Owen abroad

Archive for October, 2008

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.

Chris Blattman and Bernd Beber are looking at the economics of child soldiering.  Why do rebel armies, such as the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda, recruit adolescents?  According to Blattman and Beber, because younger children are ineffective soldiers; and adults are too difficult to indoctrinate. 

Chris Blattman has this graph

What I find interesting about this work is that from premises which sound intuitively plausible, Chris and Bernd then arrive at policy conclusions that are initially counterintuitive:

• anti-insurgency measures (eg increasing military spending by the government) may increase child soldiering (because it increases the size of army needed by a rebel commander)
• measures to reduce child labour may increase child soldiering (because it reduces alternative options for children)
• increased educational and economic opportunities for children will only reduce child soldiering if those opportunities increase faster for children than for adults
• a good strategy to reduce child soldiering would include “abduction training” – teaching children how to resist indoctrination and to escape if captured (rather as Japanese children learn to deal with earthquakes)

Chris calls himself a political scientist, rather than an economist. But I think this is exactly the sort of work that economists, at their best, should be doing.  This work is a fascinating combination of insights into human motivation and incentives, and the use of quantitative techniques to test whether those ideas correspond to the world we observe.

The third edition of the development podcast, Development Drums, is now online.

This week the guests are:

• Ngaire Woods
  Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and Director of the Global Economic Governance Programme.
• David Roodman
  Center for Global Development in Washington DC, and architect of the Commitment to Development Index.

This week the focus is on the impact of the financial crisis on developing countries, and on proposals to reform international institutions.

The podcast is now hosted on a new server.  If you have already subscribed, you may need to remove the old subscription and then subscribe again.  You can use this link:

If you use iTunes, you can search for Development Drums in the iTunes store, or use this link:

In the meantime, I’ve made some more technical improvements.  I have moved the server, to make it easier and faster to download for our listeners in Khartoum and Kinshasa; and though the file size is smaller (15Mb) the sound quality is a little better.  I’ve also kept is a bit shorter, to just 45 minutes.

As ever, I’d welcome feedback about this podcast.  Do you find it interesting? Do you have suggestions for future topics, or guests?  Perhaps you would like to come on yourself?

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.

Ray Fisman writing in Slate asks whether falling commodities prices cause civil wars in commodity-rich countries:

To reduce violence in Colombia and other commodities-rich countries, care has to be taken to recognize how fluctuating prices actually affect the situation on the ground. If lower coffee prices drive poor farmers to desperation, we need to do something to cushion the blow to their incomes. One recent suggestion from University of California, Berkeley, economist Edward Miguel and myself is to shift some amount of international development assistance away from long-term investment and toward short-term emergency aid for countries hard-hit by a collapse in prices of labor-intensive commodities. (Countries would similarly get aid if pummeled by weather shocks like drought.) This aid would kick in as soon as prices headed south, before famine or war broke out. So we’d channel aid to Colombia’s farmers when coffee prices fell (or if the Colombian rain gods failed to nurture their crops). These emergency funds would be scaled back when prices stabilized—as they did in 2001—or the rains returned.

I must say, I’m now a bit confused about whether we think the main problem facing developing countries is rising commodity prices or falling commodity prices. Of course part of the answer is that both rising and falling commodity prices can hit people in poor countries hard (namely different people in different countries), and either way, these are people least able to cushion the effect through savings, insurance, borrowing or changing jobs.

As Fisman and Miguel say in Economic Gangsters, we need a more flexible channel of large scale development assistance which can be deployed quickly to smooth the impact of the financial crisis on developing countries. Preventing the outbreak of conflict or famine will be much cheaper than coping with the consequences, quite aside from the human tragedy that will follow from failure to act quickly.

Read this first (Allana Shaikh):

Don’t do it. You’re not going to think of a solution no one else has, your approach is not as innovative as you think it is, and raising money is going to be impossible. You will have no economy of scale, your overhead will be disproportionately high, and adding one more tiny NGO to the overburdened international system may well make things worse instead of better.

The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network has a new website. This is a coalition of American thinkers who are campaigning for change in the way that US foreign assistance is provided. They are asking for the following changes:

Core Principles for Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance:

• Elevate global development as a national interest priority in actions as well as in rhetoric;
• Align foreign assistance policies, operations, budgets and statutory authorities;
• Rebuild and rationalize organizational structures;
• Commit sufficient and flexible resources with accountability for results; and,
• Partner with others to produce results.

Priority Actions for Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance:

• Develop a national strategy for global development;
• Reach a “grand bargain” between the Executive branch and Congress on management authorities and plan, design and enact a new Foreign Assistance Act;
• Streamline the organizational structure and improve organizational capacity by creating a Cabinet-level Department for Global Development, by rebuilding human resource capacity and by strengthening monitoring and evaluation; and,
• Increase funding for and accountability of foreign assistance.

The US is the world’s largest donor, in absolute terms (though not as a share of US income) and it would be a huge step forward if these changes were made by the incoming US administration following the election.

Barack Obama and John McCain have both given commitments to reform of foreign assistance.  There is a risk, however, that this will not be given the priority it deserves following an election, so it is very valuable to have a bipartisan campaign of this kind.

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.

Because everyone is so concerned with the financial situation, little attention has been paid to the other aspects of the World Bank and IMF meetings last weekend.

The Development Committee Communique says:

An additional Board seat for sub Saharan Africa on the Bank’s Board will be created.  DTC voting shares in IBRD and IDA will increase, giving special emphasis to small members.  … There is considerable agreement on the importance of a selection process for the President of the Bank that is merit-based and transparent, with nominations open to all Board members and transparent Board consideration of all candidates.

These are very welcome steps towards making the World Bank more accountable; but they are small steps so it encouraging that the communique refers to further reforms to come. (Bank President Zoellick  has established a new High Level Commission chaired by Ernesto Zedillo to look at improvements to governance.)

I suspect that there is an inwardness to the phrase “there is considerable agreement on the importance of …”.  This looks to me like a carefully-chosen form of words that masks a failure to agree stronger language that would firmly commit the Bank’s shareholders – particularly the United States – to an open competition for the Bank’s President in future.  Nonetheless, it is a step forward.

To the managers of the banks

Every time I have suggested things you might do differently, I have been told that this is impossible as you are under an obligation to pursue the interests of your shareholders.

Now that I am – unexpectedly – one of your shareholders, I expect you’d like to know what I would like you to do.  Here are seven new instructions to be getting on with.

1.  Short-term profits are not important: what is important is long-term value.  I would like you to stop chasing short term arbitrage opportunities and overnight trading and focus on identifying and investing in the best-run, most productive and valuable enterprises.  There will be no trading in derivatives or other purely financial products.

2.  Cut executive pay immediately.  From now on, nobody in the bank will get paid more than four times the salary of the lowest-paid employee.  If you want to award yourself a pay rise, you’ll have to increase the salaries at the bottom.

3. All our branches and subsidiaries overseas will pay local taxes, in full. There will be no clever arrangements to transfer profits to tax havens to avoid tax.

4. No more junk mail trying to persuade people to take out new credit.

5. It is no longer our objective to inflate house prices.  An increase in house prices is not an increase in net wealth: it is a transfer from those who do not own houses to those that do.  We will try to dampen the housing market, not reinvigorate it.

6. Every bank that is “too big to fail” will be split up into smaller banks.  We are going to reverse the cycle of mergers and takeovers that has created these monolithic institutions that have held us all to ransom.

7.  There will be no lending for businesses or individuals involved in industries that are harmful to our society and planet.  That means no lending to any of the following: the arms trade, advertising and marketing, tobacco, extracting or burning fossil fuels, or the motor industry.   Instead, please invest more in clean technologies, technologies appropriate for developing countries, non-profit organisations and community groups.

I know that you have many new shareholders, and it will take time for you to get to know us all.  My views won’t necessarily be shared by all your new bosses, but you can be pretty sure that lots of your new bosses  think more along these lines than the old lot.

I was a bit hesitant about becoming a bank-owner, but now that it has happened, I think I’m going to enjoy it.

Work hard – but not too hard.

Yours,

Owen

Michela Wrong on writing books about Africa

A book must be the biggest act of presumption it is possible to commit. If you’re a white westerner writing about Africa, that arrogance reaches dizzying levels. What gives a spoilt bourgeois, who didn’t even grow up there, the right to interpret the continent for the world?

The only answer can be: I have devoted years on the continent to listening and learning; I have done my homework as conscientiously as I know how; and it’s just possible, because I have spent so much time learning to write accessibly about foreign cultures, that I may be able to serve as a bridge between two cultural viewpoints.

… I realised that my conversations with aspirant writers, and there have been dozens, had one thing in common: they all involved the male of the species. Africa is full of female reporters who tramp through Darfur’s refugee camps and grit their teeth during Mogadishu firefights. Yet not one of these indomitable females has ever called me for the Quick Guide to Successful African Book Writing. I think I know the reason. It’s the same one that ensured I tried my hand at being an author only after 16 years of journalism. Women probably see an Africa book as featuring Africa first, their own exploits second. They fear they know too little, have nothing original to say. Even in this neo-feminist era, they have a sneaking suspicion they are not worthy.

(Via Chris).

Which reminds me of the timeless How To Write About Africa. Here’s an excerpt, but read the whole thing:

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

I’ve never liked the name of the FT’s lifestyle section, “How To Spend It“.  But with financial markets as they are now, it seems particularly ludicrous.  How to spend what, exactly?

Sitting in the airport lounge in Washington DC today, I was a bit surprised to find a “bonus issue” of How To Spend It in today’s paper.

I expect that there are lots of investors whose main concerns today include “whether the perfect sound system exists”, “the demure allure of autumn’s flattering longer skirts” (the Cavalli skirt is a snip at £3000), and “whether corporate gifts can ever truly be objects of desire”.

Alanna Shaikh complains about the use and abuse of “sustainability” in development:

I also hate this word because it so many things to so many different people.

I am also uncomfortable about the notion of sustainability, but for slightly different reasons.

There seems to be a consensus that development assistance is only politically defensible if we assert that it is temporary.  Our objective, we say, is to put ourselves out of work by creating conditions in which countries do not need our help.   This leads to a cult of sustainability which is problematic for at least 3 reasons.

First, it leads us to choose interventions that are (or appear to be) time-limited even when there are more effective alternatives available.  Some very effective development interventions can only be sustained in the poorest countries as long as donors are prepared to support them for many years to come – such as vaccination campaigns, increasing schooling or tariff reform.  As a result, aid agencies tend to prefer short-term interventions over more effective but longer term partnership.

Second, it leads us to design interventions badly.   For example, donors have pressed governments to introduce user charges (for health care, or schools) so that they can project an end to aid financing.  But user charges reduces access to those services for the very poor, so reducing the benefits of the intervention and excluding the group that most needs the help.   

Third, it pushes donors to over-claim the effects of what they can do.  Staff in development agencies feel the need to claim that each aid programme is “transformational” or at least “catalytic” and every project description describes how it will accelerate economic growth and development.  I’m doubtful, myself, that there is all that much we can do to make countries develop faster.  But there is a lot that we can do to help people to live better lives while that process is taking place.  But the cult of sustainability makes such interventions illegitimate. 

Nonetheless, I understand why developing countries and donors are keen to see an end to the aid relationship. At its worst, it can corrode accountability and create dependence that all of us want to see ended.

These thoughts may seem contradictory.  I reconcile them by believing that the richest people in the world have a duty to support the poorest people in the world – whether they are in the same country or not – as a matter of social justice rather than charity.  This is a principle that we accept within our own countries – few of us think that we should aim to exit altogether from national insurance, state pensions or unemployment benefits in our own countries.  The same principle should apply globally: there will always be people who are relatively rich and people who are relatively poor, and we should be aiming to evolve institutions which are effective at transferring income from the best off to the wost off around the world.  And we will be doing that for the foreseeable future.

The UK Department for International Development has started a group blog.  This is great news for those of us who believe that it has a good story to tell.

DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions of Britain.  I hope this blog will help tell the story in a very direct and personal way.

I used to blog when I worked at DFID, but that was before the government had guidelines about blogging. Let’s hope that the Government will be willing to accept that there will be some uncomfortable moments but that the benefits hugely outweigh the risks.

I know a few people who would benefit from reading: David Pogue’s Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User.

As usual, don’t neglect the comments which include some other top tips.

Sadly, most of the people who would benefit from these tips don’t read blogs, so they won’t be reading this.

The Ibrahim Index of African Governance was published today.  It ranks African governments in five dimensions (safety and security, rule of law & transparency, participation & human rights, sustainable economic opportunity, and human development) and then puts these together to arrive at an overall ranking.

Mauritius comes top again this year; and the top 5 countries (Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana and South Africa) are unchanged. 

Across the table as a whole,mMore than half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa – 31 out of 48 – have recorded an improvement, with the biggest improvement overall in Liberia.

I was encouraged to see that the most progress has been made across the continent in the category of “Participation and Human Rights”, with improvements in 29 out of 48 countries.

Regionally, every region except one – the Horn of Africa – has seen an improvement overall.

The countries at the bottom seem stuck there, however.  Of the bottom 10 countries, 8 saw no improvement compared to last year.

The BBC sub-editor picked an angle, with the headline Prudence pays off in Ethiopia and the teaser:

With the financial turmoil affecting many of the world’s economies, Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa considers how Ethiopia and other parts of Africa may escape the worst of the credit crisis.

But that headline does not seem to be consistent with the rest of the article which goes more like this:

Over the past few years, Ethiopia has been having something of a boom of its own, and Addis Ababa is littered with building sites.

But a lot of these ambitious construction projects seem to have got stuck halfway. Some may have run out of cement, but others, even more of them, have probably run out of money.

… In all of this, the only money coming in from outside that is a significant flow in most African countries might be remittances from workers overseas.

I think the financial difficulties might hit Ethiopia, and other African countries, pretty hard; especially if remittances dry up, investment (such as it is) falters, and rich countries become more protectionist and less likely to give aid.

There has been a lot of discussion about the debate between the candidates for Vice President, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, focusing on the lack of a train smash. But there was one important policy adjustment which has had very little attention. Joe Biden gave this answer:

IFILL: … I want to get — try to get you both to answer a question that neither of your principals quite answered when my colleague, Jim Lehrer, asked it last week, starting with you, Sen. Biden. What promises — given the events of the week, the bailout plan, all of this, what promises have you and your campaigns made to the American people that you’re not going to be able to keep?

BIDEN: Well, the one thing we might have to slow down is a commitment we made to double foreign assistance. We’ll probably have to slow that down. We also are going to make sure that we do not go forward with the tax cut proposals of the administration — of John McCain …

So “the one thing” that can be put on hold is Obama’s previous commitment to double foreign aid? 

It isn’t clear how this fits with Obama’s sponsorship of the Global Poverty Act, which would require the next President of the United States:

to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

According to Obama’s website:

With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces,” said Senator Obama. “It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America’s standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere