Owen abroad

Archive for December, 2008

Nicholas Kristof mused on Christmas Day in the New York Times on whether NGOs should pay high salaries.  He seems to come down – though equivocally – on the side of saying that sometimes they should:

In the war on poverty, there is room for all kinds of organizations. Mr. Pallotta may be right that by frowning on aid groups that pay high salaries, advertise extensively and even turn a profit, we end up hurting the world’s neediest.

“People continue to die as a result,” he says bluntly. “This we call morality.”

I think there is a dilemma here only if you retain the mindset that aid agencies and NGOs are providing charity to the world’s neediest.  If this is charity, then perhaps there is something incongruous about “profiting” from charity.  (One of the commenters on the New York Times forum calls it “a moral repugnance”.)  Today this is charity; and even so, the utilitarian in me thinks we should pay higher salaries whenever the return – in terms of higher output from securing better staff – exceed the costs.

But there is much less of a problem if we see development assistance as social justice.  In the 20th Century, most of Europe turned its backs in the  on Victorian concepts of charity and workhouses to deal with poverty in their midst in favour of building social institutions to protect all their citizens.  In the 21st Century, our view of foreign assistance will, I believe, undergo a similar change: we will see foreign assistance as an act of solidarity and social justice, as part of what it means to live together as part of the same society.  The world’s poor will have rights, not depend on charity, and there will be institutions whose job it is to protect those rights. When development assistance is not charity but justice, we will not think it strange to provide a decent income to those who deliver it, any more than we think it strange to pay our judges well.

Update: Wronging Rights has a discussion of this too.

Willem Buiter on the Christmas message from the Pope

What is it about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition that leads so many of its most prominent spokespersons to make hateful, bigoted, life-diminishing and personal security-endangering statements when it comes to human sexuality?

The internet has been running very slowly in Ethiopia for most of the past week. This may be caused by congestion, or possibly by the cable that was severed near Egypt on Thursday.

But I’ve been able to get online this morning, so I took the opportunity to upgrade my website. I’m now using WordPress 2.7 for all the pages (instead of using PHP pages for static pages and WordPress for this blog).  That means, for example, that it is possible to add comments to almost any page on the website, and that site-wide search works.

I’ve also changed the design of the site in the hope that it looks more modern.  (I see now that the graphics which look good in Firefox look pretty ropey in Internet Explorer, so I’ll try to fix that later).

I encountered one technical problem during the updated.  When I tried to log in to the upgraded site, I got this message:

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

If you get this problem, the solution is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you read this blog you might have a passing interest in development and in technology. So you just might be interested (or know someone who would be interested) in joining our team.

We are hiring a Web 2.0 specialist to help us to make data about aid and poverty more accessible and useful in the fight against poverty. Here is the advert. More information about the team is here.

We can promise a great team, highly motivated, with lots of flexibility; and you’ll have a chance to do something really important. If you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this on.

Update: thanks to those who pointed out that they couldn’t access the file. I’ve uploaded it again – let me know in the comments if there is still a problem with it.

Phil in Afghanistan writes about what it is like living in a country in which there are many very poor people:

On the way back to the car, the girl, with the unerring accuracy of the terminally poor, spots me again, and comes running. I give her 10 Afs. Wordlessly, she takes it and turns away.

I have just spent more than 20 times that amount on food she will likely never eat.

I thought about this as I drove home. She will never eat a fruit tart, nor lychees with cream.

… Poor people are real. I met one, gave her next to nothing and drove on. I drove on to my lychees and walnut bread.

It means nothing and it means everything. Poverty is the sum of a lot of big things, but it is also the sum of a lot of little decisions that I make every day. And because we all make such decisions, poverty has long ago become a permanent fixture on the unreachable horizon, a cause we strive to but never seriously expect to reach.

I think that girl has a right to better than that.

Phil’s right: the girl has a right to better than that. We can do better than that.

In the fight against global poverty, we live still in an era of Victoria charity – throwing a few spare pennies to the poor in the workhouse.  We seem to assume, unthinkingly, that the poor (a) are in that condition partly as a consequence of their own fecklessness and (b) that there is nothing much we can do about it.  Neither of these assumptions is remotely close to the truth.

There is still no news of Robert Fowler, the UN special envoy to Niger:

The Niger government is still without news of the top UN official in the country, Canadian Robert Fowler, who disappeared three days ago west of the capital, the government spokesman said Wednesday.

I met Bob Fowler when he was the representative of Canda’s Prime Minister preparing for G-8 summits (the so-called “Sherpa”); and subsequently the personal representative for Africa (“APR” in the jargon).  The Kananaskis G-8 summit, which he helped to prepare (in which I was much more marginally involved) adopted the G-8 Africa Action Plan, which was a breakthrough in raising the commitment of the richest countries to doing more for Africa.

Bob Fowler is a remarkable man with a profound commitment to the people of Africa.  He is always willing to push the boundaries – he played a pivotal role in negotiating the end of “blood diamond” sales which financed the civil war in Angola, and so helped bring about the end of that war.

I don’t know who is holding Bob now, or what they want.  But he deserves to be a hero in Africa, not a kidnap victim.   Fingers crossed for his early and safe release.

Serious flaw in Internet Explorer not fixed yet (according to AP):

Users of all current versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Monday.

Seriously, people: if you are still using internet explorer, please take a moment right now to install firefox instead, for your sake as well as all of ours.

One key problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer is that it is “closed” – only Microsoft employees can see the code.  Firefox is open source – so any mistakes like these can be identified and fixed long before they do any harm.

Update (Tuesday afternoon): Microsoft, to its credit, is going to issue a patch tomorrow.

Let me be the 10th person to link to The aspiring dictator’s guide from the Mail & Guardian Online. Here’s an extract.

Rule 3. Make America or China happy. Make Israel and Saudi Arabia very happy. Become a Muslim, like Idi Amin. Visit Moammar Gadaffi often. He likes African leaders. We do not know why. Pray with George Bush and let him see your soul. Make your country’s leading supermodel the ambassador to France and Italy. Ask her to wear a mini when presenting her papers to Nicholas Sarkozy.

From Ethan Zuckerman, FP

Tom (second from the left) visiting from the UK ran for the first time at altitude (his usual run is along the waterfront in Ayr).

More photos here.

Here’s the elevation graph:

Jean Michel Severino likes the idea of “Cash on Delivery Aid“.

I think it could be the basis of a new consensus – linking a (broadly European) agenda of giving governments in developing countries more freedom to choose their own approaches to development with a (broadly North American) agenda of ensuring that aid is more firmly linked to results.

There are, as JMS rightly says, some issues that need to be resolved: how to define the outputs exactly, and what to do about countries that are unable to make progress towards results.  As he says, the first can be solved. The second is of course a problem common with any system of payment by results: it defeats the point of results-based-aid if you get the aid irrespective of whether you deliver the results.  My answer is that if (and when) we want to give aid to countries that are not able to produce results (and there will be occasions when we do) then we should devise a separate mechanism for doing so, with its own criteria. That is not a critique of Cash on Delivery Aid, but a case for ensuring that it is not the only system for providing aid.

Ross Coggins wrote about The Development Set back in 1976 (poem below). More than thirty years later, his critique still feels very contemporary (though were he writing today, I am sure that white landcruisers, satellite phones and blackberries would feature somewhere).

I’m just back from the Doha Financing for Development Conference (about which more later, when I have time). One topic that occupied the negotiators for hours was whether the UN, or another body such as the G-20, should host the next meeting about the financial crisis. (“Thus guaranteeing continued good eating / By showing the need for another meeting.”) I estimated that the Financing for Development meeting cost about $60 million.

I have made myself a personal promise. I do not want to travel around the world telling poor countries what they should do and how they should change. I will concentrate on trying to persuade rich countries to change the policies and behaviours that make it difficult for the world’s poor to share that prosperity.

The Development Set
by Ross Coggins

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet
I’m off to join the Development Set;
My bags are packed, and I’ve had all my shots
I have traveller’s checks and pills for the trots!

The Development Set is bright and noble
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes
Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton Hotels in scattered nations
We damn multi-national corporations;
injustice seems easy to protest
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution
Raises difficulties for every solution –
Thus guaranteeing continued good eating
By showing the need for another meeting.

The language of the Development Set
Stretches the English alphabet;
We use swell words like “epigenetic”
“Micro”, “macro”, and “logarithmetic”

It pleasures us to be esoteric –
It’s so intellectually atmospheric!
And although establishments may be unmoved,
Our vocabularies are much improved.

When the talk gets deep and you’re feeling numb,
You can keep your shame to a minimum:
To show that you, too, are intelligent
Smugly ask, “Is it really development?”

Or say, “That’s fine in practice, but don’t you see:
It doesn’t work out in theory!”
A few may find this incomprehensible,
But most will admire you as deep and sensible.

Development set homes are extremely chic,
Full of carvings, curios, and draped with batik.
Eye-level photographs subtly assure
That your host is at home with the great and the poor.

Enough of these verses – on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just pray god the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.

“Adult Education and Development” September 1976