According to Channel 4 news [Hat tip to WR], Somali piracy has been so successful in disrupting foreign fishing boats that the natural fish stocks in the region are growing! Kenyan fisherman are ecstatic. Perhaps we should start deploying Somali fisherman in areas of the world where overfishing is a problem?
Archive for October, 2009
As if we needed any more evidence that centering advocacy and funding around specific diseases was a bad idea, the New York Times reports:
Diarrhea kills 1.5 million young children a year in developing countries — more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined — but only 4 in 10 of those who need the oral rehydration solution that can prevent death for pennies get it.
….lies at the heart of a wider debate over whether the United States and other rich nations spend too much on AIDS, which requires lifelong medications, compared with diarrhea and the other leading killer of children, pneumonia, both of which can be treated inexpensively.
International commitments to combat HIV and AIDS rose at an average annual rate of 48 percent from 1998 to 2007, reaching $7.4 billion and making up almost half of donor financing for global health, according to Professor Shiffman’s analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
For as long as we direct funding vertically towards specific outputs, we’re going to see this sort of imbalance. We need to be investing more in health systems (be they public or private or in-between) that can respond appropriately to needs on the ground and make the optimal allocation decisions that are nigh impossible on a global scale. I have extremely mixed feelings about this quote from the article:
Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, countered that wealthy donors still spent far too little on global health and rejected what he called the wrong-headed idea that “we need to make a terrible and tragic choice between AIDS or pneumonia.” The United States has invested heavily in the fight against AIDS, and other wealthy nations should pick up more of the cost of other global health priorities, he says.“Rather than tearing down what’s working, we should continue to invest in what’s needed,” he said.
Perhaps it is best that the US sticks to fighting AIDS – life might actually be better if donors bothered to specialise more; this is difficult, as no one wants the unglamorous problems, even if they are the crucial ones. At the same time, think about what Sachs is saying: the components of essential health package that the poor should get should be funded and provided by different groups of people. That’s a recipe for disaster – we should all be putting money into systems instead, not trying to cobble together different health intervention.
Health systems just aren’t sexy enough. We need a celebrity to start endorsing them.
Kevin Costner built the field and got a game going. I think he was lucky.
An anthropologist I know once told me a great story, which may be a rural myth. It was about a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea from which two members were given the opportunity to travel outside of their homestead to see the urban world in all its ‘glory’. When they returned, they recounted their experiences to the rest of the tribe, and they set about replicating one of the more amazing things they’d seen: an airport. They cleared a runway. They built an observation tower out of wood. They even crafted headphones with little reed antennae for the ground control team to wear. When they were done, they waited for the planes to arrive.
They never did. Building the structures, the visible artifices of an airport is only symbolic. The actual meaning of what an airport is, what makes it functional, cannot be seen. It lies in the relations between people and institutions and in agreements between them.
This anecdote constantly pops into my mind when I observe technical reform processes introduced by donors (often with domestic support) in African Governments. Mark Miller and Matt have both discussed this issue in the past. What they and I have in common (apart from devastating good looks and a rapier-sharp wit) is that we have all done time as long term TAs in developing country Governments. All of us have been witness to ambitious reform programmes stalling on the road to implementation or lying dead and ineffective after implementation. Yet only sporadically have the causes of this been critically examined and learnt from.
On this note, The Roving Bandit recently linked to an exciting post from the IMF’s Public Financial Management blog (and yes, I’m aware of the depths of geekery I’ve plumbed by using the word ‘exciting’ about the IMF and PFM). In it, Richard Allen makes a series of simple, reasonable statements about how technical reform should and shouldn’t be tackled in low income countries. Three things that had me high-fiving myself:
The experience of now-developed countries suggests that the process of establishing credible and robust budgetary institutions can take many decades, or longer. There is no reason to expect LICs to be different.
Because the necessary basics are not in place, many reforms are likely to fail.
Much more attention needs to be given to the political economy constraints to reform since changing budgetary institutions is not at root a technocratic issue.
The most important point Mr. Allen makes is the last one, and it extends beyond budgeting. Very few reform processes recognize that at root, the biggest problems in Government administrations are political economy problems. They are not technical or technocratic problems. Treating them as such can simply create new problems without actually addressing the original ones.
INEPDitude
Oct 30
I spotted this on Alanna’s twitter feed: the “International Network for Enabling Poverty Development” or the INEPD charity. It’s obvious a heavy dose of parody (although the site looks so much like the typical small-NGO setup, that it took me a few minutes to be sure). It has some wonderful quotes:
Our Inepd coordination systems allow us channel your funds to any emergency that has a high profile in the news.
We are happy to announce that applications are now open for the Humanitarian Couple of the year award
On the 22nd the acting head of the Inepd Public Health Department Shirley de Vries noticed 3 suspected cases of Mexican flu. She immediately quarantined all staff in the Inepd International office including two visitors to the office and subsequently a pizza delivery boy.
It reminds me of a joke that we had in Malawi about the proliferation of useless (and often fraudulent) NGOs – we talked about the NGO TWACIB, which stood for “Two wankers and a computer in Blantyre.”
International Network for Enabling
Poverty Development
Academic sins
Oct 30
I’ve been reading up on journal articles on birth order in preparation for a DPhil paper. I ran across two (published!) papers that both committed deep and unforgivable sins. See if you can spot them.
First up, one paper (I’ll omit titles and author names) began with citing a quote relevant to birth order:
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.
Nancy Mitford (http://www.quotegarden.com/family.html)
In the other paper, the offense came during the econometric specification:
where the parameter of interest was, of course, beta.
Unlikely enumeration
Oct 29
Stand up and be counted
According to the BBC, the Kenyan government is planning to do a gay census. There’s just one tiny problem: homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, which, like most of the continent, is extremely hostile toward its gay population. This seems like it would be a difficult thing to pull off, although still highly useful information for those leading the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Strangely, the BBC story has a photo of two African men holding hands. Maybe they don’t realise that it’s actually not unusual for two men in East Africa to walk around holding hands (even if it is a bit shocking to a mzungu).
African Film Library
Oct 29
Spotted via Marginal Revolution: an online (pay-for-access) service; a large library with some of the best of Africa cinema. I’ve yet to try it out – but it looks pretty sleek. There’s a heavy bias towards North and West African/French-language films, although this is likely due to the concentration of the industry. I’m excited.
Some thoughts on MDGs 2.0
Oct 27
You can have any development policy you want, so long as it's the MDGs
A few weeks ago I found myself watching The Biggest Loser, one of those weight-loss reality shows. Several men and women were going through an intensive weight-loss program, each competing to see who could lose the largest proportion of pounds every week. They were already several weeks into the competition and all of the remaining contestants had lost a lot of weight already. Consequently, many found it increasingly difficult to shed those extra pounds. It didn’t help that each group went through the same exercise regime each week: forced to pursue the same objectives, regardless of their current condition.
I hope the analogy is clear - we development bloggers are not known for our wonderful analogies (sorry Bill). One of the main criticisms of the Millennium Development Goals was that, as global, uniform targets, they imposed unfair expectations and an inflexible framework on many developing countries. Chris Blattman, in an unsurprisingly reasonable critique of the MDGs, put it nicely:
Once again, whatever humanitarian gains are achieved by 2015 risk being labelled as failures merely for failing to reach unrealistic and under-informed expectations.
Development must be a bottom-up process. We say this a lot, but my meaning is slightly different: development cannot be driven or dictated on a global level. While we will forever disagree on the nature and degree of government involvement in the development process, I think we can all agree that recipient governments are the key element to making it work. Whether they do this by mostly staying out of the way or providing the public goods essential for progress is still up for debate. Through planning or searching, each country must start at scratch and find their own way to the end of the maze. As a global community, we have a collective responsibility to help countries find their way – but they know the terrain better than we do.
The MDGs represent laudable goals for putting a dent in human suffering, but they also implicitly shape the way that policy is created at the domestic level. Since their inception, the they have dominated the policy debate in nearly every donor-recipient relationship on the earth. Not only does most donor assistance revolve around the targets, but after so many years of exposure, many recipient governments just mimic the same framework when creating their own policy. If you’re a firm believer in the Paris Declaration, this is truly a nightmare, akin to the brilliant scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where Brian tells his fervent followers that they’ve all got to work things out for themselves, to which they reply, in unison: “Yes, we’ve all got to work it out for ourselves! Tell us more!”
This would be fine if the cookie-cutter approach to reaching the goals worked in every context. In some places it has, but in many we see stagnation. The only way to deal with this is by letting recipient countries take the reigns, not only in the policy debate, but also in goal-setting.
Taxing Times
Oct 23
Benjamin Franklin very famously wrote that ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’.
I love a pithy turn of phrase but Franklin clearly wasn’t talking about Africa. Matt’s recent post about using revenue distribution and taxation to avoid the natural resource curse in Ghana turned me to think about taxation systems.
Let’s start from a simple premise. My vision of aid for development is not that it should ultimately provide the basics of a good life to all the world’s poor. Rather, it should help their Governments, private sectors, civil societies and private individuals develop their own capacity to provide, sustain and improve these basics.
For the institutions mentioned above to perform functions themselves they must have a revenue source with an inherent logic and sustainability. For private individuals this means a wage or ownership of resources that generate a rent. For private industry and business, this means revenues and profit from the undertaking of business.
For a Government it means tax revenue. And taxes are a very good thing, not just because they give the Government room to spend:
- Eventually, everything aid currently does for or with Governments should be undertaken through domestically generated revenue, largely tax; this revenue gives full flexibility for locally constructed and executed policies
- It stimulates accountability. Accountability in a Government powered by aid runs to donors. In a country run through taxation it goes from Government to the taxed: i.e. the general population – hence, ‘no taxation without representation’.
- Taking this argument further, others suggest taxation is an essential component of state building
- A bad taxation system, one that depends disproportionately on taxes that are easy to collect, is often regressive. This means the poor suffer more, and it is inefficient at raising revenue. Taxation systems in Africa typically depend heavily on Value Added Tax – a regressive tax.
- A good tax system can be a tool in incorporating into the legal framework the vast ‘informal’ economic activities that characterize developing countries: activities that have assets but no capital because they are not part of a formal property system. De Soto marks this as the greatest problem in development.
Unfortunately, many African countries have poor or ineffective taxation systems, which are so partly because of their structure, partly because much of the economy is hidden (in a legal sense) from the state, and partly because the structures that do exist have a fair few holes through which revenue slips. Aid is also culpable. Governments rely less on tax than they should because aid fulfills the most important functions of tax from a Government (but not civil society) perspective, weakening the incentives for creating a strong tax structure.
Expect the debate over the composition of the next set of MDGs to be heated
A few weeks ago Duncan Green posed the question on a number of our minds: what comes after the Millennium Development Goal deadline in 2015? It’s an important question that both proponents and critics should be considering. It is highly likely that political pressure will result in some sort of framework to replace it, and so it would be great if we all did our homework beforehand.
We should keep in mind the arguments of both sides when considering the future: skeptics argue that the MDGs are immeasurable and unrealistic, that the goals are implicitly heterogeneous across countries and override domestic ownership. Advocates insist that the creation of the MDGs have generated an unprecedented rally around the elimination of both poverty and its awful byproducts.
How should they change? Do they need to change at all? Should they be eliminated all together? Green has some suggestions for issues that should at least be considered: social protection, global warming, aid commitments (both levels and effectiveness e.g. Paris Declaration), other indicators of well being, as well as dealing with the problem of failed or fragile states.
I know what I think (I’ll make my suggestions the end of the weekend). What, savvy readers, do you think should come after the MDGs? Don’t be shy, there’s a comment section just below.
