Femicide, anger and struggle: stories of women’s activism in Honduras

Guest post from John Ambler, right, Oxfam America’s ‘Vice President, Strategy’ (ooo, can I be one of those?) on his recent trip to Honduras

I woke up early in the morning to the sound of gunshots.  Two, then three more.  I expected to hear sirens, but did not.  The police were taking their own sweet time.  Over 80% of the murders in Honduras go unsolved.  And when the trail begins to get close to the killers, as it did with the murder of the son of the president of the National University of Honduras, the drops of blood often lead to the doorsteps of the police themselves.  In such cases, where the blood stops, the impunity begins.

The murder rate in Honduras is 82/100,000, one of the worst in the world.  San Pedro Sula, in the north-east part of the country is the third most dangerous town in the world, after Kandahar and Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexican side of the American border.  Tegucigalpa, with its plethora of shotgun-armed private security company itself is not a city for walking. 

Women here are particularly vulnerable to all forms of violence and afraid to go out of the house in many rural areas.  In fact, many are not even allowed to go out.  The houses are not sequestered behind fortress-like mud walls, as I saw in Afghanistan, but from listening to the stories of women in Santa Maria de La Paz, three hours’ drive to the north off Tegucigalpa, the isolation, mistreatment, and humiliation women in conservative households endure is strikingly similar to the stories I heard in Ghazni, Shomali, and Kunar in Afghanistan.

The murder rate with female victims has been rising, leading to a small campaign against femicide by women’s groups. Churches (Catholic and Evangelical) sometimes talk about rights, but according to the women I talked to, they never do anything concrete.  Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out as being particularly patriarchal and unfriendly to women’s rights.  The women in Santa Maria de La Paz complained of the Church suppressing reproductive health information.  One woman had left the Church because of it.  I was really disappointed in the Catholic Church in particular.  There seems to be no new equivalent generation of “Liberation Theology” pastors to champion women’s empowerment, like the leftist firebrands of the 1980s.

Talking about their feminist activism in Santa Maria de La Paz, three of the women mentioned raising their 6, 6, and 11 children, respectively, in addition to being on 4 or 5 committees—the water board, the municipal audit committee, the transparency committee, the school committee, the PTA, the health committee, a savings and micro-credit group, the municipal women’s committee, self-help security group, a blackberry jam enterprise, and others I can’t remember.  There is even a club where pregnant women learn to sew.  They monitor government expenditures on things like the 2% that is supposed to be set aside in the budget for women’s issues, like the “Healthy Floors, Decent Roofs” program. 

Their stories were painful and powerful.  The first woman, the one with 11 children, said in a loud and confident voice that growing up her house had been plagued by incest.  Tears welled up in her eyes and another woman handed her a tissue.  She composed herself and in an even stronger voice said that when still a young teen she married a man who treated her as a slave, as did her mother-in-law, into whose house she moved.  (The scenario sounded eerily similar to the situation one finds in South Asia, where the son is the lord of the house, and his mother terrorizes the poor young bride, making her do all the grunt work, harassing her into submission, or suicide.)  She told of getting only a first grade education (she later learned to read and write); of having to put up with her husband’s wasting their hard earned money on drink and women.  She was often forbidden to leave the house.  She said that women could get no justice, that the police only support the big companies.  “They are not here for the people,” she said.  “They know the law, but they know money better.”  She said that someone had once come to her house with a gun, but she was not afraid.

Another woman said that she was 49 and had been married 35 years already.  She, too, got only a first grade education, but she is interested in politics and is now running for mayor.  She recounted how at the beginning of her engagement with politics she was told to sit in the back and shut up because what did a “dirty woman” know.  But she said that at least there had been no violence in her household, and her husband did not forbid her to go and join women’s groups and committees.  She talked of cleaning up the corruption in local politics.  When I said that politics is dirty, she rejoined, “Only if we are dirty!”  Good answer.

Everyone in the room was a member of the municipal women’s committee, except for two young women who just happened upon our meeting.  They had come to make a denunciation about domestic violence.  In this community of 11,590 people and 34 hamlets, the committee receives about 60 such formal denunciations a year, just the tip of the iceberg, I suspect.  One woman said everyone present in the room wore different colored clothing.  By that she meant that each of their stories had a different twist and turn to it, but that they all shared the basic plot structure:  intimidation, humiliation, exclusion, abuse, violence, exploitation, and sorrow.  Very deep sorrow.  And, many women were from the indigenous Lempa community, which faces even further discrimination from the government in terms of services and expenditures.

But the sorrow is now turning to anger.  The training they have gotten through Oxfam and its partners is helping them to organize and to raise their voices. 

“I am nothing, but all together we are something,” one woman said. 

“We were not organized to make a space for ourselves,”  said a second.

“We are not the shy women that we used to be, thanks be to God,” said another. 

After a rocky start, the women’s audit committee on public budgetary transparency and expenditure gradually gained the trust of the men.  They saw that the women, even though their level of literacy was limited, were actually asking good questions about the budget and following the money like bloodhounds.  The women were gaining real power and influence.

“In the past we were not even taken into consideration.” 

“When we are honest, the men can say nothing against us.”

“We can do this!  The men trust us.” 

This “struggle” (the word lucha was frequently used, the same word that was used during the wars of “liberation” of the 1980s) is not only one of networks and organizational tactics, but also of personal growth and sacrifice. In Santa Maria de La Paz, accompanied by nods and the thin smiles comrades at arms reserve for each other, one woman summed it up, “I am changed.”

And here’s an animation from the femicide campaign

Religion, making babies and ‘peak child’: brilliant new Hans Rosling video

Break out the champagne, the sword-swallowing data guru is back, with a brilliant performance on religion and fertility, delivered, as far as I can tell, in Qatar. Conclusion: ‘fertility has very little to do with the number of children in the world’, and fertility is falling rapidly, everywhere (due to women’s education and paid jobs + access to birth control) – the world has reached a 2 billion ‘peak child’ level. Compulsory viewing. And his entire back catalogue of TED talks (including the sword swallowing one) is on his Gapminder website.

update: OMG the Rosling backlash has begun, c/o Aid Thoughts and Lawrence Haddad coming over all grumpy. It just gets better.

Development’s 2 tribes; post-2015; the Big Dope Hunt; Save the Kids v The Economist; the next frontier; Millennium Villages under fire; African take-off: great advocacy videos: links I liked

And please don’t forget to fill in the reader survey to the right – only takes a few minutes, promise.

‘Both camps should show greater humility: macro-development practitioners about what they already know, and micro-development practitioners about what they can learn.’ Magisterial overview from Dani Rodrik of progress in the two great development wonk tribes – the macros and the micros (who just won the World Bank presidency, in the shape of Jim Kim)

New website on all things post-2015 (you know, what comes after the Millennium Development Goals etc)

‘Cannabis worth £5,000 found in bin bag donated to Huddersfield’s Oxfam Wastesaver depot’ A possible successor to the big bra hunt?  [h/t Liz Stuart]

Save the Children’s annual ‘State of the World’s Mothers’ report names Niger as the worst country in which to have kids and promptly gets attacked by the Economist, which makes itself look very silly indeed (read the comments) [h/t Alex Cobham] 

‘What is the next frontier? I would put money on industrial development and, with it, a new breed of industrial policy.’ Chris Blattman says forget RCTs, industrial policy is the next big thing (wait, wasn’t it the last big thing too?)

The blogosphere has been abuzz with critiques of the latest bit of self-serving hype, evaluation from the Millennium Villages Project – here’s a nice example from Aid Thoughts.

Five (interesting) reasons to expect developmental take-off in Africa, from the World Bank’s Africa Can blog.

What makes a top advocacy video (and here’s an example, on rape in the US military) [h/t Global Voices]

The IPCC Special Report on Disasters and Adaptation: more than just climate science

Guest post from one time Oxfam research team member Arabella Fraser, who is currently in the Department for International Development, London School of Economics, writing a PhD on climate risk and vulnerability in informal urban settlements. She is also a consultant on climate adaptation and development issues, working most recently on urban adaptation planning in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

The recent publication of the IPCC’s full SREX report (or Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation) certainly provides researchers and practitioners with a 594 page T-REX of a document to grapple with. The product of 220 authors and over 18 thousand reviewers, it is a ‘state of the science’ juggernaut to fill the gap between the 4th (2007)and 5th (2014) overall IPCC Assessments.

The SREX has already generated much-needed headlines about the increased confidence of climate scientists that extreme weather events can be linked to man-made climate change, and the need for investment and improvement in disaster risk management (some of its authors talk about these main messages here).

It would be a shame, though, if the read-out by the wider climate and development community stopped there. Importantly, what SREX does is shift the terrain of IPCC reports onto a better integration of lessons from the social as well as the physical sciences. This was the first time that the IPCC’s Working Groups One (Physical science) and Two (Vulnerability and adaptation) had worked together on a single document. For the first time they joined forces with experts in disaster risk management. The result draws on a long scholarship in disaster studies that has stressed the unnaturalness of ‘natural’ disasters – climate events only become disasters, after all, when vulnerable people are in the way. One of the key messages is that increased exposure of populations and human assets is driving increased disasters, alongside changes in climatic events (see fig).

SREX also changes the definition of vulnerability used since the 4th Assessment to make more explicit the role of social context, independent of physical events. The semantic change may be a tweak, but it matters. The IPCC’s definition has been ubiquitous in adaptation planning documents. The way ideas about vulnerability are framed also influences international discussions. It will be interesting to see if and how this affects debates about the scope of adaptation funding and the relationship between adaptation and development finance.

Alongside this ‘shift to the social’ SREX turns attention to all that we know about ‘the local’, which comes before the chapters on national and global issues. The report pulls in studies about the way people understand the risks they face and the importance of engaging with this knowledge. It finds both ‘high agreement’ and ‘robust evidence’ for the fact that integrating local knowledge with scientific knowledge improves disaster risk management and adaptation. Communicating risk means, in SREX, sitting down and sharing knowledge rather than simply telling people that they are at risk and what to do about it.

Where now? Too often social vulnerability analysis has been the exclusive preserve of NGO and community work, falling out of the purview of government planners. The problem is partly one of methods. It is a major challenge to incorporate contextual, multi-dimensional, dynamic and often qualitative analysis about risk and vulnerability into planning and evaluation frameworks that mostly demand numbers and high aggregation. In the context of climate change, SREX highlights the benefits of using human ‘storylines’

'Human story lines': farmers in Bolivia

alongside model projections. But what people tell us about how they coped in the past does not necessarily prepare them for an uncertain future, while their ability to cope may also have changed.

No surprise to readers of this blog, bringing what we know about the social and physical worlds together in practice is also a political as well as technical exercise. Not least because it means going beyond risk management policy to seek more structural changes, which get at the fundamental causes of exposure and vulnerability. SREX doesn’t avoid the fact that these causes are often institutional, governmental even. It sets out the evidence for more participation and more decentralisation, but also linking sub-national work better to governance at higher scales. It is hard to imagine a state-ratified report getting much more political than this. At ODI’s event to launch the report summary last year author Mark Pelling alluded to the difficulty of getting even these issues established in the text. Development workers and theorists will have much to add, though, about the workings of power and exploitation in the most vulnerable parts of the world.

Of course, there is more to take from SREX. But that’s my aid to digestion.

‘As serious as a heart attack’: Robin Hood Tax Global Week of Action Kicks Off

Update on substantial progress (and the risk the money raised won’t go to development and climate change) from Oxfam head of advocacy (and generally merry man) Max Lawson

This week sees a Global Week of Action for the campaign for the Robin Hood Tax (aka the Financial Transactions Tax, or FTT). The FTT rose to prominence as a result of the financial crisis, which continues to keep it in the spotlight as Greece stumbles towards the euro exit, not least because journalists are desperate for fresh ways to report a crisis that is simultaneously huge news and desperately dull. So from Cape Town to Paris, campaigners are pulling on their green tights and fat cat costumes, starting with a wedding in Berlin for Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel (right).

In policy land, a revised impact assessment of the FTT by the European Commission was obtained by the Guardian.  The new assessment shows that the EC got its numbers wrong in a previous study that was seized upon by the FTT’s opponents. Recognizing that the majority of small and medium size firms do not rely on financial markets for investment (and so their access to capital would be unaffected by an FTT) reduces the cost to growth of an FTT to a tiny 0.2% reduction on a total predicted growth of about 80% between now and 2050.  Moreover, if the revenues from an FTT (€57 billion a year according to the EC) are invested in creating jobs, then this tiny negative then becomes positive so that an FTT would actually boost growth in Europe. Got that? An FTT is pro-growth. Alas, such positive conclusions are unlikely to make it into any speeches by David Cameron or the front page of the Financial Times.

The pressure on EU leaders is extreme.  The political debate is shifting from austerity to growth, with Angela Merkel faring poorly in some major state elections, and the victory of the socialist party in France. Monsieur Hollande has highlighted the FTT as one of the three main ways to boost growth in Europe.  The FTT is going to figure highly in the EU leaders’ ‘Growth Summit’ on 22nd May. The Wall Street Journal made the link last week, saying that ‘even if they are calling for an FTT, at least the left are talking growth’. 

With millions across Europe facing unemployment and serious suffering, especially in Greece, it is great to finally hear leaders speaking out against the death spiral of austerity and recession.  It is also great that the FTT is one of the key things being cited to help with this.  The Robin Hood Tax has always been about helping the poorest in developed nations as well as helping finance the fight against climate change and poverty in developing countries.  If the proceeds of a tax on the unproductive and destabilising casino behaviour of the financial markets is used in part to create jobs and protect public services in Europe this would be a great redistribution and a great thing.

But this is also the biggest threat.  With global aid levels falling, and the Green Climate Fund sitting empty, revenues from the FTT are vital for global, as well as domestic causes. Before the election, Francois Hollande said publicly he would favour up to 30% being used in this way, but he has been ominously silent since.  Just last week in a closed door meeting with the heads of major NGOs, Chancellor Merkel reiterated her support for doing this.  But the exigencies of austerity and the European crisis make this far from certain.  Green groups in particular need to pile the pressure on France and Germany, ahead of next month’s Mexico G20 and Rio Earth Summit.  

I was in South Africa last week for meetings with civil society and government G20 negotiators.  South Africa has a strong interest in a successful Green Climate Fund. They agreed to speak to Brazil and Argentina as the three countries outside Europe that joined the FTT ‘coalition of the willing’ at the G20 in Cannes, focusing on supporting an FTT for funding development and climate change. Pressure on France and Germany from these governments will be critical.

In the US, the G8 is taking place today, and President Hollande has promised to raise the FTT in discussions with fellow G8 leaders.  The Robin Hood Tax USA campaign is also being launched, by thousands of nurses dressed as Robin Hood, marching in Chicago. Interviewed on US news recently, the head of the US National Nurses Union was asked by the presenter whether she was serious; she replied ‘we are as serious as a heart attack’.

And in place of the customary Bill Nighy video, here’s a nice infographic

Dear readers, please tell us what you think about the blog (there’s prizes)

It has come to our attention that you (the readers) have been under-surveyed – haven’t asked your opinion on anything very much for over two years now (see here for summary of last survey in March 2010). So some technologically gifted people in Oxfam have put together the reader survey to the right (the big red box). I would really appreciate you clicking on it – we’ve got a redesign and a second edition of the book of From Poverty to Power coming up later this year, so it’s an ideal time to make any necessary tweaks to improve the blog. Go on, two minutes of your time once every two years isn’t that much to ask. And to make it fun, we’ll give free copies of the FP2P second edition (ebook or treebook) to the best suggestions for improvements.

And please ignore Calvin – he is a bad person

What’s the connection between power, development and social media?

This post also appears on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation governance blog, although sadly, without the neanderthal

I recently gave a talk about ICT and Development at the annual Re:Campaign conference in Berlin, organized by Oxfam Germany. Anyone who knows me will realize that this is a bit odd – despite being a blogaholic, I am actually Rubbish At Technology. In front of 300 trendy,

So let me explain how Facebook works.......

young (sigh) i-thingy wielding activists, I felt like a Neanderthal at a cocktail party. Still, at least the fear of being shamed up finally got me tweeting two weeks before the conference.

I decided to make a virtue of necessity and set out some core processes in development, and then reflected on what ICT does/doesn’t contribute. Why take this approach (apart from being a techno-caveman, that is)? Because there’s too much magic bulletism in development –microfinance, GM crops and now ‘cyber utopianism’. What all of these have in common is that they are too often presented as ‘get out of jail free’ cards, delivering development without all the messy business of politics and struggle. At best, new technologies shift power balances, sometimes favourably, sometimes not, but they don’t replace the process of struggle in development.

The core of my talk was to take the ‘four powers’ model of power within, power with, power to and power over and see how the spread of IT affects each of them in turn.

Power within – that lightbulb ‘get up, stand up’ moment when an individual becomes aware of their identity and rights – is often the first step on the path of social and political change. It can come through conflict, education, conversation or through old technologies such as community radio for indigenous minorities – Quechua, a language spoken by some 10 million people in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, is rarely heard on television and is completely absent from the Internet. By contrast, 180 radio stations offer programmes in Quechua. What I haven’t yet seen is much link between social media and power within (do correct me if I’m wrong – this really is a first draft piece). Possible future avenues include distance learning, but often what is needed is low tech education – trained and paid teachers, chairs, textbooks, ending user fees.

Power With – newly awakened people finding common cause with their fellows through social movements, faith-based organizations, trades unions, political parties etc etc. In this effort to build collective organization, IT can play a role, whether by facilitating access to information, or lowering the costs and barriers to organizing (think twitter and FB in Tahrir square). It can also help bring dispersed communities together in new and powerful ways – for example the truly impressive diaspora networks of Somalis and others that rely heavily on social media, or one of my favourite Oxfam projects – pink phones in Cambodia.

Power To/Power Over involves aware, organized people expressing their needs and demands, and exercising some form of control over those in authority, first by putting the right issues on the table, and then getting the decisions and resources that are needed. Overall, I think this is where IT has most to offer. Some examples:

Getting news of human rights violations out fast, when urgency is vital, can alert national governments, international organizations and others.

Crowd-sourcing information so the authorities can’t deny what is going on, e.g. the Stop Stock-outs campaign, or Ushahidi: “Ushahidi”, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the name “Ushahidi” has come to represent the people behind the “Ushahidi Platform”.

Markets: The biggest gains for farmers and fishers have come in access to credit and to agricultural market info.

Feedback and Accountability: Gaining access to official information in a comprehensible format is a core aspect of accountability, but IT can also increase the accountability of northern NGOs and campaigns to those in the South – e.g. the great work by Al Jazeera on the Kony2012 video.

All well and good, but IT is emphatically not a magic bullet. Malcolm Gladwell’s distinction between strong and weak ties is really helpful

Now that's what I call transformational technology....

here. Strong ties are those deep bonds of trust and comradeship that allow you to ‘walk towards the guns’. Weak ties are the shallower, broader bonds that convince you to join the demo or sign the petition. IT undoubtedly helps with the latter, but no-one ever decided to risk their neck because of Twitter.

And let’s not forget ‘Bad Power’. IT can move everything in the wrong direction – strengthening elites, enhancing a culture of surveillance and control, excluding poor people and communities. Here’s a nice 10 minute RSAnimate talk by Evgeny Morozov on the dark side of IT as a corrective.

In the rich countries, ICT undoubtledly has huge potential for transforming two key aspects of the North’s role in development: Do No Harm and Aid. ‘Do No Harm’ covers everything from climate change to intellectual property restrictions to the arms trade. In all of those IT can improve the speed and scale of campaigns, link up citizens in the North to the consequences of their governments’ or societies’ decisions in developing countries, and challenge pervasive ‘hegemonic discourses’ on everything from resource-intensive growth to privatization of social services.

On Aid, there’s clearly been growing interest in transparency and accountability (e.g. IATI), but the EITI (aargh, acronym-poisoning) provided a cautionary lesson that supply (of information) doesn’t simply create demand (for accountability). IT plus growing disenchantment with institutions, is also likely to drive interest in ‘disintermediation’ in aid, linking punters directly to poor people (GiveDirectly) or budding entrepreneurs (Kiva). At the business end, fast money disbursement via mobiles can massively improve disaster response. IT can also help us plug the realtime data gap after shocks hit.

Final thoughts? For the technophiles like those gathered in Berlin, the key thing is to remember, however platitudinous it may sound, that ICT is a means not an end – are you clear what the end is? What is your theory of change, beyond scattering new kit everywhere?
In developing countries, the key is how poor/excluded people adopt, adapt and use technology: start there, and you’ll find exciting possibilities (see Twaweza in East Africa). Be too tech-led, and you may well end up in a dead end.

As you’ve probably realized, I have a long way to go in linking up the power analysis and IT worlds, so any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

And if you have 30 minutes to spare, you can see me here

What does the UN’s first Africa Human Development Report say about food security?

A guest post from Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right), who is taking over from me as head of research at Oxfam in a couple of weeks, (I’m not leaving, just changing jobs within Oxfam – more on that later).

Over the past two years, I spent most of my time working on the first Africa Human Development Report (left), which was launched yesterday in Nairobi. It was about time for the first African HDR, especially given recent famine in the Horn and repeated threats of humanitarian food crises in the Sahel. The report focuses on food security – for a large number of Africans (some 220 million), hunger is a daily threat – and often one with permanent consequences.

The premise of the Africa HDR is simple: food security, through better nutrition, can improve education, health, productivity, and other important social and economic factors that allow people to have a good life (see figure).

In contrast, malnutrition can be a long lasting burden:

“The perverse dynamic between food insecurity and poor education, bad health and poverty can last generations. Hungry children with weakened immune systems die prematurely from communicable diseases such as dysentery, malaria and respiratory infections that are ordinarily preventable and treatable. They start school late, learn less and drop out early. Malnourished mothers are at greater risk of dying in childbirth and of delivering low-birthweight babies who fail to survive infancy. Undernourished babies who make it through infancy often suffer stunting that cripples and shortens their lives. As adults they are likely to give birth to another generation of low-birthweight babies, perpetuating the vicious cycle of low human development and destitution.”  

Recent evidence reveals a jarring paradox in Africa. Several countries have been progressing very rapidly in the last years – between 2004 and 2008, African economies grew on average 6.5% annually; child mortality is decreasing; school enrollment is improving; and the Human Development Index (a composite measure of health, education, and income) has risen faster than anywhere else since 2000. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa has not been able to turn improvements in human development into better nutrition indicators – especially compared to Asia’s progress in the last two decades. In sub-Saharan Africa the number of malnourished children increased by 55 million in the last 10 years. 

The stubborn persistence of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa is partly the result of a brutal neglect of the rural sector for decades, which led to widespread rural poverty, low agricultural yields, poor infrastructure, and limited basic services in rural areas:

- 93% of the arable land is rain-fed.
- African farmers use less than 20 kgs of fertilizer per hectare of arable land, compared to nearly 350 kgs in Asia.
- Since the early 1960s, production of cereals per capita has fallen 13% — the only region to suffer a decline. Today, cereal production in Africa is around 150 kgs per capita; in Latin America it is close to 300 kgs, and in Asia more than 350 kgs.
- Only 30% of Africa’s rural population lives within 2 kilometres of a road. In South Asia, 58% do.

This policy bias reinforced a vicious circle of high levels of inequality, skewed control over resources, and access to opportunities against certain groups – for instance, women have less ability to own and inherit land (figure). As the African Progress Panel Report (launched last week) mentions, the new wealth is not creating the necessary employment or reaching marginalized groups. Add to that the detrimental effects of some international practices – including the lingering effects of structural adjustment, lavish northern agricultural subsidies, the production of bio-fuels, and neglect of agriculture in official development assistance.

African governments face important policy decisions, mostly on how to transform the recent economic growth and advances in other development indicators into long-term opportunities. The report focuses on four areas of intervention: increase agricultural productivity, strengthen nutrition policies, build resilience, and empower marginalized groups. 

These are interventions that each African country will need to weigh against other national priorities. There is evidence that African people recognize the attempts that governments make to improve access to food. And they also notice when they don’t: about 60% of respondents on the 2009 Gallup World Poll special issue on food security in Africa disagreed with the statement: “The government of this country is doing enough to help people get food”.

Creating better institutions and investing more resources are part of the solution. But any real improvement in the food security situation of African societies will need to make sure that all groups participate actively in the decision-making process. Solving the food security conundrum in Africa requires strong public action. The role of the agricultural sector in development and poverty reduction has been explored at length. But the role of nutrition, social protection, and civic participation has not been duly recognized. Active citizens can play a critical role in ensuring that governments are held accountable and that any policy related to food is participatory and equitable (a very important issue given the recent spate of land grabs).

Too often in Africa (as well as other developing regions), governing elites do not reflect the public interest in their actions and policies. Issues of governance, agency, and democracy might seem unimportant for food security but, increasingly, we have learned that hunger and starvation are closely related to politics and political economy. This is why empowerment and resilience are important. Access to information, roads, and well-designed social programs allow people to make better decisions and better participate in markets and societies. The power structures that keep certain groups from accessing land or that bias public investment towards leaders’ constituencies must be clearly identified – and African governments, civil society, and other stakeholders will need to alter these power relations and give everyone a fair chance to avoid the perils of hunger and its negative consequences for human development.

And here’s the 6 minute launch video

Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid

This book review appears in the April/May edition of Charity Times

News coverage follows the dramatic – the tsunami, famine, or grisly civil war. Public perceptions in the UK of events in the developing world are inevitably skewed by that prism. New privileges human impact and English-speaking ‘guardian angel’ saviours, rather than structural causes.  And then it moves on, leaving in the public mind lingering images of starving children, or people being plucked from earthquake-shattered buildings.

In his book, Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Telegraph and ITV journalist Peter Gill (right) sets out to explore the other side of events. In the ‘biblical’ beginnings of the 1984/5 famine, he was the first journalist to reach the epicentre of suffering, helping (along with the BBC’s Michael Buerk) to alert the outside world to impending disaster.  In 2008 and 2009 he went back to bring himself up to date on the intervening years, to find out what happened  before and after the TV cameras arrived, and how Ethiopians themselves understand the tumultuous last 25 years of their country’s history.

He brings a journalist’s craft to the task, interweaving reportage and a confident and eclectic grasp of the academic literature on the country. Through human stories, he retells the history of Ethiopia’s famines (a less infamous famine in 1973 led to the ousting of Emperor Haile Selassie), the transition years that followed the 1984/5 catastrophe, the fall of  Colonel Mengistu and his notorious Derg government, and the rise of its current Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi.

His approach reverses the media order of things. Aid agencies (both big northern governments and NGOs like Oxfam, on which he has written a largely sympathetic  book, Drops in the Ocean) are not angels, but often bumbling bureaucracies whose actions are driven by a complex mix of altruism and institutional needs. In any case, centre stage belongs to Ethiopians themselves, and in particular the Ethiopian government.

Meles emerges as an extraordinary figure, who became head of state at 36 and promptly signed up for an Open University degree in business administration, getting one of the best firsts in the OU’s history. He then went on to get a masters in economics from Erasmus University in Rotterdam (his thesis was on the developmental state in Africa). Can’t find the book or full thesis online (help please!), but here is a paper of his on the same theme.

Over the course of several interviews, Gill probes Meles’ thinking, and is clearly dazzled by his intellect, largely giving him the  benefit of the doubt on his commitment to (eventually) stepping down (he has been in power since 1995 and elections have been widely questioned) and engineering a transition to a less authoritarian system.

Part of his admiration for Meles (whose record on human rights is far from spotless), is the transformation in Ethiopia’s management of hunger: In 1984, 7.9 million faced starvation and more than 600,000 died. By contrast in a drought on Zenawi’s watch in 2003, 13.2 million faced the prospect of famine, yet Gill reports that only 300 people died (no-one at Oxfam believes the figure was that low, by the way). Gill puts this extraordinary turnaround down to a massive mobilization by the state (including using its own domestic resources, not just aid – Gill goes into some detail on the government’s impressive social safety net programme) and better reaction by the donors, who this time around, did not wait for TV images before acting.

The book’s main weakness stems from its strengths. Gill’s journalistic commitment to telling Ethiopia’s story through interviews and reportage is engaging, but comes at the expense of political analysis and subtlety, leaving him with little to say on its future, with our without Meles as its head of state. And oddly, much of the last chapter is devoted to an interview with aid guru Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University, whose expertise on Ethiopia hardly rivals the many wise local voices featured in the book.

But overall Gill gets several important things very right. Famine is the result of politics and conflict, not drought – he quotes a centuries-old quote from a Portuguese Jesuit: famines are caused not by locusts but ‘the marching if the soldiers…. Which is a plague worse than the locusts because they devour only what they find in the fields, whereas the soldiers spare not what is laid up in houses.’

His focus on the role of states in reducing the risks of disasters and then responding to them when they occur, is also spot on – Oxfam is revising its thinking on this in a similar direction. If you want to understand what’s happened to Ethiopia since Geldof, Bono, Live Aid and the rest, this is a good place to start.

Author video here

Declaration of interest: Peter’s just starting a book on the role of INGOs, and I will be liaising with him for Oxfam

Theories of change = logframes on steroids? A discussion with DFID

‘Theories of Change is just the latest attempt to shine a light on what lies behind, what makes everything work or fail. We constantly reach for new tools, but we keep alighting on small islands and losing the big picture.’ Jake Allen, Christian Aid

I recently spoke at a half-day DFID seminar discussing a draft paper by Isabel Vogel – ‘Review of the Use of Theories of Change in international development’. The draft is here (keep clicking) – Isabel wants comments by this Friday 18 May, either on the blog, or emailed directly to info[at]isabelvogel.co.uk. She is particularly looking for examples of documented theories of change (ToCs) originating in developing countries (as opposed to donor-funded programmes).

The level of interest was impressive – 40 DFIDistas in the room, plus 7 country teams via videocon and sundry NGOs and consultanty types. My overall impression was that Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) is driving the ToCs discussion in DFID, and not always in a good way. So in my allotted 5 minutes, I stressed that ToCs should not become a ‘logframe on steroids’ (a phrased nicked from Alfredo Ortiz) and the importance of power analysis and ToCs as a permanent aspect of the planning cycle - and not just for programmes but for policy and campaigns work.

Plus their usefulness (albeit in different ways) in all 4 quadrants of the Cynefin framework(Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – see graphic), rather than just in the simple/complicated quadrants preferred by development types. I also said we should throw away those horribly complicated ToC diagrams once we’ve finished them (lest they terrify those that follow).

The discussion confirmed these concerns. Lots of people (including many of the measurers) are fully aware of the risk and want to avoid it, but are struggling against powerful incentive structures that make it happen anyway (principally the results agenda, but also the difficulty of using non-linear ToCs in practice). Hivos, a wonderfully cerebral-but-practical Dutch NGO that has done a lot of thinking on this, talks about a broader range of ‘ToC thinking’ as a useful way to prevent it all being turned into just another toolkit (‘ticking the ToCs box?’). Rick Davies recalled that the logical framework approach was originally a separate exercise to filling in the logframe table, but they collapsed/reduced into the table due to the structure and working practices of the aid business. Might the same fate await ToCs?

What of the benefits? In addition to those discussed in previous posts, Joanna Monaghan of Comic Relief (a funder), sees ToCs as making explicit the hypotheses underlying funding decisions – ‘the rules of thumb we all carry around in our heads’. That allows partners to challenge them, if they think the funder has (gasp!) got it wrong.

People also saw ToCs as making people look at the evidence and identify what is known/unknown (that rather alarmed me – what were they doing before?), but also helping programmes adapt more quickly as new evidence emerges. From the MEL end, an explicit ToC also allows a discussion with beneficiaries on what indicators to measure progress against (rather than the funder just imposing them from outside).

ToC challenges
When it came to the challenges of implementing ToCs, the big headache is how to balance donor accountability (reflected in the pressure for measurement and results, and holding partners to account against pre-agreed plans), and the ability to use ToCs intelligently to learn and adapt to changing environments.

ToCs are about people engaging intelligently with the complexity and nuance of context and process. But how do you rigorously assess the quality of people’s thought? The development community usually focuses on process and outcomes, whereas ToCs may demand something more like academic assessment on how deeply people are thinking about things. ‘Accountability has to be about trying hard enough. We never ask questions about critical thinking, only about delivery on a set of results which 5 years ago we thought we would be able to achieve.’ Stand by for quasi-professorial marks for project proposals (‘beta minus, must try harder’).

The more practical types worried over how you can balance constantly revisiting/revising a ToC with the need to get on and actually, you know, do something. One answer: pre-agree circuit breaker reviews at e.g. one year, two years into the project, when everyone knows the ToC is up for grabs; another – test (and fund) a series of ToCs in a pilot stage before deciding on a final ToC – a bit like the DFID-funded research programme consortia, which include (and finance) an ‘inception phase’ during which the recipient is allowed to test and finalise their research plans for the subsequent years. Perhaps there also needs to be a clear process for designated people to have access to a ‘red button’ change of direction in response to major contextual shifts that require a rapid revision of the plan (‘Mugabe dies’).

If failure is indeed a source of ideas etc, we need to create a safe environment to recognize, communicate and learn from it. That requires a shift in culture and incentives – e.g. circuit breaker reviews must have a convincing discussion on failure and what we’ve learned – if a project can’t demonstrate failure as well as learn from it, it probably isn’t trying hard enough.

Another plea from the practical peeps – can we separate out communities of practice from communities of theory, otherwise the practitioners are cowed into silence by the theory wallahs sounding off (who could they be thinking of?)

One final random thought: Is this (i.e. funding projects with plural ToCs, greater appetite for risk of failure etc) a suitable role for philanthropic foundations who are more able to take risks on failure than publicly funded donors?