I was in a gym yesterday on the Msasani peninsula, watching the news on a muted television, surrounded by over-pumped expats. An ad came up for a CNN special report to be aired that evening. The name?
Anderson Cooper Presents:
CNN Heroes: Saving Haiti
Jan 29
Missing in action.
Nipashe and its English-language sister publication, The Guardian, have reported a few facts about Zanzibar’s ongoing power outage, which I’ve blogged about before. The title of the piece in Swahili is ‘SMZ: Umeme unaikosesha serikali mapato kibao’, which basically translates to ‘RGoZ: Electricity is causing a huge loss of Government revenue’.
I can’t find the online versions of the article in either Swahili or English, but it basically takes a few indicative facts given out by the Minister of Finance about the economic impact of the ukosefu and uses them to illustrate the scale of the economic crisis engulfing Zanzibar at the moment. Highlights:
There is no further comment in the article beyond what the Minister of Finance announced. However, a little more, from my reading of the situation:
As someone who believes that development must be driven by the development and growth of domestic capitalism, it’s sobering news. With electricity hopefully to be restored at the end of February, we will be able to start calculating the precise cost of this outage (indeed, initial data collection has already started), and seeing what damage to the economy has been done and how it can be repaired. On the plus side, this has focused attention on the basic business environment and we must take this opportunity to improve it significantly once the immediate problems are resolved.
By Carmine Paolo de Salvo
In this guest post, I wish to focus on my direct experiences of a famous experiment in development, one which is meant to bring prosperity and progress to those that have never experienced it. I refer to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and I am sure that the readers of this blog will know what the Grameen Bank is, so I don’t need to spend any time explaining it.
As with many people around the world, my interest in Grameen Bank was triggered by the award of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to it and to its founder, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. After reading “The Banker to the Poor” (Yunus’ bestselling autobiography) and finishing my studies, in September 2009 I went to the Grameen Bank headquarters in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to spend there a month as an intern.
What I want to do in this post is to compare briefly what I had read in Dr. Yunus’ book and what I actually was able to see during my experience in Bangladesh. I honestly believe that in the book there is little that can be considered false, but, at the same time, the impression that Yunus gives of the Bank’s activities is, in some respects, misleading. My opinion, of course, is not based on any robust statistical evidence, but was rather built directly in the villages in which Grameen operates, among real people, notwithstanding the limiting but necessary presence of an interpreter (I’m not so fluent in Bangla, sorry!). I am not going to share my ideas on the classical critiques that are raised against microcredit (in particular the level of interest rates due to high management costs and the support it gives to a petty form of entrepreneurship, which many don’t consider helpful) because they are already well-known and it would take me too long to repeat them here. I will instead limit my comments to three points that caught my attention and on which I would be interested in hearing feedback from others with greater expertise in the field.
A while ago Ranil took a pot shot at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – accusing it of being patronising. Others are more worried about relatively rosy-picture McCall Smith paints of the continent.
This Is Africa (awfully named, but then again we’re called Aid Thoughts) has a wonderful suggestion for McCall’s next project – to satisfy those that prefer their vision of Africa dry and bleak:
Bowing to the criticism, McCall Smith announced plans for a new series, The No. 1 Malnourished AIDS Orphans Agency. This will be followed by a film adaptation of his unreleased novella, The No. 1 Brutal Kleptocrats Club, starring Don Cheadle.
Jan 22
Continuing through the fantastic Hobsbawm book I’m currently reading, I was struck by the similarities between a current debate in development and one that Hobsbawm wrote about in the 1960s.
William Easterly conceives the battleground in development policy as a fight between ‘planners’ and ‘searchers’. He scorns the planners as blind men drawing and then following maps for terrain that can not be known. Searchers, on the other hand, are where hope lies. Without grand plans, they try; they fail. They try again. They fail better. Eventually they succeed. And eventually one of these successes lights a fuse for larger development, or all of these successes build upon each other until the economy is fully formed.
Easterly’s enemies are those who believe that the economy and economic development path can be planned. Ha-Joon Chang is one, believing that industrial policy is a central component of development success. Yet Easterly is definitely fair in maligning all planners, including those who ‘plan for markets’ by dismantling all vestiges of the pre-existing economy and its controls and letting the market do it’s magic.
This argument is oddly reminiscent of an older intellectual approach in a very different context. Anarchism historically sought to bring down Governments through constant, random, revolutionary acts. At least one, they felt, would eventually prove to be the spark of revolution. This approach contrasted with, for example, revolutionary socialists, for whom planned revolution was required to effect a change in the way the state was structured.
It’s not such a bizarre comparison to make – anarchism ran aground because its approach equated the failure of many planned revolutions to materialize with the bankruptcy of the planning approach, instead believing that random acts have a better chance of success. What this analysis failed to recognize was that these plans depended on the confluence of certain social, economic and political conditions. When they did not obtain, the plans would not come to fruition, or would fail when attempted. What this denotes is not the fundamental uselessness of the plan, but the reality that all plans must depend also on external factors. In other words, the conditions were not right for this plan to succeed; or this plan was not right for these conditions, but it was not the case that planning as an approach was inherently unsuccessful.
Anarchism attempted to remove the tyranny of circumstance. When an opportunity to act arose, it was taken. Very occasionally this led to massive social unrest, but most often it fizzled out because the opportunities were not built upon, precisely because concerted efforts require some level of planning. This is not to deny the importance of the ‘searchers’, those who act upon circumstance and build successes. They are central to success. It is simply to point out that their impact is maximized when set within a structure designed to do so.
In development, success is likely to be contingent on a wide array of conditions: is the government actively malignant, helpful or not such a strong influence one way or another? What are the natural resources available? Are there terms-of-trade trends that will influence macroeconomic conditions? What is the level of development in domestic capitalism? And so on and so on.
That plans often fail isn’t necessarily surprising. We need to consider all of these questions before we decide on either a plan that suits the circumstances or on an approach to change the circumstances till we can apply a reasonable plan. That this is difficult and will often fail should not be taken to mean something that it doesn’t. Trying to build on success as and when it is found is by no means more likely to succeed. In fact, in the knowledge that so much needs to change and so many efforts need to be coordinated, it rather seems that it is a more difficult approach, less likely to succeed; albeit one that is also less likely to fail outright simply because it doesn’t set for itself clear criteria by which it can be judged.
Skepticism of the grand plans is important. We need it to remind us that we must constantly prune our planning instincts and constantly assess conditions and plans that seek to exploit them. Yet planning itself should not rejected – the problems we deal with are too many and too interlinked to address without the coherence it can bring.
Jan 19
In a few days I’m leaving for Dar es Salaam, to help run the baseline survey for a “randomised land rights” project in the slums of the city. I’ll be away for about two months.
I’d welcome any general advice on living in Dar or on field work!
My posting frequently will inevitably plummet during this time. Ranil and I are going to try and arrange for some more guest posts to offset this. For more general (read: pretentious and thesaurusrific) writing on my travels, you can check the blog that I kept in Malawi: Stranger in a Strange land.
Does this matter? Or just the people that live there?
When you think about the reduction in poverty, do you think about the number of people who are living in poverty or the number of countries that are characterized by a high proportion of people living in poverty? And on reflection, if you haven’t thought about this before, which do you think is more important?
When I first thought about this, many years ago, my answer was immediate and absolute: the number of people in poverty. Of course: as a humanist, all lives are important and whatever actions will do the most the help the most lives must be the best. I remember reading with satisfaction a paper about growth convergence about 8 years ago, which made this very point: weighting for population, because of India and China, growth rates of the poor and the rich have been converging, in contrast to the conclusion if one takes nations as the unit of analysis (I think it was by Lant Pritchett. If anyone can confirm or correct this, I’d be very grateful).
Now I’m not so sure, and part of the reason is the (marginally) increasing debate around migration-as-development. Many, though by no means all, debates about migration and development take an almost apocalyptic tone in decrying a country as doomed or destined to suffer, and present migration as a cure for the ills of the inhabitants of these countries. (Others like Owen Barder present the migration debate as an essentially moral issue about freedom of movement and ability for individuals to improve their circumstances without getting into the prospects of long term development for the country – this closely matches my own opinions on the issue).
The response to the Haiti quake has been characterized by this kind of pessimism. On these very pages, we asked “What are the chances that Haiti is ever going to grow or develop?”; the Roving Bandit calculated how long it would take to drain Haiti of all of its inhabitants and resettle them in the US; the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Waye suggested he could give Haitians a region to make their own in Senegal; Alex Tabarrok suggested Port-au-Prince as a Charter City, which would essentially constitute an admission of the failure of Haiti as a sovereign state (by the by: great idea! Let’s tell the descendents of the only successful slave rebellion in history, a people who fought for 12 years against Napoleonic forces *and won* that they’ve had their chance and they’ve failed. Step aside and let the foreigners do it right; after all, we all know the rules that will work in Haiti, don’t we? This does nothing to change my opinion on Charter Cities as an approach to development).
What’s wrong with this kind of approach? Quite a few things, though it’s difficult to unpack them neatly for argument. Firstly, it undermines is the role of identity in determining the best paths for development, which requires us to recognize that different ways of escaping poverty are not equal and should not be judged on the same terms; secondly, it implies that the nation-state is an anachronistic organizing concept for policy purposes; and thirdly, it may have implications for paths of development in the future.
By request, I received Michala Wrong’s excellent chronicle of patronage and ethnic division for Christmas. If you haven’t read or bought it yet and have even a passing interest in development, aid, corruption, ‘Africa’ or even espionage thrillers, I highly recommend you pick it up. Wrong’s storytelling feels effortless and definitive, yet manages to avoid the typical trappings of this sort of literature.
It isn’t a flawless piece of work – Wrong spends a long time trawling through John Githongo’s (interesting) life, looking for clues that this particular man was destined to be a whistle blower. I think such predetermination is unlikely; men like Githongo are as much a product of their times and of random cumulative processes (it’s worth noting that his school, credited as shaping many of his ideals also churned out many of those complicit in the sorts of scandals he was later to challenge). Her handling of the time line of Githongo’s tenure as the anti-corruption czar is also a little confusing, as she sometimes jumps back and forth by months and sometimes years (usually to make a particularly punchy point, even if it is chronologically suspect). Against these (minor!) complaints, I still find the book to be amazingly fun to read.
What has made some portions of the book more thrilling to me was my (purely geographic) proximity to some of the events taking place. I was barely a few months into my master’s degree at St. Antony’s College when Githongo took up residency there. While I remember the odd whisper and newspaper article about who he was and why he had fled Kenya, there was little in the way of detail; I was much too busy tackling graduate school to find out. So it is quite tickling to find out that he spend time at my college putting together the dossier, transcribing taped blackmail attempts and worrying about possible assassination attempts.
A few sentences that have jumped out at me during the later chapters on aid:
Other analysts might shake their heads at Sach’s simplistic formula for the continents recover, but he had successfully wooed pop-star campaigners like Bono and Sir Bob Geldof, and their ability to mobilise a younger generation bored by traditional politics awed Western governments. Whether on the right or left, political parties realised that promising to ‘save’ Africa was apo tential vote-winner in the eyes of an ideaelistic coming generation. No wonder members of the African elite, aware of these pressures, sometimes sounded unappetisingly smug when contemplating tortured Western attitudes to the continent. As one Kenyan newspaper editor told me: ‘What we Africans have relaised is that your leaders need to lend to use more than we need to be lent to.’
Wrong goes on to discuss the urgent need of development agencies to get the money flowing. She later singles out DFID, as the organisation was often at odds with the Foreign Office over what to do about the bubbling scandal Githongo was revealing. She blames DFID’s meddling on the disbursement culture: the need to keep things moving.
On accountability and fungibility:
Critics of international aid often claim it all ends up in Swiss bank accounts, a charge development officials easily swat away, pointing at the accountants and consultants who police spending. The argument should be a different one: not that the aid is itself stolen, but that donors make it possible, via that aid, for governments to dip their hands elsewhere in the budget while still delivering basic services, thereby escaping the electorate’s wrath. Accountability moves offshore, thanks to aid’s fungibility.
We’ve all been in debates about fungibility, but it wasn’t until I had read this paragraph that I considered that there might be fungibility of graft. It makes me worry about a place like Malawi, where DFID helps fund a massive fertiliser subsidy program (which makes the population happy and willing to re-elect the governing party), but might also lead to less attention on less ‘urgent’ expenditures.
And finally, on ethnicity and division among (seemingly) absurd lines:
Kimunya and Gikonyo were there to make sure John did nothing to blow the referendum campaign off course. ‘They kept saying, “SWEAR to us, SWEAR that you won’t spill the beans before the referendum. You must swear, John.” Sensing resistance, Kimunya made the mistake of appealing to John’s supposed ethnic loyalites. ‘Do you really think uncircumcised people can rule Kenya?’
Pick it up.
is… Senegal?
President Abdoulaye Wade said Haitians were sons and daughters of Africa since Haiti was founded by slaves, including some thought to be from Senegal.
“The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin,” said Mr Wade’s spokesman, Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye.
“If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region.”
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