Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Taking sides

Mar 8

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Governance | 2 Comments

It can be awfully difficult to turn down an offer from the other side

It can be awfully difficult to turn down a job offer from a powerful donor

Over at the Roving Bandit, the Skeptical Bandit asks an important question: we’ve spent a lot of time arguing over the net effect of ‘the brain drain,’ the migration of skilled labour from poor to rich countries, but we spend very little time worrying about the internal brain drain – the movement of skilled labour from the public and private sectors to development agencies and NGOs.

Donors and NGOs typically have a mandate to hire local staff (we would be worried if they didn’t). Since foreign agencies have the desire to get the best and the brightest to work for them have a higher ability (and perhaps willingness) to pay, there is a small, but perceivable migration of talent from local governments to their development partners.

Anyone who’s spent time working for a developing government is familiar with the following scene: your department has a few extremely capable servants who spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for jobs outside of government, at the expense of their work.

Efficient civil services rely on a key driver of effort: career concerns;  you work hard because you want to climb the ladder. When the top of that ladder ends at the UN, not the government, ambitious civil servants will feel less motivated to excel (unless they are trying to impress a donor). Even when the few bright stars do bother to overachieve, they’re quickly snapped-up into the development sector.

This also reduces a government’s incentives to invest in the human capital of their own civil service. Why send your employees off for further education if it will increase the chance they’ll defect?

Donors and a charities, on a whole, don’t see a problem with this; they are typically smitten with the belief that the recipient government is incompetent or corrupt and so lose little sleep over recruiting local expertise. These beliefs aren’t entirely unjustified – NGOs and aid agencies often are much more efficient than local governments, but the practice of poaching talent reinforces this reality as the internal brain drain inevitably hinders government’s capacity. By contributing to a low-capacity ‘trap’ for governments, the development sector ensures its place in the world (even if this is not their intention).

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The 10 billion dollar question

Mar 8

Posted by Matt in Aid | 2 Comments

What would Lawrence do with $10 billion dollars?

Deciding what to do with $10 billion is difficult.

The Wall Street Journal features eight of the world’s top philanthropists explaining what they would do to help the world with an extra $10 billion dollars. Their answers are a mixed bag – there’s a lot of unproven and some very old ideas and odd misconceptions, from carbon-capture toilets (really?) to AMCs, investing in education and climate change mitigation.

Mo Ibrahim (the only person in the article who is actually from a developing country) made one of the most interesting suggestions: bolster the statistical capacity of the continent.

Better data will support improved policy making by governments and interventions by donors. The data will enable them to identify needs, to make better use of existing resources and to assess results. In the case of donors this will finally lead to aid that is “smart”—for both donor nations’ taxpayers and recipient countries’ development needs.

The only other suggestion that I found worthwhile came from Judith Rodin of the Rockerfeller Foundation, who would dedicate part of the funding to

…..equipping groups and governments with talent, technology and training so cycles of growth continue after funding dissipates.

Both Ibrahim and Rodin see aid as an potential enabler for governments, rather than as an end in itself, which is uncommonly refreshing, as philanthropists are usually more interested in reaching people directly. It’s also harder to raise money for this sort of thing, as it doesn’t directly involve starving children. Let’s have a go:

This is Steve

This is Steve. Steve works in a statistics office, earning less than £90 a day. Steve works on assessing poverty indicators and informing policy makers of the appropriate data, but has no computer. His office is dangerously understaffed (one out of every two government statisticians is poached by development partners every year). Please, when you're deciding where to send your check this Christmas, think of Steve.

Sadly, in the business of aid, the long term needs are the least photogenic.

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When the best of aid becomes the worst

Mar 6

Posted by Guest in Aid, Economics, Research | 3 Comments

By Daniel Altman

Yesterday I attended the “Best and Worst of Aid” conference at New York University, hosted by Bill Easterly and the Development Research Institute. This was an event that welcomed aid critics, but a couple of the speakers were openly pro-aid. Lant Pritchett of Harvard, for example, defended the past sixty years of aid as a necessary backdrop for some important, welfare-enhancing policy decisions in poor countries. And Isabel Guerrero, the World Bank’s vice president for South Asia, outlined some examples of official aid that, she said, had really worked.

Guerrero said she had spent twenty-seven years at the World Bank, and, on that basis, you might have expected her to cherry-pick some incredible successes. Her examples may indeed have been great achievements, but there was no way of knowing. When it came to evaluation, it was clear that the World Bank was still stuck in the past.

Guerrero’s first slide on the impact of successful aid programs focused on a rural roads project in Peru. Over a decade, she said, the project had improved access to transportation (you’d hope so), raised literacy and school attendance, and cut poverty by about nine percentage points. What she really meant, of course, is that those changes had occurred in the same region where the roads project was completed. There was no control or even a comparison to the other regions of Peru; causality was anyone’s guess.

Nor were all of her outcomes really outcomes. Who cares if access to transportation is enhanced, if no one feels like their well-being has improved? Only the poverty number really came close to an outcome, and it looked pretty flimsy: less than one percentage point per year for ten years versus an unknown but probably very high base, with no accounting for other influences. After the presentation, a Peruvian student came up to me and said that yes, other anti-poverty programs had been operating in the region at the same time as the roads project.

Now, I realize that it may be difficult to do a controlled study of a roads project that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but there was no effort at anything but prima facie evaluation. The student said that she had been out to the villages, and that the roads really had helped people. Great, I said – so why didn’t anyone at the World Bank ask them how the project had changed their lives?

Surely, the student countered, the ballot box was a sufficient verdict. The ballot box! Even if all rural Peruvians voted, would they have cast their votes based solely on this one project, which wasn’t even funded by their own government? It was too easy just to ask them about the project directly, I said, not to do so. The cost of conducting a before-and-after survey would have been a tiny fraction of the World Bank’s budget for the project.

I was surprised and disappointed that neither the World Bank nor a Peruvian studying development would have deigned to survey the people affected by the roads project in order to gauge its true impact. This is another manifestation of a mindset we see again and again: if you want to help poor people, the last thing you should do is talk to them.

It’s also a sign that the World Bank still has little idea how to convincingly evaluate its own projects, especially in front of an audience of rigorous academics and experienced practitioners. Guerrero’s other cherry-picked example, a program to help women in India’s Andhra Pradesh state, came under heavy criticism from Pritchett later in the conference for having completely unverifiable results. With so much money at stake, surely we can do better.

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Learning from a Different Angle

Mar 6

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, History, Research | 2 Comments

Want to learn about state building? Watch Deadwood.

Want to learn about state building? Watch Deadwood.

Development takes in economic change, political change, social and cultural change and technical innovation – all of which interact. This makes trying to understand development a multidisciplinary enterprise, and there are a huge range of sources and approaches to development that we can learn from. Many of them are not even strictly about ‘development’. My brother-in-law teaches history at Cambridge, and when he wants to help his students capture the sense of hope, occasion and fear that propelled so many young people into the Quit India campaign, it’s not to a history he points them, but to RK Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma.

In this spirit, I’ve listed a very personal suggestion of resources that may contribute to a richer understanding of development – things that I’ve learnt a great deal from. I’ve left out some of the usual suspects, simply because I wanted to focus on those that deserve a wider audience and a greater influence on what we do: A work of history, a memoir of a journey, a legal-economy book, a political polemic and a TV series. I’ve left out innumerable great books, and I’m sure readers can suggest many more: I’d be really interested to see what others have learnt from.

The Birth of the Modern World – Chris Bayly

This is a huge, ambitious and brilliant work of history, looking at the links between the various parts of the world in the period 1780 to 1914. The focus of this book is not on development at all, but on ‘modernity’, that phenomenon which swept through much of the world in the period covered. Modernity was a sense that societies were engaged in a step-change away from what went before them, but it was also a real set of changes: to the nature of the state, to the economy, to cultural practices, to social organizations and to ways of seeing the world.

In many ways, looking at modernity is more helpful for those of us working in development than our traditional, narrower focus. Bayly shows how the cultural and social changes that characterized the period under study in turn influenced and were influenced by the development of the state and of the economy. He looks at the British Industrial Revolution, the first truly modern economic development tale, and uses Jan de Vries’ idea of an ‘industrious revolution’ together with a host of information about transmission of styles, fashions and acquisitiveness across class and country and demonstrates how the economic transformations that characterized the fastest growing economies were influenced by factors well beyond politics, economy and trade, though these of course were central too.

His scope extends well beyond these economic changes and much of the book looks at the emergence of different forms of thought, religion and state as well as economy and culture. You may not come away with a policy recommendation, but it’s inconceivable you won’t understand more about the world today after reading this.

North of South – Shiva Naipaul

In the mid-1970s Shiva Naipaul, the younger brother of VS, decided to take the money earned from his first two books and spend a few months traveling through Kenya and Tanzania. He wrote North of South based on these experiences – not a travel book; certainly not a book about development; not even a piece of journalism.

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Schrödinger’s cat and the fall of African poverty

Mar 2

Posted by Matt in Africa, Development, Economics, Research | 2 Comments

Poverty doesn't fall until we realize it's falling.

Poverty doesn't fall until we realize it's falling.

A new working paper by income-estimation guru Xavier Sala‐i‐Martin (who still has the best homepage of any academic economist out there) and Maxim Pinkovskiy. The headline-worthy claims are all in the abstract:

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala‐i‐Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970‐2006. We show that:

  1. African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly.
  2. If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time.
  3. The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it.
  4. African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.

This is potentially exciting stuff which could do a lot to defeat the notion that African nations are permanently trapped in poverty, as well as underscore the importance of economic growth as a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) mechanism for improving the lives of the poor.

I haven’t read the paper in detail yet, so I can’t make specific comments about it’s assumptions, but there are general reasons we should be wary about getting too excited. Some of the data use the infamous Penn World Tables, a series of GDP and purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates, which are constantly being revised and are often accused of being unreliable.

The accepted facts about poverty and income distribution around the world can change quite quickly when the basic assumptions behind the data and the functional forms evolve. It was only a few years ago when World Bank revisions dropped several million people back into poverty. The art of poverty estimation is like a strange, warped example of Schrödinger’s cat, where many possibilities exist but we are unable to let the waveform collapse on a definitive result. This makes it particularly tricky for organisations to make precise statements about targeting the poor when we don’t even know how many there are (not that these concerns give them any pause).

Still, Sala‐i‐Martin knows this stuff better than most. His assumptions are out there. Now is the time for those assumptions and their implications to be debated, not for the pundit war which will inevitably happen.

It would also be nice to see some positive media coverage, although I don’t expect that will happen.

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Update on Kapuscinski

Mar 2

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, History, Worst practices | 1 Comment

A polish journalist, Artur Domoslawski, has written a book claiming that Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote a form of fiction rather than journalism, in pursuit of a ‘higher form of truth.’

The Guardian writes about the book:

… a new book claims that the legendary Polish journalist, who died three years ago aged 74, repeatedly crossed the boundary between reportage and fiction-writing – or, to put it less politely, made stuff up…

[Domoslawski] added: “Kapuscinski was experimenting in journalism. He wasn’t aware he had crossed the line between journalism and literature. I still think his books are wonderful and precious. But ultimately, they belong to fiction.”

I probably won’t be picking up the biography: I doubt it adds more to John Ryle’s critique that I mentioned a couple of weeks back. Still, this is a good warning for those inclined to quote The Shadow of the Sun as fact.

Read more here.

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Kristof on faith-based giving

Feb 28

Posted by Matt in Aid, Worst practices | 3 Comments

A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.

Read the article. Then read this article. See the comments – I was being unreasonably snarky and I take it back (a reasonable rule of thumb is: don’t blog at the end of a long day).

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Complexity

Feb 26

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Aid, Development | 9 Comments

Post in a nutshell: Development Rubiks Cube

Post in a nutshell: Development > Rubik's Cube

I defended the media’s tendency towards shallow and simplistic coverage of development issues in my last post. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should abandon complexity in analyzing development – quite the opposite. When someone wants to get involved in development beyond reading the latest NYT op-ed or Guardian report about Katine, they have to see that development work is in fact not a world of simple correlations and easy answers.

I’m not convinced that development writers (as opposed to workers) are doing much of a job in expressing this, however. We seem to have a high proportion of single-issue activists who are constantly fighting with each other and who seem incapable of taking a wider view of the world than the one embodied by their chosen solution. They spend a fair bit of time online and generally get involved in shrill arguments with their critics or competitors.

More money! Searchers! Industrial policy! Migration! Cash Transfers! Transparency!

In fairness to our advocates, there are some who have picked up a range of issues and engage with critics of each, while arguing the ins and outs of them with clarity, of whom Owen Barder seems to be the best example; I do not mean to denigrate him by saying that he isn’t exactly fighting stiff competition. His approach is a rare one. I disagree with a fair few of his positions but it is never the case that I find them simplistic, poorly argued or his advocacy shrill rather than thoughtful.

I have no problem with the concept of advocacy, though there is a coordination problem which exists within the macro-environment for advocacy which leads to major development constraints, normally the less cute ones like poor road networks and transport links, being neglected. My problem is when advocates try and make us think that solving their problem is easy as 1,2,3 – and that it is a magic bullet for development. This happens rather often and is unsurprising. Advocates do not want to weaken their position by point out its flaws. They make strident statements because confidence convinces people.

This is an unhelpful phenomenon. It directs resources and attention to a problem, yes; but simiplistic advocacy often generates simplistic responses. Just calling for greater aid transparency is fine; but only if we recognize that all forms of transparency are not equal and that the ultimate test of data published is how the developing country in question can use it to improve its aid portfolio or development approach.

Shrill advocacy also helps reduce the level of development discourse to name-calling and black and white solutions. It’s difficult to over-emphasise how big a problem this is. Development is not a well understood phenomenon, not by a long sight. We really understand very poorly why countries have developed and how they have been linked; few historians and fewer economists have been able to engage with this question with much success. The exceptions, Chris Bayly among historians (who was rather looking at modernity in all its complexity than ‘development’) and Ha-Joon Chang (whose innovation among economists was to study how rich countries developed) have not yielded a fully or largely formed or workable approach to actual development work. We need more reasoned discourse and true interaction – we all have much to learn from each other.

Development is complex in many ways, but one useful way to think about complexity is to split it between complexity across time and space, complexity within a specific national context and complexity within an issue. (This is in itself a simplification of complexity, but one designed to stimulate further thought rather than provide a final answer).

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Incentives in Storytelling and Journalism

Feb 20

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Development | 6 Comments

Its just not like this anymore...

It's just not like this anymore...

Chris Blattman linked to an interesting critique by John Ryle about Ryszard Kapuscinski recently. Ryle’s critique of Kapuscinski essentially stems from the latter’s romanticism. Ryle argues that in his desire to stress the exotic and ‘unknowable’ element of the foreign cultures he was in, Kapuscinski stretched the truth, perpetuated myths and propagated his own misunderstandings of what he observed. Kapuscinski is a genuinely great writer so it manifests itself a little differently, but this is basically just another example of the ‘Africa: Land of Rape and Lions’  phenomenon.

Like many other development blogs, we’ve spent a lot of time moaning and complaining about the quality of journalism about our field. Sometimes we criticize the specific arguments or evidence they present. More often we rail against what we’ve described as ‘Poverty Porn’ and the myth-building exotica that characterizes so much press coverage of Africa. I used to get extremely worked up about this, but after arguing about this with my sister, a journalist for a major news outlet, I’ve come to revise my opinions.

Journalism is not and has never been simply a pursuit of the truth. This has always been part of it, but it has also always been a means to engage audiences through good writing, and to respond to popular desires. It has usually been written by generalists who specialize, though often without much more than ‘learning on the job’, because the primary skill of journalism is writing. People who genuinely write well are thin on the ground; even newspapers pad out their staff with second rate writers. Writers who can keep to strict word limits and a house style are also scarce. When assessing journalism, there are a few things about their style that we need to keep in mind.

  • News media all focus on events where most of their customers are based. As such, political writing about the UK in UK newspapers is far more common and insightful than political writing about any other country in those places, because they can assume a basic background knowledge among readers and they can build narratives and stories over days, weeks and months of blanket coverage of political events. This is not possible for UK coverage of African issues, because most people in the UK don’t want to read about Niger every single day, or even every single week.
  • The function of journalism is to impart information, of course. But this isn’t so simple: most people lack the time and patience to read an eight thousand word essay about the eating habits of the Dinka every time there’s a food shortage in South Sudan, and most newspapers lack the space to provide one. Journalists must compress information in order to impart it; by necessity this reduces the subtlety of argument.
  • Journalism is also about active education. Plenty of people don’t know where Malawi is. If a journalist wants to make people care about gay rights there, they have to put a sketch of it on the paper. That’s why we always get those lines that say ‘Malawi is a small, landlocked country of 13 million people, of whom the vast majority live in extreme poverty’, which makes those of us who know and love the country cringe. But it’s accurate, if not the whole picture. We can’t expect every article to add a two-paragraph amendment also talking about its recent clean elections or the rapid growth of the last three years unless it’s directly relevant to the story.
  • We need to remain vigilant on specific issues of morality and good practice. Kristof outing a child as a rape victim is unacceptable, even if he thinks it will increase awareness of the issue. The trade-off is murky and that alone should put us on the side of the child’s privacy. Using informants who do not exist is unacceptable: Abu Sharati steals the legitimate voice of those ‘he’ claims to represent and distorts their message – with real consequences.
  • We must also remain vigilant to factual inaccuracy. Claiming that Malawi had only one paved road, as a recent Guardian article did, has real implications: it may discourage tourist visitors or encourage charitable donations in a sector that needs much less support than others in Malawi – because of it’s exceptionally good road network.

These points above are just common sense. There are other arguments about the changing nature of journalism in response to the media environment that we must also take into account.

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On the wisdom of giving shoes

Feb 20

Posted by Matt in Aid, Worst practices | 1 Comment

I’ve written a short piece for Foreign Policy on the problems with giving in-kind aid to Haiti (and to other countries). Regular readers and fellow bloggers will recognise many of the arguments and examples in the piece:

However, cost-effectiveness and the marginalization of local markets are not the only worries. When Clowns Without Borders, an NGO that provides free clown-based services to the poor, lands in Port-au-Prince, the main concern is not the harm they might cause to the Haitian miming industry, but whether flying in imported clowns is an efficient use of resources.

Apologies for the shameless self-promotion.

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