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."

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Little Ghana: Where each World Cup team's fans are in New York City

The Wall Street Journal has a great map feature today in its New York section showing where each World Cup country's nationals live in New York City. The map to the left shows the Ghanaians in New York in green.  Morris Heights in The Bronx seems to lay the strongest claim to a Little Ghana, although there are also outposts in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. The soccer balls show where there are bars or restaurants showing the World Cup -- looks like not manysuch  bars available in Little Ghana.

The map below shows where a big Cup favorite's fans live: Brazil (in yellow).  Apparently there are both wealthy Brazilians on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and poorer ones in Harlem and Queens.  Maybe class differences are one reason Brazilian New Yorkers complain about the lack of any community spirit among themselves.

Of course, Aid Watch must draw at least 3 major development insights from all this, which is that

(1) nationals are remarkably concentrated, which may be both a strength (helping new immigrants adapt) and a weakness (persistent segregation prevents economic assimilation) not to mention blah, blah, and blah,

(2) too bad the soccer bars are so unequally distributed, moreover blah, blah, and blah,  and

(3) forget all that and enjoy the World Cup, the event that unites all development folks, even soccer-challenged Americans.

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Gulf Oil Spill: The Development Edition

Vijaya Ramachandran and Julia Barmeier of the Center for Global Development are among the many commentators now looking at the development angle of the continuing, horrifying oil spill in the Gulf. They write:

Spills of this magnitude are not new to the developing world. Take Nigeria, for example. Due to poor regulation and pervasive corruption, we do not know for certain how much oil has leaked into the Niger Delta region. In 2006, it was reported that 47 million gallons of oil—a quantity not that different from the new estimates of the Gulf leak –has been spilt in the Delta over the past 50 years. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corp estimates that some 650,000 gallons of oil were spilled in 300 separate incidents each year; other reports indicate that Shell (which is now looking to drill in the Arctic) spilled nearly 4.5 million gallons of oil into the Niger Delta in the last year alone.

A widely-cited article in the UK’s Guardian (hat tip @cblatts) quoted the Nigerian head of an international environmental group on double-standards for corporations operating in rich and poor countries:

We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US but in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

As America and other rich countries import oil from faraway places, we are effectively exporting the risk of disastrous oil spills and the responsibility to enforce regulation and cleanup to countries even less well-equipped to deal with those spills than the US has turned out to be. As a recent New York Times op-ed put it:

All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.) Since the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, and the more than 40 Earth Days that have followed, Americans have increased by two-thirds the amount of petroleum we consume in our cars, while nearly quadrupling the quantity we import. Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.

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Memorial Day

Readers of this blog know that I am not a big fan of military solutions to development problems, AKA "fixing failed states",  and am unhappy about wars that are justified on development grounds. Yet I believe all of us should admire, respect, and pay tribute to those who put their lives on the line in dangerous places, which includes all of our soldiers and our aid workers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and honor the memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

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The Asian Man's Burden? China worried about prospects of Europe

According to the FT, China's Investment Corporation is "very concerned" about threats of further instability in the Eurozone. Considering also China's big new role in aid to Africa, is it time to start wondering whether both World Bank and IMF should be moved to Beijing?

Not that I am willing to join the China-worship cult, but I DO love historical ironies that deflate pretensions of the White Man as Savior.

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Poor People Behaving Badly?

NYT columnist Nick Kristof had an uber-provocative Sunday column:

…if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

The Obamzas, a Congolese family from the village of Mont-Belo that Kristof met, say they can’t afford $2.50 per month in fees required to keep their kids in school, or a $6 malaria net to protect them from disease. But mom and dad do use cell phones, which cost them $10 per month, and the Mr. Obamza admits to frequenting the local bars, spending around $12 every month on liquor.

Kristof cites a famous study by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee called The Economic Lives of the Poor: “the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco….The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.”

Kristof is treading into some very emotional territory here, and has stirred up anger among a few bloggers for playing into harmful stereotypes. We definitely condemn any stereotype of all poor African men as deadbeat dads and drunks, but think it’s legitimate to consider that poor people could behave in counterproductive and irrational ways...just like rich people do.

Imagine another columnist writing about a rich white dad driving while talking on his cell-phone after having a few beers, risking the lives of his children in the car. For that matter, who among us makes perfect, rational decisions about our health all the time?

A growing body of work, including the Duflo and Banerjee study and the recent book Portfolios of the Poor, contributes to understanding the complex economic lives of the poor and chips away at misconceptions about poor people having “nothing,” living hand-to mouth, and immediately spending every penny they receive on food and other absolute basic necessities.

Is it really such a big surprise that the poor also want recreation? That the poor have a life? Including some of the same vices that the rich have?

The larger issue is explaining the seeming irrationality of, for example, Mr. Obamza’s decision to spend his evenings in a bar while his children sleep without a mosquito net. Could it be that outsiders make simplistic assumptions about the perceived value of bed nets to people like Mr. Obamza?

For example, a chapter by Michael Kremer and Alaka Holla in the book What Works in Development shows that demand for bed nets (and other life saving technologies like de-worming drugs or water disinfectants) collapses once you change from giving them away for free to charging even a tiny amount. Does this show that some parents don’t think saving their child’s life is worth spending even a very small amount of money? Maybe, but more likely it indicates that there is something wrong with our assumptions, as Kremer and Holla explore.

Perhaps it is that parents do not really believe in the efficacy of nets, drugs, or water purification tablets. Going even further than Kremer and Holla, we speculate that belief in the scientific theories underlying all these products is not so easy to achieve in a poor society. Rich people believe in scientific medicine not only based on their education, but also because they see it working for themselves and everyone around them. Scientific medicine is a harder sell in a society that has never had a well-functioning health system to demonstrate its benefits.

Researchers are testing these and many other possible explanations (here the randomized controlled trials are actually more useful, compared to blanket statements like “nets work”). We are just as worried about stereotyping the poor as anyone else, but we’re also glad the previous taboo is falling. The efficacy of aid interventions depends very much on understanding the behavior of the poor.

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The tragic fall of the WASPs

Robert Frank in The Wall Street Journal on the decline of the WASP establishment (nobody left on the Supreme Court!)  The picture shows a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution in New York. Heart-rending episodes:

In old-money enclaves like Palm Beach, Fla., Nantucket, Mass., and Greenwich, Conn., WASPs are being priced out of their waterfront estates and displaced on their nonprofit boards by Jewish, Catholic and other non-Protestant entrepreneurs.

Elites are not forever! Interesting insight in a book published at the height of power of the WASPs in 1964:

In "The Protestant Establishment," Mr. Baltzell pointed to the prejudice and insularity of the elite as the eventual causes of its decline. "A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment's unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks."

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TIME magazine covers 1Million Shirts

Jason Sadler, the guy behind 1MillionShirts, didn’t know what he was up against:

Little did Sadler know that he had stumbled into a debate raging in the aid world about the best and worst ways to deliver charity, or whether to give at all. He crashed up against a rather simple theory that returned to prominence after failures during the 2004 Asian tsunami and the Haiti earthquake: wanting to do something to help is no excuse for not knowing the consequences of what you're doing.

The TIME magazine article published today, by Nick Wadhams, a Nairobi-based journalist, offers some closure to the bloggers, aid workers and aid watchers who have been following this debate since it broke out two weeks ago: Sadler “no longer plans to send the shirts to Africa. He says he will find another way to use the T-shirts he collects, possibly for disaster relief, giving them to homeless shelters or using them to create other goods.”

In addition to Bill Easterly, Kenyan Economist James Shikwati, and the aid worker and blogger known as Tales from the Hood, Wadhams quotes Kenyan journalist Rasna Warah:

"Africa is the greatest dumping ground on the planet. Everything is dumped here." Adds Warah: "The sad part is that African governments don't say no — in fact, they say 'Please send us more.' They're abdicating responsibility for their own citizens."

Read the whole thing here.

--

See our previous blogs on the subject here: A suggestion for the 1MillionShirts guy Nobody wants your old T-shirts

And see an exhaustive collection of posts about 1MillionShirts here.

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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

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The Plumpy’Nut dust-up: Nutriset’s side of the story

The following post was written by Alanna Shaikh. Alanna is a global health professional who blogs at UN Dispatch and Blood and Milk. Plumpy’Nut is a lifesaving Ready-to-Use-Therapeutic-Food that was developed, and patented, by a French company called Nutriset. An American NGO and company have brought suit against Nutriset in an attempt to break the patent. I wrote about the basics of the situation in a previous post.

That post brought up more questions than it answered. In an attempt to cast some light on the situation, I talked to two people from Nutriset: Remi Vallet, and Adeline Lescanne, by phone and via email. The answers below cover my communications with both of them. Mr. Vallet is the Nutriset communications officer and Ms. Lescanne is Nutriset’s deputy general manager.

The Nutriset View:

1) What’s the deal with nutritional autonomy?

When Nutriset was founded in 1986, its mandate was “feeding children.” That changed over time – the current mandate is contributing to nutritional autonomy. “Nutritional autonomy does not mean nutritional autarky,” says Vallet, “We don’t want North Koreas. But local production benefits the local economy.” Rather, communities should be able to identify their own nutritional needs and access to what they need to meet them. This means that Plumpy’Nut should be made as close to the place of need as possible. Most Plumpy’Nut ingredients are available in Africa, especially peanuts and oil.

2) Won’t restricting Plumpy’Nut to local production drive up prices and limit access to Plumpy’Nut?

Local production is not necessarily more expensive than international production; transportation taxes are high and so are import taxes. In addition, small local NGOs may not have the capacity to handle a large internal procurement of Plumpy’Nut, but they can work with a local manufacturer.  Importing Plumpy’Nut can also face political opposition, such as what we saw in India. Local production avoids that problem.

3) How does Nutriset’s patent support local production?

It’s much more difficult to set up a factory in Africa than it is in the US. African businesses have trouble accessing capital and navigating bureaucratic obstacles. The patent allows Nutriset to work with local partners and protect them from international competition while they develop. US producers would use subsidized raw materials, and overwhelm local producers.

My take on this:

I came away from my discussion with Nutriset convinced of their good intent and unconvinced of their logic. This is clearly not a case of an evil corporation profiting from hungry kids. Unfortunately, I don’t think that matters.

Nutritional autonomy is the heart of Nutriset’s case for their patent, and I just don’t get it. I spent quite a while talking to Nutriset, but I still don’t see nutritional autonomy as a justification for the Plumpy’Nut patent. It seems to me that Nutriset could support local level nutrition through methods more effective than the Plumpy’Nut patent. For example, political opposition to imported food is not immutable; Nutriset could advocate for governments to accept the product. And if local production is no more expensive than international production, it won’t make much difference if factories take longer to set up in Africa.

Nutriset is trying to argue everything at once, here, and it doesn’t hold. If locally produced Plumpy’Nut is cheaper, more accessible to small purchasers, and less taxable, why exactly does it need a patent to protect it?

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Jeff Sachs’ intellectual empire gets new funding

There’s a new way to study development: a masters degree in the practice of development. The MacArthur Foundation announced ten universities to receive funding for the new degree program yesterday, bringing the funding from MacArthur for this project to $16 million. The first students matriculated at Columbia University in 2009, and by 2013 the foundation expects the programs to be producing 400 graduates a year from around the world.

The two-year degree is multidisciplinary—the health sciences, the natural sciences and engineering, the social sciences, and management—with a focus on application and fieldwork.

Since today’s problems—like climate change, poverty and sustainable development—are interconnected, students need to be prepared to think across disciplines, so the argument goes. If ending global hunger (Millennium Development Goal number one) requires technical knowledge of health and nutrition, agronomy, agricultural supply systems, as well as managing organizational change, then this degree proposes to equip graduates with basic knowledge on all those topics.

The idea for the new global program comes from the Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sachs, an architect of the Millennium Development Goals, and John McArthur, the head of the NGO that supports the Millennium Village Project, who articulated their vision in a 2008 report on education for development professionals.

Here’s what this program assumes the world needs more of:

a new generation of development practitioners who can understand the “languages” and practices of many specialties, and who can work fluidly and flexibly across intellectual and professional disciplines and geographic regions.

This sounds pretty good. In fact, I’m a generalist myself, which is how I ended up in this job, where I write about a global health issue one day and an economics paper the next.

But what if what the world really needs more of something else? What if it needs more specialists, more people with deep knowledge about the regions they study and work in? What if it needs people who are well-versed enough in their own disciplines to be critical of half-baked development ideas cooked up by aid planners who know just enough about every topic to believe they have the answers?  What if the world needs more specialists to evaluate the quality of the work in each specialty?

Curriculum and course materials proposed by the central “Secretariat” for development practice are housed in Columbia’s Earth Institute. Will the new programs produce students with a standardized, narrowly-prescribed view of how to approach development problems? Or will the melding of disciplines encourage critical thinking and help straddle the theory-policy divide, making global cooperation run more smoothly and international aid more effective?

I hope it’s the latter. But here’s one discouraging clue: The draft 2009 syllabus for the development practice degree’s required “foundation course,” offered at Columbia and several other universities around the world through web conferencing, reads like a synopsis of the degree itself. And all the readings for the course’s introductory week, the week devoted to foreign aid and policy, and the week on the Millennium Villages Project are authored by either Jeff Sachs, John McArthur, the Millennium Villages Project scientists, or the UN.

Hat tip to Michael Clemens.

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The knowledgeable people agree on how to reform finance, so Senate gets it wrong

Senate Financial Bill Misguided, Some Academics Say As Democrats close in on their goal of overhauling the nation’s financial regulations, several prominent experts say that the legislation does not even address the right problems, leaving the financial system vulnerable to another major crisis

so says the NYT today.

Meanwhile, the academic I respect most on Finance, Ross Levine of Brown, has just released an NBER Working Paper called The Autopsy of the Financial System (ungated version), with this abstract:

In this postmortem, I find that the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system’s demise. The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble ("accident") and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products ("suicide"). Rather, the evidence indicates that regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies and yet chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that "negligent homicide" contributed to the financial system’s collapse.

...which gives yet more reason to worry that current reform bills are getting it wrong.

The concern about getting it wrong was what prompted this blog to argue clumsily against the indiscriminate rage towards malevolent bankers as individuals, and pleaded with lawmakers "not to hit the send button while you're angry." 

This is an extremely serious issue that will affect both the future of the US economy and the cause of global development, so therefore it is unlikely anyone will pay attention.

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Does complexity doom us? Not always

The NYT has an article about the proliferation of things too complex to understand -- Afghanistan, Iraq, the modern economy, collateralized debt obligations, health care reform, the 10,000 page manual for US accounting standards -- with some gloomy vibes:

There is a lot of end-of-days talk when it comes to this subject. You will find a strain of it in the work of Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and the author of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” In the book, Mr. Tainter examines three ancient civilizations, including the Roman Empire, and explains how complexity drove them to ruin, essentially by bankrupting them.

Here's a more hopeful note, along with a warning. Complex systems do not necessarily have to be understood by any one person for them to work well.  They just need to have rules and incentives for the participants that make them self-correcting.

For example, supply and demand manages the allocation of millions of goods to millions of different users in our economy without anyone in charge. When a good is in excess supply, people act so that its price goes down. When a good is in excess demand, people act so that its price goes up. The system self-corrects. (Ideological code word alert -- just because I gave this example doesn't mean I am some extreme free market fanatic that believes the market solves everything and we don't ever need government for anything ever. It just means I understand supply and demand.)

Here's the warning. Where complexity gets us into trouble is when somebody creates some complex, impossible-to-understand-or-manage thing that is NOT self-correcting.  I will leave it to the readers which items on the above list are in that category.

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