Hedge Funds for Development? An evening with Ark

I spoke earlier this week at an annual retreat of a very different kind of charity – ARK. Set up by a bunch of hedge fund managers (it prefers the term ‘alternative investment industry’) in 2002, ARK raises a pile of money from glitzy gala dinners (see pic), and uses it to do what it calls ‘venture philanthropy.’ It focuses on education, child health (especially HIV and AIDS) and child protection and, like better known ‘philanthrocapitalists’ like Bill Gates, is fixated on measuring impact – hence the name, which stands for ‘absolute return for kids’.

The interesting part of the discussion was on what can be carried across from success in business and what can’t (see here for my previous review of Michael Edwards’ very critical book on philanthrocapitalists). When they enter the aid business, captains of industry and finance often act as if they regard all existing aid workers as imbeciles, who could easily achieve their aims if only they adopted private sector practices. What follows this hubris is often a painful learning curve. Sure, the private sector brings great skills in project management and prioritization, but there are some obvious and important differences when they enter the development arena.

In the absence of the clear bottom line of profit and loss, process matters much more – it’s not just about the destination, but how you get there. Is it inclusive? Who’s shut out of the decision making? Development is about recognizing the importance of power, and the way it is endlessly renegotiated and redistributed within society. This is particularly true in the case of children – I didn’t see much evidence (albeit only from a brief conversation and a cursory skim of their materials) that Ark has followed Save the Children and shifted from treating children as victims and beneficiaries, to promoting their rights and ‘agency’ – children as citizens, workers, individuals with opinions and desires.

And the focus on measuring impact and proving success doesn’t always sit easily with risk taking – a venture capitalist happily sees 19 out of 20 projects fail, if one succeeds big time. The same does not go for ‘venture philanthropists’, who sometimes seem just as risk averse as the rest of the aid industry. Are the private sector searchers being squeezed out by the planners?

Judging by our conversation, Ark staff are serious and thoughtful about development, and seem to be going through the same process as many charities before them – starting out with individual projects, then realizing that broader programmes are needed to reach significant numbers of people, then seeing the need to tackle systemic obstacles to development through advocacy (which is best combined with programming, rather than done separately).

But it would be a waste if it just became like all the other charities – what might its private sector DNA add to the mix? My suggestion was that Ark should focus on understanding and influencing developing country elites, a much-neglected group in our campaigning and research. How to change their attitudes to their poor compatriots, paying their taxes, respecting labour standards in the firms they own etc etc?

And in ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ mode, might Ark like to use its links with hedge funds and other financial institutions to get some insider support for a Robin Hood Tax? No harm in asking, eh?

(This session was with Ark’s international team. It is also deeply involved in building and running Academy schools in the UK, something about which I have personal qualms, and is about to open an enormous Zaha Hadid-designed new school at the end of my road in London . If we’re overrun by vandals, at least I’ll know who to complain to…..)

Channel 16: a new crowdsourcing initiative on disasters and conflict

This is exciting – a new crowdsourcing initiative on humanitarian emergencies that combines wikipedia, youtube and Ushahidi to dig deeper, be more user-generated and more linked to taking action than standard media coverage. It’s called Channel 16, and here’s the blurb:

“Named after the broadcast frequency of an international distress signal, Channel 16 creates a new frontline for responding to global crises. Via Channel 16, people can see reports from the epicentre of humanitarian emergencies and long term crises and learn what actions they can take to help.

Channel 16’s international network of eyewitness bloggers provides a view from the ground, not a newsdesk. This access to unmediated, direct news makes Channel16 a unique source, unembedded in any army, uncensored by any regime, unprejudiced by any agenda other than to help those in need.”

For a taste, read this account by an aid worker of surviving the chaos of Mogadishu on the 50th anniversary of Somalia’s independence.The remit is humanitarian, with pages on the Pakistan floods, child soldiers hunger and floods in the Sahel, and education and conflict. Channel 16 is looking for original content -  text, stills or video – uploaded from areas of humanitarian emergency by email, text, twitter, phone or online. It’s geared to advocacy and action on humanitarian issues, as well as raising awareness. And it’s also available in French and Spanish. Check it out.

[declaration of interest: Channel 16 is an independent organization, but Oxfam is supporting the initiative, along with War Child, Merlin, the International Crisis Group and lots of others]

Live where you want; powerpoint MLK; world’s most isolated man; Aid data galore; development jobs and Soviet Union meets tetris on youtube: links I liked

So if everyone in the world could live wherever they wanted, where would they all end up? Not the countries you might suspect – biggest proportional population increases would be in Singapore and New Zealand, according to a survey by Gallup. Biggest losers less surprising – Sierra Leone, Haiti and Zimbabwe would each lose half their population.

The powerpoint version of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech + management-speak [h/t Bill Easterly]

The most isolated man on the planet [h/t Chris Blattman]

Have you checked out the new Aid Data site yet? Vast amount of stats by donor, recipient, purpose etc. They’re still developing the site, but it looks pretty impressive already.

I don’t usually link to adverts, but if you’re interested in a career (for want of a better word) in development, you might want to check out Alanna Shaikh’s $2 a month newsletter.

A youtube that manages somehow to link Tetris (you know, that obsessive early computer game where there never enough long ones – the last time I engaged with games of any kind) and the rise (and fall) of the Soviet state. To music. With great lyrics. Wonderful. [h/t Global Dashboard]

Is food the new oil? Fertiliser wars and Brazil as food superpower

In the Financial Times, Javier Blas gives us the back-story to the attempt by the world’s largest mining company, BHP Billiton, to buy its largest fertiliser company, PotashCorp. Suddenly fertiliser is big business: in the first eight months of the year, deals valued at $61bn have been announced by companies in the industry, a high that more than doubles the peak hit in 2008.

Why? “Countries are starting to see potash much as they see crude oil: as a hunted, strategic commodity. But, as with oil, potash deposits are not evenly spread. A handful of nations – led by Canada, Russia, Belarus and Israel – command the bulk of the reserves. Eight companies control more than 80 per cent of global supply. Two marketing groups – Canpotex for North American producers and BPC for the Russian and Belarusian groups – dominate the global trade.”

And just as with oil, China is getting worried: “[It] has to import about half of its needs, a dependency that “may become a major threat to China’s fast-developing national economy and long-term strategic needs”, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a think-tank that advises the government. Little surprise, then, that its primary importer of the mineral, Sinochem, says it is paying “close attention” to the PotashCorp battle, suggesting the group could launch a counterbid.”

And Blas thinks this is just the start. “The bid for PotashCorp is a litmus test for how companies – and nations – view the prospect of a world with tighter food supplies. In the past century, anguish over who will feed the world has always been answered with breakthroughs that have more than compensated for growing populations. But if a Chinese state-owned company should plant its flag on the potash industry, it could indicate the introduction of a more cut-throat edge to the geopolitics of agriculture.”

Meanwhile, this week’s Economist focuses on the transformation of Brazil into the world’s first tropical food giant (see chart), without deforesting the Amazon (the action has been 1,000km away from the rainforest). It’s all down to the transformation of the cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, from scrubland to breadbasket.

How? Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, set up in 1973. Embrapa shows what publicly-funded R&D can achieve, transforming the cerrado’s acidic soils by mass application of lime, importing and adapting African grasses to make cattle ranching feasible, developing nitrogen-fixing bacteria suitable for cerrado soils and most important of all, turning soyabeans into a tropical crop through ‘old-fashioned crossbreeding’, and now GM. It has also pioneered ‘no-till’ agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed and so retains its nutrients (and its carbon): in 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.

‘Can the miracle of the cerrado be exported, especially to Africa?’, asks the magazine? Here’s its answer: ‘Brazil’s agricultural miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather, Embrapa’s was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the interventions worked together. Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn’t work and it took us 30 years to create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won’t take them so long. We’ll see.”’

What’s missing from these two articles on food? The people who grow it. The Economist dismisses Brazil’s millions of small scale farmers as ‘hobby farmers’, incapable of improving yields or playing a useful role. But countries like Vietnam have shown that given the right support, small farmers are perfectly capable of driving agricultural take-offs. Small farmers also constitute many of the world’s poorest communities. Will they benefit or lose as food becomes the new oil?

How about some MDGs for the TOP billion?

In the run up to the big UN MDG summit next month, this sweet idea comes from Andrew Revkin on his dot earth blog:

“Here comes a question to ponder over the weekend. There is a set of Millennium Development Goals for the poorest of the poor – a cohort of humanity sometimes described as the the “bottom billion.”

But, as yet, there is no set of such goals for those who are already living lives that many analysts say are consuming resources at a pace well beyond the planet’s carrying capacity, particularly if the habits that attend affluence – from greatly increased meat consumption to unthinking energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions – are adopted by another few billion people.

There are plenty who contend that unrestrained pursuit of prosperity is a prerequisite for a mix of environmental care and technological advancement that will continue to improve the state of the planet. But there’s self interest in an examination of how much is enough. Some analysts have found, for example, that diseases accompanying affluence exact a toll in lost years of human lives that is not far behind the losses from diseases of poverty. And then there’s the issue of what’s being pursued – the good life as defined in Vegas or by Plato.

The question: Would the world benefit from a set of millennium development goals for the “top billion”?”

[h/t Sam Bickersteth]

Locked latrines, meat offsetting and development apps

I just spent an enthralling couple of days at a get together of Oxfam GB’s country directors (CDs). A combination of group discussions and speed-dating as I talked to as many as possible of the incredibly impressive people who are on Oxfam’s frontline, lobbying ministers and officials, consulting poor communities and doing (lots of) management stuff. I picked up some examples of effective development work that I’ll highlight over the coming weeks, but here’s a few initial impressions and stories, with countries edited out just in case.

Climate change: it was striking what a mainstream part of aid work climate change adaptation and advocacy have become. Everyone seems to be doing it. Remarkable shift in just the last few years.

Driving implementation: several conversations about how, as countries have got increasingly involved in policy work, many have concluded that you can get more bangs for your advocacy buck by focussing on implementation of existing legislation, rather than demanding nice new laws that no-one takes any notice of. As one CD from Central Asia observed: ‘the elite know how to handle the expat aid consultants. You make sure they come in, employ senior civil servants, buy a new law and can declare success. Then the expat moves on and nothing changes.’

And some stories, good and bad, (and all completely unscientific and anecdotal):

In the Pakistan floods one of the reasons why people are reluctant to move to camps is fear of losing their land. People are clinging on as near as possible to their submerged plots, so that they can get back there as soon as possible when the waters recede. A stark example of the links between land rights and humanitarian work.

Ever struggled to explain the difference between outputs and outcomes? Try this. One CD in West Africa came upon a beautiful new row of shiny latrines. Padlocked. Why? ‘We wanted to keep them clean.’ Nice output (latrines) shame about the outcome (health).

In the Middle East we are doing some fascinating research on men and boys, and their attitudes to women’s rights and violence against women. What power are men willing to give up? Generally, no problems with women getting an education or a job, but complete opposition to adultery (by women, that is) or going out without permission – a man has to know at all times where his wife is. And two surprises – men don’t necessarily make better interviewers of other men, and violence often begins with mothers (not fathers) beating their sons.

And two whacky ideas:

We know that carnivores emit more carbon (loads more grain needed to produce a kilogram of beef than a kilo of, ermm, grain) and that levels of meat consumption are far greater in the rich countries. But vegetarianism by decree is never going to fly. Obvious solution? Meat offsetting. If I want a steak, I need to compensate someone in a developing country who is going to suffer the consequences, and probably eats a lot less meat than I do.

And as iPhones or similar 3 and 4G gizmos (I’m vague on the details) spread across the developing world, what would an Oxfam app look like? GPS tools for small farmers to help them reduce fertilizer or pesticide use? Ushahidi-style crowd sourcing for activists? All suggestions welcome.

Africa’s four different kinds of economies

I’m a sucker for typologies. I guess they’re a wonk’s equivalent of those ‘what were the ten best punk/ska/heavy metal albums of all time?’ discussions in the pub. Here’s a nice one from ‘Lions on the Move’, a breathlessly upbeat new McKinsey report on Africa. It finds four clusters of African economies + a few outliers. Click on the scatterplot for a clearer picture.

The clusters are
1. Undiversified oil exporters (Angola, Libya)

2. Diversified, successful exporters (South Africa, Tunisia)

3. Transition countries (Ghana, Kenya, Senegal) en route to joining group 2

4. What are somewhat euphemistically called ‘pre-transition’ countries like DRC and Ethiopia

McKinsey uses a measure of economic diversification and exports per capita as the two axes. The colour of the blobs shows GDP per capita, the size of the blob shows total GDP. As you go up the y axis to higher levels of exports per capita, GDP per cap also grows, but countries split into two groups – the oil exporters and the diversified economies.

It’s noticeable that the two classic ‘African success stories’, Botswana and Mauritius, don’t sit neatly in any of the clusters. Botswana has high exports per capita from diamonds, but has managed to diversify somewhat, while Mauritius is more diversified and a bigger exporter than even the ‘diversified countries’.

Of course, compared to yesterday’s post, this is all terribly static. Would be great to see how these clusters have evolved over time. Anyone want to have a go?

Fun with data: the history of the world 1960-2008, and you’re in charge

I just spent a happy half hour playing with this – the first of many, I suspect. It’s the latest version of the Hans Rosling/Gapminder graphs that I’ve blogged on before and this one is really user friendly – even I can get it to work. Just click here to start messing around. It allows you to construct a graph of how different indicators from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators dataset change from 1960-2008.  It gives you a ringside seat for a speeded up history of the world – an Olympian feeling, not playing God exactly, but more like being in his/her monitoring and evaluation team.

You can chose different pairs of indicators to see what patterns emerge, e.g. how GDP per capita and infant mortality rates are connected. The closer the bubbles are to a straight line, the better the correlation (you can still argue about causation though). You can highlight particular countries, or change the bubbles to reflect GDP or population or anything else you fancy, rather than have them all the same size. Click on the axes to change the datasets. Put the cursor over any bubble to identify the country – the outliers are the interesting ones. Magic. [h/t Aid Watch]

Missing revolutionaries; food regulation; localism is wrong; China v Japan; invasion of the Austerians; liberalism and 21st Century enlightenment and hello, humanitarian workers: links I liked

‘What have all the African Revolutionaries Gone?’ muses Chris Blattman (I think he means ‘where’)

Food corner: It’s time to regulate food markets, reckons former IFPRI director-general Joachim von Braun, reacting to the wheat price spike caused by the Russian export ban.

Is eating local food environmentally virtuous? Nope, says James Choi in the New York Times, taking aim at the ‘locavores’ [h/t Chris Blattman]

Last week China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. How do we know?

Paul Krugman inveighs against the Austerians, a religious cult that has taken over the minds of the world’s policy makers this year, demanding terrible human sacrifices to appease invisible (and largely imaginary) gods

Two for the intellectuals. On Global Dashboard, Jules Evans has been writing some long, intelligent essays on some Big Questions in political philosophy. First he ponders the limits of liberalism and explores the politics of pursuing ‘the good life’. Conclusion? Enough John Stuart Mill, what we need is a bit more Aristotle.  Next up he riffs off the back of a new RSAnimate youtube video of its boss Matthew Taylor on his new big idea – 21st Century enlightenment. If ‘we are mainly automatic, irrational creatures’, asks Jules, what does that mean for progressive thinkers?  (But guys, sharpen up your titles – why would anyone click on a post called ‘Drawing over-hasty Conclusions’?)

And finally, it was World Humanitarian Day last week, and here’s a moving (and thought-provoking) 4 minute video on the lives of humanitarian workers. Respect to the lot of them.

Visual metaphor of the week – the hanging donkey

My colleague Kate Raworth includes this gem in her presentations on research methods. It illustrates the tendency for policy papers to endlessly expand their remits – ‘just add it to the terms of reference’. Sharp, focussed initial ideas come to resemble Christmas trees decorated with everybody’s particular passion. From working on many Oxfam papers over the years, I feel a terrible sense of affinity with the donkey. And I’m sure it could be used for any number of other aid industry failings (suggestions welcome). Have people got any other all-purpose visual metaphors they can send over to enliven all our powerpoints? If so, send them over to research@oxfam.org.uk. I’ll stick the best ones up here.