Trends in African governance

OOPS: see UPDATE at end of this post.  Let's just say we goofed in highlighting the word "Trends." Since, we criticize data errors in others, we will take any punishment you want to dish out to us. Or maybe we will be unintended beneficiaries of the phenomenon that nobody cares about data errors. (This is Bill: I will take the blame since I suggested the whole thing to Laura). The FT’s Emerging Africa section this week has an interactive graphic showing trends in governance for 53 African countries, as ranked  by the Mo Ibrahim index.  The index measures the quality of governance across four areas: safety and rule of law, participation and human rights, sustainable economic growth, and human development.

UPDATE 12:39pm 6/11, very nice quote from Mo Ibrahim in an article published in 2009 (HT @innovationsjrnl and @auerswald):

When accurate and timely information is accessible, it exposes bad practice and allows citizens to reject poor governance. Such a change brings us out of the era of Africans hanging their hopes on a nationalist leader or supposedly benign dictator. Kenya and Zimbabwe tell us that this is so; when people in these countries felt that their votes were not respected, they did not take it lying down and they did not accept it. This is a very strong message: that the wishes of African people can no longer be taken for granted. All Africans have a right to live in freedom and prosperity and to select their leaders through fair and democratic elections, and the time has come when Africans are no longer willing to accept lower standards of governance than those in the rest of the world.

UPDATE 2 3:47 pm 6/11: Commenter Mozza has rightly pointed out our error (and the FT's) in overlooking this statement on the Mo Ibrahim website: "Data availability prior to 2006 is patchy and is not recommended for comparison over time."

Touristiness

This map of how popular different tourist places are was generated by an Estonian programmer using the number of photo uploads to a popular site. Yellow is the most touristy, followed by red, blue is not very touristy, but grey is nowheresville.

I am a little suspicious about the methodology after I saw Toledo, Ohio show up pretty yellow. However, otherwise the map seems plausible. Coasts and mountains show up about as much as you would expect, the BosWash and LosAngeSanEattle regions are hot, and nothing beats European Ye Olde Towne Squares. In the developing world, tourist spots are as expected, including the unjust and sad omission of Africa.

The next image shows a blow up of Africa.  The no-go regions are mostly the obvious ones (better book that vacation to Chad before it's spoiled!), as are the Safaris and Coasts in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa. Lesser known tourist success stories in Namibia and Ethiopia also show up.

I'm a little more mystified by a blow-up of West Africa. I know vaguely about the tourist success in Gambia and to a lesser extent, along the coast of Ghana. The hot spots in Bissau, Conakry, Freetown, Monrovia, Niamey, Bamako, Abidjan, Ouagadougou, and Abuja are a little more surprising -- perhaps camera trigger-happy aid workers?

The Child Mortality Map

Who ya gonna call? Entrepreneurs!

Just a decade ago it seemed we were stuck with landlines. State-owned telephone companies were largely entrenched, sclerotic organizations that provided poor, delayed, or simply unavailable service —even in some rich European countries, and nearly universally in poor countries. These maps (with data from 2001, 2004, and 2008) show how cell phones have quickly bypassed the dysfunctional landline companies and emerged as a triumph of bottom-up entrepreneurial success.

The measure is cell phone subscribers per 100 population, with darker shades of blue indicating movement from 0-20 to 20-30 to 30-40 to above 40 (above 40 is the dark blue shade that is most evident in all the graphs).

Note the darker blue color now encroaching on all sides of the African continent. This gives us hope that the dynamism of the bottom from entrepreneurs can overcome sclerosis at the top.

2001:

2004:

2008:

Data source: World Development Indicators

Take seriously the power of networks (or just look at some COOL maps)

A few days ago, I met a guy because he was my wife’s girlfriend’s boyfriend. He turned out to be a high ranking official who had some fascinating inside stories about aid and corruption in an African country (which I won’t name to protect his privacy). A local aid worker friend recommended an orthopedist to treat my wife’s badly injured ankle while we were in Addis Ababa. The orthopedist was able to give my wife relief (at full American prices, which went to his NGO) and then he asked if I knew that crazy aid criticizing NYU professor.

One of the best hiring decisions I ever made was to employ my friend’s wife’s neighbor’s daughter.

More and more people are discovering the power of social networks (consult the avalanche of popular books on connectedness and shrinking degrees of separation). Being well-connected to other people, who are in turn well-connected, is a powerful way to get information, to reduce search costs for employment or trade transactions, and to create strong incentives to behave well and protect your own reputation. Formal research in economics celebrates the economic payoff to social connectedness (aka social capital). Phenomena like the Hasidic diamond merchants of 47^th street in Manhattan show the power of business networks based on ethnicity and family. Ethnic networks are common in Africa, like the Hausa traders in West Africa, or Luo fish merchants in Kenya.

The scorn usually shown for Nepotism and the Old Boy Network is so 20^th century! The 21^st century view is to respect the value of social connections wherever they come from!

OK, I’m exaggerating. You need to balance the value of social connections against accountability mechanisms, merit-valuing incentives, and ethical rules, so I don’t just hire my good-for-nothing cousin with other people’s money. Also you need to worry about people who are frozen out of networks through no fault of their own. But that is OFF MESSAGE, so I am going to ignore all that today.

Venture capitalists rely heavily on social networks to assess reputation and to make new deals. And so do social entrepreneurs. Someone tipped me off to xigi.net, which is a fantastic web site for facilitating networks among social entrepreneurs:

xigi.net (pronounced 'ziggy' as in zeitgeist) is a space for making connections and gathering intelligence within the capital market that invests in good. It’s a social network, tool provider, and online platform for tracking the nature and amount of investment activity in this emerging market.

OK, I confess, what really got me to look at this site was the hyper-cool network maps that show connections between the social entrepreneurs. Check out the map for the deservedly well-connected Ashoka folks of Bill Drayton (this is a screen shot, but you have to visit the map on the xigi site to explore its cool functionality).

The point is that part of the effectiveness of Ashoka is because they are so well connected, and they make all their partners in turn more effective in turn by being connected to the well-connected Ashoka.

We could keep dreaming: social networks could be a powerful vehicle for spreading information and evaluations about existing aid projects and actors. The Internet makes this much more feasible that it used to be. GlobalGiving.org is one initiative that tries to implement this idea. Oh, and I happen to know about and trust GlobalGiving because I have known the two founders ever since we worked together on Russia in the early 90s.

I had never heard of xigi.net until a couple days ago. I heard about it from my wife’s girlfriend, the one who had the aid and corruption story-telling boyfriend.