Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for category Africa

In which Andrew Mwenda might be getting what he wants… sort of

Aug 30

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Aid, Development | 3 Comments

Much like Ray Stantz, Andrew Mwenda should be careful of what he wishes for

Be careful of what you wish for. You might just get it.

Recently, Andrew Mwenda and five other prominent African intellectuals wrote to the Telegraph suggesting that Africa does not in fact need British development aid. Rather, they would be much happier if Britain contributed to the scrapping of the Common Agricultural Policy as a way of helping Africa.

Unfortunately, it seems like the Conservative-Liberal coalition Government might be giving them half of what they want – and not the good part. Yet another DfID-related leak has revealed that the British aid budget will from now on be allocated with a much stronger emphasis on UK security; in effect, moving aid away from being a stand-alone policy area and into a branch of a foreign policy drive aimed at ensuring the safety of the British public. Cynics will say this is nothing new, but it is surely more explicit and more closely felt than at any time since DfID’s formation.

Just to be clear: the leaked document does not suggest that Britain stop funding schools, or healthcare or even economic growth per se. DfID could continue to be a paragon of virtue in international development circles. What it does mean is that whenever DfID want to spend on these things, it will need to justify them on UK national security grounds. Since UK national security is best served by stable, prosperous, well-educated countries existing around the world this isn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster.

However, it’s another indication that the new Government want to make DfID, hitherto one of the best aid agencies to work with from a developing country point of view, more of a tool for an overall UK Government strategy founded in ideology and realpolitik. This is a real worry. Like the news from a few weeks back that DfID was dropping a number of commitments previously agreed, allegedly including the Paris Declaration, it is an indication that the Government wants to free up DfID to respond to its own priorities first and foremost.

Up til now, one of the reasons why DfID has developed such a good reputation was because it had a fairly high degree of operational independence from the rest of Government. This gave it the flexibility to pursue better aid allocations in the context of wider donor and Government spending, sometimes by taking on risk through budget support and other times by improving resource allocation procedures (budgeting, Parliamentary oversight and the like).

Giving DfID a requirement to justify what they do based on UK national security introduces an important restraint to them: it means that they cannot simply respond to country needs given the allocation of other resources, but needs to ensure it’s own resources pass a fitness test at home. What’s more, this all but rules out general budget support (from the recipient point of view, the best way of getting aid, if you care about building the ability of Government to allocate and account for funds), since there can be no guarantee on where this money will be spent.

All in all, this is a worrying sign though not a guarantee of catastrophe.

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Africa, the safest web region?

Aug 26

Posted by Matt in Africa, Research | 2 Comments

Despite the masses of negative publicity heaped on the continent by the famed Nigerian spam industry, Africa is actually one of the world’s safest places to go online in—featuring seven of the ten nations least attacked by malware.

Virus-checker company AVG surveyed 127 million computers in 144 countries and calculated the average rate of attacks—with the African nation of Sierra Leone emerging as the least assaulted, with only one virus event logged per 692 web users.

Really? My experience (admittedly primarily limited to the offices of Malawian government) is that you should treat any internet-capable computer south of the Sahara as a instant death.

Since internet and e-mail access on the continent tends to be a less reliable and more expensive, a lot of information transfer is done using memory sticks. Even if computers aren’t subjected to very many attacks from the outside,  it just takes one infected stick and a few marginally motivated employees to spread a virus to every other computer in the office. Many of these are the nasty, older viruses/trojans/worms which knock out the antivirus program’s ability to function, which means that AVG can’t see them.

This can happen astonishingly quickly. Tired of spending five minutes scanning my colleagues’ USB drives every time I wanted to get an Excel table from them, I once tried to quarantine and clear every computer in my department,  installing new (trial) antivirus on each cleared system. Unfortunately I missed a couple of computers, and within month when the trial software stopped working, the entire department had been reinfected.

It’s possible that AVG’s results are due to pretty extreme selection bias  on two fronts:

  1. AVG users are probably a little more concerned and careful than those who don’t bother to update (as most don’t).
  2. As I mentioned before, many attacks can knock out AVG, which means no reporting.
  3. Many don’t bother to update AVG’s virus definitions, leaving the program incapable of detecting or reporting new viruses.

So yes, Africa might be a safe continent to go online by yourself in a locked room with tape over your USB drives, but any file-swapping outside the net should be handled with extreme caution.

Hat tip to Chris Blattman’s Google Reader shared items.

Return to the poverty safari

Aug 11

Posted by Matt in Africa, Poverty porn | 9 Comments

Kennedy Odede, who grew up in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, reflects on poverty tourism in the New York Times:

I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on.

On the educational value of these trips:

To be fair, many foreigners come to the slums wanting to understand poverty, and they leave with what they believe is a better grasp of our desperately poor conditions. The expectation, among the visitors and the tour organizers, is that the experience may lead the tourists to action once they get home.

But it’s just as likely that a tour will come to nothing. After all, looking at conditions like those in Kibera is overwhelming, and I imagine many visitors think that merely bearing witness to such poverty is enough.

A few months ago Ravi Kanbur wrote an interesting paper suggesting that development workers should have to go on routine ‘exposure’ trips, where they spend a few days staying in a rural village to get a better perspective on poverty. Several others thought this would be a good idea, but I remain concerned that this would be nothing more than a glorified poverty safari, akin to earning a merit badge in the Boy Scouts.

The very first post on this blog was on poverty safaris. What do you think of them?

Hat tip to Aid Watch for the link.

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Who wants to get pumped up?

Jul 24

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Worst practices | No Comments

So I watched Conan the Barbarian tonight, and I was particularly struck by the scene where the young Conan is forced into slave labour, condemned to push a wheel round and round for years. You can watch the scene here (embedding is disabled so you’ll have to click through to youtube:

As I watched it I suddenly had a really familiar feeling. Why was that? Oh, that’s right: Playpumps!

You can read about the Playpump controversy along with some pointed criticism over at Barefoot Economics and Aid Watch. I am also deeply disappointed the pumps didn’t succeed in churning out out a few million Arnold-sized children.

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Outside the sample

Jul 21

Posted by Matt in Africa, Development | 2 Comments

Extrapolation can be a tricky business

Reflecting on the recent news that Afghanistan is sitting on a large hunk of mineral wealth, Paul Collier warns of the many pitfalls that the country must avoid if it is to benefit from the new find. It’s a good read for those interested in good, natural resource policy. One thing bothered me though: Afghanistan is in central Asia, but all but one of Collier’s examples are from sub-Saharan Africa (brief excerpts below), the sole exception being Malaysia:

  1. “Consider how in Sierra Leone diamonds enabled the Revolutionary United Front to evolve from a protest movement into a lethal diamonds racket.”
  2. “In eastern Congo, $1 billion in gold is being extracted and exported annually, yet because the government lacks control over the territory the revenues for the national Treasury last year were a mere $37,000.”
  3. “Nigeria is a prime example of what happens when the local population pays the price for extraction without reaping the rewards.”
  4. “To avoid such fallout, Afghanistan should follow the example of Botswana, which has used diamond revenues to build roads, power lines and schools, raising the economic standard of the country from very poor to upper-middle income.”
  5. “Malaysia, likewise, has used revenues from tin and oil to diversify its economy and create jobs — building, for example, a manufactured exports zone in the impoverished region of Penang.”
  6. “Here a cautionary example is Zambia, where a copper boom has been a bonanza for Chinese companies, but copper exports of around $3 billion a year generate a mere $100 million in tax revenue for Zambians.”

There are some fundamental things that all natural resource-based economies need to get right, and Collier touches upon them here, but perhaps these fundamentals interact in interesting ways with geographically-correlated attributes. Most of Collier’s academic work on the subject has been limited to Africa, so there is a little bit of extrapolation going on here.

Places like Sierra Leone and Nigeria offer powerful examples, but perhaps we can reap even greater insight by looking at Afghanistan’s similarly-endowed neighbors like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, or perhaps nearby Kazakhstan?

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The Power of Equality

Jul 19

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Development, Political Economy | 6 Comments

Before they turned to cookie cutter stadium rock, RHCP cared about the Power of Equality.

I recently wrote a piece for Change.Org about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I got back from South Africa: the disappearance of equity and redistribution from the vocabulary of development work. Up till about twenty years ago or so, it was a common practice in development work to talk about ‘social and economic equalization’ as an aim in its own right. This normally took the form of deciding on a manner in which redistribution of wealth could be made: through taxation and selective expenditure, through active redistribution of resources, such as land, through subsidization and so on. Over time, this approach was removed completely from the discourse. Structural Adjustment was one reason for this, as it tightened purse-strings and regulated taxation structure. It began to seen as counterproductive, discouraging private sector enterprise. There were many reasons for this decline, many of them sound.

However, the concept of redressing imbalances in society didn’t disappear from development discourse. It simply mutated to a new kind of approach, described as ‘pro-poor’ expenditure. The idea behind pro-poor expenditure is essentially that Governments and donors should focus on development activities that aim most directly at the poorest sections of the population. This is less controversial than redistribution though taxation, subsidization or resource transfer, since it simply means that the portfolio of development projects is weighted in a different way.

This approach is based on a very different set of assumptions about the economy than a redistributive policy mix. By focusing expenditures on activities that are most directly related to the poor, the implicit assumption is that economic development and the improvement in the lot of the poor is best served by spending on activities directly relating to them, and allowing the industrial and commercial agriculture sectors to work on their own, unaided or with much less aid. This is new: prior development policy looked more at the prospects for developing a modern economy, one which generates wealth rapidly, in the mould of most currently developed nations, and then seeking to protect the poor from the worst inequities and exploitation that such an economic system can generate.

This is a fundamental change, one that deserves far more thought than has been given to it. Spending more directly on the poor has an obvious intuitive appeal: you’re not relying on any opaque feedback mechanisms to see support translate into gains for the poor, as you would under the historically far more common approach of pushing for overall economic strength and then redistributing through taxation. The idea is that if you spend directly on the poor, if the project is worthwhile, you will see a gain in their standards of living.

Yet, there’s a big unanswered question about this approach: what is the long-term effect of such expenditure? Does it generate a fast-growing economy which creates jobs internally? Or does it create a sort of smaller-scale, class-based aid dependency, something like the morphine drip Matt suggests aid might function as?

I suspect the latter is much more likely than the former. In the last few years, I’ve had the chance to examine the donor portfolios in a number of countries, and have seen first hand how they use their influence to put pro-poor expenditure at the centre of local budgeting processes as well. Yet, the suspicion lingers that these approaches are not sustainable, and not generating further gains: though we’ve spent the last fifteen or twenty years supporting small scale agriculture in Malawi, for example, there is little sign that these small farms are becoming bigger farms, or even moving systematically away from food insecurity in the long-term. What’s more there’s no counter-example we can give: no example of a currently developed country or even a high-flying semi-developed or middle-income country that has followed the pro-poor route.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Unity and Fragmentation

Jul 8

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Development, Governance | 2 Comments

I was in Cape Town last week for the World Cup, and watched the Ghana – Uruguay quarterfinal in the FIFA Fan Fest there, together with several thousand supports from South Africa and abroad. For those who have missed it, Ghana lost in controversial circumstances, and the trend of blatant cheating in this World Cup continued.

What really struck me during the whole experience was quite how much almost everyone there wanted Ghana to win. South Africans white and black, Africans from elsewhere – all supported Ghana. Almost every face had a Ghana flag painted on, Ghana scarves, t-shirts and flags were everywhere, no doubt encouraged by the TV campaign on DSTV encouraging all Africans to wear Ghana’s colours for the match, and the numerous newspaper headlines and posters extolling this pan-Africanism, including one I ‘liberated’ from its mooring: ‘We are ALL Ghana’. And the allegiance did not seem to simply be skin-paint deep, either: after Ghana scored one of their penalties, the big South African behind me literally lifted me off the ground with a powerful hug, while simultaneously obliterating the sound of the vuvuzelas (and the skin on my ears) with a primeval roar of joy. Meanwhile, a string of supporters in front of me were on their knees with arms linked, praying for Ghanaian success in the penalty shootout.

I was talking about this with a couple of friends afterwards. One asked why this happens. After all, he said, European nations would rarely cheer for each other on principle, and North and South Americans are more likely to boo their neighbours than will them on. As a counterpoint, my other friend pointed out that with the exception of Egypt and Algeria, pretty much all Arab nations would cheer for each other in lieu of their own team. It has something to do with a shared sense of oppression, an ‘us against the world’ attitude that is often brought about by shared misfortunes. Many Africans don’t partake in this form of supra-nationalism, but far more do.

Particularly in the immediate post-colonial period, pan-African nationalism was a major intellectual force in Africa: the countries that had been agitating for independence often did so together, and their intellectuals, who had traveled to Europe for education and to further their cause, met to exchange ideas and develop friendships. There’s a great passage in Wole Soyinka’s autobiography You Must Set Forth At Dawn that captures this moment – the excitement of being a black African fighting for a new future meeting peers, artists and intellectuals who shared that goal and saw success in one country as success for all.

After independence was achieved, Nyerere and Nkrumah in particular pushed pan-Africanism as a ideological basis for the continent’s advance, leading to the founding the Organisation for African Unity, now succeeded by the African Union. None of this is to say that Africans primarily identify themselves as African as opposed to more specific markers such as (for example) Kenyan or Kikuyu. But there is an identity ‘African’ that many people choose to use in many situations, and it certainly appears to be one of the most powerful supra-national identities around (not as much, of course, as religious identification).

Yet, in an apparent paradox, while Africa is tightly bound by this self-identification, there seems to be an increasing talk about whether the countries of Africa make sense, and specifically, if they should be much smaller than they are. Lee mentioned a few such discussions in this blog, and Jina Moore at Change.Org blogged about an even more radical idea: redrawing the national boundaries of Africa altogether. This is, of course, only a paradox in a superficial sense. When you get down to it, it’s perfectly possible to celebrate one identity, ‘African’, that binds you to another group while simultaneously fighting a second identity ‘Nigerian’ that also binds you to some of the same people, because these identities have different functions and relate to different aspects of one’s life.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Really useless statements

Jul 8

Posted by Matt in Africa, Worst practices | 2 Comments

If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

More here. Hat tip to AIC.

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Up close and personal

Jun 30

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid | 4 Comments

Is it appropriate to single out individuals for help?

Slate recently ran a piece by Emily Meehan, an aid worker who weighs the pros and cons of giving a young Congolese boy money for school:

It was a long time before anyone explicitly told me that they didn’t like what I was doing with Aimé. I knew that I was breaking an aid-worker code, one that says it’s unprofessional for an individual aid worker to single out an individual “beneficiary” and help them with their own money.

No one would actually talk about this code, just as they didn’t talk about the code against discussing why you left home and came to work in a warzone. In fact, people didn’t talk about a lot of things, and I sometimes think that’s why we had become expatriates—to avoid talking about our lives and to avoid our lives.

Still, I had heard a number of vague reasons why I shouldn’t help Aimé. One was that if you help an individual, they will become dependent on your help, and when you stop helping them, which is inevitable, they will be crushed. Aid agencies do that all the time, though. They help a group of people here one day and then stop another day. Besides, almost everyone broke the code.

The dependency argument is a compelling one, but, as Meehan points out, one that applies to all aid. Aside from official aid and charitable interventions like the one in the story, many local staff becomes dependent on expatriate aid workers for their livelihood.

Meehan’s piece is insightful, but a little naive at times. It perfectly captures the ambivalence and uncertainty aid workers feel about giving to specific people – such concerns boil over at the end of the piece when Meehan temporarily suspects her beneficiary, Aimé, of lying to get more money out of her:

“And they stole my money,” said Aimé quietly, smiling and looking at the ground.

“What money?” I asked.

“All the money you gave me,” he said, still looking at the ground and smiling. My little brother used to smile when he lied.

“Who’s they?” I asked, in shock.

“I don’t know,” Aimé replied.

After thinking for a minute, I told him I didn’t believe him.

“You think I would trick you?” said Aimé.

…..I was confused and upset. I realized that I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know whether Aimé was tricking me. I didn’t know why he would trick me. I didn’t know if anything I have told you about his life was true, and I didn’t know if foreign aid works.

I think part of the frustration over helping individuals is driven by the contradictions that arise: aid workers work on programmes that are meant to, directly or indirectly, help people in recipient countries. If we were driven purely by altruism, we should be working in the programmes that offer the greatest chance of improving people’s lives. The desire to spend time outside the programme helping people might be driven by a desire to maximise time spent doing good, but more likely it is a silent acknowledgement that we don’t know whether or not our aid work is doing any good. Otherwise, if we wanted to help more people, we could just put in a few more hours of work per day, or return a hunk of your pay check.

Perhaps there are less rational reasons that most of us have been in Meehan’s shoes before: we have an innate desire to see our charity up close. We have to question who’s needs we are really satisfying when we single out people to ‘save.’

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Living in hell

Jun 28

Posted by Matt in Africa, Poverty porn, Worst practices | 5 Comments

So much for rose-tinted glasses

Foreign Policy recently ran a photo essay with images from countries that scored the worst on their Failed States Index. The title? “Postcards from Hell.”

But as the photos here demonstrate, sometimes the best test is the simplest one: You’ll only know a failed state when you see it.

Really? Isn’t selection an issue here? If I went to the projects of Baltimore to take some photos, Maryland would start looking like a failed state pretty quickly.

The Failed States Index, a creation of both Foreign Policy and The Fund For Peace, uses a range of indicators, some more reasonable than others. The ranking of failed states is based on an amalgamation of these indicators, which means that some states get a similar ranking, despite being “failed” for drastically different reasons. This is why war-torn, refugee-laden Sierra Leone is tied with extremely-peaceful but desperately poor Malawi.

Sean Jacobs also weighs in.

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