African Universities: Creating True Researchers or “Native Informers” to NGOs?

In a recent speech addressing the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani described the state of academic research and higher education in Africa as dominated by a “corrosive culture of consultancy.”

Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of the university. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style power point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz words have taken the place of lively debates…

What’s the difference between academic research and consultancy-driven research? Mamdani, who spent decades teaching at universities in South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda before moving to Columbia University, defines research for a consultant as seeking answers to problems posed and defined by a client. But university research, properly understood, requires formulating the problem itself.

His example of how this works in practice is an interesting one. In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shifted global health spending priorities towards their research question: How to eradicate malaria? But if malaria can’t be eradicated, as a team of scientists from France and Gabon now believe, then researchers have spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars answering the wrong question.

The cumulative effect of this model is to “devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa.”

The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate.

In my view, the proliferation of “short courses” on methodology that aim to teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers.

Mamdani, who is now director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in addition to his professorship at Columbia, seeks to counter the spread of consultancy culture “through an intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful intellectual culture.”

“To my knowledge,” he said, “there is no model for this on the African continent today. It is something we will have to create.”

HT Africa is a Country.

NYT on HIV/AIDS crisis: “You cannot mop the floor when the tap is still running on it”

UPDATE 4:10pm 5/11: Bill responds to Gregg Gonsalves' comment on this post, at the END of the post. The New York Times ran not one but two articles (edit: make that four) on the global fight against HIV/AIDS last Sunday. As these pieces tragically recount, the international community’s hard won successes against HIV/AIDS are in danger. There is not enough funding to meet the demand for treatment among sick patients in Uganda, and expiring grants, frozen funds, and drug shortages have already or are expected soon to spread to Nigeria, Swaziland, Botswana, Tanzania and Kenya.

The last decade has been what some doctors call a “golden window” for treatment. Drugs that once cost $12,000 a year fell to less than $100, and the world was willing to pay.

In Uganda, where fewer than 10,000 were on drugs a decade ago, nearly 200,000 now are, largely as a result of American generosity. But the golden window is closing.

The reasons given for current and projected shortages include the global recession; a “growing sense” among donors that more lives can be saved more cost-effectively fighting other diseases like malaria or pneumonia; and the disappointing failure of the scientific community to find a cure or vaccine.

The most devastating breakdown of all comes down to failure to prevent enough new infections and a simple, brutal equation:

For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected, according to the United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency, Unaids. … “You cannot mop the floor when the tap is still running on it,” said Dr. David Kihumuro Apuuli, director-general of the Uganda AIDS Commission.

UPDATE 4:10pm 4/11 from Bill: I am responding to Gregg Gonsalves’ comment below

Dear Gregg,

First, on the complementarity between treatment and prevention, let’s clear up some things. There is some complementarity, conceivably a lot, but it’s definitely not perfect. Treatment is not necessary and sufficient to do prevention. Prevention will remain a separate goal that needs at least SOME direct attention even if there is a lot of complementarity.

Second, I think to move forward we all have to move out of our defensive positions.

You see my plea for attention to prevention as an attack on treatment programs. There is some justification for this, as I and others have argued, and still would argue, that treatment was used as an excuse by aid and political actors in both the West and Africa to ignore prevention. This is because prevention is both politically and technically more difficult than treatment. But suppose you disagree with this argument – that’s fine. Suppose we all even gave up that argument and said let treatment programs alone. Suppose that none of us blame treatment at all for the inattention to prevention.

Could you then discuss prevention without spending most of your effort defending treatment? Prevention is now not working, as you acknowledge yourself. You are right that there are no obvious new solutions now, but some solution must be found sooner or later – bottom up, top down, or sideways – because you acknowledge that prevention has to work to end the AIDS tragedy. Could everyone involved in AIDS therefore agree there needs to be a new focused conversation and effort on prevention?

Regards, Bill

You want cell phone entrepreneurs, we’ll give you cell phone entrepreneurs

Last week we posted some cool maps showing the spread of cell phones especially in Africa over the last decade. We called this “a triumph of bottom-up entrepreneurial success,” but you weren’t convinced. You thought it was foreign direct investment (FDI). Provide more evidence that entrepreneurs are part of this picture, you said. Aid Watch never declines a challenge: 1) OK, it’s true that 52 percent of the African Market is dominated by 6 multinationals: Orange (France), Vodafone/Vodacom (UK/South Africa), Zain (Kuwait), MTN (South Africa), Moov (UAE), and Tigo (Luxembourg).  But that other 48 percent is the battleground of dozens more, many of them home-grown.  (Also we heard a rumor that South Africa is located somewhere in Africa.) To give an example from The White Man’s Burden:

Entrepreneur Alieu Conteh started building a cellular network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo … when it was still in the midst of its civil war in the 1990s. He couldn’t get foreign manufacturers to ship cellular towers into the country with rebel soldiers around, so he got local men to weld scrap metal into a makeshift tower. Demand exploded for Conteh’s phones, and in 2001 he formed a joint venture with the South African firm Vodacom. One illiterate fisherwoman who lives in the Congo without electricity relies on her cell phone to sell her fish. She can’t put the fish in a freezer, so she keeps them alive on a line in the river until customers call to place an order.

Sudanese-born entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim is another example. His mobile telecom company, Celtel, had about 5 million subscribers in 13 African countries when it was sold in 2004 for $3.4 billion. 100 Celtel employees, most of them African, earned more than $1 million from the sale. Celtel is now part of Kuwaiti-owned Zain, which serves 40 million subscribers in 17 African countries.

2) Being a successful mobile operator often requires big infrastructure investments, so it’s no surprise many of the first telecom firms to enter the African mobile market have been large. Multinationals investing in Africa to provide millions of Africans with essential service is a GOOD thing. Yes, the market needs more  effective regulation, increased competition, and lower end-user costs, but those trends are now happening.

3) Multinationals spur smaller entrepreneurs. The Nigerian telecom sector has created some 450,000 indirect jobs since it was liberalized in 2000. And Uganda’s five mobile operators provide employment for more than 100,000 people, who work for the operators directly or indirectly, selling airtime or handsets. An Economist article noted:

In 2003 Ms [Mary] Wokhwale was one of the first 15 women in Uganda to become “village phone” operators. Thanks to a microfinance loan, she was able to buy a basic handset and a roof-mounted antenna to ensure a reliable signal. She went into business selling phone calls to other villagers, making a small profit on each call. This enabled her to pay back her loan and buy a second phone. The income from selling phone calls subsequently enabled her to set up a business selling beer, open a music and video shop and help members of her family pay their children’s school fees.

4) Finally, farmers and fishermen now check prices in markets across the country before selling their goods, while unbanked buyers can make payments with mobile banking technologies. Individual entrepreneurs are beneficiaries of mobile technology’s spread in a big way.

Debates on losing the AIDS War

We got some great comments in response to yesterday’s post How the war on AIDS was lost.  Much of the debate centered around three questions: 1) Isn’t treatment complementary to prevention?  And so there is no tradeoff?

While some agreed with the post’s overall assertion that prevention has been neglected in favor of treatment, Caitlin argued that this distinction is artificial: “in many places, the availability of treatment makes prevention possible.”

Gregg Gonsalves expanded: “ART can reduce viral load and transmissibility. In the absence of a vaccine or a microbicide and the difficulties in achieving behavior change in general in public health, can you afford to be so categorical about AIDS treatment? Might ART provision be an important part of HIV prevention strategies?”

OUR RESPONSE: We all agree that there should not be 100% of one and zero of the other. Beyond this, we disagree. Even if treatment does help prevention, this is only partial. (Treatment is not 100% necessary and sufficient for prevention).  And they are still two separate goals. So there is still SOME tradeoff between efforts that target treatment and those that target prevention.

2) Do we know how to do prevention? If not, why not?

Uganda is often cited as a prevention success story, but Justin added that “there is still a lot of debate over what actually accounts for the Uganda decline in infections, but even if we could narrow down the cause, it may not be generalizable to other countries because of different patterns and cultural practices. And even in Uganda, the trend is reversing.”

One problem is that while treatment shows obvious, life-saving results, there is more room for human messiness and error with prevention. Unsurprised wrote: “Prevention cannot be bought with aid dollars…The problem is NOT that more financial resources have gone to treatment rather than prevention, but that no one—especially local leadership—has ever been serious about sending the necessarily blunt and uncomfortable messages it takes to get people to change their sexual behaviors.”

Avam pointed to the downsides of a development economics-centric approach, and others emphasized the power of locals rather than global “experts” in figuring out prevention for their own communities. Caitlin said that many communities did “figure out” prevention in their own areas, but that these gains were not sustained or brought to other communities.

OUR RESPONSE: These are all good points, and Aid Watch is very familiar with the ideas that (1) money alone does not solve problems, including prevention, and (2) solutions arise from local people and are specific to each area. Our point was that the international effort could have helped contribute advice to prevention programs, but it didn’t because treatment effort crowded out prevention effort. In fact, Helen Epstein and Daniel Halperin have offered insights like the effectiveness of male circumcision to lower transmission and the importance of multiple long-run sexual partners in transmission in Africa. The international AIDS effort ignored them for a long time and is still not serious about applying these insights.

3) Who are the “Searchers” and who are the “Planners” in the quest for more effective AIDS treatment and prevention?

Caitlin took the post to task for leaving out local community leaders' explanations of  for how we got to where we are today. Gregg Gonsalves argued that the post pinned blame on well-known experts and funders, while “fail[ing] to acknowledge that most of the drive for treatment has been derived from local activism in Brazil and Thailand, first, then South Africa, then with help from activists most with small NGOs in the North…You ignore your own “searchers”– the “little” people who have been building up the AIDS response for 30 years and invest all the power in the planners…who come late into the game.”

OUR RESPONSE: You are right, I have been inconsistent about this. Solutions usually do arise from local searchers, and I should be more respectful of how the local treatment advocates responded to their own circumstances and found solutions, and I congratulate them on what they have achieved.

However, not all searchers have successful searches. Good economics and common sense should be injected into the debate that searchers participate in, and searchers are also influenced by the availability of resources and political capital. The result in AIDS is that there have been a lot of searchers in treatment, and far too few in prevention.

WE WONDER: Would treatment advocates now be willing to make a forceful statement about the critical urgency of prevention?

How About a Free Press to Hold Aid to Africa Accountable?

Courageous independent Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda was featured in a mass circulation magazine last weekend, getting some well-deserved recognition.

Mwenda has been in and out of jail for his criticism of the (aid-supported) authoritarian Ugandan government. He was a recipient of the International Press Freedom Award for 2008.

Mwenda started his own independent newspaper (known appropriately as the Independent) in Uganda, after complaining the government was curtailing the freedom of the newspaper where he previously worked.

He also is a frequent critic of aid agencies’ operations in Africa for tolerating corruption and poor results, which caused Bono to heckle him in a famous confrontation at the TED conference in Tanzania in 2007.

A free press is an important way in which we hold our governments accountable in rich democratic countries. Why shouldn’t Africans have the right to freedom of the press as well?

Mwenda will be speaking at the NYU conference “What Would the Poor Say? Debates in Aid Evalution” this Friday, February 6.