Dowden on DFID

Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society on the new DFID Ministers. Interesting stuff.

How does it look from Africa? Two things matter for African presidents and ministers. They like to establish personal relationships and trust in face to face talks with the same people over a long period. Secondly they like to deal with people who know something about their country’s history. They do not like ministers who talk down to them (as Mitchell did) or those who just read a brief on the plane as they fly in (as Douglas Alexander did). 

The recent reshuffle ignores these aspects and casts doubt over how much this government cares about development and its relations with Africa.

... 

[Greening] talks of a line by line investigation to ensure value for money which sounds good, but is actually nonsense. How can someone with no experience of development, with an annual accounts mentality, judge the value of long term development projects?

... 

although the indications are not propitious for a dynamic team working creatively to help get Africa nearer to the MDG targets in the next three years, I will not write off any of these appointments. But they look more like internal political expediency than what Africa and the rest of the developing world needs right now.

War and Peace

Presidents Bashir and Salva Kiir met in Addis yesterday to finalise a peace deal.

Just two days earlier, Sudanese planes airdropped supplies, possibly weapons, to an anti-government militia deep within South Sudan. UN troops provided confirmation that planes dropped packages in the area. The Small Arms Survey also confirm the pattern through 2009-2012 of Chinese-made arms being supplied (in contravention of a UN embargo) by Sudan to militia in Darfur and South Sudan. 

Either Bashir is not serious, or perhaps more likely, he is not in control.

How do we scale up personalized support? (policy response to heterogeneity)

The CGAP Graduation pilots seem to be getting good results (evaluations with Esther Duflo here and Dean Karlan here). My instinctive reaction is that personalised, individualised, tailored support may very well be successful, but is it possible to set up systems to implement this routinely at scale?

The need seems to be clear. Perhaps the key bottom line from the microfinance impact literature is heterogeneity - people are different, their needs are different, and one-size-fits-all policy has all sorts of different impacts, both positive and negative, on different kinds of people.

Similar results seem to be emerging on support for small businesses (a lit review by David McKenzie here and and evaluation from Ghana here), and in education and early child development (see this great episode of This American Life covering Paul Tough's new book How Children Succeed).

Meanwhile in the UK, Iain Duncan Smith has decided that the benefits system is far too complicated (it is complicated) and so it needs to be simplified, rolling 6 different benefits into one "Universal Credit." But maybe, just maybe, complicated people need complicated support? And is that a realistic goal for developing countries with weak government systems?

Regional Integration - East African Community

I'm sitting waiting for a connection at Nairobi airport. I have about 80,000 Burundian Francs ($50) that I forgot to change in Bujumbura.

   Me: Hi, do you take Burundian Francs?

   Nairobi Airport Forex Lady: AaaaahahahahahhaHA! Nobody takes Burundian Francs!

Africa Express

What to say about Africa Express? I like Simon Ayre's take:

After five days of thinking about it, it’s time to write something about the Cardiff leg of the Africa Express tour that traveled across the country last week. But what do I write that hasn’t already been said? How do I put into words an experience that left me sat down staring into space for nearly forty minutes when I got home?  

I can’t. I’ve tried, I’ve deleted what I’ve written and tried again and again. I’ve given up and come back to it- I just can’t come up with anything that would do it justice.

Here's a five star review of the Manchester show, and a detailed review of the London show. Apparently Fatboy Slim called a Mali trip "like the greatest ever edition of Later ... with Jools." Which is close but not quite right. It's better than that. The London show was more like a live 5-hour mashup-style remix. Like Girl Talk played by 50 live musicians jamming.

In any case, thanks to Damon Albarn and Ian Birrell and all of the artists for making it all happen.

This audience-shot video gives a bit of a taste (HT: Matt).

First, do no harm: Post-2015 Development Goals

Some ideas from Dani Rodrik put the priority on the responsibility of rich countries to not get in the way of development, so;

• carbon taxes and other measures to ameliorate climate change;
• more work visas to allow larger temporary migration flows from poor countries;
• strict controls on arms sales to developing nations;
• reduced support for repressive regimes; and
• improved sharing of financial information to reduce money laundering and tax avoidance.

How not to market your university

From the website of the University of Burundi (with thanks to Google Translate). Where do I enroll! To make a serious point though, is this a pernicious influence of the aid industry?

How to improve capacity building

Shanta Devarajan at the World Bank thinks we should be focusing on demand-side interventions (demand for improved performance, rather than "supply-side" interventions focused on training etc to improve the supply of improved performance), and then doing rigorous experiments to test these interventions (yes, RCTs).

SD: It is definitely not just about technical solutions. At the first level it is a question of incentives. And it is even deeper than that. At a fundamental level, it is a problem of politics.

Well worth reading in full. (HT: TH)

Aid for Infrastructure in Fragile States

This is a guest post by Maham Farhat from OPM.

Development sometimes feel like a bit of a catch- 22. Economic growth requires decent "institutions" and political stability, but in many ways good institutions require a decent level of economic development to begin with. Nowhere is this more relevant in aid policy than large scale infrastructure development. Infrastructure projects have the potential to spur development through crucial inputs such as employment, connectivity and capacity building. But mismanaged they can do more harm than good, by fuelling corruption and environmental degradation. 

A recent report published by OPM and Mott MacDonald (funded by DFID) looks at donor engagement in infrastructure development in Fragile and conflicted affected states (FCAS). The findings of the report are striking. Donor engagement in FCAS is patchy on following the recommended OECD principles and there is surprisingly little hard evidence to support the notion that infrastructure development results in peace building and stabilisation. Or for that matter even simple and much trumpeted outcomes like employment generation are supported by little hard evidence. 

Existing evidence seems to suggest that "Quick Impact Projects" as implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan have a questionable record of achievement whereas community driven development projects have been shown to produce more lasting results in terms of encouraging peace and stability in local communities. Private investment can work wonders in sectors like power and telecom, a case in point being the rapidly developing telecommunication sector in Afghanistan, but attracting large scale private investment is difficult in the transport and water sectors where returns to investment are realised at a much later stage. A mix of case studies on South Sudan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Congo demonstrates that the effectiveness of donor aid in the infrastructure sector is highly dependent on country context. This is not to argue that infrastructure investment should be dumped by donors, just that much more evidence is needed to evaluate what works and what doesn't.

The link to the full report is here.

Do Urban Livelihoods Programmes Work?

Apparently not in Sri Lanka.

The authors conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business program. They work with two representative groups of women: a random sample of women operating subsistence enterprises and a random sample of women who are out of the labor force but interested in starting a business. They track the impacts of two treatments -- training only and training plus a cash grant -- over two years with four follow-up surveys and find that the short and medium-term impacts differ. For women already in business, training alone leads to some changes in business practices but has no impact on business profits, sales or capital stock. In contrast, the combination of training and a grant leads to large and significant improvements in business profitability in the first eight months, but this impact dissipates in the second year. For women interested in starting enterprises, business training speeds up entry but leads to no increase in net business ownership by the final survey round.

Suresh de Mel, David  McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff , "Business training and female enterprise start-up, growth, and dynamics: experimental evidence from Sri Lanka" (HT: @timothyogden)

Modern Growth and Development in the UK

We may still be coming through the deepest recession in living memory, but we are for the most part incomparably better off than we were in the Silver Jubilee year [1977]. Incomes have doubled on average. We need devote much less of our spending to necessities such as food, leaving us free to spend more on leisure pursuits. As a nation, we are vastly better educated. We have moved decisively away from a manufacturing economy towards one based on services. Many more of us work in professional and whitecollar occupations. Women are much more established in the labour market and have made particularly substantial strides in educational attainment.

From IFS, Jubilees compared: incomes, spending and work in the late 1970s and early 2010s

The sky is falling!

Amongst dire warning of pending global vegetarianism, the Guardian notes

"The UN predicts that we must increase food production by 70% by mid-century"

What on earth does that mean? Is that a big number or a little number? A little context maybe? Handily I've just finished reading Tyler Cowen's excellent "An Economist Gets Lunch," in which he notes:

"during the period 1949-1990, new technological innovations boosted agricultural productivity by an average of 2.02 percent a year. From 1990 to 2002, this same rate of improvement fell to 0.97 percent"

Where would those rates get us? By my calculation, we would need a roughly 1.35% annual rate to get to that 70% increase target by mid century. A significant increase on the present rate, but certainly achievable in the context of past gains.

(Note also that this is just pure productivity gains from technological innovation - meaning no additional land inputs required)

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.

Child-focused budgeting

Interesting new briefing note from John Channon here at Oxford Policy Management on his work with UNICEF on "child-focused budgeting." This represents an interesting strategic shift for UNICEF from doing project-based work to getting to grips with government systems and PFM in order to help governments think more clearly about the outcomes and impacts of their programmes in health, education, and social protection, and better achieve their own goals with regards to outcomes for children.

John concludes:

"For donors looking to adopt a similar approach to UNICEF, there is an important underlying message: to achieve the changes in service delivery that many donors want to see - and governments themselves want to make - effective PFM systems must be in place first. These are the foundations for enabling wider, more sustainable social change, as the PFM approach ensures funding is aligned with policy priorities and long-term goals, rather than simply financing short-term projects, however superficially attractive these may be."

See the full note (just 4 pages) here.