I know that it isn’t nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this.
First the religious right were asked to pray for rain during the Denver Democratic National Convention:
Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, one of America’s leading evangelical groups, was shown in a video filmed at Denver’s Invesco Field, where 75,000 are expected to cheer Mr Obama on Aug 28, asking Christians to pray for “torrential” rain.
“I’m talking ‘umbrella-ain’t-going-to-help-you rain,” the former pastor and television meteorologist said. He explained on the video: “I’m still pro life, and I’m still in favour of marriage as being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree.”
Did it rain on Mr Obama’s parade? Did it heck.
But what’s this? Hurricane Gustav has prompted a rethink over the Republican convention. John McCain said:
“But you know it just wouldn’t be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster. So we’re monitoring it from day to day and I’m saying a few prayers too.”
If the Big Guy is sending rain according to which side he’s on, then He seems to be a Democrat.
while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.
Incentives for Global Health have published a new report:”The Health Impact Fund: Making New Medicines Accessible for All”
The Health Impact Fund, our flagship proposal, is a new way of stimulating research and development of life-saving pharmaceuticals. To provide wide access, medicines need to be affordable-but low prices don’t create strong incentives for innovators to invest in research and development. The Health Impact Fund is an optional mechanism that offers pharmaceutical innovators a supplementary reward based on the health impact of their products, if they agree to sell those products at cost. The proposed Fund is to be financed mainly by governments.
I personally find this idea attractive. It shares a lot of characteristics and thinking with the Advance Market Commitment idea that I have worked on in the past. The main difference is that the AMC leaves patents in place; under the IGH they are signed away. If the pharmaceutical industry is willing to participate, this would be very attractive; my guess is that many firms will find this too challenging to their existing business model.
Via Chris, from Scarlett Lion.
This is scarily accurate.
CNN’s “Inside Africa” show this week covers three stories: the migration of wildebeest in the Masai Mara, gorillas in northern Congo, and a white man kayaking around Madagascar.
The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks:
2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?
Exactly right. And, in particular, why don’t we apply this form of cost-benefit analysis to international development spending?
A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following:
The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
- Changing riders;
- Appointing a committee to study the horse;
- Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses;
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included;
- Reclassifying the dead horse as ‘living impaired’;
- Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse;
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed;
- Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance;
- Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance;
- Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the mission of the organization than do some other horses;
- Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses;
- Preparing a workshop with paid attendants on the subject of Experience gaining in riding dead horses in post war setting;
- Preparing a second workshop on environmental hazards caused by horse shit, and the advantage on using dead horses since they do not shit therefore are of no hazard to the environment.
The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they’ve been universally misreported.
The estimates show:
- the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not 985 million as we previously thought
- nonetheless, progress in reducing poverty has been about as fast as previously believed – poverty has been declining at the rate of about one percentage point a year, from 52 percent of the developing world’s population in 1981 to 26 percent in 2005. This is a reduction in the number of poor of about 500 million people.
As the full paper explains, the new poverty line is $1.25 a day in 2005 prices, compared to the old poverty line of $1.08 a day in 1993 prices. This is actually a downward revision of the poverty line in real terms: if it had been kept the same in real terms (ie adjusted only for inflation) it would be $1.45 a day in 2005 prices. (There are currently 1.7 billion people living on less than $1.45 a day in 2005 prices, the equivalent today of the old poverty line – which is nearly twice as many as we previously thought lived in poverty.)
The meaning of the poverty line is often misunderstood. Some people assume that the poverty line measures the number of people who have an income of $1.25 a day; and they reassure themselves by thinking “a dollar will go a long way in some countries”. But the poverty line is measured as $1.25 a day at purchasing power parity – that is, people below this line are able to buy each day what $1.25 would buy them in the United States. This really is an absolute measure of poverty.
Of course, the newspapers got this all wrong:
James Politi in the FT reported
The new figure was estimated after researchers at the bank raised the threshold for extreme poverty from earnings of $1 a day to $1.25.
(Not true; the threshold has been reduced in real terms). The BBC reported
The new estimates suggest that poverty is both more persistent, and has fallen less sharply, than previously thought.
(Not true: it has fallen at the same rate as previously thought; just at a much higher level.)
Finally – a big untold part of this story is the big changes in the purchasing power parity estimates that underpin these poverty figures. These show massive changes in the estimates of GDP at PPP. For example, here in Ethiopia, GDP per capita is now estimated to be $591 per year, compared to $1084 under the previous estimate. India is down 40%, now below Pakistan in income-per-head; and China’s income per head is also 40% lower than the previously estimated.
If you think it is okay to ignore economists because they are so often wrong, you’re looking at the wrong questions. Economists are generally wrong with complicated models but right about concepts. For example, they know that additional domestic drilling won’t make much of a dent in the energy problem. And they know that free trade is generally good for all economies. (You can argue with my examples, but the point is that some things are generally known by economists while not being understood by the general public.)
By analogy, a mechanic knows that changing your oil is good for your engine, but he can’t tell you what problems you will have with your car next year. You shouldn’t ignore the mechanic’s advice on changing oil just because he doesn’t know when your battery will die, or because he didn’t personally perform any scientific studies on oil changes.
This is the entrance to a tiny 13th Century Rock Church in Tigray, called Abuna Yemata Guh. And yes, that’s a narrow ledge you have to walk along, with a 200 metre vertical drop to your left, at the end of a terrifying ascent up the side of a cliff to get there.
The dangerous climb is rewarded with an extraordinary church, carved into the rock, with glorious paintings.
More photos here or as a slideshow.
Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa.
The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of the market for GM technology, the pace of research has slowed. GM research takes a long time to come to fruition, and its core benefit – the permanent reduction of global food prices – cannot fully be captured through patents. European governments should be funding this research, but it is entirely reliant on the private sector. Private money for research depends on the prospect of sales, so the ban has not only blocked public research – it has reduced private research. …
…. It is conventional to say that Africa needs a green revolution. The reality is that the green revolution was based on chemical fertilisers, and even when fertiliser was cheap, Africa did not adopt it. With the rise in fertiliser costs as a byproduct of high energy prices, any green revolution will perforce not be chemical. What African agriculture needs is a biological revolution. This is what GM offers, if only sufficient money is put into research. There has as yet been no work on the crops specific to the region, such as cassava and yams.
Mainstream scientists have responded to Priince Charles that GM offers the opportunity to redistribute wealth to feed the poor. With the right investments in technology, Africa could not only feed itself, it could be a major food producer for the rest of the world. GM corn in Africa produces four times as much corn per acre (and the corn can be protected from witchweed, unlike the previous varieties).
I’m very excited to have made an inaugural post on the new aidinfo blog. This is the website for the work we are doing to increase the transparency of foreign aid.
This RSS feed gives you an update of what is changing on the site – add it to your favourite feedreader today.
Last weekend, we stayed in Gheralta Lodge, about 2 hours drive from Mekele in Tigray, Ethiopia, as our base for seeing some of the countryside and visiting the local rock churches. (See also here and here.)
Gheralta is near Hawzien (or Hawzen), a small market town which is the site of an infamous massacre by the Derg of TPLF rebels.
The Lodge is beautifully designed to fit in with the local countryside and architecture, and to minimize the environmental impact of the accommodation. They grow their own food and bake delicious bread.
More photos here or as a slideshow.
Here it is in Tripadvisor.
Nancy Birdsall and Kate Vyborny at the Center for Global Development suggest six concrete steps for the Accra meeting on aid effectiveness:
- Untie all aid, including technical assistance, and publish information on which providers get contracts in practice.
- Tell recipients what donors are spending through a concrete set of standards for transparency.
- Make all evaluations public, regardless of their results, by entering them into a prospective registry.
- Pay for outcomes not inputs, by piloting a Cash on Delivery aid contract with interested recipients.
- Let recipients use technical assistance to buy what they need by piloting with interested recipient(s) an arrangement giving recipients full flexibility in what consulting and training to buy, and financing a platform for recipients to give and see each other’s feedback on the services offered by multiple providers.
- Give recipients ironclad predictability of the future aid flows to which they commit by allowing recipients to arrange with an intermediary to receive a guaranteed cash flow, and sign over the donor’s actual flows over some agreed period to the intermediary.
I like these suggestions partly because they are each sensible in themselves. But the main reason I like them is that too much of the discussion about Accra has focused on rather narrow and technocratic measures to address particular items in the Paris Declaration. These ideas from CGD are more far-reaching: proposals such as greater aid transparency (which is what I spend most of my time working on) or on paying for outcomes (instead of micromanaging how money is spent) are ways to change the whole nature of the relationship between donor and recipient in the way that Paris envisages.
My only complaint is that they should have called the paper “a little less conversation”. After all, as Elvis said:
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby
I’m impressed by the idea of the Welbodi Partnership, a charity supporting the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone:
The Welbodi Partnership was established to support the provision of paediatric care in Sierra Leone, where child health statistics are the worst in the world.
The cool thing – as Tristan points out – is that:
they work directly with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to improve the hospital, instead of running their own hospital, as many NGOs like to do. This way, they deliver services and build capacity in the country’s health system.
There are far too many NGOs who, for respectable reasons, set up parallel services. The result is duplication and waste, and foreign-funded NGOs often deplete capacity from already hard-pressed government systems. The Welbody partnership approach seems to combine the best of both worlds.
Does anyone know of other NGOs taking this approach?
The Disease Control Priorities Project has a striking feature article about fistula and maternal mortality
… across much of the less developed world, fistula is an ordinary hazard of childbirth for many women and a permanent blight on countless lives. In those countries, obstetric fistula overwhelming results from obstructed labor, which occurs when the baby cannot pass through the mother’s birth canal because it either does not come head first or is too large for her pelvis. In the developed world, prompt medical intervention, often including Caesarean section, permits a delivery safe for both mother and child. But thousands of times each year in poor countries, birthing women receive no such aid and their labor is a futile agony lasting up to five days, with uterine contractions constantly forcing the baby, usually head first, against unyielding pelvic bone.Long before the mother’s torment ends, however, the unremitting pressure kills the child. It also cuts off the blood supply to the soft tissues of her vagina and other organs trapped between the baby’s skull and her pelvis. Eventually these tissues also die, forming one or more fistulas, and the baby’s head softens sufficiently for the stillborn child to pass from her body. Should she survive, the mother soon finds urine, feces or both leaking unstoppably from her vagina. In about a fifth of cases, the woman also suffers nerve injury that can cause a condition called footdrop, which prevents normal walking. Constant contact with urine or feces irritates and infects her skin and other tissues. Her kidneys, bladder, or other nearby organs may also be damaged. Her menstrual periods may stop, rendering her infertile.
The stark difference between the experience of mothers in the developing and developed worlds explains one of the greatest discrepancies known in health statistics, that between the rates of maternal mortality in rich and poor countries—a gap that constitutes “one of the most neglected issues of social injustice in the world today,” according to Wall and co-authors.17 Only 1 percent of the more than half a million maternal deaths each year happen in developed nations. In Northern Europe and North America, 11 women die for every 100,000 live births and a woman’s lifetime chance of dying because of pregnancy is 1 in 4,000. In Africa, that risk has been estimated at 1 in 14,18 and in some of the poorest parts of the continent, where over a thousand women die for every 100,000 live births, at 1 in 7.19
… A number of facilities, most prominently the renowned Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, in Ethiopia, repair thousands of fistulas each year at a cost of about $450 for each operation and related care.26 But still, the number of women suffering the disability and indignity continues to grow, creating a backlog that by some estimates would take centuries to clear, but which others believe could, with appropriate effort, be managed in a decade. And given the limited funds available for maternal care overall, experts differ on how to balance resources between prevention and treatment. In the opinion of Dr. Yifru Berhan, an obstetrician in the Ethiopian town of Hawassa, for example, “it’s unfortunate that we have hospitals to manage the complication but not to prevent the complication.”27
(Declaration of interest: my partner works for Marie Stopes International, whose slogan is “Children by choice, not by chance”. Their work to provide women with access to sexual health services including contraception and abortion, enables women to choose when and whether they want to have children, enabling them to avoid pregnancy when they are very young, to avoid having too many children and to increase the spacing between children, all of which are important ways to prevent this kind of complication from pregnancy and childbirth.)
I’ve been puzzling for a while about why food prices are rising here in Ethiopia. Teff, the local grain, has trebled in price from about 400 Birr per quintal to about 1,200 Birr for the same amount. There is almost no global trade in teff, so it does not seem to be an effect of rising global teff prices. Teff production has been at high levels for four years, according to Ethiopian government statistics (which may be inaccurate); and there is no obvious reason why overall food demand should have increased enough to cause such a sharp increase in prices.
A few weeks ago, Javier Blas in the FT, offered one possible explanation. He said that the problem was abnormally high demand, driven by substitution effects:
United Nations’ agriculture and food aid officials said that record prices of imported food have prompted a substitution effect, boosting the demand – and the price – of indigenous staples such as yam, sweetpotato, sorghum, cassava, millet or teff in Africa, Latin America andparts of Asia.
I’d be surprised if the price of teff would treble as a result of the rising price of substitute products, though I suppose this is theoretically possible.
Yesterday, Barney Jopson, also in the FT, apparently reporting from here in Addis, offered a different explanation:
The crisis has been magnified by local factors – drought, hoarding, and a splurge of public infrastructure investment that has left the finances of the country’s cash-strapped government under strain.
Unfortunately, Jopson doesn’t offer us any evidence for any of this. Who are these people “hoarding” teff, and where is it? In which parts of the country has drought caused a reduction in teff production, and by how much has the supply of teff fallen, overall? I’m particularly at a loss to understand Jopson’s thought that investment in public infrastructure would lead to rising food prices (though I can see why it has made it more difficult for the Government of Ethiopia to use subsidies or tax cuts to offset the effects.)
I’d like to see some more thorough reporting of teff production. My hunch is that food production figures have been flattered by official statistics in recent years, possibly to bolster GDP growth figures (agricultural production being a substantial share of GDP), and that the government has run down domestic teff reserves to make up the difference between actual and reported production. Now that the reserves are running low, the tightening of supply is leading to the increase in prices. But I have no more evidence for this than Jopson’s theory that it is because of hoarding.
Helmut Reisen points out that the global development finance system is dysfunctional:
A prerequisite for effective ownership and efficient aid delivery, at the core of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, is to map the rising complexity of multilateral development finance, to help identify areas for consolidation, address fragmentation and poor co-ordination at country level, and help identify comparative advantages for institutional role assignments among multilateral agencies. Such mapping identifies overlaps – leading to reduction of multilateral remit or proposals for consolidation; rivalries – leading to clarification of roles; and absences of co-ordination – leading to the design and implementation of co-ordinating structure.
I don’t think that mapping comparative advantage is the way forward. In the real world, firms do not try to analyze comparative advantage: they focus on maximising shareholder value and the ones that don’t succeed go bust or get taken over. Focusing on comparative advantage is the outcome of effective decisions, not the input. The problem in the aid industry is that there is no feedback mechanism to drive organisations towards their comparative advantage. The solution to this is to create stronger incentives – such as measuring results, greater transparency, funding outputs rather than inputs and increasing accountability – to force organisations closer to their comparative advantages. The “Gosplan” approach has been tried in development and it doesn’t work.
In a slightly whimsical account of Bill Clinton’s trip to Ethiopia in The Guardian, we find this:
Awke Tiruneh and his wife Emaye Beyene are not the only couple who are faintly bemused. They are pleased with their two lightbulbs, one in the main room and a second in the kitchen annexe of their pristine mud hut, and with the radio that everybody in Rema tunes to get music, not news. But they say they don’t want anything else.“When they have more money, they don’t know what to do with it in Rema,” says Samson Tsegaye, country director of the Solar Power Foundation. “They are happy. They don’t need a Mercedes or a television. When they have money, the men are always going to the bar.
The idea that the people of Rema “don’t want anything else” seems improbable to me. I am all for looking at consumerism with a sceptical eye; but there is a world of difference between conspicuous consumption and having enough money to send your children to school, or to afford health care, or to have what you need to cope with the failure of the harvest. And why shouldn’t the people of Rema have a television if they want one? Does the country director of a western NGO really speak for them?
In Le Monde, David Martin has a rather intelligent piece about aid to Ethiopia:
Major operators such as Difid, the British government arm, and USAid play a cat-and-mouse game with the government (GoE) because Meles is sensitive about external pressures in an environment in which domestic critics are almost silenced and expatriate websites blocked. Yet donor aid contributes at least 20% of GNP to a precarious economy, so cash can’t be turned away.Donors are aware of their power and responsibility. With the Ethiopian opposition parties in disarray (1) they are the only real curb on Meles. Big-time donors (the World Bank via the International Development Association, UNDP, the US, the UK, international NGOs) work through GoE to agreed MDG objectives set out in the government’s plan for accelerated and sustained development to end poverty (PASDEP). Cash goes to approved projects administered by Ethiopians.
I do wonder about the role donors should play when the domestic political opposition does not exist or, as in this case, is in disarray. It is tempting for donors to step in to the gap and provide the necessary checks and balances. But in the end this undermines the space for parliament and opposition parties to hold the government to account.
So my view is that donors should avoid playing this role: not because I don’t think it is important to hold governments to account but because I do.
We went recently to the village of Amber, about 6 hours north of Addis Ababa, to spend some time listening to people telling us about their attitudes to children, marriage, divorce, sex, abortion and contraceptions. (This is part of G’s work; I went along to listen and learn.)
The most surprising thing to me was that, although this is a deeply religious society, there were no social, religious or other concerns about people using contraception and abortion to limit the size of their family. The concern that people have about the pressure on land of having too many children in the community was far more pressing. The only objections to contraception were (perceived and real) side effects and the practicalities (and cost) of getting it.
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