Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for December, 2009

How a universal advocate would respond to the universal critic

Dec 30

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Economics, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

This post is meant as a light-hearted response to Owen’s truly excellent dig at generic, by-the-hip criticisms of aid.

You see, my aid project will work because:
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1. Thousands of children die of X every day, so my project will work.

You may think my project to prevent/enhance/promote/incentivise/develop/reduce/empower X won’t work, but don’t you know that 1,000 children die of X every second (it’s a well established fact that Dambisa Moyo is now personally responsible for the death of every African child). Because so many people will die every day without our help, my project will work.

 
2. We did a RCT which is immediately applicable to this new setting

Traditional research methods are crap, so we should ignore all results using anything else but rigorous, randomised controlled trials. Luckily, we’ve already done a RCT of my intervention on Himalayan goat-herders, so we are confident that the intervention will be successful among Ugandan sharecroppers.
 
3. Because my regression says it will

Do you know any econometrics? No? Too bad. Then you’d know how awesome my regressions are. They show that, on average, a variable that’s tangentially related to my project is significantly correlated with a variable that we know from a previous study is correlated with reducing poverty. Therefore, my project will work.

 
4. Because….look at this picture:

African-child

 
5. We’ve piloted our project in carefully chosen locations, so we know it will work.

We’ve already tried out my project in places we picked because we thought it would be most likely to work there, and it worked, so my project will work elsewhere. No, you can’t see the documentation.

 
6. Because if my project doesn’t work, then that other project doesn’t work, and if we talk about it too much, someone will reduce funding to both our projects, and then more people will die.

It’s dangerous to criticise my work, because I save lives. You don’t want to be responsible for killing people do you? Then zip it.

 
7. Jeffrey Sachs gets shrill and angry every time you suggest the project won’t work, so it will work.

Why would Jeffrey Sachs and Bono spend so much time promoting my project if it didn’t work? Ergo, it will work.

 
8. A study has shown that the stuff my project is about is inextricably linked to climate change, or HIV/AIDs, or was it both?

Either way, my project is hot stuff. Because an NGO has taken the time and the money to produce a huge report with heaps of incomparable/unverifiable evidence lumped together which show that my project is linked to whatever issue you care about, my project will work.

 
9. There is a scientific link between my intervention X and better Y.

Therefore, my project is guaranteed to work in practice. We can ignore the human element.

 
10. My project has led to X number of stuff built/bought/people sitting in classrooms

These things are necessary conditions for development happening, so my project is working.

 
11. All you examples of aid not working are because we’ve never had enough money to make it work

My previous projects have all been underfunded, so of course you can’t find any previous evidence of an impact (although I should note that all my previous projects have worked anyway).

 
12. All these great things have happened while my project has been around.

Since we started my project, infant mortality rate has dropped by X% and enrolment is up by Y%. So what if my project is on fertiliser, it works! It’s all there in the consultant’s report.

 
13. If you just spent more time on the ground, in the thick of it, you would just know that things are working.

Sure, my project might not stand up to your “rigorous empirical methods,” but if you were actually based in the field, you’d see the changes happening. Everyone is very optimistic about the impact of the project, especially my staff (they even gave up their incredible jobs in government to come work for me!)

 
14. You once sat in the same room as Dambisa Moyo, so we can’t take your argument seriously.

Seriously, didn’t I see the two of you together? There’s a rumour out there that you sleep with “Dead Aid” under your pillow.
Additional suggestions are welcome.

The art of receiving

Dec 23

Posted by Matt in Aid | No Comments

There is a quote that is both appropriate for the holiday season and amazingly relevant for the great aid debate. It is by John Steinbeck, from The Log from the Sea of Cortez:

Perhaps the most overrated virtue on our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver……. it is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

I first ran across it in Robert Klitgaard’s Tropical Gangsters. Keep it in mind when you do your holiday  shopping… and when you’re designing you next aid project.

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Power, Glory, Sound, Fury

Dec 23

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Development | 5 Comments

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker prepare to restore power to Zanzibar

Two international consultants prepare to restore power to Zanzibar

In solidarity with the recent (failed) efforts of the Copenhagen summit conference, Zanzibar is doing its level best to both promote and wreck responsible attitudes towards the climate and measures to secure our global future. We’ve had a power cut on Unguja, the larger island and seat of the Revolutionary Government for about 2 weeks now. We recently tried restoring the power, but the problem was discovered to be larger than originally thought and we probably won’t have any power for a few more weeks yet.

This is just an inconvenience for well-off individuals: most have generators (though I don’t), and can afford to eat out (be it at a nyama choma stall or a high-end restaurant) when necessary. It’s actually quite amusing in some ways. You can see us foreigners congregating in cafes with our laptops, using their power outlets to charge five things at once. Outside, I imagine a line of muggers licking their lips and lining up to a kind of ATM machine for thieves: a huge supply of laptops, mobile phones and cash-rich wazungu.

For the poor, though it is more serious: on the one hand, people in rural poverty don’t have power at any time in the year, so it makes very little difference. On the other, in the urban area (yes, that is singular!), the poor depend on electricity to pump water into their houses, and to provide security lights in the darker recesses of stone town, where the near-total darkness provides cover for the few unscrupulous individuals who do exist here. With water powered by electric pumps in urban areas, the ukosefu is also a public health nightmare. What water that is available isn’t always of the best provenance and may also be transported in dirty vessels. Water borne diseases are likely to spread rapidly.

The economy is being brought to its knees as well. Tourists on the mainland are forgoing Zanzibar; but enough are still here to require businesses to stay open with their generators running. These generators are incredibly expensive to keep going and a fair few places are operating at a loss. They can’t close though, because competition for the tourist dollar is fierce here, and sustained success requires constant positive word-of-mouth support. Being closed has long term ramifications. Beyond the service industry, much production in Zanzibar is undertaken using piece work. Piece workers don’t have generators, and so any work requiring machines is being done ad hoc as and when a generator can be borrowed, or not being done at all. Alternative employment is thin on the ground but people are necessarily looking.

All of this has really opened my eyes to how important it is to have reliable energy sources. Talking to private sector business owners in Malawi gave me an idea of how much money was lost in each power cut then (not to mention the hospitals running without electricity), but here it’s even worse.

Lastly, this isn’t doing any good for the climate. While many of us are operating in the darkness at home, offices and hotels use monstrous generators. One large hotel allegedly guzzles 800 litres of diesel each day to make sure its rooms have round the clock air conditioning. And yet, not a single project I’ve seen here examines alternative energy sources, such as solar power, windmills or hydroelectricity; and from accounts, few donors are willing to fund such studies. Why? Well, the power solution is provided by a European company – word on the street (not the most reliable source, of course) is that few are willing to put them out of a lucrative contract.

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I’m off to the Serengeti for Christmas and to the beach for New Years – I won’t be posting again until early January. Happy Holidays!

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Joined at the hip?

Dec 21

Posted by Matt in Development | 5 Comments

I’m sitting here in snowy Copenhagen listening to the BBC World Service. Sir Nicholas Stern, who was being interviewed, made this statement:

The two biggest challenges of the future are solving world poverty and combating climate change, and we can’t accomplish one without the other.

What do you think about this? If global warming got really awful, would those currently in poverty be condemned to stay in poverty (ignoring the small island nations)? Similarly, as it isn’t the bottom billion that are responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions, I don’t see how the presence of poverty (give that they aren’t really growing that quickly) prevents the rich and industrialising nations of the world from tackling climate change.

If anything, I think the two are more likely to conflict rather than to complement each other, but what do you think?

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Examining Aid Success Using an Octopus, Classical Economics and a Blog

Dec 18

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Aid, Political Economy | 8 Comments

Aid, you say? Well, on the one hand...

"Aid, you say? Well, on the one hand..."

Owen Barder recently wrote an excellent, thought-provoking piece for Open Democracy about what aid does and how it should be judged. There seems to be an incipient groundswell around the idea that the ‘failing aid’ agenda is based on a misconception of what aid should be assessed against. Roger Ridell alluded to the same in his earlier piece that I wrote about here, and Chris Blattman floated the idea following conversations with Owen.

What Owen and Roger essentially argue is that the role of aid is more limited than that which it has been assessed on. Most critiques of aid are concerned with the stylized fact that aid is being poured into countries that remain resolutely poor. But what if aid isn’t meant to affect how rich or poor a country is? What if aid is just meant to make people healthier, give them a better education, and access to clean water? What if, in short, aid is simply about making conditions for individuals better without actually changing the economic structures within which they live? Owen doesn’t completely rule out the possibility that aid may make long term macroeconomic improvements, but he argues that if they do occur, there is little to suggest that they would become visible before many years pass.

The argument is enticing in that it allows a way out for those who argue that economic transformation is the standard against which development must be measured. Even if we believe this, it no longer follows that aid should be rejected, since its virtues are shorter term. This allows us to celebrate unreservedly the education that aid funds, the bednets it distributes, and the farmers it supports. None of us wants these things to be bad or useless: we all like to see individuals made better off. If we completely separate the arguments for economic growth and transformation from the arguments for education, health and farmer-support, we remove any need for us to choose what to support.

By my reading, there are three central components to this argument that we should examine a little further.

  1. Aid is aimed at improving lives of individuals and communities, without changing the structural aspects of the socio-economies in which they live. As such, aid can be successful without causing a transformation in the economy.
  2. Aid doesn’t harm the prospects of structural change in the economy. Owen argues that “aid can be used in ways that make such transformations more likely. It can pay for critical infrastructure – such as power, roads and ports – on which economic growth depends. It can finance new skills and capacity. It can provide access to financial services for entrepreneurs wanting to build their businesses.” He also cites South Korea and Taiwan as countries that grew with the support of aid.
  3. Though aid is working, according to the bounded criteria we should set for it, it could work better. Just because he thinks aid works doesn’t mean that there isn’t much we can do to make aid work even better; at the heart of this is a need for more transparency.

I believe in aid. This may come as a surprise to some of our readers, because I take a critical view of how it works and question much of our dominant thinking about development. At root, though, I believe that aid can contribute to deeper changes that are necessary, but to get there we need to change a great deal of our discourse about development. From this perspective, there are things I would challenge, and things I would wholeheartedly support from Owen’s argument.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Dad, where do aid acronyms come from?

Dec 17

Posted by Matt in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

ntds

A little shout out to the Global Network for neglected tropical diseases.

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Transparency and climate change payouts

Dec 16

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Political Economy | 4 Comments

Publish What You Fund‘s Federico Pirzio-Biroli is concerned that rich countries will divert traditional aid towards financing climate change mitigation in developing countries rather than generating new funds.

The poverty advocacy group ONE has launched a last ditch attempt to stop aid money being ‘double counted’. Their petition will be handed to the Danish host of the conference next week and asks:

1. That existing aid promises are kept.
2. That additional costs borne by people living in poverty caused by climate change are paid for by additional money.
3. That countries are transparent about how much development aid is being reallocated to fighting climate change.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m less worried than Pirzio-Biroli about diverted resources: we’re still recovering from a downturn in global prosperity and aid (like it or not) is pro-cyclical. I’m much more concerned that climate change mitigation funds won’t be used for their intended purpose  Most of the receiving nations have enough trouble implementing the aid they do receive- what are the chances that funds will be used to transform entire countries to better deal with global warming? I think it’s much more likely that all the showboating by the poorest countries (like staging 1.5 hour walk outs, or, as Jon Stewart calls it, “lunch”) is just veiled rent-seeking.

Then again, climate-change funds might be easier to control (and, unfortunately, withdraw) than traditional aid. If you did believe that developing countries are pure in their motives for seeking mitigation funds (or even if you believed that they were at least seeking fungibility for good reasons), then why not just lobby for an extra dose of general budget support, and let them make their own trade-off between investing in mitigation and dealing with the rest of their troubles?

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The Twelve Days of Christmas (Aid Edition)™

Dec 15

Posted by Matt in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

On the twelfth day of Christmas my donors gave to me

twelve delayed disbursements!

eleven sketchy studies

ten consultants calling

nine economists arguing

eight mission meetings

seven worthless workshops

six gender trainings

five RCTs!

four 4x4s

three acronyms

two empty schools

and a lecture on M&E!

—

Maybe it’s time for a music video? Suggestions for alternate versions are welcome.

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A Short Post about Violence

Dec 11

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in History, Research | 8 Comments

Killing in the name of... well... Killing...

Killing in the name of... well... not much...

I’m currently re-reading that classic of anti-colonial rage, The Wretched of the Earth. For those of you who haven’t come across it, it was published in 1961 as Les Damnés de la Terre by Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a young man from Martinique who worked as Psychiatrist in Algiera during their rising against France. His experiences there radicalized him and he became a spokesman for the FLN’s violent anti-colonial rebellion. The Wretched of the Earth was the most articulate expression of the logic of their campaign, drawing on socialist and pan-African rhetoric as well as Fanon’s own experiences as a doctor, drawing a direct link between colonialism and a range of psychiatric conditions. Perhaps even more famous was the Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, addressed to European readers. He painted a grim picture of their moral complicity in the worst outrages of colonialism, and asserted the inevitability of their own revolution.

The book is a curious mix of the naïve and the insightful. The naïve I will deal with another time. I’m concerned now with the insight, specifically those into the nature of violence in the liberation struggle.

Violence in Africa is one of the central issues exercising academics concerned with development these days. Texas in Africa has done a great job in educating us about some of the issues in the Congo, and one of the things that emerge starkly from her writing is the complexity of motivation that drives violence. Single-issue causality simplicity or an analysis that denies the personal or direct motivation of violence is insufficient for her:

Many Congolese join armed groups … in order to defend their homes, villages, or co-ethnics. They are not necessarily fighting for control of gold mines or to take territory

For a layman in this issue like myself, this immediately has me thinking about the role of violence as an ends in itself and the importance of the form and practice of violence as an internally logical consequence of circumstance. Though I can’t claim an intimate knowledge of the academic writing on conflict, this seems to be a strand of analysis that gets relatively little attention.

In the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon and Sartre excel in is representing how in circumstances of oppression or intense dissatisfaction, violence is itself an ends. Sartre first:

To shoot down a European is to … destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man and a free man…

Now Fanon, for whom the process of decolonization was necessarily violent:

The ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes a man during the same process by which it frees itself…

What both of these quotes imply is that there is a self-expression and actualisation that occurs through the process of engaging in violence, which will in turn need consideration when addressing the causes, consequences and solutions to conflict. In other words, if the act of violence plays a direct role in the remaking of the individual or groups conducting the violence, transforming them from victim to positive agent, solutions to conflict which remove violence altogether need to conceive an alternative solution to the remaking of the self-image of individuals and groups engaged in conflict.

Are there academics out there who examine this issue? It seems to me that most analysis of violence (particularly structured violence) tend to take a functionalist or instrumental view of the violence itself. It’s conceived as a means to an end, and a symptom of a relationship. This seems to me a major aspect of it, but perhaps also insufficient insofar as we wish to understand how violence is used to create new identities and outcomes and thus also how it can be averted.

There are plenty of bloggers out there who know much more about this than me. Anyone care to point me to some useful reading or present counter-arguments?

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Malaria in Myrtle Beach

Dec 10

Posted by Matt in Development, History | 2 Comments

malaria_map

Via Ryan Briggs (originally from iayork), a malaria mortality map of the US from 1870. I grew up near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which is heavily red on the map (mostly due to the swampy landscape and mosquitoes the size of small dogs).

Ryan sees this map as a sign:

Let’s say it together everyone, geography is not destiny.

I’m not sure that Jared Diamond would agree. For the Native American population geography was much, much closer to destiny.

Maybe I’m wrong – after all, look at the beacon of enlightenment, culture and development Myrtle Beach has become!

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