Rwanda Could Thrive Faster by Putting (Even) More Women in Charge

Rwanda has the largest share of female parliamentarians of any country in the world. But things in Rwanda seldom sit still, and it is time to start going faster and further. 

Rwanda’s impressive female representation in national politics is not yet replicated at the local level. Only eight of the thirty district mayors in Rwanda (twenty-seven percent) are women, and just thirteen percent of village leaders are women.

Me in The Kigalian

Are Rwandans really too scared to answer surveys honestly? (TLDR; Probably no)

Hi Roving Bandit blog fans! Long time no write. I've just relocated from London to Kigali, so I'm hoping that being in a more stimulating environment is going to encourage me to start blogging more frequently. Probably the best economics blog in Rwanda!

I'll kick things off by just regurgitating some recent twitter chat. A couple of days ago I posted Gallup survey findings that Rwanda is the 3rd most accepting countries for migrants in the world (pretty cool Rwanda).

The brilliant Dina Pomeranz responded "A friend who works at Afrobarometer told me that survey responses from Rwanda are problematic in general, because people tend to answer "it's very good" to everything (out of fear of repercussions)."

This would indeed be worrying were it the case, but I was sceptical. Afrobarometer doesn't actually operate in Rwanda, but I thought I'd take a look at some responses on some of the surveys that have been done here.

First, the 2014 National Household Survey asks people about satisfaction with some government services.

- 45% said they were dissatisfied with water services

- 23% said they were dissatisfied with roads 

That seems to be a lot of people who were not afraid to give a negative answer to a survey. 

The 2015 DHS asks people about their experience of personal violence, and a large number of people do say they have been affected.

Finally, a 2016 government survey by the Rwanda Governance Board also asked people about their satisfaction with a range of government services. Some were pretty positive, some not so much. There was

-  31% net dissatisfaction with social protection services 

-  38% net dissatisfaction with hygiene & sanitation services. 

-  45% net dissatisfaction with infrastructure services 

These do not at all look to me like the kind of numbers you'd expect from people so cowed by fear that they are afraid to give negative responses to an anonymous survey. Maybe its time for the team at Afrobarometer to take another look at Rwanda?

The Continuing Saga of Rwandan Poverty Data

via Ken Opalo, there is new analysis out of the 2014 Rwanda poverty numbers that contradicts official Government reports, finding that poverty actually rose between 2010 and 2014. Professor Filip Reyntjens made a similar argument at the time, which I disagreed with.  

This new (anonymous) analysis in the Review of African Political Economy supports the conclusion of Reyntjens, based on new analysis of the survey microdata (with commendably published stata code). The key difference seems to be that their analysis updates the poverty line based on prices reported in the survey microdata rather than using the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure of inflation.

What I took away from this at the time was the apparent fragility of trend data on poverty that depends on consumption aggregates and price data. I also drafting a follow-up blogpost that for whatever reason never got posted, so here it is. 

What else do we know about welfare in Rwanda? 

Given the disagreement about the right price indices to use for calculating the poverty line, it might be informative to look at other indicators of welfare that we might care about, and even better to look at other indicators from a different survey. In fact, it was looking at the first table in the EICV4 Report that made me doubt Filip's claim that poverty had actually increased. This table suggests that between 2010 and 2014,

- inequality was down,

- school attendance and literacy up,

- housing and access to electricity and clean water improved,

- health services improved, and

- household savings were up.

All strong indicators of progress. 

Inequality is down on two different measures (both unaffected by the level of the poverty line) and Food Production is Up



If Rwanda fiddled the poverty numbers, did they also fiddle the entire survey? A useful check is the results from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), which as Justin Sandefur and Amanda Glassman have pointed out, tends to have particularly heavy donor involvement, making them particularly difficult for governments to fudge. And the overall impression from the two surveys is strikingly similar - rapid improvements in child and maternal healthcare and health outcomes.

Health Indicators have substantially improved over the same period on the DHS Survey



It's certainly possible that the whole EICV4 was fudged and that consumption poverty increased whilst at the same time health care services and health outcomes improved. To me, it just seems kind of unlikely.

No, Rwanda didn't "fiddle" its poverty stats

A couple of weeks ago, France24 ran a story featuring accusations by Belgian Professor Filip Reyntjens that the Government of Rwanda had manipulated its poverty statistics. The truth, to my relief*, is somewhat less exciting.

What seems to have actually happened, is that Rwanda quite resonably decided to update the methodology for calculating what the poverty line should be, but then found that the new methodology led to an implausibly high poverty line, and so decided to (slightly arbitrarily) “adjust” the new methodology, resulting in the final poverty line being almost exactly what you would have expected it to be had you simply updated the original poverty line for inflation.

It took me a while to figure all this out, as the original criticism and rebuttal by NISR weren’t entirely clear, and it was only in Filip’s reaction to NISR’s rebuttal that I grasped his (mistaken) point (here’s also the Rwanda EICV4 Report and EICV3 Report).

How is poverty measured?

Rwanda has followed a fairly typical process - set a poverty line by first defining a minimum quantity of calories needed, second working out how much it would cost a poor person to buy that many calories, third increasing that amount by 40% to account for some basic minimum non-food spending needs. Then to get your poverty rate, just calculate how many people spend less than the poverty line.

What was the disagreement about?

Rwanda’s poverty line was set in 2001 based on how much it cost then to purchase a basket of goods that poor people bought back then. You need to keep your methodology consistent over time to allow for fair comparisons, but its also reasonable to think that the minimum consumption basket is likely to change over 15 years of rapid growth.

The government of Rwanda decided to keep the minimum assumed number of calories (2,500 per day, which is pretty high), but change step 2 - the way of working out how much it costs to buy these calories. In a normal survey year, this cost is simply updated for inflation (even if prices and consumption habits have changed in the meantime). This year, Rwanda decided to make an update to the prices and consumption habits, but found something odd. Most poor people consume far fewer than the minimum number of calories - almost half. So how do you construct a hypothetical “ bare minimum" food consumption basket, that is twice as big as what people actually buy? Do you just double everything? Or do you assume that if people bought more food than they did, they might buy more of some items than others? This is where the big disagreement presumably came. Rather than choosing to simply double everything, the Rwandan stats agency made a few arguably arbitrary choices about which items to increase and which to decrease, that has a big effect on the overall price of the basket, and therefore the overall poverty line, and therefore the poverty rate.

Why is Filip Reyntjens wrong?

Filip argues, correctly, that Rwanda’s assumptions about how to scale up consumption patterns to reach their minimum calorie basket, affects the overall line. In fact, their adjustments reduce the line by 19%. But his next step is wrong. He argues that as this new methodology line has been reduced by 19%, we should also reduce the 2010/11 line by 19%, giving a substantially lower poverty rate in 2010/11, and therefore an increase in 2013/14. But he misses the intermediate step - the Rwandans didn’t just adjust the new food basket, they first also calculated a whole new food basket.

Yes, what should really happen is for the new methodology to applied retrospectively to all the old survey data to allow for truly comparable numbers, but the adjustment made to the new methodology leads you to a poverty line that is basically the same as it would have been with the old methodology anyway.

Implications for how we measure poverty?

One thing that this choice really highlights is the number of assumptions you sometimes need to make, and the fragility of the whole concept of poverty estimates.

Here's an example of another seemingly arbitrary choice of assumption with big consequences - the Indian stats agency used to measure poverty with surveys that asked people how much food they had bought in the last 30 days, longer than practice elsewhere which uses 7 day recall periods. To their great credit the stats agency decided to run a randomised control trial to test these two methods against each other. The result was that moving from a 30 day to a 7 day recall period increased measured consumption massively - and reducing poverty by 175 million people - close to half of all those in poverty (from Angus Deaton’s 2014 LSE lecture, via Nic Spaull).

The bottom line: measurement is hard, and it is possible for reasonable people to disagree, without there necessarily being any nefarious trickery.

---

* Relief, because I have previously worked both for OPM as a staff member, on a project with OPM for the Rwandan Stats agency, and directly on a project for the Rwandan Ministry of Finance.

Kigali to Oxford

This draft has been sitting here since I got back a week ago, because I wasn't sure how passionate and emotional and angry I was comfortable with being in public. The short story is, as I sat in the coffee shop at Kigali airport waiting for check-in to open, a man who I'd met a couple of days earlier asked me with total sincerity to take one of his children with me back to England so that they could get a better education and a chance of a better job, which for some reason really got to me. A man who totally seriously wanted a total stranger to take one of his children thousands of miles away because he knows that living standards are so much better in rich countries. And he couldn't move himself because of our totally self-absorbed immigration policies. So I'll skip the rant, but sometimes it just breaks my heart that we live in a world where such desperation is so mundane.

In other news, 3 months away is probably too short for any proper reverse culture shock, but I do admit to being mystified by the battery-powered electric salt and pepper grinders in the apartment I am renting, which make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Also a few people have commented that I've lost weight, which I hadn't noticed at all, but seems plausible following a typically overwhelming first-trip-to-the-supermarket-following-a-period-of-developing-country-living. Seriously, no wonder we have so much obesity when food is this cheap and easy.

Aid to Rwanda: "Best value for money in the world"

Tony Blair has an article in Foreign Policy backing aid to Rwanda, and Laura Seay responds here. I'm not going to get into that debate, beyond to say that on balance I think we probably should be restoring aid to Rwanda, but I was intrigued by this quote from TB:

"[Rwanda] is frequently cited for its aid effectiveness by the World Bank and Britain's Bilateral Aid Review acknowledged that aid to Rwanda "offers the best value for taxpayers' money in the world."

How are they measuring that value for money? I took a look at the DFID Bilateral Aid Review technical report. This constructs a Need-Effectiveness Index, which combines measures of poverty and state fragility (need) with a measure of governance (effectiveness). Rwanda comes in the top 25% on this index but not the top 10%. So that can't be the measure of "best value for money."

Maybe "value for money" is just referring to the effectiveness part of the index? This is captured entirely by the World Bank CPIA (Country Policy and Institutional Assessment). So I looked up the index (now renamed to IRAI which contains a nested acronym within an acronym - meta - "IDA Resource Allocation Index" - where IDA = International Development Association, the part of the World Bank which does grants and interest-free loans). The data is available here, and Rwanda scores very highly but not quite "the best" - stable at a score of 3.8 between 2009 and 2011 (where 1 is the lowest and 6 is the highest). The top country in 2011 (the latest publicly available ranking, remembering this is only "developing countries", I'm not going to get into how that is defined) is Georgia on 4.4. The top African country is Cape Verde (4.0) followed by Ghana (3.9).

So there you have it, Rwanda "offers the best value for taxpayers' money in the world" where "best" is defined as "amongst the best but not necessarily actually number 1" and "value for money" is measured exclusively by score on the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (which to be fair is probably as reasonable a measure as actually exists).

Visit Rwanda

Another very slick video about Rwanda, this one promoting RwandAir (via Mark Doyle).

Getting by in Rwanda

I can't get enough of these vignettes on the lives of the poor. 

Suprian Ndorimana, 12, lives in the outskirts of Kigali. 

I wake up at 4 a.m. and think about what to bring to the market for my customers. My mother goes to the garden every evening and gathers what I carry to the market. 

At around 7 a.m. I arrive at the market and business starts. 

I do not go to school because of the kind of work I am doing. It helps us in the family a great deal. Since I am the first born, I am basically the one in charge of my siblings. 

Even my mother encourages me to keep running this business as opposed to going to school when my young sister is just beginning to go to school. 

This is the business I have been doing for the last two years. Our family has gone from worse to better and my mother is very happy with me. 

I finish preparing the following day’s produce at around 7 p.m. and take supper around 8 p.m., after which I go to bed.

A day in the life of a child market vendor, New Times

Dismus Nsengiyera, 20, is a street vendor, selling items like sweets in Remera, Gasabo district 

I always wake up at 7a.m and take a shower. Ordinarily, since I am not a rich person, I skip breakfast. The money I would have used for breakfast, I save it and add it on what I have for lunch. 

My job is so complicated and it requires some patience. Sometimes, I earn nothing and go back home empty handed. 

At around 10am, I keep on the lookout because police can fix you if you are not careful. Sometimes, I keep running away from the police. We are not allowed to sell in the middle of the streets. 

Once in while, the police confiscates our things. This means, you have to go back home without a single coin. I use Frw3000 every day to buy what I will sell in the day but some times, I end of gaining nothing. 

Before 2pm, my lunch, is over and I start working till 6pm and I retire back home. When I reach home, I head straight to bed. I rarely have supper.

A day in the life of a street hawker, New Times

Eradicating Malaria in Rwanda

“In 2008, malaria was the topmost killer disease in Rwanda, but results have shown that now it is the eighth. Our aim is to eradicate it completely from the list of killer diseases in Rwanda,” she said.

The Demographic Health Survey conducted in 2010, indicates that malaria prevalence has decreased from 2.6 per cent in 2008 to 1.4 per cent in 2010 in children under five and from 1.4 per cent in 2008 to 0.7 per cent in 2010 in pregnant women.

Ministry looks to eradicate malaria, New Times

"We hate ourselves, we'll probably hate you too"

I'm supposed to be coming back to Britain in about a month. But the British government and the Guardian are doing their best to discourage me.

 

Meanwhile, it's sunny every day in Kigali. Rents are roughly a third of London - £250 a month including bills, a full-time guard, and a part-time cleaner who does all of the dishes and the laundry. Beers cost £1 each in most bars, tennis lessons cost £5 an hour, and there are outdoor swimming pools all over. It's clean and safe and there is no crime and no malaria and no traffic and there are business opportunities everywhere. And I played my first moto polo game (NYT, Youtube) this weekend, which I can confirm, as if you had any doubt, is insanely fun. Can everyone please just come join me over here instead?

Rwanda: The Trailer

This video is really great. Come and visit! Prepared for the Rwanda Tourism Board. Though why they decided to call it "Africa".... (they apparently changed the name to "Rwanda" - better!)


AFRICA from MAMMOTH on Vimeo.

There is no poverty in America...

... was the subject of a recent household debate. I'm talking, of course, about real, deep, absolute poverty, of the one dollar per day variety (at purchasing power parity, meaning already adjusted for the big price differences between rich and poor countries).

Exhibit A:

"By international standards the US poverty line of $23,050 corrected for exchange rates is around the average of world income, and is deemed a comfortably middle-class income in India" -- Deidre McCloskey.

Exhibit B:

A 1996 survey of users of homeless shelters and soup kitchens found a median monthly individual income of around $250 in inner cities in America (quite a lot higher than the $35 per month earned by about a billion people).

Exhibit C:

The housemate sent me a link to this paper which shows some quite shocking life expectancy outcomes for certain groups in America. If you pick out some of the very worst, you get life expectancy for black males in America of 68.7, or for Native Americans in South Dakota of 58 years. Compare this to the life expectancy of Rwandans, all Rwandans, not just those living in poverty, and you get 55 years.

And despite all this, it seems to be quite normal to feel more guilty about poverty in America or England.

Is there really poverty in America? Should we care? Can we just call it something different in America to be clear about the distinction?

---

Jina Moore's comments on this post below are excellent (though I think we still have some disagreements), as are her two articles in the CS Monitor about poverty in America here and here. 

Agonising over tiny moral problems

I take motorbike taxis to work most days here in Kigali. They are convenient, regularly roaming around the streets so you never have to wait long, they are fun, and they are cheap. A trip around town costs somewhere between 50p and £1, depending on how far you are going and what time of day it is. Which isn't bad compared to the £7 you can pay for a return tube trip in London if you forget your oyster card. It is so cheap I haven't bothered using my transport allowance (though perhaps I am under-pricing the small risk of accidents somewhat).

Most expats I speak to seem to worry about getting "ripped off" by paying a higher price than locals. As there is no set price or meter, you need to haggle. It isn't about the money (perhaps 20p), they say, but about the principle. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are all intuitive economists, who understand that it is their consumer surplus, and that the driver is engaging in price discrimination. "Consumer surplus" is the name in economic theory given to the gap between the maximum price that the buyer is willing to pay, and the minimum price that a seller is willing to accept. "Price discrimination" is where a seller tries to charge different prices to different customers (based on their ability to pay), in order to capture some of this surplus. Both phrases - consumer surplus, and price discrimination, suggest that maybe the expats are right to feel aggrieved at being conned out of their 20p. But does economic theory really tell us anything about the ethics of this situation?

For a concrete (and realistic) example, suppose the price for locals is about 50p, but the driver asks me for 70p. We are still a long way from the £2 it costs for that single tube trip in London (with the oyster card). Of the £1.50 consumer surplus, the taxi driver (who earns perhaps £2,000 a year at purchasing power parity - roughly the average income in Kigali*), is conning me out of 20p (13% of the surplus). I'm keeping £1.30 (87% of the surplus).

Is that really in any sense wrong? Or on the contrary am I wrong to keep so much of the surplus? Particularly given that the main reason I earn more than 10 times what the taxi driver does is not that I'm smarter or harder working, but that I was lucky enough to be born in a rich country not a poor one. What are the ethics of that?

Of course haggling can be fun. I often make a mock protest at the price, and then just leave a big tip and round up to £1. Thirty pence seems pretty cheap for a very big grin.

---

* Just realised that is average household income, so probably a substantial over-estimate of individual income. 

The Rwandan National Strategic... Rap Video?

This is definitely the first national strategic plan that I've worked on that has its own music video. Presenting... the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2 (EDPRS 2) song.

Underpants Gnomes in Rwanda

One of DFID's many genuinely excellent initiatives is requiring a detailed business case for all of its new programmes, so that there is a carefully thought through theory of change before any money is spent on implementing something new.

However a friend-known-to-be-witty suggests by email that DFID's theory of change for suspending aid to Rwanda seems to be pure underpants gnomes:

1. Aid to Rwandan domestic programmes is stopped
2. Rwanda stops alleged support for M23

3. ??????

4. Peace in Eastern Congo, and free ponies for everyone!!!!

Any better ideas?

Mapping rebel groups in the Congo

A bit of perspective - if M23 totally disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, there would still be more than 25 armed groups operating in the eastern DRC. All Rwanda's fault?

via BBC - Hattip - someone on my twitter feed

What about diplomacy?

Finally, cutting aid just strikes me as a fundamentally lazy and cowardly choice. If you want to achieve political goals, how about bothering to spend the time engaging politically and talking to people? Diplomacy brought peace to Northern Ireland and diplomacy brought a 2005 peace agreement to North and South Sudan. That meant long hours of hard work, and real political commitment. How many international leaders have even been to the DRC? Maybe if the collective international political community had demonstrated even the slightest regard for the people of the DR Congo through any actual tangible action then all of this posturing wouldn't leave such a bad taste.

A few reasons not to cut aid to Rwanda

The Rwandan High Commissioner to the UK has a good article in today's New Times on the aid cuts, highlighting the farce of continued donor failure to meet our own commitments on the predictability of aid. 

Budget support to Rwanda was frozen not because the country has failed to use it for the benefit of those who need it most, but to influence a political end in the DRC. There is no direct link between what is happening in the DRC and what aid achieves for ordinary Rwandan citizens. This is definitely not the right way to solve DRC’s problems. Rwanda should not be penalized for the failures of another country... 

One important point to underscore is that these political decisions directly affect the poor. They compromise the quality of aid which has an adverse effect on the quality of development outcomes and results. But fundamentally the belief that aid is primarily aimed at reducing poverty and improving the welfare of the poor is greatly undermined. Even ordinary citizens begin to perceive aid as a tool only intended for political control and to buy political leverage and influence. 

Well worth reading in full. Some of the points he makes include the frankly phenomenal successes that the Rwandan government has achieved over the past five years, with the support of foreign aid, such as

- the rapid growth in the economy, 
- the rapid fall in poverty, (faster than anywhere else in Africa, and amongst the fastest ever) 
- the rapid increase in agricultural output, 
- the rapid improvement in access to finance, 
- the improvements in healthcare (basically no malaria to worry about thanks to mass bednet provision), and
- increases in school enrolment.
- that people in Rwanda feel safe (the safest place in Africa?), 
- and see Rwanda as one of the least corrupt countries in Africa.

Despite this impressive progress, the government is impatient, and wants to deliver more and faster. A spokesperson for Tony Blair notes that "a recent study by the British Government showed that Rwanda was one of the most effective users of aid in the world."

Of course things in DRC are complicated and it's hard to know what is really going on, but I can't help feeling that putting all of these gains at risk by seriously threatening the economy of Rwanda is just a bit irresponsible.

(I should add that I'm presently in Kigali working on a project for the Government of Rwanda. These opinions are mine and only mine, so you can of course discount any of this as you wish, but the facts.... they are just facts).

The fiscal cliff in East Africa

So, when South Sudan makes a strategic choice to temporarily (but drastically) cut government spending in order to achieve political objectives, it is being "reckless". And when Western donors decide to temporarily cut government spending in Rwanda and Uganda in order to achieve political objectives, they are being... what exactly? Is there any evidence that sanctions are even effective? And it's lucky that our whiter than white British government has a totally clean record on corruption, human rights, and interfering in other countries... ahem, MPs expenses, Leveson, our Prime Ministers acting as arms salesman to Middle Eastern despots, our financial services industry laundering exactly the cash stolen from foreign governments that we pretend to care about, the invasion of Iraq... good job our citizens don't rely on foreign aid for basic service delivery then.

Measuring internal migration with mobiles

This is a cool idea by Joshua Blumenstock - measuring migration within Rwanda through mobile phone data. This video shows one person's movements over four years, proxied by the nearest mobile phone tower with each call made (the full paper is on his website). Are there any visualisations of M-Pesa transfers? I'd love to see a video along the lines of the Kiva one.


Mobility Inference from Call Data from Joshua Blumenstock on Vimeo.