Author: Ed

Spam as aid?

From the comments section, something I had to manually spam:

I am a poor man from the African region, I need money to survive by comment on your blogs / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. Here are the list of my websites (Vimax, vimax, penis enlargement, penis enlargement pills, bigger penis, penis enlargement pills, penis enlargement, download youtube videos, penis enlargement pills) [URL=http://www.vimax-pills.org]vimax[/URL]
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[URL=http://www.buypenisenlargement.com]penis enlargement pills[/URL]
[URL=http://vimax3-4.com]vimax[/URL]
PLEASE SEND YOUR HELP BY APPROVING MY COMMENT!

Now, like most bloggers, I have a spam filter on for my comments . . . so this had to be entered manually by someone able to deal with a captcha code.  This greatly limits the number of comments that could be left in a day . . . so instead, the spammer goes for the “I really need the money” tactic to hopefully raise the return on the limited number of comments.
Interesting how the spammer has mobilized the “help the poor” discourse of many aid agencies, though.  It would be interesting to see if this sort of tactic actually works . . .

Posted on by Ed 2

From the aid/development divide to the climate change/development divide

I’ve been going on quite a bit about how we envision the relationship between aid and development – or perhaps more appropriately, how we do not really envision that transition, but assume that it simply happens – quite a bit lately.  But pressing on my mind during my work life is the relationship between climate change and development – how do mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to development?  The answer, of course, is that they relate to development in many different ways.  For example, mitigation efforts include things like land use, which can impact existing agricultural practices, and constrain (or sometimes enable) the options available to the designers of agricultural development projects.  Adaptation efforts emphasize the prevention of negative outcomes, a form of coping, but unless this relationship is explicitly considered they do not necessarily rhyme with development projects that seek to build on existing resources and capacity to improve people’s situations.
(I confess that I am deeply concerned that development is rapidly being subsumed under adaptation in some quarters, which is a real problem as they have two different missions.  To refocus development projects on adaptation is to shift from an effort to improve someone’s situation to an effort to help them hang on to what little they might have.  But this is a post for a different day.)
There is a danger, in this era of enhanced attention and funding toward climate change, of using climate change funds to continue doing the same development work as we were doing before, only under a new label (i.e. calling agricultural development “agricultural adaptation”, then using climate change funds to support that program even though nothing about it has really changed).  It is an annoying habit of people in agencies, who are often cash- and personnel-strapped, to try to use new initiatives to support their existing projects.  There is also a danger, in places where climate change has a greater emphasis than development, that development dollars aimed at particular challenges will be repurposed to the end of addressing climate change, thus negatively impacting the original development goal.  A year ago, Bill Gates wrote warned against just such an outcome in his 2010 Annual Letter as co-chair of the Gates Foundation.  On first read, it is a reasonable argument – and one that I largely agree with.  We live in a world of finite donors, and new dollars to address climate change often have to come from some other pot of money funding another project or issue.  These are difficult choices, and Gates has every right to argue that his pet interest, global health, should not lose funding in favor of climate change related efforts.  However, his argument sets up a needless dichotomy between development/aid (in the form of public health funding) and efforts to address the impacts of climate change:

The final communiqué of the Copenhagen Summit, held last December, talks about mobilizing $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.

I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases. In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.
Well, sort of.  I could make a pretty brutal counterargument – not spending on health, such as HIV/AIDS leads to a lot of deaths in the productive segment of the population pyramid, leaving a lot of fallow land to recover its nonagricultural ecological functions.  This sort of land use change is actually visible in places like Swaziland, but very hard to quantify because the studies aren’t there yet – nobody wants to be seen as potentially supporting this sort of nightmarish conservation argument.  I certainly don’t – but that is not my point.  My point was that Gates’ argument is pretty thin.
In making a political point, Gates is being a bit selective about the relationship between climate change and health.  What he is completely ignoring is the fact that mitigation efforts might limit the future range of disease vectors for any number of illnesses, thus saving tremendous numbers of lives.  This is especially true for diseases, like malaria, where a vaccine has proven elusive.  Further, he ignores the ways in which coherent, participatory adaptation programs might address health issues (by managing everything from nutrition to sanitation) in an effective manner.  While I am not arguing that mitigation and adaptation efforts could completely address the impacts caused by the loss of $1 billion in vaccination funding, his argument for 700,000 extra deaths* rests upon the assumption that nothing in the climate change portfolio will address the causes of such deaths through other means.  He’s creating an either/or that does not exist.
Again, Gates is making a political point here – which is his right.  But that political point sets up a false dichotomy between aid/development and efforts to address climate change that even Bjorn Lomborg has abandoned at this point.  We can argue in the interest of our agencies and organizations all we want, but the problems we are trying to address are deeply interlinked, and in the end creating these false dichotomies, and claiming that one issue is THE issue that must be addressed, shortchanges the very constituencies we claim to be working with and working for.
*I must admit I loathe this sort of quantification – it is always based on horribly fuzzy math that, at best, is grounded in loose correlations between an action and a health outcome.  I raise this issue and take it apart at length in my book . . .

Posted on by Ed 4

Blogging gone wild

Rick Rowden wrote an article.
I wrote an 800 word response.
Rick wrote a 1000 word response to my response (the first comment).
I wrote a 1200 word response to Rick’s response (my response is directly below his comment).
It’s like an intellectual arms race, only with really, really tiny stakes.  But I think it is educational for those who wonder where modernization theory went, and why nobody has warmed it over yet.

UPDATE 1-12-11

Rick comes back with 1450 words (second comment).

I respond with 2200 words.

We are starting to agree on a few things, at least.

Stop the madness.

Posted on by Ed 1

Poverty reduction and development: it's not either/or

A piece on the Guardian‘s Poverty Matters Blog today sets up one of the oddest, and most pointless, dichotomies I’ve seen in a discussion of development.  To summarize, the post by Rick Rowden argues that a focus on aid effectiveness and poverty reduction

perpetuates a bloated aid industry that doles out millions of dollars each year to legions of contractors and NGOs to carry out projects in dozens of poor countries.

What it does not do, apparently, is work toward any definition of development

In recent decades, earlier notions of development economics have been replaced with meeting the MDGs. But poverty reduction is not development. We seem to have suffered collective amnesia about the history of development, which used to be widely understood as industrialisation – in which poor countries undergo a transformative process out of primary agriculture and extractive industries into manufacturing and services industries with higher value-added over time.

First, this is an absurdly reductionist definition of development.  If Rowden wants to talk down to his readers about the history of development, he’d do well to note that his particular take fell out of currency in the late 1960s because IT DIDN’T WORK.  There is a reason modernization/big push theories fell out of favor (unless you are Jeff Sachs, and then you are forever reviving the corpse of the big push at the community level via the MVP.  Then again, Sachs doesn’t seem to read development history, either).  In short, the borrowing required for industrial ramp-ups almost never paid off with enough revenue to pay off the loans.  To understand why this happened is to understand the country-specific interplay of three key factors.  First, there were (and still are) structural issues in world trade that locked much of the developing world out of key markets.  Second, these policies failed because markets were dominated by large corporate entities operating with very small margins because of their huge economies of scale, basically undercutting any new competitors on price because they had the advantage of a huge head start provided by colonialism.  Third, massive corruption within countries drained the productive capital out of these loans, dooming the projects there were meant to fund.  Countries had to address either two or three of these factors, in varying ratios, at different times.  Modernization theories pushing industrialization had little to offer in addressing them.  This is why we eventually saw the rise of an attention to institutions and governance in development – not just at the level of the state, but also in markets and broader trade arenas.  It is also why so many countries in the Global South found themselves saddled with crushing debt at the end of the last century – many of those debts were the original loans and continued accumulation of interest tied to these failed policies.
The other issue is that industrialization requires resources (to make products) and consumption (to sell them).  At a time when our demand on the natural environment is already beginning to overshoot its capacity to serve our needs, asking countries to take on even more unsustainable activities is an absurdity that will end in failure.  There is nothing sustainable in this pathway – and if you look at the post, you will see that the entire argument is framed in an unlimited world, where the only constraint on development is growth:

If countries are unable to use the industrial policies they will need to transform their domestic industries, diversify their economies and build up their own tax bases over time, how will they ever get off the foreign aid bandwagon? Here the “poverty reduction” discourse is misleading; it neglects to ask how countries are supposed develop without industrialising.

Well, that isn’t totally true unless you take a very, very narrow reading of the poverty reduction discourse.  A lot of us are working in this space to imagine alternatives.  Indeed, there are community level projects that, while not elevating people to the standards of living seen in the Global North, have created sustainable, substantive changes in the quality of residents’ lives.  The examples are out there if people want to look.
Beyond all of this, though, is the larger issue – Rowden clearly has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to development when he dichotomizes poverty reduction and development.  Even if we saw economic growth as the be-all, end-all of development, there is a lot of work out there arguing that endemic poverty is a huge drag on economic growth and therefore has to be addressed as part of a growth package (see the OECD Observer here).  So even in a fairly reductionist view of development, you need poverty reduction . . . and I don’t know anyone who believes that growth adequately addresses poverty.  Not even at USAID.  Really.
So poverty reduction and development are not an either/or proposition, from any reasonable perspective on development.  Rowden’s piece would have been interesting . . . in 1960.  I have no idea what the point was in publishing it today.

Posted on by Ed 9

Development isn't impossible, just hard to understand

A few comments on the blog related to some earlier posts on a Grand Challenge for Development have gotten me thinking a bit about development (the concept and the project) and if it is achievable.  There are those who would argue it is not, that development is an ill-conceived idea that invokes pathways of change that are now closed due to the changing global political economy, and treats life in the advanced economies as the apotheosis of human existence toward which everyone else is (and should be) marching.  To the extent development is taken to mean this sort of change, I agree completely – development is unattainable and meaningless.  There are not enough resources on Earth to allow everyone to live the way we do in the advanced economies, so the idea of a march toward that standard of living as a goal is gone regardless of how one might feel about it morally/ethically/etc.
But that does not mean that change cannot happen, that things cannot improve in a manner that is appreciated by people living in particular places.  Certainly, a shift from a post-subsistence income of $1 a day to $5 a day is a huge change that, in many parts of the world, would enable very different standards of health, education and well-being.  Surely this is worth striving for – and certainly, the people with whom I have worked in Ghana and Malawi would take that kind of a change over no change at all – and they would much rather than kind of change, than endless, pride-killing aid dependence. There is no doubt that this sort of change can be attained in many, if not most places.  Indeed, it has been accomplished.  Further, there are places where life expectancy has risen dramatically, infant mortality has fallen, nutrition and education levels have improved, and by any qualitative measure the quality of life has improved as a direct result of aid interventions (often termed development, but this should only count as development if the changes are sustained after the aid ends).  The real question at hand is not if it can be done, but why the results of our aid/development efforts are so erratic.
You see, for every case of improved life expectancy, there is the falling expectancies in Southern Africa.  For every case of improved nutrition and food availability, there are cases of increasing malnutrition and food insecurity (such that in sub-Saharan Africa, the balance has tipped toward less food availability per capita than two decades ago), and so on.  What works in one place often fails in another.  And the fact is that we don’t understand why this is in a systematic way.  I am a geographer and an anthropologist, so I am quite sympathetic to the argument that the local specificity of culture and society have a lot to do with the efficacy of particular interventions, and therefore explain a lot of the variability we see in project outcomes.  However, “local specificity” isn’t an answer, it is a blanket explanation that isn’t actionable in a specific way.  We persist in this answer because it pushes development (and aid) failure into the realm of the qualitative, the idiosyncratic.  And this attitude absolves us, the development community, from blame when things don’t work out.  Your project failed? Ah, well, who could have known that local land tenure rules would prevent the successful adoption of tree crops by women?  Subtly, we blame the victims with this mentality.
What it comes down to, I think, is a need to admit that we have at best a shaky idea of what works because in many areas (both geographic and technical) we really don’t understand what it is we are trying to transform when we engage in aid and development work.  We are better in some areas (health) because, frankly, they do a better job of gathering data and analyzing it than we do in, say, rural development (hey, don’t take my word for it – read some Robert Chambers, for heaven’s sake!).  But, in the end, we are driven by our myths about how markets and globalization work, how development/aid is linked to change, and how the problems we claim to address through development and aid came about in the first place.  This argument is the heart of my book (Amazon link here) – and I spend the first half using the story of two villages in Ghana to lay out how our assumptions about the world and how it works are mostly wrong, the next quarter explaining why this is a major problem for everything from economics to the environment, and the last quarter thinking about how to change things.
My take is but one take – and a partial one at that.  We need more people to think about our assumptions when we identify development challenges, design programs, and implement projects.  We need to replace assumptions with evidence.  And we need to be a lot more humble about our assumptions AND our evidence – so we stay open to new ideas and evidence as they inevitably flow in.

Posted on by Ed 3

Oh, Ghana!

For any of you who might have spent time in Ghana, you’ve likely heard that shout: “Oh, Ghana!”  It is a good-natured expression of frustration with the everyday annoyances that make life what it is in Ghana.  Power cuts out in the middle of a World Cup match? “Oh, Ghana!”  Traffic completely stops in Cape Coast because the local herd of cattle have gotten into the road? “Oh, Ghana!”  Anyway, you get it.
Well, today’s “Oh, Ghana!” moment comes courtesy of Ghanaian President John Atta Mills, who has taken a particularly depressing stance on the turmoil in Ghana’s neighbor, Cote d’Ivoire:

“Ghana is not taking sides,” he said, pointing out that “We have about one million Ghanaians living in Ivory Coast who could be victims of any military intervention.”

Super, the head of state of the most legitimate democracy in West Africa, and arguably all of sub-Saharan Africa, has decided not to cash in any of that legitimacy to help resolve a fairly clear electoral situation right next door.  Of course, this ignores the fact that there are many millions more Ghanaians living along the border with Cote d’Ivoire that could be affected if things go badly, or that cross-border flows of Ivorians trying to escape conflict could pour into Ghana, which lacks the capacity to adequately address their needs.  Further, Mills’ response to the crisis is . . . prayer.  Prayer is fine, but it is no substitute for working in this world for a solution.  No, Mills’ stance is a depressing bit of hedging one’s bets.
The good news, I suppose, is that there is nothing inherently Ghanaian about this attitude toward the situation in Cote d’Ivoire.  Nana Akufo-Addo, the New Patriot Party’s (NPP) presidential candidate in 2008 (and likely in 2012), issued a statement earlier this week that more or less addressed the absurdity of Mills’ position.

“Much as most of us Ghanaians believe in the efficacy of prayer, prayer cannot be a replacement of or substitute for an active policy of Ghanaian diplomacy and engagement. It is said that heaven helps those who help themselves.”

Amen.  Now go, Ghana.  Do something now.

Posted on by Ed 0

Lemonade from low earth orbit lemons

Right, so George Clooney is part of an effort to use satellite imagery to cast a light on any atrocities that might take shape as the Sudan referendum goes forward.  In short, this project aims to use hig-res commercial satellite imagery, gathered on a pretty regular basis, to document evidence of genocidal or other criminal behavior.  The idea is, as they put it, to create a form of “antigenocide paparazzi” that will bring unwanted attention to atrocities.  As Clooney argues:

“This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, ‘O.K., if you guys don’t want to do anything about it, that’s one thing,’” Clooney says. “But you can’t say you did not know.”

This is genius marketing, even if you dislike the idea (those of us with good ideas really do need to take marketing more seriously).  And a lot of people dislike the idea.  Blogger Laurenist has a critique under the hilarious title “In Space, no one can hear you say “WTF”?” (genius marketing, people).  A lot of this critique is focused on the fact that the imagery will probably not bring about the sorts of accountability necessary to actually get people to stop unwanted behaviors, at least in part because the imagery is fairly low-res.  Indeed, it is – actually lower-res than the article about the story quotes – 50 centimeter imagery is not 50 square centimeters, but 50 centimeters a side (I work with this stuff).  So it is hard to even see people in these images, unless it is at a time of day where you can pick up their shadows.  It is also focused on the fact that “just knowing” about a problem isn’t good enough to spur action – after all, it is now well documented that the international community was well aware of what was going on in Rwanda right before and during the genocide, and did nothing.  Fuzzy imagery certainly won’t change that.
I agree with this assessment.  However, there is a way to make lemonade out of this particular batch of lemons, because these images could be retasked for something much more useful.  One of the likely points of conflict post-referendum is along the corridors through which various groups move their livestock in the course seasonal migrations for food and water (if you want to drop a big word for it, say “transhumance”).  There are two things this sort of imagery can do for us – it can tell us about the biophysical situation in those corridors – are they still able to support this migration, are they ecologically unbroken or fragmented, are there barriers to movement?  Second, it can tell us how many people and animals are using these corridors, which we can use to measure local carrying capacity, and estimate the challenges that might emerge if these corridors are closed or otherwise challenged.  This would allow for effective humanitarian intervention in areas where these pastoral groups (who are typically left behind by aid and development, and hated by the state, because they won’t stay put and like crossing borders).  Hell, if they are going to drop big dollars on the images, we may as well use them for something useful and actionable.
George, you interested?  I can help set this up . . .

Posted on by Ed 2

Birthers, Cote d'Ivoire and the abandonment of logic

The people looking for a birther conspiracy behind our (very minimal) support for the rightful winner of a democratic election in Cote d’Ivoire are more or less totally unhinged at this point – and they are making insane leaps of logic that are internally contradictory.  They are also issuing astonishing ad hominem attacks (for example, here).
So, to review this logic.  The very minimal support from the United States for Outtara in Cote d’Ivoire is an indication that Obama is helping one of his Muslim buddies take over a good Christian nation.  However, our rather engaged and substantive support for the Sudanese referendum that will almost certainly lead to a new African country next week – and a country that will be Christian and animist dominated, no less, doesn’t count for anything.
Wow.
So apparently our minimal support for the rule of law in Cote d’Ivoire is not a problem because the guy we’d have to support is Muslim.  Because of that, we can forget that Gbagbo clearly stole the election, or that he has mobilized issues of citizenship to disenfranchise a large percentage of the Ivorian population.  Good news, Christian dictators – you are free to toss democracy, just keep the Muslims out.  Does anyone hear the echoes of US Cold War policy re: communism?  Anyone?
One of my favorite twitterers, @bill_westerly, is right: “some enemy: fight wit honner und sword uf reason. some enemy: immune to reason, just kick in duh goolies und laff.”

Posted on by Ed 3

Is the Aid/Development divide the Grand Challenge for Development?

A few conversations on the blogs over the past two weeks have me thinking about the divide between aid/relief work and development – one of those minor issues I am supposed to be addressing in my current job.  I am nothing if not ambitious.  However, as folks have tried to clarify the difference between aid and development, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable because I really think these two areas need more blending, not more distinction.
And so now I am wondering if, in fact, the gap between aid and development is part of the reason so many “development” projects don’t work out.  I put development in quotes there for a reason – most of these projects never actually get to the development phase.  Take my ongoing rants about the Millennium Village Project.  Here is an ambitious program of interventions that is meant to be a development project.  However, at this point it is really an aid project – at least by the definitions I am seeing circulate.  The MVP is still completely dependent on external interventions and expertise for its outcomes.  Where it seems to me the MVP falls down is in the transition from the aid phase to the development phase, when these changes in people’s lives become self-sustaining, and engender new changes that do not require any sort of external intervention.  In short, the MVP seems to assume that with enough aid over enough time, change becomes self-sustaining and the processes necessary to bring about well-being spontaneously emerge.  This is what I like to call the “then a miracle happens” moment.  As in:
Dump money, aid and material into a place over a series of years –> then a miracle happens –> change is self-sustaining
The MVP is hardly the only project guilty of this – hell, this thinking is endemic to development.  We can back up to Rostow’s Stages of Growth in the 1950s (at least) and find the exact same fallacy.  Big push/modernization theories, the Washington Consensus, basically every program founded on the core idea that economic growth drives everything else, they all suffer from this fallacy.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is your grand challenge for development – the “big question” that could really change how we do what we do.  We need to articulate how our initial interventions, our “aid”, is/can be transformed/built upon/leveraged/instrumentalized/whatever to result in the self-sustaining changes we see as development.

Posted on by Ed 11