development website:

Donor countries have committed themselves to increase aid to developing countries by 60 percent over the next five years; and larger increases would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But there are concerns that there may be a limit on the amount of aid that developing countries can absorb and use effectively — and that large aid flows might even be harmful. Could a large increase in aid be “too much of a good thing?”

In this essay, CGD Senior Program Associate Owen Barder disentangles the seven possible reasons why additional aid might not be effective. These include microeconomic effects (e.g. transactions costs), macroeconomic effects (e.g. ‘Dutch Disease’) and the impact on political economy (e.g. the ‘Resource Curse’). The paper looks at each possible constraint in turn.

The paper finds that there are indeed serious obstacles to effective use of increased aid, but than none is immutable. All of the constraints which limit the effective use of additional aid can be addressed by a relatively small set of practical improvements in the way that aid is provided and used. Donors have already committed themselves to a significant program of aid reform. If the measures to which donors are committed were consistently implemented, the seven constraints to effective aid absorption could be relaxed.

The paper concludes that, provided that increased aid is accompanied by reforms to the way aid is delivered, the capacity of developing countries to absorb and use aid should not be presented as a barrier to the increases in aid which would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

Fascinating article by Alan Beattie (registration required) on what he says are five common myths of world trade:

1. "Ghana is allowed to sell raw cocoa beans to the European Union, but if it exports finished chocolate it gets hit by big tariffs."

2. "Each European Union cow gets $2.40 a day in subsidies, more than what 1bn people each have to live on."

3. "The World Trade Organisation is undemocratic and secretive.

4. "No economy ever got rich without using tariffs to industrialise."

5. "Cutting rich countries' farm subsidies and tariffs will be a big boost for the world's poorest."

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