Why Kenya should partner with private schools to achieve Universal Secondary School

Op-ed for the Daily Nation.

Does it help to be African to study Africa?

For sure there is tacit local knowledge, but how you define “local” matters. Ken Opalo writes:

"As a social scientist, my knowledge of Kenya is largely informed by my experience as a Nairobian. Over the years I have had to learn a lot about the rest of Kenya, in much the same way an Australian would. In doing so I incurred a lower cost than a hypothetical Australian would, for sure, but the cost was not zero. And who is to say that I would necessarily be able to articulate a research agenda on whatever subject in Malawi better than a Southern Californian? What proportion of Kenyans can locate Bangui on a map?"

Effective Altruism, RCTs, NGOs, & the Government End-Game

Good Ventures just gave a $25 million unrestricted grant to Give Directly on the advice of Givewell. That’s a lot of good news in one sentence, but it’s not even the best part. Givewell buried the lede when they mention around paragraph 20 that;

"GiveDirectly plans to discuss partnerships with the following types of institutions:

- Donor aid agencies
- Developing country governments (national and local). (For example, several governors in Kenya have already approached GiveDirectly about running cash transfer programs in their counties.)"

That’s what it’s all about. To really get sustainability and scale in social policy you need government involvement - that’s why the best NGOs combine a mixture of immediate direct service delivery in places where government just doesn’t have the capacity to deliver, with support to interested governments to build that capacity for the longer-term, often at the local level where administrators struggle to actually implement well-designed central policy documents, and with innovation in new models of service delivery, that governments might later adopt, of which GiveDirectly is clearly a strong example. Similarly whilst Innovations for Poverty Action and J-PAL may have started off following that recently infamous Kremer-Miguel deworming study by working on service delivery through small NGOs, their focus is on things that can work at scale, and having built a reputation through working with NGOs have been able to transition to working with governments (for example in Ghana and Peru).

As Jessica Brass writes,

"Government and NGOs learn from each other to improve what they do. In particular, many government agencies notice the successes achieved by NGOs and, whether intentionally or not, mimic their actions"

So yes, maybe some of the effective altruists can be accused of being philosophers not development wonks, and potentially even naive about politics, but for every anecdote-backed theoretical case for how aid might undermine the process of building citizen-state accountability, I can come up with an anecdote-backed theoretical case for how aid can support improved governance through innovation in service delivery models, and until we get some quantitative evidence on the issue, I don’t see how else we’re going to resolve the debate.

Did I miss anything?

If you are buying flowers for tomorrow, buy them from Kenya

The Mirror has an exposé looking at the shocking conditions of workers on Kenyan flower farms - some earning just £30 a month. 

What they fail to point out is that absolutely the best thing you can do for global welfare is to buy your flowers from Africa rather than Europe. Even if flower-pickers are on a low wage, it's a better wage than their alternative, your spending stimulates the Kenyan economy, and it is even good for the environment (flights from sunny places on the Equator pollute less than all the electric lights you need to grow flowers in cloudy Europe).

Yes be shocked at wage rates in Kenya. But then the best thing you can do to fix that is to do more business with Kenya and spend more money on Kenyan products. Happy Valentine's Day. 

My favourite thing about the World Bank Nairobi office

It's a pretty close tie between the Nyama Choma crisps and the statistics-packed toilet paper.

The panoramic view from the 17th floor across Nairobi isn't bad either, but somehow I didn't manage to prioritise taking any photos of that. 

60% discount on holiday giving

I've been frustrated this year about not really being able to give to GiveDirectly because they aren't registered in the UK and so are ineligible for Gift Aid (a 25% top-up donation by the government taken from your income tax payment).

I just discovered that this PROBLEM IS NOW SOLVED.

The new Giving What We Can Trust is eligible for Gift Aid, and they will pass on your money directly (plus gift aid) to the charity of your choice (as long as its either one of their recommended charities, or one of Givewell's recommended charities, which GiveDirectly is, though I'm guessing there is some additional bank charge for the trust to send money to GiveDirectly in the US?).

On top of this, Good Ventures (an awesome foundation financed by one of Facebook's co-founders) is offering a 100% match for any donations to GiveDirectly up to January 31st 2014.

So if you give £100 to the trust, this becomes £125 with gift aid, and £250 with the match (which is your 60% discount), which minus processing fees comes to around £225 directly in the hands of a family living in extreme poverty somewhere in rural Kenya, a pretty hefty chunk of cash when you're living on a dollar a day.

Big thanks to everyone at Give Directly, Give Well, Giving What We Can, Good Ventures, and Innovations for Poverty Action who have made this stunningly simple effective efficient way to make the world a slightly better place possible.

Merry Christmas!

Cash transfers in Northern Kenya

The BBC have a short clip here of the new DFID Minister Justine Greening visiting the Hunger Safety Net Programme in Northern Kenya, where eligible households are said to get $40 every couple of months via a "Smartcard."



OPM is managing the evaluation of the project: you can see the Year 1 impact report here.

The economics of female genital mutilation

We also had a presentation on female genital mutilation, or female circumcision as some insist on calling it, and it seemed to me it could be characterized, at least in part, as a multiple equilibrium, collective action problem with tipping points. So I asked what they knew about tipping points -- the point where the social pressure switches from doing it to not having it done as fewer and fewer have the procedure done to them

From Mark Thoma's recent trip to Kenya.

New OPM research

1. An evaluation of Oxfam's Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods Urban Programme.

2. How to making agricultural financing work in Rwanda (it's about post-harvest storage & marketing, not inputs)

3. How savings banks can provide better services for the poor

4. Assessing value for money of donor support to the financial sector in Kenya

Does aid improve governance?

Jennifer Brass makes the case in the "Governance" journal [gated] that international NGOs operating in Kenya have contributed to improved democratic governance and accountability. This contrasts with the Bauer/Easterly/Moyo-ish lines that external aid undermines governance, but resonates with my recent limited experience looking at NGO programmes in Kenya which comes across as pretty positive interaction with government, and also with something Paul Collier has hypothesised, that the difference between aid and oil (and thus the explanation for better outcomes on average from aid than oil) is the added value of the technical assistance.

Brass writes

"Governance is no longer the purview of only public government actors; it is increasingly seen as a shared or networked process among several types of organizations. 

Government and NGOs learn from each other to improve what they do. In particular, many government agencies notice the successes achieved by NGOs and, whether intentionally or not, mimic their actions, recalling DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) mimetic isomorphism. This is most obvious in their attempts at participatory approaches, in which opinions from the village to the city are solicited (if not always actually listened to). As a result, governance in Kenya has slowly begun to more democratic, moving away from its hierarchical, authoritarian past."

She also reports broad individual support for NGOs in Uganda and Kenya (perhaps not a surprising result that people report to surveyors that they like people who give out free stuff);

"in a survey of NGOs in Uganda, 90% of organizations reported involving host communities in the delivery of services, and nearly 60% of beneficiaries of these NGOs agreed that the NGOs seek community participation (Barr, Fafchamps, and Owens 2005). While NGOs claimed more participatory involvement than the respective communities saw, 60% participation rates are significant. Relative to the Kenyan government and its public administration over the past 40 years, NGOs unquestionably try to be more participatory and accountable. 

Kenyan citizens agree, viewing NGOs as looking after the interests of the common man. When asked, “To what extent do you think NGOs have the interests of the people in mind?” in a survey, the author conducted on service provision and service providers with 501 Kenyans, 70% of respondents answered positively, and only 20% responded negatively."

Finally, a separate paper finds that NGOs on average choose to locate themselves where need is great, but also in convenient locations (close to roads and towns - which isn't necessarily the worst thing for cost effectiveness), and best of all not due to political factors.

BRASS, J. N. (2012), Blurring Boundaries: The Integration of NGOs into Governance in Kenya. Governance, 25: 209-235. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2011.01553.x

How to improve education: Pay teachers less

Abhijeet has a new post up at the CSAE blog. He makes the critical point that when a study finds no difference between regular teachers and contract teachers in Kenya, those contract teachers are still being paid only a fifth of regular teachers. It's kind of silly to be disappointed by seeing no positive impact (but no negative impact either) when you are paying a fifth of the cost. (edit: the above isn't actually correct - see the discussion in the comments here - the quote below is still accurate however)

across all these studies, contract teachers never do worse than civil service teachers, despite being younger, more inexperienced and more likely to not have had formal teacher training. In value-for-money terms, each contract teacher is at least four to five times as productive as a regular public service teacher: in Kenya, the average pay of a civil service teacher is $261 per month compared to $56 for a contract teacher. The problem is not that the contract teachers are being paid too little (they get paid salaries comparable to private school teachers in these countries) but that public sector employment just has a huge premium attached.

Maasai Land

Last week I was mostly in Kajiado County. Maasai-land. The County is apparently the third richest in Kenya (by the KIHBS, but this number is disputed), though this wealth is driven by "outsiders" building new developments along the recently completed tarmac road to Nairobi. It can now take as little as an hour from Kajiado Central. The Maasai struggle to compete in the new economy, with limited education and skills.

I spoke to an educated professional (middle class?) Maasai who expressed his dismay at the erosion of the traditional Maasai way of life, as the government's land privatisation policy had led to the parcelling off of land, obstructing traditional migratory herding practices based on traditional beliefs that land is communally owned.

I sat there wondering how I could register some disagreement without sounding like a dick, and how this place epitomised the tension between modernisation and traditional ways of living, transported back to a development studies classroom of tedious debates on "what really is development?" I couldn't help but think that perhaps it was a little hypocritical for this well-educated man to sit in comfortable surroundings and talk about how tough it is for his people to have to give up their cattle herding.

Ultimately, for the Kenyan government to be able to afford to provide better health and education services for its people, it is going to need the revenues that come from the kind of economic development that comes with urbanisation and modernisation.

But this process is disruptive, and the best solution for the "losers" is not to put the brakes on development, but to provide compensation, safety nets, services, and the skills that they will need to engage in the growing economy.

How to build resilience to climate change in Kenya

Cash transfers.

A growing body of evidence shows that safety nets are an important complement to efforts to improve the livelihoods of the poor, particularly in areas that remain vulnerable to shocks such as drought. Reliable access to safety net support allows households to take on more investment risk and thus produce higher returns.

 Gabriel Demombynes and Jane Kiringai (World Bank, Kenya)

East African etiquette

One of my favourite Juba-things, which is apparently also a Kenya-thing, is hand-shaking. You always shake hands with the people you meet, all the time, every person in the room, no matter how long it takes.

There's also a great rule for when you are eating, or your hands are otherwise dirty - just offer a wrist instead. Simple, and avoids that English awkwardness where you don't know what to do. I'm bringing it back to England. Who's with me?

Lenny Henry in Kibera

Four British celebrities try living and working in Kibera for a week on the £1-£2 average daily income (hattip: my mum).

Why do Kenyans save?

0.089% of them apparently answered "When I receive money in ransom" to this question, from the 2009 Financial Access survey. Ahem.

Korogocho

I've spent most of this week wandering around Korogocho, Nairobi's third or fourth biggest slum (against recent FCO advice against "all but essential travel to low income areas of Nairobi, including all township or slum areas" - worth a few dangerzone street-cred points?). 

Korogocho is probably a bit poorer and a bit more dangerous than Kibera so I was advised against taking a camera, but it looks pretty similar to Duncan's photos of Kibera from this week. In fairness, someone did have a phone snatched literally opposite where we were sitting, and there was a stabbing on the same street a few nights ago. A local medical centre reported stabbings as the #1 source of admissions, followed by malaria and typhoid. 

I did sneak one photo from the safety of the NGO building we were based in. Remember those "amazing" sunlight powered water-bottle lights innovated for slums in Philippines that were all over the development blogs a few months ago? Rubbish. Everywhere in Korogocho just fits a square of transparent corrugated plastic into the corrugated iron roof. Much better. 

Lots of other interesting moments, but for now;

Best t-shirt slogan: “No Handouts, Just Empower me.”

Best blog on the neighbouring Kariobangi light industrial cluster where many Korogocho residents work.

What you can do to help: apparently uneaten plane meals from Kenyan Airways get dumped at the enormous dandora dumpsite adjacent to Korogocho, and end up in the market (including things like quite expensive Out of Africa brand Macadamia nuts). So the moral of the story: next time you fly Kenya airways, don't eat your plane meal and donate it to a poor slum dweller!

Kenyan Political joke of the week

No, not the election news, but this:

Little Njoro of Buru estate in Nairobi wanted Kshs 1,000 badly and prayed to God for two weeks but nothing happened. 

Then he decided to write God a letter requesting the Kshs 1,000. When the postal authorities received the letter addressed to God from Buru buru in Kenya, they decided to send it to State House. 

The letter never even got to the president but an aide was very touched and so he sent the boy Kshs 200. He felt that this was a lot of money for a small kid.
Njoro was delighted when he received the Kshs 200 and sat down to write a thank you note to God, which read: 

Dear God, 

Thank you very much for sending the money.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I noticed that for some reason you had to send it through State House and, as usual, those crooks deducted a whole Kshs 800. My teacher tells me that you never forget, but did you not this once forget that Kenya is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and that as my dad is always saying corruption starts at the top? 

I suggest you send an angel next time.
Thanks,Njoro.

HT: @RichardTrillo 

I'm off to Kenya

Sorry. You can blame Stefan Dercon because I found this on his old website. 

Exploring the Portaloo Product Jungle

The Great BBC series African Dream profiles entrepreneur Moses Nderitu, who went from being a TV producer to setting up Kenya's first portable toilet rental business almost by accident. He needed to buy a portaloo, but couldn't just ship 1 to Kenya, so had to ship 4. And then slowly started persuading people to rent them from him. And now employs 20 staff in his booming loo rental business.

Which is a lovely illustration of Hidalgo and Hausman's product space theory of economic development. The economy is a bit evolutionary, with lots of random leaps, but some products (and services) are closer together, and so it only takes a small leap (like Nderitu's). Some are much further apart. So the things that an economy can produce tomorrow depend a lot on what you can produce today (learning by doing and path dependence are not new ideas in development economics, but this is a sophisticated new data-driven way of looking at it).

Or as Rodrik puts it

think of the product space as a forest, goods as trees, and entrepreneurs as monkeys. Countries develop as monkeys jump from tree to tree. Trees further away are harder to jump to. Some parts of the forest are denser than others. What trees you have monkeys on today determines where your monkeys will be tomorrow. And it goes from there.