Cashewman quotes a friend:
“You can give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. But did you ever ask him if he wanted a fucking fish in the first place? And it’s not as simple as a fish anyway.”
My day job is leading the aidinfo team working to improve the transparency of international aid. Why? Because we think that when aid is more transparent it will be more effectively used and it will help people in developing countries to hold their governments to account. We also believe that if taxpayers can see where aid is really going, and see what a difference it makes, they will support more of it.
So I was dead pleased to see this by David Cameron in today’s Guardian
Transparency tears down the hiding places for sleaze, overspending and corruption. Soon enough all MPs’ expenses are going to be published online for everyone to see: I and the rest of the shadow cabinet are already doing it. And if we win the next election, we’re going to do the same for all other public servants earning over £150,000. Just imagine the effect that an army of armchair auditors is going to have on those expense claims.
Indeed, the promise of public scrutiny is going to have a powerful effect on over-spending of any variety. A Conservative government will put all national spending over £25,000 online for everyone to see, so citizens can hold the government to account for how their tax money is being spent. And we will extend this principle of transparency to every nook and cranny of politics and public life, because it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to transfer power to the powerless and prevent waste, exploitation and abuse.
Yes, yes, and thrice yes, as Mark Kermode would say.
What’s more, with current technologies, we can do this quite easily, and unleash the creative power not only of armchair auditors, but of millions of people who are not in armchairs but are directly experiencing the effects of that spending and who can help us to understand what is working and how it can be made to work better.
A friend visiting from the UK brought a CD-ROM with the new version of Ubuntu Linux. Those of you with better bandwidth than we have got in Ethiopia (which would be pretty much everyone) can download it here. And another friend brought over a 1TB hard disk (that is 1,000 Gb) for my Shuttle XPC computer.
So I fitted the hard disk (which took about 30 seconds), stuck the Ubuntu CD in the drive, and the install was going nicely until about 54% of the way through, when I got this error message :
[Errno 5] Input/output error
This particular error is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.
I tried again; tried a different copy of the install CD (my friend had helpfully brought two copies); and tried installing from the Live CD. Nothing worked. So, on a hunch, I tried removing all but one of the RAM sticks in my PC (I have 4GB of RAM). With only one RAM stick, the install worked perfectly. I then reinstalled the RAM and rebooted.
I then followed these instructions to install additional software that I wanted.
First impressions: I much prefer the look and feel of Ubuntu to Windows. I enjoy the combination of simplicity and ease of use, with the knowledge that there is power under the hood to do what I want. I am in complete control, with no digital rights management restrictions trying to stop me from doing what I want.
Ubuntu is normally very easy to install and use. It is disappointing that there seems to be a problem with the installation programme for Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 – I guess a lot of people would be put off by having to remove the memory chips from their PC, so I hope it is fixed soon.
Because I now have two hard disks, I’ve kept the old version (Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn) on the old disk for now. Ubuntu is smart enough to configure my PC to give me an option at boot time to decide which version I want to use. So I can easily go back if there is something I don’t like in the new version.
Kudos to the US Government for giving food aid to Ethiopia. This is good:
USAID has provided an additional 87,910 metric tons of emergency food aid, valued at approximately U.S. $50 million, to the Joint Emergency Operational Plan in response to the Ethiopian Government’s January 2009 appeal. This emergency food aid will provide a full ration to 1.18 million beneficiaries for four months in 72 woredas in the most severely impacted regions – Afar, Amhara, Oromiya, Somali, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples, and Tigray Regions and in Dire Dawa Administrative Council.
That’s good, but it could better.
The US imports food aid to Ethiopia. It is bought from American farmers and shipped by boat to Djibouti, then brought by road to where it is needed in Ethiopia. The cost of all this works out at $568 per metric tonne. Here in Addis Ababa, today’s market price of wheat is $489 per metric tonne. It is cheaper out of the capital. So America’s generosity could buy 16% more wheat if it were bought locally. From that difference alone, another 190,000 people could be given a full ration of food for four months. Furthermore, buying the food locally would increase the incomes of farmers either in Ethiopia or in neighbouring countries and the improve livelihoods of other parts of the economy (e.g. haulage companies) needed to make the agriculture market work. Their livelihoods, which are undermined by imported food aid, would be improved if the food were bought locally. If there is sufficient supply response among local farmers (which there probably would be) so it does not have to be imported, then the generous aid would also provide $50 million of much needed foreign currency for Ethiopia.
This is not possible at the moment because American legislation requires that food aid be bought in the US, that 50 percent of commodities be processed and packed in the US before shipment, and that 75 percent of food aid managed by USAID and 50 percent of the food aid managed by the US Department of Agriculture be transported in “flag-carrying” US-registered vessels. The result is that only 40% of money spent on food aid by the US actually goes towards buying food; the rest goes to US transport companies.
Buying the food locally would be better, but best of all might be something even more radical. Why not give the money itself to people who are hungry? Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking study of famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.
People are usually hungry because they are too poor to buy food. (They are often reduced to this poverty by the failure of their own harvest. But that does not mean that there is not enough food for them.) If we give them money (or vouchers, if we really have to) they can buy food locally. Food growers elsewhere will grow food, and traders will bring it to them. It will be the food they prefer and know how to eat (NB this often means not wheat). This will not only help to protect people from starving, it will support local and regional food producers, and other local businesses.
US food aid is all in bags labelled “From the American People”. It is a generous thought, but it might be less misleading if it were labelled “From the American People, mainly to the American People”.
In the latest episode of Development Drums, Matthew Bishop and Mike Green talk about their book, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them
Development Drums 14 is here. You can also download Development Drums free using iTunes: search for ‘Development Drums’ in iTunes or click this link.
I would welcome your feedback via the Development Drums website, or in the Facebook Group for Development Drums.
Hurrah! Google Maps have now got more detailed maps of a number of African countries.
Until the last couple of days, Addis Ababa was just a cross-roads. Now look at it. A detailed map at last.
According to White African,
There are now 27 more African countries that now have detailed maps, including:
Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Togo.
We hear a lot about the impact on carbon emissions and climate change of travel, especially by air, but very little about the impact of the livestock industry, which has been estimated to be responsible for 18% of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions, more than the total emissions from all sorts of travel put together.
I have a personal interest in this because I travel a lot by air (boo!) but I have not eaten meat for 25 years, nor do I own a car. I also live in a house that has neither any heating nor air conditioning; nor (unlike many ex pats in Addis Ababa) do we have a generator. So if we are fixated only on air travel, my carbon footprint looks horrendous; but it looks a lot better if you take account of other aspects of my lifestyle. I am sure I should do more, probably much more, to reduce the damage that I do to the environment: but let’s look objectively at the overall impact of a person’s lifestyle, rather than focus on any single measure.
The fixation with air travel annoys me because I think that there is public good in air travel. The world would, in my view, be a better place if more people were able to travel and meet people in other countries and learn about other cultures. We would have a stronger sense of solidarity with other people around the world and a greater willingness to act collectively to solve global problems. We would probably be more worked up about the need to tackle global warming if we saw first hand how it is already affecting communities affected by rising temperatures and rising sea levels. Air transport also enables farmers in Africa to grow flowers and beans for sale in Europe, with an overall carbon cost that is much lower than if these products were grown in greenhouses in Europe, and that trade provides livelihoods for more than a million people who desperately need it so that they can trade their way out of poverty.
I do not see a similar “public good” argument for eating meat. I did not become a vegetarian 25 years ago because of climate change, which hadn’t been invented then, but because I thought then and continue to believe that it is wrong to eat animals purely for pleasure. As well as being bad for the animals themselves, and for the climate, the meat industry is destroying our health and our countryside.
Yesterday Tristram Stuart Hunt in The Guardian calculated how much we should reduce our meat consumption:
Based on the global food production figures published by the FAO, I did a few preliminary calculations. Global average consumption of meat and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda’s was 45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production, rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7 times – and this doesn’t include the fact that the butter will have to be spread even more thinly if the global population really does increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.
However, still further reductions would be necessary because global meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy consumption are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to take its share of the hit. For rich western countries this would mean decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.
So let’s try to focus less on air travel – which has positive benefits for the world – and more on changing our diet, which we should be doing even if there were no impact from livestock on climate change.
I suspect that the environmental movement focuses on air travel partly because it appeals to an instinct for class war. The kind of people who fly several times a year on long-haul flights are the kind of people we love to hate. This makes a campaign against air travel much more popular than criticising people for eating meat, which would mean taking on “ordinary” people.
Of course, as a vegetarian who flies a lot, I would say this, wouldn’t I?
Here in Ethiopia it is common for little children to shout ferenj when they see a white face. I am told that this comes from the Amharic word for a French person, ፈረንሳዊ (pronounced färänsawi), because French people were among the first white people Ethiopians had seen.
Today G and I were running down a dirt track through a small village and a small girl, about 4 years old, saw us running past. She shouted,
China! China!
I heard the other day that there were two old men sitting on a hillside in north Wello, watching the Chinese labourers building a new road. They were old-timers, who had fought against the Italians in 1935, and then watched the Italians build the first roads across the Blue Nile gorge and up to Eritrea. (“What have the Romans ever done for us?”) As these men watched the Chinese roll out the tarmac, one of them said to the other:
The Italians are back. Only now they have narrower eyes.
In the latest edition of Development Drums, Andrew Mitchell MP talks about the policy of the British Conservative party on international development. If the Conservatives win the next General Election, Mr Mitchell is set to become the Cabinet Minister responsible for international development.
You can subscribe to Development Drums (free) in iTunes – or you can downoad it here:
http://developmentdrums.org
… I lost my young sister. She died of HIV-related complications. She should still be alive today since she was on ARVs.
But ARVs go hand in hand with good nutrition. My sister could not afford proper daily meals since she was looking after a large extended family. Besides her three children, she was looking after six double orphans that our elder brother left behind.
Her story is commonplace in Zambia. The HIV and AIDS pandemic can be mitigated by people having proper access to medicines and food. Both have become bigger problems in the current world economic crisis.
It is such situations that prompt those of us in civil society to redouble our efforts to do more advocacy work, asking our governments, in Africa, not only to be accountable to the people, but to prioritise issues of poverty and unemployment in their economic policy frameworks.
Our governments, though, are also limited in their capacity to cope with the severe effects of the global economic crisis. This is where the rich countries come in. They should remain committed to their aid promises.
So asks Chris Blattman:
I seldom fly business myself, even on Bank and UN consultancies, mostly to conserve my project funds for research assistants and survey expenses. My incentives are just right: money I spend on me comes out of money I’d spend making my research projects just a little better. Not so the rest of the agency?
I also hold back from business for another reason: $6000 for a single ticket? When the purpose of your trip is to contribute (however little) to ending poverty, something about that price tag just doesn’t seem right.
The Bankers and UNers have a good response: I’m only there for a week, and I’m much more productive if I can sleep on the plane.
To which I reply: your productivity for a 0.5% of your time is worth 4% of your annual salary?
In some cases, I might add: what development assistance exactly is achieved in a week?
In an age of diminishing aid and global belt-tightening, now seems an opportune time to change this little practice. Mr. Zoellick? Mr. Ki-Moon?
The answer is obvious: of course not. The staff of aid agencies should fly economy class.
Business class flights are not the only expensive perks. Why do World Bank and IMF staff visiting Addis Ababa stay in the Sheraton, which is one of the most luxurious and vulgar hotels in the world, when there are very good hotels down the road for one fifth of the price? Why do international aid agency staff living overseas have such luxurious houses, with allowances for gardeners and domestic staff? Why do some aid agencies pay to fly their belongings to Addis Ababa air freight, when it could come by sea for a fraction of the price? Should staff be allowed to ship cars from home, at public expense, duty free, and then sell them locally at a profit?
A good start would be to make all this transparent. As we are seeing with the row over MPs’ expenses in the UK, sunlight is a good disinfectant. If all these expenses were individually and separately itemised and published, I suspect many aid agencies would soon decide that they are difficult to defend.
The senior staff of the Canadian aid agency, CIDA, are required by Canadian policy to publish their travel and hospitality expenses. Here are the returns for the first quarter of this year. That’s a good start. But I’d like to even more detailed figures published for all staff of aid agencies. I suspect quite a lot of this stuff would stop quite quickly.
I fear I may be turning in to Bernard, the Private Secretary in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Bernard is the slightly naiive, pedantic character who corrects mixed metaphors and challenges figures of speech. (I once had a job in No.10 a bit like Bernard’s job).
Nick Robinson – the BBC Political Editor – should know better than this:
The fate of nations, of monarchs and of the British people have been sealed in the Commons. Yet now the reputation of the mother of all parliaments has been brought low by rules written and exploited here by claims for a kitkat, a tin of pet food and a bottle of shampoo.
England, not the House of Commons, is the “mother of Parliaments”. This phrase was coined by John Bright, in a speech in 1865, in which Bright was advocating an extension of the right to vote. His campaign led to the Reform Act of 1867 which gave the vote to the (male) urban working class. Bright said:
We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments.
I realise that this is pedantry. But I would expect the BBC Political Editor, of all people, to understand the resonance of this phrase and to know what it means.
Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, writes about aid in today’s Financial Times:
Dambisa Moyo’s controversial book, Dead Aid, has given us an accurate evaluation of the aid culture today. The cycle of aid and poverty is durable: as long as poor nations are focused on receiving aid they will not work to improve their economies. Some of Ms Moyo’s prescriptions, such as ending all aid within five years, are aggressive. But I always thought this was the discussion we should be having: when to end aid and how best to end it.
… Often, aid has left recipient populations unstable, distracted and more dependent; as Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, has pointed out, it can even sever the relationship between democratically elected leadership and the populace.
It seems to me that Dambisa Moyo has set up a false dichotomy between aid and entrepreneurship. Many of the things Moyo would like to see – better access to financial services, a better business environment, lower tariffs – can be (and are) supported by aid. We can and should use aid to support the growth of an entrepreneurial society; and we can and should use aid to support people in developing countries to enable them live better lives while the benefits of that economic growth are coming through.
My review of Dead Aid is here.
Kagame’s position is more nuanced than Moyo’s argument. He seems to be calling for a different kind of support from outside:
We appreciate support from the outside, but it should be support for what we intend to achieve ourselves. No one should pretend that they care about our nations more than we do; or assume that they know what is good for us better than we do ourselves. They should, in fact, respect us for wanting to decide our own fate.
… While this is encouraging, we know the road to prosperity is a long one. We will travel it with the help of a new school of development thinkers and entrepreneurs, with those who demonstrate they have not just a heart, but also a mind for the poor.
This is striking stuff from the President of one of the most aid dependent countries in the world, in which foreign aid is about $55 per person per year, or more than 25% of GDP.
It would be nice to think that rich countries could help the poorest countries develop faster.
In the 1960s, they thought that an injection of capital would increase growth. Then in the 1980s they decided it wasn’t just investment, but the quality of economic policies that determined growth. That was where the Structural Adjustment Programmes came in. In the 1990s they decided it was not just economic policies but the institutions of the state more generally – such as property rights and the quality of the civil service – that determined how quickly the country would develop. And this decade, we have concluded that those institutions are themselves a consequence of more fundamental determinants such as conflict, natural resources, population, and the capacity of civil society. Policy-makers in aid agencies are scratching their heads thinking of ways to put these problems right.
This search for the ultimate causes of poverty is understandable and well-meaning. We keep hoping that if we can find the underlying reasons why some countries are still poor, we can use our money and expertise to remove those reasons and set the countries on the path to economic development.
In the meantime, twenty thousand people a day die of easily preventable causes. Mothers are condemned to watch their children die. Those children, if they survive beyond their fifth birthday, may not be able to go to school, because they are needed to work on the farm, or because the school is too far away or too expensive. In hard times, families may have to make do with one meal a day, or none at all.
If we can find a way to help countries to develop faster, we should. But in the meantime, there is a lot we can do to enable people to live better lives. We can pay for vaccines, or for the costs of school teachers. We can provide income to people to enable them to buy enough food to eat. Taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is a worthy activity.
But as my new paper published by the Center for Global Development argues, the development community has been seduced by the rhetoric of transformation and sustainability. In every programme we design we have to argue that it will lead to economic growth, that it will be financially sustainable, and that we have an exit strategy.
A few years ago I was involved in ideas for making vaccines more available in developing countries. There was a lot of pressure from donors to show that reducing the number of people suffering from these diseases would lead to higher productivity and economic growth, so that the intervention would pay for itself in a few years. We had to explain how subsidies for vaccines would not be needed after a few years, because the price would fall or the developing country would be able to buy the vaccines itself. Nobody was prepared to say that we should pay for these vaccines now and for the forseeable future.
Sometimes these exit strategies can be damaging. Some donors have required governments to introduce user fees for health and education, to make these services financial sustainable – which denies access to the basic services for the very poorest. Maintenance of capital equipment like wells or roads is handed over to local communities or government, which are not equipped to maintain them. The result is that these aid programmes are not as effective as they could be. Worse, there are some aid programmes that make perfect sense which are never started, because nobody can see what the exit will be in the next decade.
None of us wants developing countries to be dependent on aid forever. If there is a way for us to accelerate development, we should do what we can to support it. But we should not allow poverty reduction to be defined in these narrow terms. There is much that we can and should do to support people in developing countries which will help them to live better lives while that development is taking place.
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