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?

Stop highlighting our differences? #moreincommon

Last night at my local primary school Governor meeting one of the other governors objected to a table showing a disaggregation of recent pupil discipline issues categorised by ethnic grouping. “Should we really be calling children ‘White Other’ or ‘Black Other’?” Turns out these are the standard official government categories offered to students/parents to self-identify with. As a researcher I'm naturally interested in as many descriptive categories as possible to help understand the factors that drive differences in outcomes between individuals, but every time we ask the question we also ask people to think in ethnic or racial or national terms, highlighting our differences not the more in common. 

 

As Chris Dillow wrote recently in an excellent take-down of David Goodheart:

"The thing is, we all have multiple identities: I’m tall, white, Oxford-educated, bald, heterosexual, male, bourgeois with a working class background, an economist, an atheist with a Methodist upbringing. And so on and on. The question is not: what are my identities? But rather: which of these identities matter?

 

… 

 

Even if you accept biological essentialism, the question of which of our multiple identities becomes salient is surely in large part a social construct.

 

...

 

No good can come from raising the salience of racial or ethnic identities."

The issue comes up often in national censuses. For the last South Sudan census in 2008 it was decided it was too politically charged to ask people their ethnic group. Lebanon hasn’t had a census to count the number of Christians and Muslims since 1932. In the UK, the government recently started asking schools for pupil’s nationalities, with a stated aim of allowing for better targeting of support, but leading to widespread suspicion and calls for a boycott. 

 

The first step to thinking about when we should and should not ask for ethnic identities might be assigning some plausible values to the likely costs and benefits of doing so. A new paper by Evan S. Lieberman and Prerna Singh has taken a systematic approach and coded over 1000 census questionnaires for 150 countries over 200 years and whether they ask for ethnic identities. 

"Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war”.

That seems like a pretty high price to pay.

Breaking: The country is going to the dogs

One of many bizarre things about public opinion on immigration in the UK is the divergence in opinion between impacts "on your local area" and impacts on the country at large. People are much more worried about the country than about their local area. 

Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future who commissioned a recent survey showing this fact, said to the Guardian:

"People are obviously very anxious about immigration. But I was struck by how much higher it was as a national rather than a local tension. That to me suggests that managing local tensions is obviously very important, but it is probably not the answer entirely because people have this national-level concern. 

"I think it would be wrong to say that local concerns are real and national concerns are just driven by the media, but I think what is going on there is people asking: does the system work? And I don't think anyone has any confidence as how it is managed as a system. Also there is a concern around national cohesion, identity and ability to cope with the scale of change."

Clearly he's being polite here. How on earth do people know how immigration is affecting the rest of the country except through the media? Are survey respondents travelling up and down the country carrying out their own research each weekend?

A nation is an "imagined community." In your own local area you know people. By contrast: "[A nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".

So almost by definition it is true that national concerns about immigration are driven by media. 

This phenomenon is not just limited to immigration. A recent Populus survey finds that people systematically think that things are going worse "for the country as a whole" than for "you and your family". Is it even possible for things to be going well for all of us as individuals but badly "for the country as a whole"? What is the country as a whole but the aggregation of all of us individually? 

Maybe just maybe it is in fact our relentless diet of media pessimism that is giving us a distorted view of reality?

Chart of the Day: What do Africans think their governments should be doing?

Afrobarometer asked over 33,000 Africans between 2010 and 2012 what the most important problem facing their country that government should address is. Here are their answers. With apologies for the tiny font, but it's worth reading down the full list (I left off a few of the country-specific responses at the bottom).

Data from: Benin 2012, Botswana 2012, Burkina Faso 2012, Burundi 2012, Cape Verde 2011, Ghana 2012, Kenya 2011, Lesotho 2012, Liberia 2012, Malawi 2012, Mali 2012, Mauritius 2012, Namibia 2012, Nigeria 2012, Sierra Leone 2012, South-Africa 2011, Tanzania 2012, Togo 2012, Uganda 2012, Zimbabwe 2012 (Base=33598; Weighted results)


I'm quite surprised by how high up water supply is, but less surprised by the top 3 of unemployment, the economy, and poverty. The public policy challenge is still, first and foremost, about broad-based inclusive economic growth. Interesting to compare this with Justin Sandefur's analysis of what African researchers care about (jobs).

The tragedy is that we don't really have a clue what policy instruments can create jobs. For most of sub-Saharan Africa the challenge is a lack of demand for labour. What is needed is a way of linking African workers with consumers who have money - who are mostly in rich countries. This link could come in 3 ways:

1: Trade. Africans stay where they are and export things to rich countries. This one looks difficult in most countries, which are uncompetitive with poor Asian countries in manufacturing, and don't yet have the skills or infrastructure for high-tech service exports. Gains to agricultural productivity holds some promise, but faces serious barriers to getting going.
2: Migration. The Africans come to rich countries. An economic no-brainer, and a political non-starter.
3: Tourism. The rich people go to Africa. Tourism? Really?

There will probably be marginal improvements in all 3 areas, but its hard to see where the really big shift that could get millions of Africans up to rich country poverty lines of around $12.50 per day over the next generation is going to come from.

The very easy to use online Afrobarometer data analysis tool is here.

[and before anyone says it, of course Africa is not a country, but actually the patterns look pretty similar when you look at the country-level data, I just couldn't figure out a good way of showing that data visually - very open to suggestion]

Seeing like a State vs Seeing like a Donor

In which Justin Sandefur takes Chris Blattman and Bill Gates to school.... he argues that African governments don't need GDP data or internationally comparable micro survey data, they need good quality administrative data.

This, rather than the need for more duplicative household surveys, is the big challenge facing African statistics. Right now governments face a trade-off between high quality survey data of limited relevance, and low quality administrative data that actually fits their needs. It doesn’t have to be this way. But to overcome the trade-offs donors are going to have to back off with their pet survey projects, and stats bureaus across Africa will need to exert some renewed independence, and stop serving as research consultancies for donors.

Zing!

Love in Rwanda

Rwanda is one of the most loving countries in the world.

Sadly, I am telling you this not from personal experience (anecdotal data is rubbish anyway) but real hard survey evidence.

In 2006 and 2007, Gallup went to 136 countries and asked people, “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?” It’s the largest such dataset ever collected.

90% of Rwandans felt love, compared to the global average of 70%, and higher than the US (81%), UK (75%), and poor lonely Japan (only 59%).

Happy Valentine's Day

Surveys, lions, and suicide bombers

The opening paragraph of the OPM survey manual is fucking cool:

OPM has an ability to carry out surveys in amazing places, ranging from the deserts of Northern Kenya via the mountains of Pakistan to the tiny islands of the Maldives. People deal with the usual challenges of sand, snow, sea sickness, and occasionally with hazards such as lions or suicide bombers.

What do Africans think about the UN?

There is an interesting paradox here: the people (e.g., Mozambicans) who know least about the UN give it the highest rating, whereas people who seem relatively well informed (e.g., South Africans) have far more mixed opinions.

I'm not sure that paradox is the word they are going for there.... from Afrobarometer. 

Street kids in Sierra Leone

A fascinating new report from Sierra Leone of a census of street children (via the Guardian): . Some headline results:

• In total there are just under 50,000 kids living and working on the streets in Sierra Leone.
• About half live in Freetown and half in other towns.
• There is a roughly even gender split with slightly more boys than girls.
• These kids make up around 5% of the urban population.
• 4,388 children under 6 years old were counted.
• 2,699 children were found sleeping rough.
• 1,821 under-age girls were recorded as working in the commercial sex industry.
• 633 disabled children were counted.

I would have loved to have seen a slightly more detailed age breakdown, and more detail on the types of economic activities these kids are doing. I’m a lot more worried about 8 year olds washing cars and polishing shoes than 17 year olds selling mobile phone credit. 

Poverty down 12% in Rwanda

Rwanda launches its new poverty numbers today. Poverty has fallen by almost 12 percentage points in just 5 years. That is pretty incredible. Speaking at the launch, Paul Collier said  "The combination of growth, reduction in poverty and more equity has been achieved no where else in Africa."

Here is a comparison with international experience of poverty reduction:

I imagine that some commentators may have something to say about the political implications of all this. Not me. Just congratulations to the approximately 1 half a million* Rwandans who have managed to increase their income and work themselves out of poverty. And to the National Institute of Statistics and the Ministry of Finance & Economic Planning of Rwanda for getting these numbers out so quickly after the end of fieldwork. (And... to the team from OPM and Sussex who gave them a hand).

For more, follow @RwandaGov , @MinFinanceRw , #rwanda2020 , and you can find the full launch presentations here.

* A note on translating the % decrease into a number of people - I've heard the 1 million people lifted out of poverty line from a couple of people and that was also my initial estimate. The difference between 57% and 45% of the current population is 1 million people. However the population grew substantially between 2005 and 2010, such that around half of those people "lifted out of poverty" weren't actually born in 2005, but would have been born into poverty, so you need to be a little careful about saying "lifted 1 million people out of poverty". Actually half a million were lifted out of poverty, and half a million, were not born into poverty, which they would have been if the poverty rate had not fallen. 

Stationary Bandits

The 2009 World Bank Report Sudan: The Road Toward Sustainable and Broad-Based Growth and the 2010 GoSS Growth Strategy both highlight the issue of informal road checkpoints as a major constraint to trade within South Sudan, but primarily based upon (extensive) anecdote.

The South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) have now just released the results from the first survey of Check-points on Major Trade Routes within South Sudan. Following an approach used by Ben Olken and Patrick Barron in Indonesia Thailand (oops), the NBS hired enumerators to sit, unannounced, alongside commercial trucks travelling along major trade routes, and make notes of the location of each checkpoint, the amount charged, and time spent waiting. The results are pretty damning.

Check-points are numerous. There are 4 check-points per 100km or 1 per 25km along the major trade routes in South Sudan.  

Payment is widespread. On all except one route surveyed, drivers made a payment at an average of 97% or more of the check-points they stopped at. 

Payment is not confined to the international border posts. While the largest payments occur at the international borders, payment on internal routes can be up to 8% of the value of goods transported.  

Most individual payments are small. 47% of individual payments were less than 20 SDG and only 4% were more than 500 SDG. 

Total payment is significant. For all but two routes surveyed, average payment per 100km exceeds 100 SDG. For more than half the routes surveyed, payment per 100 km exceeds 200 SDG. For 10 of 21 routes surveyed, drivers pay 4% or more of the value of items carried. Even on purely internal routes, drivers pay out up to 8% of the value of items carried. 

Many payments are unreceipted. 47% of individual payments made during the survey were unreceipted. 27% of the total payment made during the survey was unreceipted. 

Waiting times at check-points are high. Across all routes, waiting time is on average 2 hours 9 minutes per 100km or 65% of driving time. 

The most commonly observed officials are police and traffic police, sighted at more than 50% of check-points respectively. In many cases, more than one type of official is present at a check-point.

 If the government is as serious about acting to stop collections at checkpoints as they say they are, this is plenty of evidence to go on.

Census love

"In the absence of actual data (such as an official census), NGO staff make a back-of-envelope estimate in order to plan their projects; a postgraduate visiting the NGO staff tweaks that estimate for his thesis research; a journalist interviews the researcher and includes the estimate in a newspaper article; a UN officer reads the article and copies the estimate into her report; a television station picks up the report and the estimate becomes the headline; NGO staff see the television report and update their original estimate accordingly." (source: www.humanitarian.info) (via Map Kibera Project)

I honestly had no idea that Kibera is less than 200,000 people, and not over a million, despite the Kenyan census establishing this fact taking place 2 years ago. Via the Africa Research Institute

More on Kids and Happiness

Justin Wolfers on why having children may not make you happy and the shortcomings of happiness-targeting policies:

When I ask other people who would say their kids had made them always happy, they’d say they’d still have kids and the reason is they get meaning from them. Or some deeper sense of something or other. And so it turns out there’s more to life than happiness. That’s actually really important because if you go back and think about these happiness debates, people are saying politicians should target happiness. Well if we really believed that, the first thing we should do is have mass sterilization policies. Now it turns out that that’s an absurd suggestion. And it’s absurd because there’s a whole bunch of other things we also care about. Now what that suggests is not that the happiness project is- is wrong and needs to stop, but it suggests that it needs to expand and start to take account of these other things. These crazy things that make us do things like go out and have kids.

I'd be interested to hear Justin's suggestions for how the UK should build on the new list of happiness questions to be included in national surveys.

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
• Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?
• Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

The future of data collection

The Sudanese like to talk, so giving out mobile phones is always going to be a winner. Gabriel Demombynes at the World Bank is now starting to get the first data in from the Southern Sudan Experimental Phone Survey which I wrote about last year.

In November, in conjunction with the Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, we delivered mobile phones to 1000 households in the 10 state capitals of Southern Sudan. Each month starting last December, Sudanese interviewers from a call center in Nairobi have phoned respondents on those phones to collect information on their economic situation, security, outlook, and other topics.

What is so exciting about this project is the sheer quantity and frequency of data that is being collected at relatively low cost.

For more info see Gabriel’s blogpost and photo essay, and make sure to follow his new Twitter account@gdemom.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Across the vast majority of countries, Africans perceive respect to be asymmetric. In other words, they believe they respect Americans and the Chinese but they don’t believe these two groups of foreigners respect them.

That’s from Gallup survey data. It’s such a shame all of Gallup’s fascinating data is private. Perhaps this is an area for more international public funding.

When Gallup asked Africans about the presence of foreigners in their respective countries, an average of 44 percent said there are “too many” Chinese and 16 percent said there are “too many” Americans. These figures hardly tell the whole story. Strong majorities in many of China’s trading partners perceive the Chinese presence to be overwhelming. For example, 93 percent of Botswanans, 89 percent of Angolans, 69 percent of South Africans and 68 percent of Zambians say there are “too many” Chinese in their countries.

Africans’ perceptions that Americans are too numerous are far less widespread. It’s highest in Djibouti as 51 percent of residents said there are “too many” Americans in their country and lowest in Benin (7 percent) and Zimbabwe (3 percent). However, relatively significant proportions of Angolans (37 percent), Sierra Leonans (30 percent) and Liberians (29 percent), among others, told Gallup there are “too many” Americans in their countries.

Poverty Figures for Southern Sudan

The full report is now available to download from the GoSS website.

This figure shows consumption by State. Upper Nile is the richest, being the State closest to Khartoum and with the best trading links to the North, followed by Central Equatoria, home of GoSS in Juba. The poorest states are in Bahr el Ghazal, presumably due to being the most remote from both Uganda/Kenya and Northern Sudan.

Consumption is unsurprisingly higher in urban than rural areas. The poor spend very little on anything besides food. The non-poor also spend a lot on food. Their main non-food expenditure is on transportation, demonstrating the importance of connectivity.

The SSCCSE is planning a series of reports looking into the data on education, health and agriculture. I can’t wait. You can see what is possible from the survey questionnaire, attached to the report.

The Child Labour Market in Juba

This chart comes from a fascinating new report on Child workers in Juba.

Economic Activities of Children working on the streets in Juba.

I’m really torn on whether it is a good idea to give money to these kids or not. They are usually around outside the Ministries washing cars, and polishing shoes at the local cafes. It seems like a classic aid problem of weighing the direct benefit vs the indirect harm. Is the meal today worth more than the disincentive to attend school?

I’ve tried to do a bit of homework (er, googling), and one of the foremost experts on the economics of child labour seems to be Kaushik Basu, previously a professor at Princeton and now Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India (he has written a book on the subject - see here for the review on Marginal Revolution). Sadly though all I can really find are government policy recommendations, with no suggestions for the concerned individual (although there are some general concerns about potentially perverse impacts of well-meaning trade boycotts at the national level.

Any ideas?

Finally back to that report. It doesn’t tell us how many of their interviewees just work on the streets, and how many live there too. It doesn’t tell us how the questions were worded. It doesn’t have any cross-tabulations. Next time I would recommend paying a visit to the SSCCSE for some statistical advice.

New Poverty figures for Southern Sudan

The Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics, and Evaluation (SSCCSE - yes its a bit of a tongue-twister, but still probably easier to say and remember than the SSFFAMC), released yesterday the results of the first ever nationally representative household survey in Southern Sudan.

The headline to note is that “poverty” is considerably lower than previously estimated. In 2005 somebody licked their finger and stuck it in the air, and decided that probably about 90% of the population was living below a poverty line of $1 a day. This figure then got quoted and repeated in the opening paragraph of every report written since. Back to the drawing-board guys.

The new poverty line (based on a basic calorific intake plus a bit of non-food consumption) is SDG 73 per month - roughly a dollar a day at official market exchange rates (but a bit less at actual unofficial market exchange rates).

50% of the population falls below this poverty line.

Average consumption is SDG 100 per month.

More to come as soon as I can find an online version I can link to.

And does anyone at SSCCSE want to comment?

The best thing about skyrocketing mobile phone prevalence in Africa that you haven’t heard of yet

is surveying.

Mobile phones are already transforming markets by allowing information on prices to be shared, and are showing the potential to transform service delivery in education, health, agriculture and emergencies (hey TH where is that paper huh?).

I’ve recently heard rumours though of a household survey to be carried out in Sudan via mobile phone. Brian Dillon is trying this already in Tanzania with EDI.

The idea is that you do a regular door-to-door survey first, but also take down everyone’s mobile number so that you can make follow-up questions.

The reason that this is so exciting is it allows for the tracking of changes to individuals over time rather than just the usual one-off snapshot. This gives you a much better shot at untangling causality, and figuring out the process of how people get richer, rather than just describing the characteristics of those who are already rich.

And if research is like a piano recital, then just maybe, a massive proliferation of cheap longitudinal data collection and a thousand research papers, could result in just one crucial insight that could transform the lives of millions.

Barely getting by

Walking through the markets of Juba, women selling vegetables, tea and managing local food outlets catch your eyes most.  We do not do these odd jobs because they are our favourite, said Elizabeth Wani, a tea seller. “This is the only way we can find an income since we are illiterate,”.  Ms. Wani like most of her colleagues makes a living of less than 15 Sudanese pounds (5$) per day.

 

Betty Nyadeng, a 15 year old serving in a local hotel makes 10 Sudanese pounds (3$) in a day which caters for her two daughters and four siblings. “If I had an education, I would be earning more for my siblings,” she said upon tears. She added that her eldest sister passed away while giving birth early this year due to the hard times she went though while pregnant.

From SudanVotes.com

The SSCCSE are killing me, I can’t wait to see some published household survey data.