Fun and Games!

Today is a holiday so I will be mostly listening to techno (How to make international public sector accounting standards sound cool - UN Dispatch), playing computer games (Somali pirate game via Ethan Zuckerman, and maybe Marcel Fafchamps' Welcome to Africa game if it still works), reading comics (The Adventures of a Would-be Arms Dealer, again via Ethan Zuckerman), and watching Matt Dillon movies.

Monday Links

1. Thank god it's not only me: http://www.purgetheurge.com/ - HT: Oliver Burkeman

2. Sara Pantuliano (ODI, whoop whoop!) and Luka Biong Deng (Minister of Presidential Affairs) talk Abyei on Al-Jazeera - from Michael Kevane

3. The economics of The Wire (yes I'm a few years behind on this one, just finished season 3), which also reminds me of a discussion I read somewhere about Goodfellas perfectly summarising IR theory...

4. And finally, Hamas expose sexy zionist chewing gum plot

The Church of UN-tology

The new head of a UN agency here seems to be trying to make his mark on the place. I suppose its natural, the new Minister of Finance is also giving his Ministry a new lick of paint (literally), but I think the UN are probably winning in the crazy-stakes.

Apparently they had an away-day bonding type experience last week in which everyone had to swear allegiance to the UN, hand-on-heart and everything. Too funny.

New evidence against the Summers hypothesis on gender and innate scientific aptitude

""in those countries where more people held stereotyped beliefs about gender and science, girls tended to under-perform at science relative to boys."

Psychology Research Digest Blog

Mwenda on Obama

Andrew Mwenda, a big critic of aid, the Ugandan government and editor of Uganda's quality news magazine The Independent, is not impressed by Obama's speech. This quote is bang on:

"He thinks that Africa has failed because its leaders - either out of stupidity or bad judgement - made wrong choices. In focusing largely on the personality of individual presidents, Obama misses the incentives that make Africa's rulers make choices that harm/hurt their citizens. From this wrong premise, Obama proceeds, thinking that Africa's rulers can change their ways through moral exhortations."

Of course, leaders can choose to make good decisions, but why should they when all their incentives point them otherwise? The challenge is fixing those incentives.

HT: Blattman

Central Equatoria State Police at it again

After a number of Sudanese girls were arrested and beaten in Khartoum earlier this week for their "provocative clothing", it seems the Juba authorities are not about to be outdone, despite Salva Kiir telling them to stop this nonsense the last time they tried it. Today a girl from my office was beaten for wearing trousers. Being a clued in government employee she went straight to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (central government, above the state government who run the police) to register a complaint. Hopefully someone will sort them out.

Economists in International Agencies

Great quote from a lifer OECD economist (Stephen Morris) from 1986.

"Working for a long time at two or three removes from actual decision making, people working in international organizations can easily get out of touch with political reality and become over impressed by their own supposed omniscience. At the same time, because they do not have the power of a national government behind them, and can never be sure what real influence they have, they can become overly sensitive, defensive, or defensively aggressive."

Sounds kind of familiar.

Coats, A.W., The Role of Economists in Government and International Agencies: A Fresh Look at the Field, History of Economics Review

Former Finance Minister in SDG 6.2 billion ($2.4bn) Scam

If there are 8.2m people in Southern Sudan, then this equates to about $290 per man, woman and child.

Small luxuries

"one of the benefits to living and working in a place like Southern Sudan is that you learn to appreciate the small luxuries in life that many people take for granted on a daily basis. I am sure that I fell in love with Spain partly because of where I've been living for the past couple months."

Indeed. That's how I fell in love with Kampala and Addis (and London all over again).

The value of everything and the price of nothing

The World Food Programme runs a school-feeding programme in Southern Sudan.

In a country where primary enrolment is well below 50% this is clearly a fantastic initiative. However for government to effectively plan for its own activities it needs to know what its partners are doing.

WFP has not reported this programme during the government's planning process, because it DOESN'T KNOW HOW MUCH THE FOOD IS WORTH. And this despite being actively involved and attending meetings for the planning process. Presumably the food is donated in-kind - but seriously the WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME can't put a best guess on the cost of a quantity of FOOD?!!!

FAO are not much better. They have designed a survey on farming and fisheries, which includes a question on the respondent's preferences for types of fish. They questionnaire then lists 35 species of fish, along with their scientific names. The sampling strategy is also terrible. Their plan to sample more areas than exist in some counties is apparently due to the Census being incorrect, not their strategy.

Office Hawkers

A couple of years ago I spent the summer working in the office of a Microfinance firm in Uganda. One of the great features of office life there was the lady who would come by once a week with shoes or accessories to show to the women in the office. I was very jealous that I don't like ladies shoes or accessories.

In Juba the newspaper guy is pretty regular which is nice, the only trouble being that the writing isn't exactly going to be winning any prizes anytime soon. Today though, I did my first proper office-based shopping, a guy came round selling flash drives just when I've lost both of mine and I'm too busy to make it into the shops in town.

UK aid

DFID becomes UK Aid? Really?

As Lant Pritchett says about USAID

"The name of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is too clever by half. By forming the acronym "aid" it attempts to create popularity (who could be against "aid" broadly interpreted as "assistance" to the world's poorest?) at the expense of perhaps confusing everyone, including itself, about its actual mission."

TH wonders if this is the largest academic-inspired aid programme ever. I'm not so sure, as Keynes or somebody said, men of action are always slaves to some dead man of ideas.

Anyway more substantively, I do like the Collier-esque reorientation of spending towards security. You really notice the importance of security in places like Sudan. Why would anyone bother invest in the future when all hell might break loose at any moment? So yeah, lets spend more on security. But the Tories, they're bat-shit crazy "£9.1bn of overseas aid on funding for private schools"??? If the private sector is so awesome why does it need such huge subsidies? Wouldn't that destroy all their competitive cost-pressures which makes them so efficient in the first place? Obviously, what you want to do is subsidise the kids. Which is why I am interested by their voucher idea, even though my friend Alan ridicules it

"vouchers! why didn't anyone think of that before? 

then they can pop down to the local sainsburys and exchange those vouchers for essentials! lets sign them up for Nectar cards while we're at it! gosh - aren't these poor people lucky!"

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And finally

1. Free SOAS cleaners - "the man", picking on the little guy

2. And I love the dutch

Twitter

I now have a twitter account. I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet. Very few of my friends are on it. I've so far just responded to a couple of interesting comments by others.

I was very skeptical when I first heard about it. It sounded stupid. But then so did facebook and blogs when I first heard about them. So I was skeptical but curious.

And then all my favourite blogs started talking about twitter, and then I realised that a load of my favourite bloggers were also on twitter. So I finally caved. My god is this the end?

Happy Independence Day Congo

Here is Wronging Rights, Mo' Dernity Mo' Problems and Texas in Africa