After Google Reader

I've left it to the very last minute to switch. For what it's worth - I'm now using feedbin, mostly because it lets me keep using the excellent Reeder app on my iphone. And until the new Reeder app comes out for ipad (with feedbin support), I'll be using Mr. Reader on the ipad (which is pretty decent but not quite as good as reeder). Something about feedly didn't quite do it for me.

Social media and the End of NGOs?

Then of course there is the issue of whether in the future we will even need international NGOs any more. Will people just be able to use social media to directly sponsor a child in the community? 

In development there is a tendency to think about trends and gradual change but we need to be aware of the possibility of disruptive change. Development may face a complete sea change at some point - similar to what happened to the music industry where suddenly downloads decimated the CD market. However, preparing for that is more difficult: usually the change that comes is not what you put on your risk register.

Caroline Harper, chief executive of Sightsavers interviewed in the Guardian

"Nature is not on our side"

I enjoyed this riposte from Rob Rhinehart to critics of his new chemical liquid food which fall prey to the "appeal to nature" fallacy;

Nature is not on our side. Most of it is trying to kill us. Nature abounds with neurotoxins, carcinogens, starvation, violence, and death. It is technology that makes our lives so comfortable. We have a responsibility to protect the environment, but it feels no such responsibility for us. Technological innovations should be thoroughly tested and verified to be safe, and they are. Besides being an arbitrary distinction, being "natural" is absolutely no guarantee of safety, usefulness, or practicality. Today it is often the opposite. I think it's a little weird to eat food that comes from a tree. Do we still use leaves for clothing? Like diet, balance is key. I am glad to drink fluoridated water for the same reason I prefer the natural sky. It's healthier.

I'm looking forward to trying some.

"God must be a white man"

An excellent, heart-felt lament in the Sudan Tribune from a man with what must be an incredibly difficult job, the Auditor General of South Sudan, Steven Wöndu.

Donors beware! The African big man eats without limit. He accumulates without consideration for the needs of others. ‘Enough’ does not exist in the dictionary. Africans in power do not want to consider the fundamental zero-sum concept that the more you scoop from the common pot, the less everyone else gets. They refuse to ponder the life or death consequences of misappropriating resources intended for interventions in maternal care, solid waste management, infant vaccination, and clean drinking water. They do not feel the danger of living in a massive mansion surrounded by tragic slums. In the rare event that an African big man visits a village, he would ‘donate’ a class room, or a clinic or a road that would never exist except in the government’s financial expenditure schedule of that year. The announcement of the fake donation is proof that the big men know the needs of their people. Why they choose not to do the right thing beats imagination. But then, they are modern African big men! 

We are very efficient in taxing our poorest people mercilessly. In Africa, a woman with three chicken eggs to sell because the baby has fever is taxed in the village market. Nobody knows the destination of Africa’s tax proceeds. We only know they do not go to municipal services. Municipal services my foot! In Africa, every upper class household is a municipality with a mayor, a generator, a bore well and a septic tank. In Africa top government officials proudly import 4-wheel drive SUVs duty free. 

In other parts of the world, corrupt officials risk prosecution, fines, imprisonment or even hanging. There is a judicial deterrent to graft. In Africa, impunity is the norm. In the best case scenarios, selective justice is applied. Only the ‘small fish’ see the jail house. Reports about major embezzlement in high places only warrant inconclusive investigations. That is why African corruption is not practiced discretely. There is no need to disguise sleaze. Conversely, scruples are equated to stupidity. That is why African auditors have no difficulty reaching adverse findings.

via Abhijeet Singh 

How to invest in Africa

Todd Moss and Ross Thuotte at CGD made the case a few weeks ago for investing in Africa (literally). 

The question for how best to do this popped into my head a few weeks ago at a conference on business in Africa. So what can you do? I have some very meagre savings, and interest rates are so low right now in the UK they may as well be stuffed under my mattress. Surely there is a way of tapping into the high growth in developing countries?

I asked the question on twitter and got these five responses:

‏@davidcshipley: There's plenty of options which will get you way more than 2% - EMD, AR strasts etc. (Not investment advice). for Africa specifically there are some frontier funds which directly focus there, plus EM Eqs which have some allocation 

@Scott_Gilmore:  Try http://myc4.com  

@StyledByAfrica: Check out @Homestrings about investing in Africa 

‏@tylercowen: Some contemporary African art is fairly liquid, it has a high bid-ask spread but one way to start... 

‏@RealClearAfrica:  http://investinginafrica.net/#cat-1

Anyone have any experience with any of this or any other tips?

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]

"Aren't you going to recycle that?"

I'm terrible about remembering to recycle. It's partly moving about so much and not keeping up with the different rules in each city. It's partly just laziness.

Andrea reprimanded me for forgetting last week, and after some debate I realised that though she was right about the recycling and my excuses were lame, I was annoyed about the reprimanding. Or rather interested - how and when did it became socially acceptable to reprimand people for forgetting to recycle, or for wasting food as the pope just did (by the way, it's great that this new pope is such a do-gooder, but wow is he a naive do-gooder for someone who has presumably been in the do-gooding business for... how many years?).

And why is it not socially acceptable to reprimand people for wasting money on crap they don't need when they could be giving it to charity and saving lives? Sure it's annoying, but so is being reprimanded about recycling.

In the UK at least I think a lot of this is our squeamishness about talking about money in general. As Kate Fox writes:

Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social life is well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nor do you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social contexts, there is a sort of ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo, in that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic ‘rules of Englishness’ to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism and other forms of hypocrisy.

But at the same time it is kind of nuts that there are such good giving opportunities out there to make the world a better place and we're not allowed to talk about them. In the UK only 39 percent of people give more than fifty pounds a year to charity (NPC 2013). Of those, the average amount for "mainstream" donors is £303 a year, for high-income donors £1,282 a year. Meanwhile, you could be saving a child's life for as little as £1500.

I have a bit of an advantage here because I'm from Yorkshire. As Kate explains:

There are pockets of stronger resistance to the money-talk taboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself on being forthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mincing, hesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money.

Also it's much easier to type things into the internet ether than to actually say them to people in person. So consider this an annoying reprimand. We have the tools. We have efficient, low overhead, transparent, charities that have proven impact on poverty and child health. Excuses about waste and corruption just don't cut it any more. Aren't you going to recycle that?

Addendum:

I waste money on crap I don't need all the time, and it's annoying to be reminded of that. But is it bad to be reminded? Shouldn't I feel guilty? Andrea owes me some money, and so I'm making her give it to poor Kenyans via givedirectly.org instead of back to me, mostly just in order to annoy her or something. Which had instant positive results - she writes "excellent punishment actually. I started searching "bobbi brown cream eye shadow" and had to close it because the givedirectly page was open right next to it". How about that for a nudge - keeping a givedirectly tab open in your browser all the time?

Social Spending and ethnic diversity

The core of a David Goodhart's "left-wing" argument against immigration is that racial diversity makes it harder to sustain high levels of social spending. 

I don't necessarily disagree with the point, but harder does not mean impossible. 

The argument is motivated by work by Alberto Alesina and other economists at Harvard. Alberto Alesina is a smart, original, and prolific thinker who does a lot of interesting work. But this particular paper, was never actually published in a peer-reviewed journal. The chart below is the main empirical result driving their argument (from this paper). 

As David is not an economist, I'll break this down for him slowly. This is called a "scatterplot". Social welfare spending as a percent of GDP is on the vertical axis, and an index of racial fractionalization is on the horizontal axis. You can see that there is a negative relationship between the two, but there is also a lot of variation around the fitted line.

A few observations:

- All of the European countries have relatively low levels of racial fractionalization - below 0.2 - but being European actually tells you very little about levels of social spending, which are spread widely between low spending Iceland and Greece, and high spending Belgium and Luxembourg. 

- Removing the European countries would remove the negative trend. Japan (almost no diversity) has almost exactly the same social spending as high diversity Brazil or US. Low diversity Costa Rica has the same social spending as high diversity Mauritius. 

- Looking at the UK - imagine that the UK began to approach New Zealand or US levels of diversity - does that mean we would have New Zealand levels of social spending (higher) or US levels of social spending (lower).

The key point from just looking at this chart is that even if there is a relationship, which it is not even clear that there really is if you consider Europe separately to the rest of the world, diversity is not destiny. Social spending is a policy choice. Diversity might influence this policy choice, but so do a lot of other things. Even if diversity did make social spending harder, it does not make it impossible. Correlation is not causation. Etc. QED. 

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.

"Poverty Barons"

From the independent review of DFID's use of consultants:

ICAI reviewed the DFID Central Procurement Group and a range of programmes with a combined contract value of £264 million. The case studies show that contractors are an effective option for delivering aid. DFID has selected contractors that have delivered positive results at competitive fee rates. DFID’s poor end-to-end programme management, however, has led to delays. In the case studies that we examined, this has had the greatest impact during the mobilisation phase and is exacerbated by a lack of ‘whole life’ individual responsibility for programmes. In addition, learning is not being captured from contractors or used to inform future programming. 

The reform of DFID’s central procurement group has improved processes but is too slow and lacks prioritisation. As a result, decisions to use contractors are not guided by a strategic plan to deploy the right contractors, including major, niche and innovative new entrant organisations, to best effect.

via TNL

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!

This TED talk will probably save someone's life

Are private school fees in India "inflated"?

Adventures in fact-checking exfam lefties

Swati Narayan on Duncan Green’s blog celebrates a new law passed in India reserving 25% of private school places for underprivileged kids. As part of the deal, the government reimburses private schools, but only at the level of government per pupil funding rather than necessarily the fees charged by private schools. Swati writes:

The Act is categorical that the state will reimburse private schools only based on what it spends per pupil in government schools, which is typically much less. For-profit private schools are therefore keen to pass on the burden and increase their already inflated fees for the remainder of the class.

Are those fees really inflated? It is possible that high-end elite schools are getting a raw deal here, but most private schools are not high-end elite schools. Here are some numbers from Karthik Muralidharan, who is possibly the global expert on the economics of education in India. In his survey of rural primary schools in Andra Pradesh, spending per pupil at government schools is typically five times more than at private schools.

Average spending per pupil at government schools: 7680 rupees ($140) per year

Average fees at private schools: 1330 rupees ($24) per year

Right then. I don't have a strong opinion about this new law, but let's maybe have less demonisation of private schools in poor countries where the public education system is pretty dysfunctional yeah?

PFM in Myanmar: do you have to choose between coordination and flexibility?

This is a guest post from Ben French (a policy adviser formerly based in Juba)

Following two short recent visits to Myanmar where I was looking at the Public Financial Management (PFM) and Planning aspects of Myanmar’s reforms, I kept encountering the same question: How to balance coordination between donors with the need for a rapid and flexible response to reform?

The PFM reform programme in Myanmar has strong government leadership and appears to be off to a good start. In line with best international practice, development partners, under the leadership of the World Bank, have taken the initiative to coordinate amongst themselves. This has been followed by the establishment of a donor-government PFM working group. Almost all donors interested in the sector have aligned behind this which is very much to the credit of both the government and the World Bank. The working group has been the locus for coordination of PFM activities with the recent PEFA (Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability Review) and the PER (Public Expenditure Review) to show for it. This coordination sets an impressive and important precedent for government leadership and donor cooperation in PFM. Moreover, it shows that the international community has been learning from experience and is prioritising planning and coordination (as discussed in this report by ODI).

At the same time, Myanmar is changing rapidly and has only 24 months to deliver on its reform agenda before the election period takes hold in the run up to 2015. Within this period there is a need to embed the government’s reform process into its day-to-day functioning, in order to limit backsliding and to strengthen the hand of reformers. Given this, a more immediate, direct and flexible package of support is essential and critical in direct contrast to a more measured approach focused on laying the foundation for future work through planning and studies.

As an observer looking in, there is considerable tension between the ongoing planning and coordination for future larger scale programming, and the immediate support needed by the government in order to prepare the ground. I wonder how to strike a balance between coordination and planning and a rapid, flexible response? Is it a zero-sum game between the two? A balance is clearly called for as running in too quickly without a coordinated, joint government-donor plan leads to poorly sequenced, uncoordinated reforms that are poorly understood at the national level. However, if those reforms aren’t supported right now they could die on the vine before any of the future planning gets a chance to take root.

In the context of Myanmar, and other countries with both immediate and longer term PFM needs (usually conflict-affected, post-conflict, fragile states as well as countries in political transition) it seems that the government and donors can become stuck in a cycle of ‘planning to plan’ at the expense of delivering a quick, flexible programme of support. Granted, immediate support will not resolve all issues but they do ‘soften the ground’ for the long term and are complimentary to that long term planning.

Obviously, context and circumstance are essential for determining the balance between the two. However, the balance must be considered and there are a number of ideas worth considering.

First, delivering quickly and rapidly builds trust between partners which is important in and of itself but is also critical for the success of any cooperation long term. The concept of building trust through short term support that supports basic skills and processes within government demonstrably achieves the objective of building relationships between various stakeholders - and not just at the senior policy level but down in the trenches where support for long term programmes is most critical. In other words, keep it simple stupid. Provide focused training and support to the current reform process with the aim of making the government an intelligent customer which is able to determine what it needs and wants from the range of options it will be presented.

Second, recognise that even if short-term support is limited it can be clearly and easily linked to future programme development and planning. Rapid implementation should not be allowed to evolve into full implementation but it can, and should, provide useful experience and information to inform the long-term full implementation. In practice this will mean that flexible, upfront, support will need to focus on basic training, simple implementation and refinements to systems and process (see some other interesting work from ODI here, and here).

This balancing act is starting to take place in Myanmar with the EU and JICA placing technical advisors in the Ministry of Planning who will build government capacity and understanding on how to effectively coordinate and engage with other government agencies and development partners across a range of sectors (health, education, electricity, etc.). This short-term approach will be implemented prior to and whilst a longer term plan takes shape, both meeting the government’s need for reform support and allowing the development partners to demonstrate rapid success.

And finally, a warning. Any short term, flexible support should be designed in such a way that it co-opts as many stakeholders as possible Short-term support parachuted in, acting in isolation, and with no tie to long-term goals undermines the balancing act. At minimum this should mean that the short term support is part of the coordination process and reports to all the actors involved in coordination. Various World Bank and regional development bank trust funds do this reasonably well when there are funds available.

These general observations should, by no means, detract from the on-going successes in coordination in countries such as Myanmar especially as these pockets of coordination are islands of sanity in a larger and more complex donor environment. Instead, this coordination should be fostered, incorporating both quick short-term support as well as long-term planning and research. Both are critical to confidence building between stakeholders, success of current reforms and PFM in the future. Finding, and striking, the right balance between planning and flexible support through good coordination is essential to long term positive outcomes.