Graduate Jobs in South Sudan

Looking for your first job in international development? Charlie Goldsmith is hiring in South Sudan;

"International development work is generally best done by people of the country in question: there is no shortage of talent in and from any of Somalia, South Sudan, DRC, or any other FCAS place you might name, only the conditions in which it might be deployed and developed. 

But there is still a role in development work for people from the Global North if they have the right skills, the humility, understanding and connection to apply them well where they are sent, and hopefully the intention to continue to apply them in this work for the medium term. That doesn’t just mean water engineers and hard-bitten Treasury hands, it can also mean the high-achieving, high-potential generalists/fast-streamers that any organisation, the world over, would be glad to have. 

But for those bright young people, getting into international development is not always straightforward: it can seem unwise to set off to a fragile state with no particular fixed plan, as many of those now working in this sector first did; getting to, and staying in, some of the places we work is expensive even if you do have systems already set up, let alone if you’re doing this the first time, straight out of College. 

This Autumn, we are therefore going to be looking to hire up to six CGA Fellows to send to South Sudan, who will be either immediate or fairly recent graduates."

Why be a consultant (with Mokoro)?

"Martin Adams never set out to be a consultant, but found himself stuck in an office job and so decided to go freelance ‘in places where I wanted to be and with people I liked.’ For him, this is the most rewarding part of being a consultant. For Liz Daley, ‘consultancy enables you to be your own boss and work flexibly and independently. This is a great asset if you have other responsibilities that you are very committed to - like being a parent in my case. It gives you variety of assignments and clients, which is good for intellectual stimulation. But, the big downside, it can be very isolating. And there is constant uncertainty financially, worrying about where the next piece of work will come from.’ Catherine Dom likes the flexibility and independence that the consultancy life offers and has been fortunate to have developed long-term relationships with a number of countries and people in them. For Chris Tanner, initially ‘consultancy allowed me to get a vast depth of experience in several places far more quickly than a ‘proper job’ would have done. The strong point of being a consultant is on the technical side for sure.’ Now returning to consultancy after a long stint with FAO in Mozambique, it ‘allows me to use my experience and to work in a way that is flexible and still keep my feet under the table in Wales.’ Stephen Turner drifted into consultancy, finds it ‘stimulating and stressful, perhaps especially for a generalist like me’, but also depressing because you can work hard on a project and yet get zero feedback."

From Robin Palmer's reflections on his career. One part of my lack of blogging steam has been the takeover of twitter as a quicker way of sharing interesting snippets, but twitter is much less useful for me as a way of quickly finding the interesting clippings that I remember reading months ago and want to find again, so maybe expect more of this cutting and pasting. 

What do development economists do?

A series of youtube interviews profiling the careers of 6 development economists; Angela Ambroz (IGC, former ODI fellow & JPAL), Luca Pellerano (OPM and IFS), Peter D'Souza (DFID), Sarah Lilley (Save the Children), Henry Mphwanthe (ODI fellow), and Aarushi Bhatnagar (Phd student and World Bank consultant).

Why voluntourism might even just do some good

When Pippa Biddle wrote last week about "the problem with little white girls," she was adding to a rich vein of development self-flagellation. I just ventured to google "why voluntourism is good," and the top 3 hits were:

"Beware the voluntourists intent on doing good"

"Is voluntourism doing any good? No!"

"Does 'voluntourism' do more harm than good?"

Pippa writes of her own experience as a voluntourist, including the wonderful story of the Tanzanians staying up all night to rebuild the wall that the white American girls messed up, so they wouldn't know what a terrible job they did.

"It would have been more cost effective, stimulative of the local economy, and efficient for the orphanage to take our money and hire locals to do the work, but there we were trying to build straight walls without a level."

But here's the thing - if Pippa had never gone to Tanzania, she would never have sent her money there. We know this. Despite the dizzying scale of global inequality, the vast majority of charitable spending by individuals in rich countries is spent in rich countries, not poor ones. In the UK just 10% goes overseas. 

And for good reasons. Why do we give? Our giving is driven by empathy. And we can't empathise with 6 billion people at the same time. There's just too much suffering to worry about it all - "we would be in a permanent emotional turmoil". And so we use filters, including critically that our familiarity with a person matters, and our similarity and identification matter.

That is why the Kristof uses "bridge characters":

"The problem that I face — my challenge as a writer — in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I’m writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that’s the moment to turn the page. It’s very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that. 

One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character. And so if this is a way I can get people to care about foreign countries, to read about them, ideally, to get a little bit more involved, then I plead guilty."

Or think about the story of Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave - I feel almost ashamed to admit, but it is clear that it was so harrowing because he is a middle class guy from New York - someone familiar who we can identify with.

Spending time living in or even briefly visiting a developing country can let you skip the bridge characters. You are now familiar with, and can identify with, a handful of the millions of people living in societies with such a profoundly worse set of opportunities to those of us born in rich countries. That matters. There's a sad irony that having made the empathetic leap, so many who work in development then seem to lose their empathy with the uninitiated. Having made a connection with someone living in extreme poverty, we forget how easy it was to not care before we had made that connection. I'd bet that the vast majority of development workers, even the most hardened economists, really got their passion from some form of real human interaction, not abstract analysis, and yet we pour scorn on young kids who venture out trying to have their own interactions and make their own connections, building their own cross-cultural empathy, because voluntourism is tacky. Does it really matter if it is tacky?

In terms of immediate development impact, village voluntourism is probably mostly irrelevant. We could spend time doing careful cost-benefit analysis of the value for money of having American teenagers build brick walls in Tanzania, or we could reflect on the 90% of our collective charitable impulse which goes on other rich people, the 99% of our government spending which goes on other rich people, or our narcissistic trade and immigration policies which help other rich people, and consider instead what it might take to get rich people to actually really give a fuck about global poverty, and that maybe just maybe that might come through actually living and working with people, even if just for a short time. Travel really does broaden the mind (there is even evidence, some of it randomised). If tacky white saviour marketing for a fundamentally useless project is what it takes to grab some attention away from a video of a cat on youtube, maybe that's worth it?

There is a German translation of this article on wegweiser-freiwilligenarbeit.com

Development as Burritos

This one has been sitting in my drafts folder for months, but Hausmann just got me thinking about it again.

"Meze Fresh" is probably one of the best places to eat in Kigali. Certainly one of the fastest. It's a Chipotle-style Mexican place, with a range of salads, meats, salsas, and sauces in a bar at the front that are thrown together in a tortilla in no time at all. Plus they do margaritas. The owner, I'm told, is a young American guy in his 20s who worked in a Chipotle back home in California, and basically borrowed the entire concept and replicated it here. A similar thing is going on with the Office, or with the young Americans in Kigali setting up their own gyms and solar energy businesses.

To some extent, that is what development is. Borrowing ideas. At least that's what catch-up growth is. At the world technological frontier you need to invent new ideas to get economic growth, but for most developing countries you can get a long way just copying other ideas.

Hausmann's point is that it takes people to transfer ideas, because it's really hard to teach people things that depend upon learning by doing. Which resonates with the experience of all these expats in Kigali who came to do traditional aid work, decided they liked living there, and started spotting all these business opportunities based on ideas from back home. The policy implications of this? For developing countries, one is to make it really easy for people to come visit and live in your country. Rwanda is doing this. The kind of bureaucracy and visa fees you find in many other countries is just incredibly short-sighted.

I'm also reminded of another Hausmann contribution - growth diagnostics. In a place like Rwanda, having got the basics of physical security, macroeconomic stability, decent government administration, and infrastructure under control, one of the things that might start to bind as a constraint to growth is "information externalities."

Any suggestions for what any of this implies for donor policy? Can we and would we want to increase subsidies for foreign investment?

How to switch careers into international development

A 6-part guide from Rachel Strohm (formerly of IPA and other things):

1. What is development
2. What interests you
3. Building transferable skills
4. Unpaid internships
5. What to do if you can't go unpaid
6. CVs and cover letters

And whilst I'm on the subject - a plug for an exciting new job for a social science PhD to work with OPM and the University of Bath to develop better ways of integrating quantitative and qualitative methods in development policy impact evaluation.

Advice for new ODI fellows

Some assorted advice for this year's crop of ODI fellows who will be heading out soon (former fellows - what else should they know?).

1. Your main job (should) be translating economic theory and evidence into English. (see for example, Portes or Coats)

2. Your main job will actually be poring over spreadsheets.

3. Be nice and focus on building good relationships with your colleagues. 

4. You can probably give up on the idea of building much capacity.

5. But that's ok. The ODI fellowship is as much about gap-filling as capacity building. (As an aside, even with stratospheric levels of growth, poor countries will remain poor for a while. If you have 10% annual income growth but only start with $500, it takes 32 years to get to $10,000, the "rich country poverty line". Poor countries will need external assistance for a while. Worrying too much about the short-term sustainability of projects is over-rated. African success stories such as Botswana and Rwanda have relied heavily on external assistance over long periods).

6. Don't wear flip-flops to the office.

7. Don't take any crap about the fellowship. A 2009 review concluded that:

"it has spawned hundreds of careers in economic development as well as launched prominent scholars and distinguished civil servants. It had done so with very modest resources and a management that has stretched itself to fit and to cover, earning the praise of its Fellows, current and former, and the grateful recognition of its delivery of quality service by host governments. There is very little that needs to be done to maintain and sustain this successful partnership. What has been recommended in this review are simply steps to ensure its continuity and survival. There is no need to provide extended encomiums—the alumni, DFID and the satisfied client countries already said what needs to be said. The ODI Fellowship Scheme is a success."

On giving up development

Nora Schenkel wrote a post mortem last week of her aborted development career 'I Came to Haiti to Do Good….'
I'm sorry we lost you Nora, and I hope that you change your mind. Though long hours hunched over a laptop fiddling with Excel might not always feel like it, working on the most important moral issue of our time, in whatever small way, is really a great privilege.

I sympathise with your guilt living a comfortable life amidst extreme poverty, and your frustration feeling that aid isn't making a positive difference. But your guilt is misplaced, and our frustration with ineffective aid should be a spur to do it better, not to just give up.

Your guilt is misplaced because almost all of us lucky enough to be born in wealthy countries have relatively comfortable lives. Even an average British salary puts you in the top one percent on the global rich list. The fact that in Britain we don't have to brush shoulders every day with extreme poverty does not make it cease to exist, and does not mean that morally we should feel any more or less than guilty than if we were living on the same salary in Haiti. That out of sight is out of mind is not moral reasoning.

Frustration with ineffective aid is exactly what is driving reform in the sector, towards more focus on measurement, results, transparency, and accountability. Yes there is still lots of improvement to be made, especially in difficult places to operate such as Haiti. But there can be no doubt that aid saves lives. And yes, in order for that to happen, some overheads are needed, including occasionally paying the salaries that it costs to hire skilled international staff, and for some of those air-conditioned offices and shiny white cars.

Extreme poverty is ugly. And it can seem uglier when it is contrasted so sharply with rich world largesse. But that contrast didn't cause the poverty, and running away from the problem doesn't make it better. It just means that you aren't forced to think about it every day.

Good luck Nora, I'm sure you'll do good.

Policy job vacancies, South Sudan and Indonesia

International Advisor to the Presidential Economic Advisor South Sudan (full-time in Juba, to apply send CV to frenchwb at gmail dot com, deadline: 31st of January 2013)

Assistant Consultant, Oxford Policy Managament, Jakarta

Consultant, Oxford Policy Managament, Jakarta

Assistant Consultant Job at Oxford Policy Management

There a few days left to apply for the Assistant Consultant vacancy at Oxford Policy Management in the "cross-cutting" team that I am part of. I can honestly say that it's a really fantastic place to work with lots of smart interesting people (including tons of ODI Fellows) doing all sorts of smart interesting work. From the job ad:

Oxford Policy Management (OPM) is a leading development consultancy with offices in Oxford, Islamabad, Delhi, Pretoria, Dhaka and Jakarta. We provide rigorous analysis, policy advice, management and training services to governments, international aid agencies and other public sector and non-government organisations. OPM aims to contribute in innovative ways to enhance economic and social progress in developing and transition economies, with a focus on the needs of the poorest people. We have worked in over 90 low and middle income countries over the last 30 years. 

OPM is seeking to recruit an Assistant Consultant to work in its cross-cutting portfolio. The cross-cutting team is OPM's entry point for talented and passionate individuals with limited experience or no particular specialisation to work in development consultancy, and progress by either specialising in one of the other technical areas or remaining generalist. Skills are learnt through project work with senior consultants (including overseas fieldwork and ministry work as possible), a year-round training programme, and mentorship from an experienced senior consultant. We expect high performance, and reward it with promotions, salary increments and responsibility. The cross-cutting portfolio currently contains four assistant consultants and four consultants who work on and sometimes lead consulting and research projects across the rest of OPM’s specialist portfolios.

This role is full-time based in our Oxford office and the anticipated salary range is between £20,000 and £23,000.

Closing date is 01 April 2025

For more see here. There are also a few other positions open, including an Assistant Consultant based in Jakarta and a Senior Health Economist.

How to Get a Job in International Development

I just spoke on a panel to some Yale undergrads on this very subject, along with some real people, as if I was some kind of real person too! Mainly because about 12 of my more accomplished colleagues couldn’t make it, but I will totally grab almost any opportunity to blather about international development.
My main message was basically “study economics.” Not only is it a fun gratifying subject which will teach you lots about the world, and specifically about the question of why some people are rich and some people are so poor, but it also happens to be quite good for getting jobs.
Specifically, economics degrees can get you jobs with the British Government, the Government of Southern Sudan, and Innovations for Poverty Action, just like me, amongst many other glittering career options.
My other message was, “ok fine, if you don’t want to study economics, then a) learn some kind of useful skill, and b) just go.”
“Just go” sounds a bit scary but I know so many people for whom it has worked out, in all sorts of different jobs, and really what do you have to lose?
Thankfully the panel all pretty much agreed. With perhaps the exception of my passion for economics.
For more good advice, go and read through Dave Algoso’s collection of career advice from smart people like Chris Blattman and Alanna Shaikh.