Owen abroad

Archive for January, 2009

Here is a very interesting article by Minouche Shafik, the Permanent Secretary at the UK Department for International Development. (For our cousins elsewhere, a Permanent Secretary is the most senior civil servant in a government department, ranking somewhere just below a Minister).

Minouche makes two key points: first, social protection schemes seem to be working quite well; and second, that poor people suffer much more from volatility and shocks than others – and there is growing evidence of the permanent harm that they suffer following a temporary shock. That makes a pretty compelling case for widespread use of social protection to put a safety net under people so that temporary shocks do not reduce a family to poverty for not just one but sometimes two generations.

There is a new paper by John Page and Jorge Saba Arbache (here) which finds that child mortality, for instance, goes up when growth is low, but doesn’t come back down when growth accelerates agan. Primary school completion rates and life expectancy similarly go down when growth is low but don’t recover in periods of high growth.  The paper also finds that aid goes down during decelerations, adding to the volatility.

Minouche also says something I agree with and something I don’t agree with.

Here is what I think is dead right:

… attempts to orchestrate a tailored response to protect the most vulnerable will almost always lag behind the need.

This suggests the need for an automatic safety net response so that social protection kicks in automatically in the face of a shock.  I would like to see social protection schemes become “demand led” – that is, donors would agree the entitlement criteria with governments, and if, in the face of an economic shock, there are more people who fall below that threshold, then the amount of funding from donors should automatically increase. This would help to make aid counter-cyclical, instead of pro-cyclical.

Here is what I don’t agree with:

DFID does not see the money we have committed to social protection as a welfare programme, although clearly for some households it will provide this function.

Why not? I think there is a strong case for having a permanent welfare programme, which transfers money from the rich to the poor.  We should see aid not as a matter of temporary charity but the beginnings of a global system of social justice.   (I wonder if Minouche’s choice of words – attributing this view to “DFID” rather than herself, suggests that she secretly agrees?)

From John Naughton:

The most satisfactory sight yesterday was that of Dick Cheney, looking for all the world like Dr Strangelove, being wheeled off the scene in a wheelchair. The only problem is that he was then helped into a limousine rather than a police van.

My colleague Simon nails the link between the Obama team’s idea of openness and what we are trying to do with aid data:

The pitch for the idea states:

“We can unleash a wave of civic innovation if we open up government data to programmers. The government has a treasure trove of information: legislation, budgets, voter files, campaign finance data, census data, etc. Let’s STANDARDIZE, STRUCTURE, and OPEN up this data.”

Quite. This is exactly what we want to do with aid data!

New website from the Royal African Society, African Arguments, with some really good contributors:

we promise to make African Arguments Online the site of the most vigorous debates on Africa available on the web.

A new book The Trouble with Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africaby Jonathan Glennie (the Christian Aid representative in Colombia) says that aid can do more harm than good.

In the latest edition of the Development Drums podcast, I talk to Jonathan about his book.  He explains why he thinks that we need to take a more complete view of the positive and negative impacts of aid, and he disagrees with my view that aid can be made to work better.

Andrew Mueller in this weekend’s FT writes about the Merkato, Addis Ababa’s market district

To wander (and flinch, and wince, and boggle, and marvel) within its limits is to acquire the quickest and most bracing imaginable appreciation of Africa’s industry, its possibility, its genius for improvisation, its insuperable will, despite everything, to live.

Dead right. The Merkato is said to be Africa’s largest outdoor market; and people here in Addis say you can buy absolutely anything there (the British used to say the same about Harrods).

We went to see Teza last night, a newish film by Haile Gerima which won Best Screenplay and the  Special jury prize at the Venice film festival last year.  The film is in Amharic with English sub-titles.

The film is about Anberber (played by Aaron Arefe – shown left) who returns to his village in Gondar after years spent studying medicine in Germany.  But he returns at the time of the Derg, led by Haile Mariam Mengistu, and in Anberber’s village, young men have to hide in the hills to avoid being conscripted.

Much of the film is in flashback as Anberber looks back on his experiences.

We thought this was an entertaining and moving account of Ethiopia’s history, and especially the time of the Derg.  It was well scripted and acted, and beautifully filmed.  For those of us who love the Ethiopian countryside, people and culture, there was much to revel in.

In today’s Dubai marathon, Ethiopians had 8 out of the top 10 men, and 8 of the top 10 women.   That is a quite extraordinary domination of the sport. Here is Reuters:

Gebrselassie wins wet Dubai Marathon (Reuters)

DUBAI- Haile Gebrselassie produced a classic performance to win the rain-hit Dubai Marathon on Friday, though well outside his own world best time.

The Ethiopian missed out on a million dollar jackpot for breaking the world record, finishing in two hours, five minutes and 29 seconds.

Gebrselassie set the world’s quickest time of 2:03:59 in Berlin last year after opting out of the Beijing Olympics but wet conditions ruined any hopes of a repeat.

He earned $250,000 for his latest victory, leading an Ethiopian sweep of the podium with Deressa Chimsa (2:07:54) and Eshetu Wendimu Tsige (2:08:41) trailing him in Dubai.

“That’s one of the best races I’ve run in such weather conditions,” Gebrselassie told reporters after retaining his Dubai title. “I was doing pretty well until the 30km mark.

“But then things became a little bit difficult because of the rain and that made the difference. But it was wonderful to clock this time in such conditions.”
Dubai Marathon results

Leading results from Friday’s Dubai Marathon: Men

1.   Haile Gebrselassie, Ethiopia, 2 hours, 5 minutes, 29 seconds.

2.   Deressa Edae Chimsa, Ethiopia, 2:07:54.

3.   Eshetu Wendimu Tsige, Ethiopia, 2:08:41.

4.   Gashaw Melese Asfaw, Ethiopia, 2:10:59.

5.   Dereje Tesfaye Gebrehiwot, Ethiopia, 2:11:42.

6.   David Kemboi Murkomen, Kenya, 2:12:14.

7.   Mesfin Admasu Abebe, Ethiopia, 2:12:.23.

8.   Tesfaye Tola, Ethiopia, 2:12:56.

9.   Asnake Fikadu Roro, Ethiopia, 2:15:01.

10.  Nephat Ngotho Kinyanjui, Kenya, 2:15:23.

Women

1.   Bezunesh Bekele Sertsu, Ethiopia, 2:24:02.

2.   Atsede Habtamu Besuye, Ethiopia, 2:25:17.

3.   Helena Loshanyang Kirop, Kenya, 2:25:35.

4.   Tatyana Petrova, Russia, 2:25:53.

5.   Genet Getaneh Wendimagegnehu, Ethiopia, 2:26:37.

6.   Eyerusalem Kuma Mutal, Ethiopia, 2:26:51.

7.   Berhane Adere Debela, Ethiopia, 2:27:47.

8.   Shuru Diriba Dulume, Ethiopia, 2:28:26.

9.   Atsede Baysa Tesema, Ethiopia, 2:29:13.

10.  Mulu Seboka Seyfu, Ethiopia, 2:30:10.

Edward Barder is a not-very-distant relative who makes fishing rods.

According to a quote from the Independent, quoted on the The Edward Barder Rod Company Website

“Barder is unquestionably Britain’s finest rod-maker”

Personally, I’m for banning fishing, though I wish Edward well. 

Esther Duflo runs the Poverty Action Lab at MIT. They do great analysis of what works in development.  And Esther is a big hit in France. According to the The Independent

Mme Duflo is the youngest woman ever to be asked to lecture at this prestigious, 500-year-old institution at the heart of the Left Bank. Her introductory talk was the hottest (free) ticket in town. Several hundred people, including the former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, arrived too late and were locked out.

Mme Duflo is a “development economist” one of the world’s greatest experts – perhaps the greatest – on why development programmes in poor countries often fail and why they sometimes succeed. Her precise field of expertise has existed less than a decade. She is among its inventors.

Bill Sonnenschein, educator, civil rights activist, roadie, and friend, died on 29 December 2008.

Bill had been  a special advisor to President Marc Ravalomananat of Madagascar for the last few months.  He taught leadership at Berkeley, which is where I first met him, and helped to run the Environmental Leadership Program there.

Grethe, who was one of Bill’s graduate student instructors, writes here about the impact that Bill had on her life.

Cal obituary here.

He was an inspiration to many to make the world a better place.

Last month the OECD published aid data from donors for the period up to and including 2007.  With my colleagues at Development Initiatives, we have done an analysis of the figures for the House of Commons International Development Committee. The full memorandum (as .pdf) is here.

Here are some key points:

• Donors promised to increase aid by 2010.  Half way to that target, if donors had been increasing aid at a constant rate to meet their commitments:
  - Global aid in 2007 would have been $18.4 billion higher
  - Over the last three years donors would have spent an additional $29.5 billion
  - This would have lifted approximately an extra 15 million people permanently out of poverty.
• The G7 also promised in 2005 to double aid to Africa. Half way to that target:
  - G7 aid to Africa has increased by only $3.3 billion, less than a sixth of the promised increase.
  - If aid had been increased at a constant rate towards the target, aid to Africa would have been more than $6 billion higher in 2007.
• It is becoming clear that Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece and France are not going to meet their promises
• The financial crisis is a potential “quadruple whammy” for developing countries. The value of the existing aid commitments has fallen (because they are expressed as a share of GDP), donors are increasingly unikely to meet those commitments, the financing needs of developing countries have been increased by the downturn, and there will be be substantial declines in non-aid flows to developing countries such as foreign direct investment, remittances, and equity investment.

In industrialised countries the fiscal “automatic stabilisers” tend to increase spending in recession, which both dampens the macroeconomic effects of the downturn and channels additional funding to services that face additional costs. By contrast the institutional arrangements for providing finance to developing countries tend to mean that finance is reduced just as needs are increasing, which amplifies the economic downturn, increases economic instability and jeopardises poverty reduction and service delivery.

The Ethiopian Government passed a new law on Tuesday that limits the activities of foreign-funded organisations. The law prevents organizations that receive more than 10% of their funding from abroad from involvement in human rights, gender equality and conflict resolution.  It has been greeted with howls of protest by international organisations.

I’m going to make myself very unpopular with  lots of the ferenj here in Addis Ababa, many of whom make a good living working for NGOs with foreign funding and are up in arms about this. But I see where the Ethiopian Government is coming from, and I don’t think the law is completely unreasonable.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I would not have brought in this law. I think 15 years imprisonment (that was in the draft bill) for breaking this law is draconian. I do not think that government officials should have the right to attend internal meetings of civil society organisations.

But it is not unreasonable for the Ethiopian Government to say that foreign-funded organisations should not be able to use their funding to buy political influence and change in Ethiopia. Foreign donations to political parties are illegal in the UK – that is why there has been such a fuss about the allegations that George Osborne may have solicited donations from Russian oligarchs on a yacht. We are uncomfortable with the idea that very wealthy people should buy political power – that is why we have spending limits and caps on political donations – and in the UK we look rather pityingly at the United States, where funding by rich companies and individuals seems to dominate political life.  Think what this must feel like in a very poor country, where even quite modestly wealthy organisations and individuals overseas have undreamt of wealth by comparison with Ethiopians, and try to use that disparity of wealth to buy change.

So why shouldn’t a very poor country be concerned to avoid having its politics shaped by foreign funding?

There are about 3,800 NGOs here in Addis, with a total budget of $1.5 billion a year. (That is a lot of money in a country in which the annual government budget is about $4 billion a year. The government health budget is less than $300 million a year.) The money going to NGOs could make a huge difference if it were used to improve government services directly, rather that to fund a motley collection of advocacy organisations and fragmented small scale delivery organisations.

It is important to note that the new law does not forbid civil society organisations from being involved in advocacy for human rights. It forbids organisations from being involved in political advocacy if they get more than 10% of their funding from abroad.

So while this law isn’t one that I would have introduced myself, I see where the Government is coming from. It is not completely mad. The hysterical over-reaction from donors, often under political pressure from international NGOs at home, is out of all proportion.

Chris Blattman asks us to comment on his advice to aspiring graduate student who want to be an impact evaluator:

If your goal is to improve the delivery of aid, and truly advance development, many more skills and knowledge are involved than the randomized evaluation. See here for more. But in short: a well-identified causal impact that arrives two years after the program does not performance management make.

My conclusion is similar, but my perspective is a bit different.

The development business needs much better and more rigorous evaluations.  There are a huge number of superficial, poorly designed evaluations whose sole purpose is to tick a box, rather than to find out what works.  We would be better off with fewer, but properly designed evaluations.

Like Chris, I think there are ways to do rigorous evaluations other than through randomised trials. But I probably believe more strongly in randomisation as being the most rigorous and effective approach where possible. I think the burden of proof is on those who want to use other methods to show that a randomised trial is impossible, or disproportionately expensive, or unethical, or that their alternative approach is in some way superior.  Very often the choice is made out of laziness or ignorance. 

But I think there is a big problem in the evaluation industry.  Too many evaluations are conducted because they are methodologically interesting – for example, because a researcher has thought of a neat way of randomising, or of demonstrating a new statistical technique.  Apparently using well-established and proven techniques of evaluation is too boring: people think they won’t get tenure if they don’t do something new.  The result is that evaluations are frequently driven by the interest of the researcher in evaluation techniques, rather than the most important and relevant questions in development policy.  We know all kinds of strange things about the use of deworming pills, but we don’t know what the best way is to get girls in school.

And that is why I agree with Chris that you should not specialize in having a PhD in evaluation, and that a broad range of skills is preferable. What we want is people who understand the big picture, and know what are the important questions to ask, and hopefully answer, instead of people who have disappeared up their own navel with an obsession about neat new statistical techniques. 

The Economist has a stupid article, Managing the Facebookers which claims that the net generation will suffer int he recession:

Once again, the touchy-feely management fads that always spring up in years of plenty (remember the guff about “the search for meaning” and “the importance of brand me”) are being ditched in favour of more brutal command-and-control methods. Having grown up in good times, Net Geners have laboured under the illusion that the world owed them a living. But hopping between jobs to find one that meets your inner spiritual needs is not so easy when there are no jobs to hop to. And as for that sabbatical: here’s a permanent one, sunshine.

The article is unencumbered by evidence: it reads more like wishful thinking by some curmudgeonly old hack who resents the rise of younger, smarter, better connected and more self-confident rivals.

It is quite plausible that the exact opposite might happen and that the economic upheaval will accelerate trends in the workplace towards the tools and attitudes of the Net Generation.  It seems to be the industry dinosaurs that are going bust (think General Motors and Woolworths) not the new economy (Amazon is doing well).  At a time of belt-tightening and rapid change, there will be a premium for people who can collaborate effectively, are comfortable working in teams and multi-tasking, and able to adapt rapidly to new ways of working. 

Maybe the cosh is actually hovering over the gnarly old bosses who have resisted change for the last decade, not the facebook generation?

Spare a thought for those of us trying to use the internet in Ethiopia.

It isn’t great at the best of times.  When it went down during the rainy season I rang technical support and was told that “the firewall has flooded”.  Apparently there is a single computer through which the entire nation’s traffic passes (or, that day, doesn’t pass).  The authorities block some websites (including blogspot.com, nazret.com, and skype.com) though they say they don’t, and they block Skype.  The bandwidth is always limited, but it is also frustrtingly unpredictable. Some days it will be OK, others terrible.  

According to internet world statistics, there are just 300 broadband internet users (as of March 2008) in Ethiopia; and fewer than 300,000 internet subscribers in total.

And now this:

Internet and telephone traffic between the Middle East and Europe will continue to be disrupted until Jan. 4 after a repaired submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea suffered more damage, France Telecom SA said.

We’ve had very limited internet since December 19th, when the three underwater cables linking Egypt to Europe were cut by an ship’s anchor.  Apparently it was working on December 24th and 25th (I was away from Addis) when it was damaged again by an underwater earthquake.  

Let’s hope that things get better from January 4th.

Jeremy Gould, one of the few civil servants who “gets” the internet, is leaving to spend more time with his family.

I’ve been scouting around for a new challenge in Whitehall for a long time now but the truth is that beyond building and managing corporate websites, those roles don’t exist. There’s been a lot of talk over the last four years of how more senior strategic web roles are inevitable, but in that time its been just talk. So there was no next move for me.

It isn’t a good sign that people leave the civil service partly because it is so frustrating to be an advocate of change.  On the positive side, things are starting to change – mainly in local government rather than central government – but the UK Government is miles behind where we could be.  Jeremy also describes the way that he was discouraged from blogging, which is worrying.

Dave and Simon both highlight the significance of Jeremy’s departure.