Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for category Africa

Ex-president

Jul 25

Posted by Matt in Africa, Elections, Governance, History | Comments off

One evening, back in 2010, I found myself stuck in Dar es Salaam’s soul-destroying evening traffic. I was trapped on Ocean Road, which leads from the ferries crossing the harbour past the presidential grounds. Often clogged with government workers and ex-pats trying to escape to the peninsula and beyond, the local street sellers have long-since adapted to this particular group, often selling international magazines (the Economist!) and informational maps and posters. It is here that I picked up my 2010 African Leaders Calendar poster, which devotes 90% of its space to African heads of state and 10% to anything calendar related.

I never put the poster up – it always sat on a shelf behind my desk in the department. It started seeming terribly out of date after the Arab spring and the second Ivorian civil war, so I started crossing presidents off when they were no longer in office. Not as part of some macabre hit list, but just to keep track of who had left. Out of the 56 countries represented, about 12 heads-of-state are no longer in power. The reasons for an X are myriad – failed re-elections, retirements, untimely deaths, revolutions and coups. Not always, but often, an X represents a shift for the better – or at the very least change.

Today I crossed off Professor John Evans Atta Mills, president of Ghana, who died yesterday. It’s not totally clear what illness Mills died of, possibly a complication of his throat cancer. I’ve written before of the tendency for African president to unexpectedly fall off their perches, felled by common ailments of the elderly such as cancer or strokes.

Two and a half years have seen an attrition of about 20%s. How long until that number hits 100%? At the top of the poster sit two of the stalwarts: Museveni and Kagame. I fear it will be quite some time before this calendar is finished.

By the way, if anyone can get their hands on either the 2011 or 2012 posters, let me know.

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Not in my backyard

Jul 10

Posted by Matt in Africa, Development | 3 Comments

In her work on urban land titling in Peru, Erica Field maintained that squatters often needed to keep people around to protect their land, presumably from those who would try and claim it as their own, and that providing formal property rights through land titling would free these family members up to go do more productive things. While I frequently restate this idea while presenting, I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of it – the idea of a roving band of land snatchers always seemed a bit fantastical.

Until Saturday, when a colleague of mine stumbled upon a man claiming to be a victim of land theft in Mburahati Barafu, one of the unplanned, informal settlements of Dar es Salaam. We went back to interview him today. After being away from home for only ten days he found that not only had someone managed to sell his back garden to a third party, but that someone had already built a house in its place. His neighbors seem to have signed off on the deal, as did the local officials. The worst part: his own brother was the one that made the sale and skipped town with the proceeds.

Maybe a land title would have guarded against this crazy fraternal expropriation, maybe not. Other residents seem to have taken matter into their own hands to make it clear that their property is strictly off the market: another house we ran into had nyumba haiuzwi scrawled all over it - house not for sale.

Dar es Salaam bleg

Jul 2

Posted by Matt in Africa | 5 Comments

So I’m heading to Dar es Salaam tomorrow for a little over a week. I’ve been there plenty of times for the land titling project we’re working on, and am very familiar with the city, but still have yet to find the optimal place to sit and work in between meetings and visits to the communities we’re working with. Suggestions? Good food and wifi are a plus.

I’ve found Africafe in Sea Cliffe village to be decent for this, but I’m not overly fond of the place. Epi D’Or is always nice, but no wifi as far as I can tell. The Southern Sun always seems to have free wifi, but the food there has gotten awfully expensive. Late at night, when everything else has closed, I sometimes escape to Level 8 bar on top of the Kilimanjaro, but I’m not that keen on the cheesy music and abundance of sex workers.

 

 

 

If you’re not with us, you’re against us

May 30

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Economics, Worst practices | 2 Comments

"Only a Sachs deals in absolutes"

This post could also be titled “Taking credit, part deux.” Writing in the Guardian, Jeffrey Sachs considers the impressive reduction in child mortality rates across sub-Saharan Africa.

The critics of foreign aid are wrong. A growing flood of data shows that death rates in many poor countries are falling sharply, and that aid-supported programmes for healthcare delivery have played a key role. Aid works; it saves lives.

For the rest of us who are still burdened with the ability to question, this narrative seems a little too convenient. While the last decade was characterized by a massive increase in health aid to African countries, many of these countries also experienced significant economic growth and improvements in governance and safety. As Charles Kenny pointed out in his book many of these gains in survival may be technological, a result of to interventions which were made readily available. Of course, some of this was due to aid – but the resulting relationship is much more complex than “aid goes up, infant mortality goes down.”

All of this is not to suggest that health aid did not play a role – it almost certainly did – but waving one’s hand and giving all the credit to aid is a dangerous simplification. It also ignores a significant amount of heterogeneity – some countries did better than others, so we really need to start asking ourselves “why?” before we start patting ourselves on the back.

Yet, it isn’t the simplistic narrative that bothers me, it is what comes after: a declaration that aid skeptics are not only completely wrong, but that they could be responsible for the death of children:

Unfortunately, at every step during the past decade – and still today – a chorus of aid sceptics has argued against the needed help. They have repeatedly claimed that aid does not work; that the funds will simply be wasted; that anti-malaria bed nets cannot be given to the poor, since the poor won’t use them; that the poor will not take anti-Aids medicines properly; and so on and so forth. Their attacks have been relentless (I’ve faced my share).

The opponents of aid are not merely wrong. Their vocal antagonism still threatens the funding that is needed to get the job done, to cut child and maternal deaths by enough to meet the MDGs by 2015 in the poorest countries, and to continue after that to ensure that all people everywhere finally have access to basic health services.

Emphasis is mine. While Sachs is probably referring to pundits on the other extreme of the distribution, his rhetoric leaves no room for shades of grey; writing what I just wrote doesn’t make me a cautious optimist, it makes me an aid sceptic.

Then he tries to quietly paint aid sceptics as responsible for the deaths of children. Astonishingly, if you read the sentence in bold carefully sentence carefully, it’s clear that Sachs is putting much more weight on reductions in child and maternal death before 2015 than after. Does Mr. Sachs not care about children of the future? That interpretation might seem a bit unfair to you. What a shame.

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Taking credit

May 30

Posted by Matt in Africa, Development, Research, Worst practices | Comments off

When you have a moment, I'd really like to see your source for that

While the Millennium Village Project’s shaky claim of reducing child mortality resulted in an impressive backlash, these sorts of assertions are not uncommon. Very frequently, donors, NGOs and philanthropists make unsubstantiated claims to impact which go unchallenged, either because they go unnoticed by those who know better or because we’re all just too busy to raise the alarm every time someone makes a bogus claim (or, perhaps, we’re being funded by said entity).

For example, take this tweet by Oxfam international:

That’s quite a claim. What does Oxfam have to back up this claim? The tweet links to an article in the Ghana Business News:

Speaking at a ceremony in Bolgatanga to introduce phase II of the project and to present the donation g, Mrs Rosemary Anderson Akolaa,, Health Advocacy Manager of Oxfam lauded the effort of the TBAs, the Community Health Committees and other stakeholders for their effort at bringing reducing mortality rate in the Region by seven per cent in 2010.

So, one of Oxfam’s managers in Ghana made the claim – what is it based on? To make this claim, Oxfam needs to:

  1. Describe the data it is using to estimate the 7% drop in maternal mortality.
  2. Convincingly show us that this drop is due to Oxfam’s (and partner’s) intervention. For example, did maternal mortality in the Upper East region fall faster than in other regions which did not receive the intervention?
As far as I can tell, Oxfam has done neither of these. Can we stop making claims we haven’t yet made an effort to back up?

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How to avoid your social obligations: adopt a new religion

May 16

Posted by Matt in Africa, Development | 3 Comments

David Parkin’s (1972) study of the Giriama of Kenya has become a classic analysis of the balance between social relationships and material accumulation. Parkin argued that Giriama palm growers who wished to accumulate material wealth were faced with a challenging problem. To accumulate capital, palm growers had to distance themselves from community expectations that they would redistribute their wealth in the form of feasts involving large amounts of meat and palm wine. At the same time, access to land depended on social support. For palm growers to accumulate material wealth, they had to avoid redistributing their wealth  while maintaining the social ties necessary to ensure their access to land. In Parkin’s study, conversion to Islam enabled farmers to solve this problem. Islam prevented men from drinking palm wine and eating meat slaughtered by non-Muslims and allowed them to be more selective about their engagement in relations of reciprocity. Therefore religion provided a justification for refraining from expending one’s wealth on shared consumption without being exposed to accusations of selfishness.

That is from Daniel Mains’s Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment and the Future in Urban Ethiopia. Hat tip to my desk mate Stefano, who often makes me feel guilty about how little of the ethnographic literature I have read.

Perhaps you should be more cautious about always treated religion as exogenous in that regression you just ran.

 

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Sachs the rainmaker

May 9

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Economics, Research, Worst practices | 12 Comments

"But kemosabe, this would not stand up to a diff-in-diff"

Many of you will already be familiar with the ongoing debate over the efficacy and evaluation of the Millennium Village Project, the brainchild of the Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sachs. Due primarily to the work of Michael Clemens at the CGD and Gabriel Demombynes at the World Bank, the MVP’s claims of development impact have finally faced substantial scrutiny, although frequently the debate has felt more like a war of attrition than productive discourse.

Enter the Lancet, a reputable medical journal which has a worrying tendency to publish really disreputable social science research, which just published a study by Sachs et al. showing that, over three years, child mortality (under the age of five) has fallen by roughly 25% across nine Millennium Villages. When compared with `control’ villages (which were chosen later and differ from the MVs in many, substantial ways), the drop was even larger – close to 31%.

Suddenly the bells starting ringing: after all the doubt, the MVP is hailed as being successful in reducing child mortality, with the editor-in-chief of the Lancet rallying behind the paper and the Guardian reporting the results with an astonishing lack of scrutiny. Only in the twitterverse/blogosphere has the response been largely negative (Lee Crawfurd disassembles the results of the Lancet article here).

However undeserved, this might have been a good opportunity for the the Earth Institute to bask in its momentary glory. Yet, the results might have already been undermined by awful timing: the Lancet study arrived just days after another study by the World Bank’s Gabriel Demombynes and Karina Trommlerová showing absolutely massive decreases in child mortality across most of sub-Saharan Africa in the past few years.

To understand why this is a problem for the Lancet study, consider the table below, which I’ve assembled from results from that study and some figures from the World Bank one (admittedly swiped from Michael Clemens’s post on it).

From the WB study I’ve taken the same nine countries used in the Lancet article, listed their declines in mortality and (assuming a linear trend) calculated the average decline in under-5 mortality per year. One caveat: the years considered in the World Bank study do not necessarily coincide with the timing of the Millennium Villages in their respective countries, so we may be comparing trends from different periods. Even so – these figures still provide a rough idea of the relative magnitude of the mortality decline.

Per-country figures are not available in the Sachs et al. study (which is it a bit worrying in itself), so I can only compare the average declines in these countries to the average decline in all Millennium Villages. What do the results suggest? While child mortality dropped by 24.6 (less children dying per thousand births) over a 3 year period, average declines for all countries in the study are broadly similar: 22.5.

The first and most important thing to take from these results is that the Millennium Villages aren’t vastly outperforming aggregate gains in the same countries. This makes it very difficult for the MVP to claim it is making an impact – it’s a bit like claiming credit for rain in Oxford, when it has been raining all over the UK.

The second thing worth noting: if you look at the above table, taken from the Lancet study, you’ll see that under-five mortality is actually increasing in the control villages. This strongly suggests that control villages are quite different from the rest of the country at large. The Earth Institute has argued that Millennium Villages (and their control counterparts) were selected because they were different – but even if these odd trends in the control villages don’t disqualify them as a counterfactual (which I still think they do), the differences seen here certainly prevent the MVP from having any sort of claims of external validity.

The argument that the Millennium Villages aren’t outperforming the rest of their host countries is not new: Clemens and Demombynes made it over a year ago, when they found that many other claims of `impact’ by the MVP were reflected in national statistics.  Let’s hope the hype from the this study is similarly deflated.

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The African Man vs the Hollywood Stereotype

Apr 25

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

Excellent stuff from the fine folks who brought us Alex presents: Commando:

Hat tip to Xeni Jardin.

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The temptation of the empirical knockout punch

Apr 19

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Economics, Research | 1 Comment

Admit it, you love watching popular development preconceptions being destroyed by cold, hard empirical reality just as much as I do. Despite the slightly queasy feeling I got knowing that Nicholas Negroponte was still out there wasting people’s time and money, these feelings were recently swept away by the satisfaction of knowing that the One-Laptop-Per-Child program was, for the umpteenth time, proven to be ineffective by a rigorous RCT.

These knockouts are especially welcome when a program’s hype far outstretches its evidence base. Such was the case with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves once Hilary Clinton endorsed it, much to the ire of the developmentistas who pointed out that there was nothing new or particularly encouraging about the use of cleaner stoves. This didn’t stop Madeleine Bunting and Julia Roberts (yes, Julia Roberts) from claiming clean cookstoves would work wonders and save millions of lives.

Finally, some more rigorous evidence arrived this month, with the knockout delivered by a group of MIT researchers – including the prolific Esther Duflo – who released a new study basically showing cookstoves had little long term impact. Charles Kenny, who resists the temptation to declare a K.O, offers a good summary of the results:

So the results of the MIT study will come as a disappointment to the clean cookstove movement: 2,600 households in India were sold simple improved cookstoves at a highly subsidized price –they cost $12.50 to put in but families paid just 75 cents.  Yet after three years, hardly any of the stoves were being used, and most had fallen into disrepair.  The stoves ended up no more efficient than traditional models –they burned as much wood– and levels of indoor air pollution were not improved.

Disheartening results, to be sure.  But they shouldn’t come as a surprise.  There are piles of previous evaluations of cookstove programs that may have been less rigorous but still pointed in the same direction.  In fact, seventeen years ago, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology published a review article noting that “in spite of quite ambitious programmes” in support of renewable energy technologies for cooking, they had “not met the expectations of the planners and implementing organisations.”  Amongst the reasons that improved cookstoves in particular were proving a disappointment, the researchers pointed to findings which suggested the stoves did not in fact save fuel, and they were hard to use and maintain (sound familiar?).

So this is an open and shut case, right? Well, not quite. The MIT paper, the Washington Post article which covered it and Kenny all seemed to have missed something: a different RCT on improved cooking stoves which was released just last month. That paper, by Gunther  Bensch and Jörg Peters, studies the impact of a randomised lottery of stoves in rural Senegal. The results suggest that, a year later, households receiving an improved cooking stove used less wood, spent less time cooking meals, reported better indoor air quality and (for women, who presumably did all the cooking) were significantly less likely to have respiratory disease symptoms, eye problems. Nearly all recipients of a stove used it at least seven times a week, in sharp contrast to the lack of use seen in the MIT paper.

Make no mistake: Duflo, Hanna and Greenstone’s study has many advantages over the Bensch/Peters paper. The India paper benefits from a much larger sample size, repeated follow-ups and much more sophisticated measurement techniques. Yet the Senegal paper is still worthwhile because it is – well – written about Senegal and not India. It is perfectly possible for an intervention to fail in one setting but work in another. The J-Pal study strongly suggests that we need to visit treated households more than a year later, as it is possible that the families in the Senegal sample might still stop using the stoves in the future. However, the timing of the latter study provides an excellent opportunity: the intervention was carried out in November, 2009, so if a follow-up survey was conducted this November at the three year mark, we’d be able to identify a long run impact which could either reinforce or undermine the MIT researchers’ result.

Sadly, I doubt anyone will take advantage of this opportunity. The incentives for replication in academia are still incredibly weak, and compelling studies which knocks down popular ideas can be just as persistent as those with novel, positive result. Even if Bensch and Peters return in a year with compelling evidence that cookstoves do have long term impacts in Senegal, it won’t have the quite same impact that the Duflo paper did. We should be a bit more cautious about embracing papers which confirm our priors - a knockout is sometimes just too good to be true.

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Poverty porn, Scandinavian chocolate cake edition

Apr 18

Posted by Matt in Africa, Poverty porn, Worst practices | 2 Comments

From the Guardian:

Sweden’s minister of culture has been accused of racism after cutting a cake depicting a naked black woman.

Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was taking part in an event at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the capital’s museum of modern art and home to works by Picasso and Dalí. She was invited to cut the cake, an art installation meant to highlight the issue of female genital mutilation. She began, as instructed, by taking a chunk from the cake’s “clitoris”.

The artist, Makode Aj Linde, who created the installation for World Art Day on 15 April, took part in the cake-cutting, with his blackened face and head sticking up next to the cake’s stomach and arms. The cakes “insides” were a gruesome red. A video shows him screaming loudly every time a visitor hacks off another slice of the cake.

The Swedes seem to have mastered the art of combining blackface*, torso-shaped cake design and cringe-worthy cake-slicing into one, massive chocolaty faux pax. Bravo, Ms. Liljeroth, bravo.

Note: Despite being black himself, it appears that Makode Linde went for full blackface anyway. 

Update: nice analysis of the situation and resulting photo by Johan Palme over at Africa is a Country, who suggests that this whole thing might have been staged to snap the photo.

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