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