Ugandan comic books; cash transfers in New York; praise for Jacob Zuma; Reaganite timewarp on healthcare reform and wonderful Magnum pics: links I liked

Chris Blattman raves (in a good way) about a comic book (sorry, graphic novel) about the civil war in Uganda

And links to a fascinating attempt to apply the lessons of conditional cash transfer programmes in Mexico and Brazil to…… New York

The FT finds much to celebrate in Jacob Zuma’s first hundred days

‘The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.’ Paul Krugman laments the Reaganite timewarp of the US healthcare debate

Alex Evans takes John Prescott to task for supporting contraction and convergence in carbon emissions and proposes a more pro-development alternative

And the Magnum photo agency puts its breath-taking back catalogue to the service of the climate change campaign in  the ‘one-planet-one-chance‘ photo essay (you’ll need sound).

Update and correction: Oxfam just received this email from the ever-vigilant Aubrey Meyer, director of the Global Commons Institute, and chief originator of contraction and convergence: ‘Duncan Green Head of Research Oxfam GB blogs on your website that: – “Alex Evans takes John Prescott to task for supporting contraction and convergence in carbon emissions and proposes a more pro-development alternative.” This is incorrrect. Actually what Alex Evans did was to crticize Prescott for not arguing contraction and convergence in carbon emissions entitlements accurately.  Please will you get his attention on this and require him to make a correction.’ I stand duly corrected……

The great Microfinance debate: Comments on the Comments, some loose ends and some new info

Back from Bangladesh and still processing both the real life and blog discussions on microfinance institutions (MFIs), following last week’s post and the good debate in the comments. A few final (probably…) observations:

Microcredit v Microfinance: point taken. A lot of the doubts and criticisms apply to microcredit (loans), not to the wider range of financial services (insurance, savings etc) that MFIs sometimes provide. Non-loan financial services can avoid people getting into a debt trap, and be tailored more to their individual needs. The problem here (ref Nicholas Colloff) is that the business model skews efforts towards microcredit because it is more profitable. Interesting thoughts from Suyash on how the Hyderabad experiment could have been transformed if non-credit products had been part of the package, and what looks like a fascinating microsavings project from Oxfam America, which should generate some useful research in due course (when’s that due, Jeff?). I was a bit worried about 49% rates of return in Mali though – where does that money come from? If all the capital is generated internally and members lend to each other, it must come from net borrowers in any group, right? If so, what is the equity impact – do we risk creating a new class of community loan sharks? But I don’t fully agree with Milford Bateman’s critique of Saving for Change – doesn’t what it is doing resemble the credit coops that Milton praises in China? And the planned RCT can check whether the impact is greater than merely the injection of $x into the community via the scheme.

Interest rates and equity: microcredit providers may be better than loan sharks, but they still charge a lot of interest. I’m a bit baffled by the numbers on this, to be honest: the nominal rate charged by large MFIs is 10-15%, but according to the book by QK Khan mentioned in a subsequent post, the effective rate is about 2.7 times greater, mainly because the interest repayment applies over the whole year to the full value of the loan, whereas because repayments commence immediately, the average value of the loan over the year is half the initial amount (on a one year payback schedule). If this is true, MF borrowers are paying effective interest rates of 27-41% a year, far more than commercial bank rates. This would make credit a bit like clean water – poor people in shanty towns often pay several times more for it than rich people, driving up inequality, as Mukta points out.

Springboard or Safety Net? Sure, if MF provides a woman with a way to reduce her vulnerability eg a loan to buy a goat, that is a good thing, but wouldn’t it be better if she didn’t have to repay the loan? If MF is actually acting as a safety net rather than a means to finance would-be entrepreneurs, it starts to look more like poor quality social protection, as Kate Carroll argues.

Gender impact: MF advocates have simply seen money flowing to women as a ‘good thing’ (see this recent article in the New York Times for an example). They need to try a bit harder – the actual gender impact of MF appears more complex and interesting, but needs research.  The study by QK Khan found that only 10% of women fully controlled decisions on how the money was spent (but they still all bear the responsibility for repayment). Even more alarmingly, it found that one of MF’s unintended consequences is to aggravate the problem of dowry (the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings to her husband in marriage). 82% of the 2,500 women interviewed in Khan’s study reported that dowry had increased since enrolment. This would presumably (the book isn’t clear on this point) mean that the loan is wrapped up into the dowry payment, while the bride’s family is expected to meet the repayments. MF loans are in effect being diverted into boosting a discredited practice, rather than creating new businesses.

On the other hand, there is evidence that micro-credit stengthens bonds between women in borrowing groups, leads to reduced incidence of domestic violence and increases in community involvement. This reminds me of some of the research on the impact of fairtrade, which found that the main benefit is from its encouragement for cooperative action, rather than the direct benefits from a premium price for coffee, cocoa etc.

Fund-raising via MF – a conflict of interest?: In Bangladesh in particular, numerous NGOs now run MF businesses as a way to cross-subsidise their core costs and other activities, through what Mukta calls ‘primitve accumulation’. The danger is that financial dependence on the proceeds from microcredit will make it harder for them to take an objective view of the developmental pros and cons of microfinance. It could also mean (shades of the fairtrade movement, here ) that MFIs spend far more time making their business models work than using their clout to press for changes in public policy.

Reforming microcredit: Unlike some of the commenters, I am not inherently anti-bank, or for that matter, anti micro-finance – poor people need a range of financial services and they are not getting them. Sso I was interested in some of the good ideas for reform. These include, to quote Nicholas, ‘placing specific and regulatory obligations on interest, credit recovery, community reinvestment and community participation in governance.’ Requiring both banks and MFIs to publish accurate information on charges and real interest rates (as Russia has done) would be a good start. As would rebalancing microcredit with other microfinance products. The codes of conduct for MFIs that I’ve seen are incredibly vague (see here and here) – anyone got better examples? The best thing I’ve seen on this very superficial look at the issue comes from some MF industry leaders who, aware of these criticisms and concerns, met in 2008 and drew up the ‘Pocantico Declaration‘.

Some fair criticism of both the original blogpost, and the studies it reported. On the latter, Alan points out that the Poverty Action Lab study, as with most (all?) others, ignores the issue of whether setting up a business via MF actually destroys another business in the vicinity – it measures gross business creation, not net. And Suyash is absolutely right to say it’s very harsh to draw conclusions after only 18 months – let’s hope MIT has plans to return and continue the research in Hyderabad, but I can find no suggestion of this in their paper.

Finally, if, as Chris pointed out, these criticisms have been circulating for well over 10 years, how has microfinance retained its Teflon magic bullet status? This is where ideology trumps evidence, I think – it was just too good a fit with the neoliberal spirits of the age to let a little thing like evidence stand in the way. Might the Teflon start to peel off in these new Post-Washington Consensus times? President Obama’s recent award of the Medal of Freedom to Grameen Founder Muhammed Yunus and the appointment earlier this month of MFI Accion International’s President and CEO, Maria Otero, as US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs suggest that view is at best premature.

Up to our knees in Climate Change in Bangladesh

Wading through tidal salt water pouring across a rapidly eroding road in an area of the coast that had never previously seen anything on this scale, climate change has never seemed so immediate. In May, Cyclone Aila breached the embankments and produced a humanitarian disaster, killing hundreds and affecting some 5 million Bangladeshis. Three months on, 300,000 are still homeless and the communities around the town of Koyra seem stuck at day one, clinging on in the wreckage and collapsed homes (see pic) that have become islands, or in cramped tarpaulin and reed shacks alongside the raised roads (see pic – that’s the road they’re standing on). Every day, high tide brings in fresh inundations of salt water, poisoning the land. The trees are already dying. The people will have to wait a further two months before the rains stop, the water level drops, and the government can start to repair the embankments that keep out the water.

As with all climate change-related disasters, the causes are multiple and interlinked: corruption diverted money away from maintaining the embankments; shrimp farmers needed salt water and nibbled away at the embankments like termites to let it in; and the cyclone coincided with the high tide that accompanies the full moon. But everyone in the area attests to the inexorable rise of sea level, driven by climate change, as a key contributory factor.

Later we attend a ‘climate poverty hearing’ – a kind of people’s tribunal, held on high-prowed boats moored to what were once the goalposts of the local school soccer pitch (now under several feet of water). A woman testifies (see pic), beating the air with thin brown arms and shouting over and over ‘I want my old life back’. That may not be possible. As a local NGO leader comments, ‘if we can’t build good embankments, this area will be sea. People will have to migrate.’

Bangladesh is a land of 150 million people where millions live at (or in some cases below) sea level. Every centimetre of sea level rise (and it’s currently rising at 4-8 millimetres per year) has huge human consequences. Unsurprisingly, Bangladeshi activists and politicians speak with real anger about what is happening to their country, and the need for the polluting countries to pay compensation for the devastation that is already under way. More on this debate later.

Snapshots of Bangladesh: inequality on wheels, evil prawns, resilient garments, acid attacks and dodgy infrastructure

Just spent a week on a ‘busman’s holiday’ (where the distinction between work and leisure gets very blurred), visiting Bangladesh with younger son Finlay (17). A few headlines, and then tomorrow, something more substantial on climate change.

Prawns, raised in paddy fields for export, have long had a bad press in Bangladesh, and no wonder. Prawns need salt water, rice needs fresh; the battle over who controls the water regime pits powerful exporters against small farmers, and in many cases the prawns win. Prawn farming has led to the creeping salinisation of the soil, and the road down from Dhaka runs a dismal spectrum from the lush green paddy and jute fields up country to the barren, salty expanses of the coast. Prawns have also undermined the embankment system, increasing the risk of floods – more on that tomorrow.

But surprisingly, activists in the prawn town of Khulna (there’s even a giant prawn sculpture on one of the main crossroads, see pic) oppose any kind of boycott by consumers. Despite the salinity and the handful of jobs it creates, they argue that the country needs the export income, and if properly taxed and regulated, prawn production could be a force for good.

Infrastructure: the roads are great, and the mobile (cellphone) reception was five bars, even standing in floodwater in the middle of the cyclone-devastated coastal area. But the electricity cuts out every few hours (conversations don’t miss a beat – people are so used to it), and Dhaka must be a candidate for some kind of global awful-traffic prize (see pic, the guy in the foreground is my rickshaw driver).

Garments: Bangladesh has been transformed by the globalization of the garment industry, which now employs about 2.4m people, 85% of them women, earning $11bn a year in exports. While the global recession has hit garment exports in more up-market producers, Bangladesh’ exports are still rising, albeit at a slower rate of growth. Why? Because it produces the cheap stuff that people buy, even in a recession. In fact, by driving higher cost competitors out of business, the recession could leave Bangladesh in a stronger position to cash in on the upswing. The downside is that margins are getting squeezed as buyers drive down prices, and the pressures on garment workers (already intense) are growing.

Acid Attacks: Our hotel in Khulna was host to some deafening kids’ parties, which largely drowned out our efforts to talk to local NGOs about climate change. But all the mothers (there were no fathers) had terrible skin lacerations – they were a survivors’ group for women who had suffered acid attacks. This particularly barbaric form of gender violence is meted out to women by men for a range of ‘crimes’ including conflicts over dowry and land, alleged infidelity, or simply rejected advances.

Inequality: Dhaka’s traffic provides an in-your-face demonstration of inequality. Take the rickshaws (as I did) – stick-limbed men sweating their way through the traffic transporting a stern faced, pot bellied businessman (sometimes more than one), often with a mobile glued to his ear (see truly terrible pic – I really should stick to the written word). And the rickshaw wallah must wend his way through the SUVs of the even better off.

And the prize for the question that left me gasping like a beached fish? ‘What is your opinion of dialectical materialism?’ (from an unnamed Oxfam staffer)

Microfinance again – the views of some Bangladeshi farmers

I spent some time yesterday with a group of 20 Bangladeshi small farmers (13 men, 7 women) linked to a sustainable agriculture NGO, Unnayan Dhara (sorry, they don’t yet have a website). Among other things (climate change, access to markets etc) I asked them about microfinance, given my post on Wednesday and the subsequent discussion on the comments. Here’s a summary of what they told me:

7/20 (6 men, 1 woman) had taken out loans from the state agriculture bank, the Bangladesh Krishi Bank

8/20 (6 women and 2 men, via their wives) had taken out microcredit (what they called ‘NGO money’) from Grameen Bank, BRAC, ASA and others. In some cases they had borrowed from more than one.

None had gone to local money lenders, who charge 20% interest per month

The state bank charges lower interest rates than the MF providers, but it takes 2-6 months to get the loan, you have to be able to show a land title in your name (a particular problem for those women, sharecroppers, or groups of relatives farming together who can’t provide land titles) and you have to pay an estimated 20-25% of the value of the loan in bribes.

MF providers do not demand bribes, do not require land titles, and are quick, but the women had some criticisms:

They have to start repayments immediately, even though they need to wait til the harvest comes in before the investment (in seeds, fertiliser, fuel etc) bears fruit. They would much  prefer to repay in one go at the end of the loan period rather than through the weekly repayments beloved of MF providers.

The women thought men ought to be eligible for MF loans, rather than having to go through their wives.

The MF providers deduct any savings they make from their loan repayments.

Overall, the farmers said the one single change that would improve the impact of MF (apart from lower interest rates, obviously) would be if the providers shifted from their insistence on one year loans to 2-4 month seasonal loans adapted to farmers’ needs (for example allowing them to repay after the harvest and/or hang on to their crops for a few months, and then sell at higher prices, rather than sell straight after harvest, when prices are lowest).

My conclusion? Microfinance is clearly a mainstream provider, at least in this community. These farmers need credit, and microfinance probably qualifies as ‘least worst’ as a source, but the farmers see MF providers as really just another bank, and one which could be much more responsive to farmers needs.

Here’s a photo of the discussion, held in the group’s future seed bank. Alas, no prizes for guessing which one is me….

What can you do if teachers don’t show up?

There has been significant progress in recent years in getting kids into school, but what’s the point if the teachers don’t show up for work? In general, the poorer the country, the higher the level of absenteeism. The explanations are both obvious (wages are so low, teachers need to look for second jobs, or funnel their students into private tuition) and less apparent (demoralized teachers with no money for textbooks and huge class sizes; weak governance means no-one holds absentees to account, and good attendance is not rewarded).

The first priority should be to pay teachers properly, invest in education and build a real public service ethos, as has been achieved in countries such as Sri Lanka.  But what other policies could contribute to reducing teacher absence?

A new paper from the Poverty Action Lab at MIT surveys some of the attempts to measure the effectiveness of efforts to reduce absenteeism, and comes up with some interesting success stories. Cautionary note: because PAL likes to conduct randomised control trials, it gravitated towards non-state providers willing to experiment with introducing new techniques in some schools and not others, however, the lessons might be useful for reforming state services too.

One way is to improve the accountability of teachers to their local communities. An ICS Africa programme in Kenya, the Extra Teacher Programme, tested a range of different approaches to improving education, including hiring locally accountable teachers, tracking students by ability level, and training the local school committees that oversaw these teachers. Locally accountable teachers had much lower absence rates than centrally hired teachers and pupils’ test scores improved.

Unfortunately, the Extra Teacher programme also paid the extra teachers a fraction of the government salary, (something the MIT researchers seem unhealthily delighted by), but the overarching point is that you can raise teacher attendance through local accountability. This is born out by the Citizen Report Card programme in Uganda, which informed communities about the quality of services (in this case health care services) and facilitated a “shared action plan” to monitor providers, including drawing up a “community contract” between local communities and health providers. The result was better quality health care, attributed to increased provider effort. Although provider absence was not the focus of the programme, the programme resulted in a 10 percentage point improvement in attendance.

More draconian methods also seem to work. The most successful project reported in terms of overall impact in reducing absenteeism took place in rural Udaipur in India, where Seva Mandir, an Indian NGO, runs informal schools to help students not reached by ordinary government schools. Each school has only one teacher who instructs about 20 students in basic Hindi and maths. Similar to other schools around the world, teacher absenteeism was high: the teacher absence rate was 44 percent. Because these were NGO schools and teachers, it was an ideal setting to test how teachers responded to incentives. Each teacher in the programme was given a camera with a tamper proof date and time stamp and was instructed to take a picture with students at the beginning and end of each school day. Teachers were paid for the number of days that they attended as recorded by the cameras, giving them a clear incentive to attend school. To test the effectiveness of the programme, Seva Mandir randomly assigned half of the teachers to the camera programme, while the rest were supervised and paid the normal way as a control group. Unannounced, random checks measured the true attendance of each group.

Ordinarily, teachers were paid a salary of Rs. 1,000 (about $22) per month, for 21 days of teaching. In the camera schools, each teacher was guaranteed a base pay of Rs. 500. Teachers were rewarded with Rs. 50 for each valid day taught, so if they turned up every day, they could significantly increase their admittedly paltry wage.

The cameras worked. Attendance increased from 58 percent in the control group to 79 percent in the group with cameras. Overall, this translates into 34 more days of instruction per student per year. Attendance increased for teachers with both relatively high and low attendance records. Teachers liked the programme because it gave them some control over their own income. Some initially resisted its inflexibility – invalid pictures meant no pay even if a teacher was present. But teachers grew to better understand the programme and technical problems became rare. Because the cameras were so successful, Seva Mandir has continued to use them long after the experiment has ended. From October 2006 to September 2007, attendance was 15 percentage points higher in classrooms with cameras, compared to those without cameras; attendance was still as high as before in the school with cameras, but it had some what improved in the other schools.

Not surprisingly, students in the camera schools learned more. They were 62 per cent more likely to be admitted to regular government schools. Seven percent more girls were able to take a test that required being able to write.

Finally, teachers respond to their pupils. A Girls Scholarship programme in Kenya, also run by ICS Africa, offered scholarships to sixth-grade girls who scored highest on tests, and showed an unintended (though positive) impact of incentives. The girls eligible for the scholarship showed academic improvement—as did girls who were unlikely to win and boys, who could not win. Teachers— who received no incentives themselves from the programme—responded to students’ increased motivation to learn and were absent 4.8 percentage points less than teachers in control schools. In other words, teachers responded to students’ increased motivation to learn.

At this point, the PAL researchers start to show the limits of the RCT number-crunching mindset and start to resemble that Monty Python sketch of the banker struggling to understand why someone should collect money for charity: ‘Is an appreciated or contented teacher less likely to be absent? If so, a programme carefully designed around a teacher’s situation could be successful without being financially expensive. It is not yet known exactly how teachers should be encouraged to want to teach. Researchers in J-PAL’s network are continuing to experiment with making teaching rewarding.’ Good luck with that, guys.

The backlash against microfinance

The intellectual battlefield of development is littered with magic bullets. New ideas or technologies such as the internet or mobile phones are picked up, promoted as panaceas that will end poverty and transform societies, and then rapidly cut down to size by scrutiny and research. That process seems to be well under way on microfinance.

As it happens, I’m in Bangladesh at the moment, where microfinance, spearheaded by the Grameen Bank , began its meteoric rise. It has been picked up and supported by the World Bank, the UN and increasingly, the private sector and reaching over 100m borrowers by 2004.  Microfinance’s rise culminated with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Grameen’s founder, Muhammad Yunus, in 2006.

Cue backlash. The critique has come from several angles. Firstly the evidence. The ‘success’ of MF has largely been judged on the success of the business model (i.e. do people repay their loans?), but does it actually reduce poverty? Two recent papers raise serious doubts, using ‘randomized control trials’ (RCTs) (themselves rapidly becoming a methodological magic bullet). These try and get round some thorny problems neatly summarized by the Economist:

‘Measuring the impact of microcredit is complicated by the fact that the counterfactual—what would have happened to a person who borrowed from a microlender if he had not done so—cannot easily be tested. Many early studies compared borrowers with non-borrowers. But if borrowers are in any case more entrepreneurial than those who do not borrow, such comparisons are likely to overstate hugely the effect of microcredit.’

RCTs, as the name implies, get over this by comparing a randomly selected sample of communities that do receive MF with another group that do not – if the randomisation is robust, any differences between them should be down to the presence (or absence of microfinance).

The results are striking. At least over the initial 18 months, two large RCTs in India and the Philippines found that MF did not reduce poverty.

The India study, conducted by MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (one of the main advocates for RCTs) summarized its findings thus:

‘Half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of an MFI branch while the remainder were not. We show that the intervention increased total MFI borrowing, and study the effects on the creation and the profitability of small businesses, investment, and consumption. 15 to 18 months after the program, there was no effect of access to microcredit on average monthly expenditure per capita, but durable expenditure did increase…. We find no impact on health, education, or women’s decision-making.’

MF did have some impact though: pre-existing businesses used it to invest; would be entrepreneurs invested it and then cut back on ‘temptation goods’ like alcohol in order to keep up repayments. Others simply spent their windfalls on food and other consumption goods.

The study concludes: ‘at least in the short-term (within 15-18 months), microcredit does not appear to be a recipe for changing education, health, or women’s decision-making. Microcredit therefore may not be the ‘miracle’ that is sometimes claimed on its behalf, but it does allow households to borrow, invest, and create and expand businesses.’

All this confirms the arguments in a much more comprehensive attack in ‘The Microfinance Illusion’, a draft paper by Milford Bateman and Ha-Joon Chang.  The paper starts off by pointing out that no successful national development stories to date have included a role for microfinance – I think it’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if what you are proposing has never worked at a national scale, you should step up your scepticism levels.

Bateman and Chang also make the point that MF is not ideologically neutral. In fact, MF is rather like the promotion of private individual property rights by Hernando de Soto and others -  ‘by emphasising individual entrepreneurship over all other forms (state, cooperative, etc), the microfinance concept has strong political/ideological serviceability to the prevailing neoliberal/globalisation model.’

So much for the broad brush. Among Bateman and Chang’s more detailed criticisms are:

1. Microfinance ignores the crucial role of scale economies. It is ‘crucially important to invest in small enterprise units (including in agriculture) that can rapidly achieve a minimum efficient scale of operations.’ Instead, MF produces ‘an over-supply of inefficient microenterprises that undermines the development of more efficient small and medium enterprises (SMEs)’. This is a key point – economic dynamism often springs from supporting SME that can grow – MF diverts credit and support from these to much smaller businesses, often in retail rather than manufacturing, which merely flood the cities with tailors and streetsellers.

2. Microfinance ignores the ‘fallacy of composition’. Supporting one streetseller to buy larger quantities of stock at lower prices may make sense for that individual, but if everyone does it, the market becomes saturated and retail prices (and incomes) are driven down. La Paz, Bolivia, where I once calculated that there was one street seller for every 3 families in the city, does not need more vendors.

3. The entry of more commercial MF providers has driven up interest rates – at some point, as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the MF providers and the loan sharks start to look indistinguishable. Moreover, commercial providers are often keener to encourage borrowing than saving, even though poor people often want a safe and accessible place to save small amounts, rather than get into debt through microcredit. MF risks encouraging a debt rather than a savings culture.

What do Bateman and Chang suggest as alternatives? Well, how about financial and credit cooperatives, community and state development banks or subsidised SME loan and credit programmes. They’ve all worked in the past, but have fallen into disfavour in recent years. Hopefully they can be rehabilitated, now that the market fundamentalism of recent decades is looking so threadbare.

It’s all pretty healthy, really. Development is a messy business. On closer inspection simple solutions are often neither simple, nor a complete solution. Time to work out what MF can and can’t deliver and add it to the repertoire.

And the scepticism has even spread to Bangladesh. Yesterday I met the President of the Bangladesh Economic Association, QK Ahmad, whose own survey of 2,500 borrowers (99% of them women) concluded that microfinance had been grossly oversold. ‘They take out credit, and give it back. That’s all they do’ he said. His book, snappily titled ‘Socio-Economic and Indebtedness-Related Impact of Micro-Credit in Bangladesh’ criticised the ’severe limitations of such a simplistic approach to poverty alleviation’ which ignored crucial issues such as ‘existing power relations in society.’ Couldn’t agree more.

The Global Campaign for Education – a model of international activism

‘Global campaigning’ is sometimes criticised for being driven by northern agendas. As one frustrated Indian activist interviewed in the paper discussed here asked ‘what is a global campaign? Does it mean you get a lot of people together in UK, have a Bono concert and ask us here in India to get together and shout? That is not locally relevant.’ One exception is the Global Campaign for Education, discussed in a new working paper from the Institute of Development Studies  Some highlights:

‘Four large NGOs came together in 1999 to establish the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) and to promote the realization of the right to quality, free and compulsory education for all. Two of these founding organisations – ActionAid and Oxfam International – are international NGOs (INGOs). The third, Education International, is an international association of teachers’ unions formed in 1993, which brought resources from international trade union organisations to the campaign. The fourth founder member, the Global March Against Child Labour, is an international movement concerned with children’s rights, based in the global South. By 2007, the GCE had involved over 18 million people and thousands of organisations in over 100 countries. It has emerged as one of the longest-lasting, and by many counts, most effective transnational campaigns, attempting to bring together local, national, regional and international voices for change. Over 80 per cent of GCE funds go to support national coalitions along with lots of support and training on lobbying and advocacy, and its governance is carefully balanced between North and South.

But building any such advocacy coalition involves multiple challenges. Global actions may be perceived as unrepresentative or even undermining to the efforts of those engaging at national and local levels of governance. The question of ‘who legitimately speaks for whom’ constitutes a continuing issue within civil society organisations and social movements locally as well as internationally, across both global South and global North. Further, trade unions organise in very different ways from NGOs and social movements, leading to mutual suspicions and potential conflicts. And yet, the GCE has faced and survived precisely such challenges and provides evidence therefore of how differences may be negotiated, and how trust may be built across a diversity of interests, experiences and organisational cultures.

Although of course there are tensions within the GCE, our interviews with actors at every level in the UK, India and Nigeria revealed a surprising amount of internal trust and legitimacy between actors at all levels, and a sense of inclusion and voice that is not always the case in transnational citizen mobilisations.

The GCE provides illustrations of all three. It has been flexible enough to take on new issues or themes – as reflected in the changing themes of each of its global weeks of action – and to raise challenges in different spaces – from the IMF to regional level institutions and beyond to the local level. While it has developed an institutional structure, that structure recognises the differing roles played by INGOs, trade unions, and national members. And, as has been seen, this involvement has contributed to a widely-felt sense of solidarity with others, giving a collective identity to the emerging movement.

This case study of the GCE also revealed several other factors which contribute to its relative legitimacy and durability. These included firstly, deep pre-existing roots and forms of collective organisation at the national level, particularly in the South, before the global campaign was formed. Secondly, once formed, the GCE was highly sensitive to building upon these existing organisations, especially in its inclusive and representative formal structures. Third, a great deal of attention was been paid to the collective framing of issues, across actors and levels of the coalition. Fourth, there is wide recognition of the differential roles that can be played by activists at each level in the campaign, with a high value placed on local actors, and ensuring complementarity rather than competition. Finally, there was attention paid to the material base of the campaign, especially in the distribution of the resources. The formation and existence of a global funding mechanism was particularly important in helping to ensure that national level organisations were able to access the funds which they needed.

Interviews with actors reveal that the development of a strong sense of connectedness and solidarity with those across borders working on similar issues. Yet, for most activists, this was not replacing a sense of national or local citizenship, but was adding to it. As governance is increasingly multi-scaled, so citizenship can therefore also be multi-dimensional.’

The paper accepts that in some ways, the GCE has it easy – education is a relatively non-contentious issue (at least apart from privatization and user fees, and their advocates are not in the campaign) with a clear set of global goals agreed at the Dakar World Education Forum in 2000. Other campaigns on a range of economic and environmental issues, tend to run up against ideological and/or North-South differences much earlier on (witness the food sovereignty v food security and food miles debates).

The research involved extensive interviews with activists in India, Nigeria and the UK. It looked at process and inputs, the nuts and bolts of campaigning and alliance-building. I would have liked at least a summary of the evidence of the impact that all this activism has had, but its findings on how a large global campaign can be constructed are worth reading.

When farmers and weather men disagree, who’s right?

I recently blogged on an excellent new paper by Steve Jennings and John Magrath on the changing nature of the seasons across a range of developing countries. One of the interesting side issues that emerged is that, while in most countries farmers’ perceptions fit the meteorological data, in a few others, farmers say that seasons, and particularly rainfall patterns have changed drastically since their parents’ time, but the meteorological data insist that nothing significant has occurred. What explains the disparity and who should we believe?

Some useful ideas come in a 2004 paper on Ethiopia by Elisabeth Meze-Hausken, published in the ‘Climate Research’ journal. She sets up the problem as follows:

‘Statistical analysis of rainfall chronologies was performed and contrasted with qualitative data collected through a survey and questionnaires. Fieldwork studies showed that local authorities, farmers and pastoralists perceived regional climate to have changed during the last few decades. Farmers explained that they have been changing their farming strategies by shifting to more drought-resistant crops as well as to a shorter agricultural calendar. They attributed this to a loss of the spring rains since ‘their father’s time’ (20–30 yr ago), as well as a shorter main summer wet period. However, rainfall measurements do not show a downward trend in rainfall.’

Meze-Hausken asked the question ‘If there is no proven change, has the need for rainfall changed during recent decades?’  For example increased demand for staple food (due to population growth) can be met by intensification or extensification of agriculture. If that increased pressure on the land leads to a crop failure, farmers may attribute it to drought (the traditional explanation) even if the rain fell as normal.

An alternative explanation is that other natural and human factors such as soil fertility, vegetation cover can reduce water availability, which farmers then interpret as due to declining rainfall, even without any actual measured change in rainfall itself.

Moreover, increased competition for land with the local pastoralists may have led to higher needs for stable and sufficient rainfall.

Steve Jennings, one of the authors of the Oxfam paper on seasonality, summarizes as follows:

‘The Ethiopia paper seems to say that farmer perceptions were of a compound variable (such as temperature + rainfall pattern + rainfall amount = agricultural drought) rather than the simple variable (rainfall amount) measured by weather stations. (No prizes for guessing he’s an environmental scientist by training……) This very much chimes with what we’ve supposed about the discrepancies between perceptions and data in Uganda (but sadly only had time to allude to in our paper). So the question then becomes why do people in some places seem to perceive changes in rainfall alone, whereas in others they perceive a compound variable. Is it what we ask them? Or is it that in places like Ethiopia, rainfall is so variable and the historical record so poor that it impossible for meteorologists to detect subtle changes that are obvious to communities?’

So who’s right, farmers or weathermen? Answer both, but they are measuring different things.

And if course it would be nice to have a similar exercise from the 1950s. Did tropical farmers back then say, ’the weather hasn’t changed a bit since my granny’s time’, or did they too radiate nostalgia for the good old days? After all, it’s not just a British trait to complain about the weather.

Failed States Index 2009, with interactive map

Foreign Policy magazine has teamed up again with the Washington DC-based ‘Fund for Peace’ thinktank to produce an interactive map of state fragility, to illustrate their Failed States Index 2009, covering 177 countries. Most fragile are Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Chad, Sudan and DRC. Most stable are (inevitably) the Scandinavians – Norway, followed by Finland and Sweden. Annoyingly, I can’t find anywhere on the site that says which countries have fallen/risen the most over the four years the FSI has been reporting, but you can work it out for yourself by clicking on the league table for each year.

The methodology uses the Fund for Peace’s ‘Conflict Assessment System Tool’ (CAST), an original methodology it has developed and tested over the past decade. This rates 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, which provides snapshots of state vulnerability or risk of violence for one time period each year. The data used in each index are collected from May to December of the preceding year. The CAST software indexed and scanned more than 90,000 open-source articles and reports using Boolean logic, which consists of key phrases designed to capture the variables measured.

Full-text data are electronically gathered from a range of publicly available print, radio, television and Internet sources from all over the world, including international and local media reports, essays, interviews, polling and survey data, government documents, independent studies from think tanks, NGOs and universities, and even corporate financial filings. The software determines the salience of the 12 indicators as well as hundreds of sub-indicators by calculating the number of “hits” as a proportion of the sample for a given time period. Quantitative data is also included, when available. Subject-matter experts then review each score for every country and indicator, as well as consult the original documents, when necessary, to ensure accuracy.

The 12 categories are:

Social Indicators
Mounting Demographic Pressures
Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons creating Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
Legacy of Vengeance-Seeking Group Grievance or Group Paranoia
Chronic and Sustained Human Flight

Economic Indicators
Uneven Economic Development along Group Lines
Sharp and/or Severe Economic Decline

Political Indicators
Criminalization and/or Delegitimization of the State
 Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
 Suspension or Arbitrary Application of the Rule of Law and Widespread 

Violation of Human Rights
Security Apparatus Operates as a “State Within a State”
Rise of Factionalized Elites
Intervention of Other States or External Political Actors

It all feels very odd – a nice tidy clickable map for desk jockeys looking for numbers on the human mayhem and misery of collapsing states. The methodology looks impressive, but obviously reflects the sources on which it is based – is it a reflection of media coverage rather than reality? Hard to say without spending some serious time picking over it – anyone done so?