Owen abroad

Archive for September, 2008

Growth Commission Blog

We are launching the Commission on Growth and Development BLOG (The Growth Blog) today, while unprecedented changes in the financial markets are underway. These changes have the potential to reconfigure financial systems and manner not seen since the 1930s.

I found the Growth Commission Report strangely disappointing.  Let’s hope the blog is better.

The second episode of Development Drums is at http://developmentdrums.org.  You can also subscribe on iTunes here.

Professor Adrian Wood and Peter daCosta joined me to discuss whether donors should cap aid to Africa; the power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe; the Care International paper criticising wasted aid; and the new Doing Business survey.

I would say that this episode is 50% better than the first episode.  It works better having two guests rather than one; we kept the discussion of each topic shorter; and the sound quality is a better.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the length. This episode is 50 minutes, which is too long for many people (and it results in a very long download, unless I degrade the sound quality even more).  But I like the fact that we are not constrained like a radio or TV show to limit the experts to talking in sound-bites, so we can have a real and substantive discussion.   I think I’ll try to bring the next one down to 40 minutes next time.

By the way – it is great fun recording and producing this.  This week was much quicker and easier because I’m getting used to the software.

Please let me know if you have suggestions for future topics or guests, and feedback on the podcast so we can make it better next time.

I know this is all very immature, but I thought this was a funny idea (via):

when you make a donation to Planned Parenthood in her name, they’ll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here’s the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

https://secure.ga0.org/02/pp10000_inhonor

You’ll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the “in Sarah Palin’s honor” card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202

PS make sure you use that link above or choose the pulldown of Donate–Honorary or Memorial Donations, not the regular “Donate Online”

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

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

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

Dan Kimmerling on Techcrunch says that Facebook is the new Outlook for the younger generation

for young people, who really only care about functionality, Facebook succeeds because it is the killer web application for communications and personal information management. Facebook Mail is not without its problems, but the combination of Facebook Mail, Facebook Chat, and what is functionally an auto updating address book, makes Facebook into the new Outlook not only for those who are inside of Silicon Valley, but for anyone of the millions of people who use Facebook as either their sole or their primary digital identity.

What I find interesting is that I know plenty of older people (ie of my generation and older) who have never used Facebook or Myspace, and plenty of younger people (ie younger than me) who never use email.

For people leaving university today, email is like carbon paper – it was used by their parents, and perhaps it is still used in a quaint way by their bank or tax office.

Meanwhile the people who run government departments in the UK, and who run private firms, reckon they are hip and down with the kids if they answer their own emails.

The PSD Blog, citing Chris Blattman, wonders if randomized evaluation is too expensive:

In some circumstances, simple monitoring and evaluation without randomization might be enough, even if it leaves us with less certainty about the outcomes. Perhaps it’s time to develop more formal cost-benefit guidelines for randomized evaluations?

Our problem is that we are investing too little in rigorous evaluations, not too much.  We’ve been giving aid for 50 years now with pitifully little evidence about what really works. 

Of course it is true in principle that we could invest too much in evaluation – but the point of diminishing returns is a long way above where we are now.  The sums of money involved are trivial by comparison with the huge amounts of aid we are spending on the basis of far too little information.

I’m reminded of Derek Curtis Bok’s famous remark:

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

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

I’ve written about last week’s Accra meeting on the aidinfo blog and discussed it with Simon Maxwell in this week’s Development Drums.

The inauguaral edition of my new development news podcast, Development Drums, is now online.

Simon Maxwell, Director of ODI, joined me for a discussion of this week’s Accra Agenda for Action, the UN MDG Gap Report, and the latest poverty statistics from the World Bank

To listen to the podcast, you can use this link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DevelopmentDrums

I’m aiming for a weekly roundup of development news.

This is my first effort at podcasting. I’d welcome feedback – do you like the format? How can we make it better?

The Guardian reports that the UK is pushing for greater transparency of aid in an initiative to be launched tomorrow:

The UK wants donor countries to provide full and detailed information of all the financial assistance provided to each country; details of individual projects and their aims; and reliable information on future aid flows so that developing countries can plan ahead.

This political pressure is a very welcome boost for our work on the need for greater transparency for aid, with strong civil society backing, and the UK Government deserves great credit for pushing it. It

The next stage for us is an intensive period of listening to people in developing countries – parliaments, finance ministries, civil society, the private sector – as well as in donor countries, to understand exactly what information should be published, and how.

And that’s what we’ll be doing for the next couple of years.

I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.

About 12-13 million Ethiopians need food relief or emergency assistance as a result of the failure of the short rains in southern Ethiopia, according to AFP:

The lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age five at risk from malnutrition, OCHA said. …

The United Nations appealed in June for 325.2 million dollars mainly for drought victims . Only 52 percent of the appeal has been met.

I don’t understand how this can happen. We presumably knew – or could have known – in April that the short rains had failed, and that there would be hunger in southern Ethiopia. So how is it that we find ourselves in September – at least 4 full months later – and we’ve only raised half the money we need to prevent people from dying of hunger?

I am told that the food shortages were accurately predicted by the experts as early as May. But this predictions don’t translate into political pressure, and thus funding, until there are pictures on TV of children with distended bellies and flies on their face.

So the question for the future is: how can we translate warnings about food shortages into a flow of the necessary resources without having to wait for people to start to die?