How can Ethiopia’s coffee farmers get more from your $3 latte?

According to legend Kaldi (left), a 9th Century Ethiopian goatherd, discovered coffee when he saw his flock start leaping around after nibbling the bright red berries of a certain bush. He gave them a try, and the ensuing buzz prompted him to bring the berries to an Islamic holy man in a nearby monastery. The holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into the fire, from which an enticing aroma then billowed. The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding the world’s first cup of coffee. No, I don’t believe it either, but it’s a nice story.

In the 12 centuries since Kaldi got his first fix, coffee certainly hasn’t made many Ethiopians rich, so how can its farmers earn a decent

Teferi and Fikrte (my Oxfam minders) celebrate Kaldi's discovery

living from growing it, especially when world prices (as now) are good? To find out, I headed for Kaldi’s region, Jimma (see pic – they believe the Kaldi story, anyway), where Oxfam is trying to help thousands of small coffee farmers (typically 2-3 hectares a family) export directly into the international market for organic coffee, and so pocket a much bigger chunk of the final price.

But the international coffee trade requires container loads of uniformly high-quality coffee beans, with minimal impurities. That’s a leap for small farmers used to selling their coffee by the sack, with a fair number of broken and damaged beans. Here are some of the ways the farmers are facing up to the challenge:

1. Organization and scale: They set up the Limmu Innara Union of cooperatives in 2006, which now comprises 41 coops, with 30,000 households. Strengthening the management capacity and market linkages of the union will be crucial to getting the coffee to market.

2. Quality control: success will depend on improving the quality of the beans. That means making sure that every family member or day labourer picks the red beans, and not the green ones, and that every stage of transport and processing minimises impurities. One of the key ways to achieve this is actually through a fascinating ‘functional adult literacy’ programme and a focus on women’s rights – more on that tomorrow.

3. Access to working capital: the union needs to pay the farmers up front for their coffee, otherwise their desperate need for cash will force them to sell to private traders even though they pay less. It takes time to build up that capital, and access to credit is hard until they have assets they can put down as collateral, so Oxfam has part-funded the building of a new warehouse that can both clean up the coffee chain, and simultaneously act as collateral for bank loans.

4. Learning to navigate the value chain: the coffee value chain is complex (see diagram), and requires different skills as you move from selling to local traders at the farmgate to doing international deals. Oxfam is working with a team from Accenture to find organizations that can work with the union to set up those links.

What struck me most in conversations with farmers both at the grassroots and in the union’s management board, is their awareness of the need to change. As Marina, a dynamic board member, spelt out, in words echoed by several others, ‘Our parents had a simple, peaceful life, but technology is always advancing. Unless our kids get an education, many of them will be unemployed or on the street. That could threaten the stability of the country. If we learn to use technology, we can live better.’

If the project is successful, how big a difference would it make? According to Fikadu Dugassa, the union manager, selling direct to export would bump up profits by some 25% – an extra US$ 0.50 per kilo. Then there are union plans for diversification, insurance and other ways to reduce the vulnerability of its members.

Developments in the wider coffee market could also help. If Ethiopia manages to follow the example of Jamaica Blue Mountain, and trademark its coffee (following the successful campaign to stop Starbucks and others blocking its efforts) then the price it receives could jump significantly, and with it, farmers’ incomes.

When I asked a group of coffee farmers how much they thought I would pay for a coffee in London, they reckoned 1 birr, (6 US cents) would be about right. When they heard it was more like 50 times that much, they wondered where the money went. It would be extraordinary (and only fair) if a lot of more of it could go to the people who invented and now grow it.

Postscript: Some readers were pretty unconvinced by my earlier post on roses, which argued that Ethiopia getting just 3 cents to the dollar on its roses was a rip off. That’s just how relative prices work, no big deal. OK, how about this. The women (and girls) sorting through the coffee beans in this pic will have to work for 8 years to earn what I get from Oxfam in one day. Sorry, but that just can’t be right.

Top tips on interviewing people in groups

They may not qualify as ‘proper focus groups’, as when it comes to that horrible word ‘methodology’, I am largely self-taught, but for

Talking to coffee farmers in Ethiopia - can't believe I get paid to do this

decades, I have been sitting down under trees, in people’s houses or in NGO offices and talking to groups of men and women about their lives. It’s one of the most fulfilling aspects of working in development.

The conversations feed into my writing and analysis, but also prompt new ideas and takes on different development issues- a good group discussion sends your thoughts racing off in numerous different directions. I greatly prefer them to the kind of one-to-one interview you sometimes need to conduct for a report or article, but which the interviewee can often experience as an intimidating interrogation by an unknown whitey. With groups, the balance of power is less skewed, especially when discussions get going. Maybe as you spend longer in a place and get to know people, the one-to-ones become more useful – my colleague Martin Walsh sees ‘group interviews as a kind of collective brainstorm and first cut at issues; individual interviews to tease out details and differences of opinion.’ Sadly, I don’t normally stay long enough to get to that stage.

Here are a few tips on getting the most out of them.

The Basics: Know how long you’ve got for the meeting. Introduce yourself and why you’re here. Sit in a circle, and begin by going round and collecting names. If people are literate, ask them to write down their names, ages etc themselves. Then you can quickly refer back to the list and put names to comments as you take notes.

Be prepared: Have a list of questions on a separate sheet of paper to refer to while waiting for translations etc. There’s nothing worse than drying up (e.g. if you’re jetlagged or ill) or forgetting to ask about something and remembering just as you leave the meeting. But you’re not filling in a questionnaire – if it goes well, you should abandon the list and follow conversational threads, use your instinct, be a bit random.

Ethics and Courtesy: explain at the beginning what you intend to do with the material; end by asking people if they have any questions for you (their questions are often really interesting). Be prepared to talk about yourself (age, kids etc) and the real politics or other issues in your country. If people ask your advice, give it your best shot, however inadequate you feel (but explain if you are not an expert on the topic). They can always ignore it if it isn’t useful.

Working through translators: This can be frustrating as hell, especially if the translator is struggling and/or has their own agenda – the five minute animated response that is then translated as ‘they don’t think so’ drives me crazy. Keep your questions singular, simple and avoid complex plays on words. Explain to the translator how you would like to work with them, (eg translating short or long) but in the end, you have no choice but to accept a level of uncertainty over what people really said. Remember, you’re privileged to be there at all and have people give up their time to talk to you.

Handling intermediaries: Often, there will be people in the group such as health promoters, or technical assistance people, who sometimes feel they should speak on behalf of the group. Even though they are often very knowledgeable, they do not represent the group as a whole, so you need to listen for a bit then use questions and body language to politely move on to the other members of the group.

Men v Women: A classic challenge, especially if you’re a male interviewer, is to avoid men doing all the talking in mixed groups (all-women ones are usually much easier). You need to prompt the translator, and when a woman starts talking, encourage her, but you can’t be too blatant. If you just blurt out ‘I want to hear from the women’, it can cause offense or bafflement.

Have fun: If you can, get people talking, laughing and disagreeing. As an ice breaker, you can try saying hello in the local language in a suitably awful accent. Asking ‘who works harder, men or women?’ usually provokes a good argument. Banter a bit. Enjoy yourself.

Keep a foot in each camp: It’s easy to obsess on details (e.g. the prices of different kinds of food) that subsequently prove of little use. The hardest thing is to remember your eventual readership and what will be meaningful to them, at the same time as genuinely trying to enter into the lives of the people in the room.

Remember to ask the big questions: What future do you want for your kids? What’s the biggest change in your life since they built the road? What’s so good about mobile phones? They’re often the hardest to ask, and the most revealing.

Be on the ball: you are likely to only have one chance to speak to these people. If there are long answers that must await a translation, skip back over your notes, and look for the gaps – what have you missed? What needs a follow up question? Concentration has to be total – you can always sleep in the car afterwards.

OK, that’s a few of my tips, what others have people got?

Should we buy roses from Ethiopia?

OK, back to Ethiopia week. On leaving Addis, we head off to the Rift Valley on one of Ethiopia’s many excellent roads (shame about the driving…) to an enormous flower farm owned by a company called Sher, which rents them out to three large Dutch flower companies, including Herburg Roses Ethiopia plc, who we are meeting. And I mean enormous – rows of identical green plastic greenhouses, each one a kilometre in length, covering a total of 325 hectares so far, and aiming to reach 450. What follows is a classic flying NGO visit – a hurried conversation with the managers, a quick chat to some workers, and then we have to leave with a steadily accumulating series of unasked or unanswered questions, what the French call pensées d’escalier (‘thoughts on the stairs’).

So what is (more or less) certain? Roses have boomed in Ethiopia, overtaking Kenya this year. According to Alemayehu Geda, an economist from Addis Ababa University, about 100 firms are involved, 2/3 of them foreign-owned. Cut flower exports have risen tenfold over the last 3-4 years and now bring in an annual $170m in 2008 – that’s 11% of national exports. Peter van Heukelom and Jos Kliks, respectively Herburg’s Managing Director and Farm Manager, think Geda’s figure may even be too low. 90% of Ethiopia’s roses go to Holland.

Flowers create jobs: Herburg needs 26 people per hectare to grow its flowers, which is a lot more than can make a living from a hectare of any other crop I’ve come across. And Ethiopians want to work there, as the long lines outside the farm gates demonstrate.

Flowers bring in vital foreign exchange. The deal between the Ethiopian government and the foreign investors specifies a minimum of €0.08 must enter Ethiopia per flower. Herburg alone exports 80 million roses a year to Holland – that’s a guaranteed €6.4 million entering the country.

But only a tiny proportion of the sales price reaches Ethiopia: Peter says he would be happy to earn €0.13 a stem, (i.e. above

3p for you; 97p for us.....

the minimum set by the government), but a 12 rose bouquet on a UK supermarket website costs £40, or €3.91 per rose. That means 97% of the final value of the rose you buy in the shop never reaches Ethiopia!

The companies spend a fair amount on social responsibility, including a gleaming hospital, free to all employees, and a nursery and primary school. Herburg is regularly audited and certified on both its environmental and social performance by MPS, a quality assurance company.

Herburg pays no corporation tax, because of a five year tax holiday that runs out next year. But even after that, as long as Ethiopia prevents companies from repatriating profits, they will probably make sure their pricing policy ensures that profits accrue in Holland, so little corporation tax will be paid in Ethiopia.

Beyond that, a one hour visit leaves a large cloud of uncertainty. Wages are low (about $28 a month for a packing worker, $50 for her supervisor), but that is reportedly a good deal more than the minimum wage and the few workers we speak to see it as a good, secure job.

On the environmental questions that always surround flower farms, Peter and Jos point to their MPS certification and say that the firm uses only organic chemicals, and takes great pains to clean up its effluents. A local environmentalist claims the fish are dying in the lake, but the lake looked luxuriant and was full of birdlife (including fish eaters), so who knows? Certainly not me. And I have no way of knowing the health impacts on the workers, if any, of chemical use, although Peter stresses that they are required to wear safety gear and fined if they fail to do so. And I have no information on the views of the small farmers evicted (with compensation) by the government to make way for the farms.

So on the basis of this sketchy information, do I think we should continue to buy Ethiopian roses? Yes. Does Ethiopia earn a fair proportion of the final price for its roses? No. Should we keep up pressure on the companies involved to improve wages, conditions and environmental management? Definitely. I suspect not all readers will agree, though……..

Evo Morales and Somerset beauty queens; trashing Bill Easterly; cutting aid starts wars; developmentfest in NY; we hate fun; 100 years of US inequality: links I liked

Time out from Ethiopia week (which continues tomorrow) for some links I liked

“Jessica Anne Jordan Burton’s background gave no indications that she would end up in politics. Born in the Somerset town of Bath in England, the 26-year-old moved to Bolivia as a young girl with her mother after her parents divorced. She was crowned Miss Bolivia in 2006 (see pic). Four years later she is now responsible for development in Beni, north- east Bolivia.” With a $700m development pot. Seems Evo Morales has indeed been influenced by Venezuela, at least when it comes to a weakness for beauty queens. And Bath’s my home town – we all dress like this. Oh dear……. P.S. If you’re thinking jobs-for-beauty-queens is a purely Latin American phenomenon, I have two words for you. Silvio. Berlusconi. [h/t James Stevenson]

How many hungry people are there? A lazy and supercilious attack on the latest FAO numbers by Bill Easterly is politely but comprehensively trashed by the FAO’s David Dawe, supported by our very own Richard King (but at least Aid Watch had the decency to publish the responses on their blog).

Cutting aid triggers new conflicts, according to a new paper. Worrying, given the pressures on aid in a number of countries. [h/t Chris Blattman]

A flavour of development week in New York. Makes me glad I was in Ethiopia….

A wonderfully grumpy attack on compulsory fun in the workplace

US Inequality, 1917-2008

How butter leads to women’s emancipation: a self help group in Ethiopia

In societies where women are traditionally confined to the home and denied any voice, how can NGOs help bring them together? Ethiopia week on the blog continues with a visit to a women’s group supported by an Oxfam partner, Rift Valley Children and Women Development. On the way, Hussen Delecha, an ex-Save the Children staffer who decided to switch to a local NGO in the shape of ‘Rift Valley’, as everyone calls it, filled me in.

They work with ex-pastoralist communities who have settled and are trying to make a go of farming on tiny (typically quarter hectare) plots. The small size and regular failure of the rains means that drought and hunger are the norm (although thankfully, the rains are good this year, and the valley is lush).

Although men have traditionally dominated access to resources, with women often isolated in their homes, Rift Valley spotted a tradition they could build on: the butter economy, known as wijjo in the local Oromo language. Oromo women have traditionally shared and exchanged butter, e.g. as gifts to the sick, or at weddings, providing a model for establishing savings groups that could help people through crises, diversify incomes and reduce vulnerability to drought. Hussen sees it as an example of ‘community based risk management’.

There followed one of my favourite experiences of working for an NGO. Sitting under a tree and talking for an hour with a circle of some 15 Oromo women of all ages, as the rainclouds loomed and the birds squabbled in the branches overhead. (Sorry, no pics, my camera has got trashed somewhere on the trip – but here’s a pic from the Rift Valley website, obviously taken in drier times). Here are some highlights:

Savings: “We save about 14 Birr (US$0.90) a month, and can take out loans that we can use to buy goats and cattle. We didn’t have a culture of saving before – now I have what I didn’t have before.”

Community: “When one of us gets sick, we visit. We support each other for weddings and social occasions. We help the poorest members of the group improve their houses.”

Relations with men: “Before, it was our husbands who bought assets. We were stuck in our houses, we didn’t meet. Now the decision is up to me – what to do with my money. That’s a big change. Our husbands are changing too – they have their own group now.”

Climate Change and living with drought: “1984 was a terrible drought, but it was unique. Now it has become routine – we never used to see all the plants die. It’s really difficult, but last year we fought back through petty trade, we collected salt lick from the lake shore, and got some food aid to feed the children. Animals died, but no people did.”

Family size: The older women have 7-10 children, but add “we are struggling to change their (the younger ones’) lives. It was ignorance that led to large families. Now we are starting to use family planning and we get education from the health office. Some of our children are getting educated and moving to the town, but there are not many jobs there.” The younger women say they want only 4-5 children. (See this week’s excellent post on family planning and safe abortion in Ethiopia from Owen Barder)

What’s next? They want to be able to store grains, and buy a grinding mill. They dream of having their own vehicle to get to market. They would like to finish their education – most are barely literate – and have started a literacy class. “We want more skills and knowledge. That’s why we have come together.”

As well as supporting the self-help groups, Rift Valley is helping women increase their income in the face of climate change by providing them with low tech drip irrigation systems (suspended waterproof bags  distributing water to pierced rubber tubes – even lower tech than the example in the pic). These allow the women to grow food in gardens, even when the rains fail, improving nutrition and income, which in turn allows them to rent more land and set off a virtuous circle.

Nothing flashy, just the hard graft of long-term development and women’s emancipation, running up the down escalator of climate change and shrinking farm size.

Ethiopia is Beautiful

And I’ve just got back from a fantastic five day field trip there, so I’m going to subject you to a week of posts on it.

I go on two kinds of trips for Oxfam – laptop and notebook. Laptop trips are usually to conferences, with powerpoint, wifi, memory sticks, email and all the paraphernalia of the modern wonk, which sometimes leaves you feeling that you might as well have stayed in the office. Notebook trips leave all that behind in favour of my trusty reporter’s  pad and five senses, talking to farmers, street vendors, business people etc, trying to reality check all the stuff I spend my time reading (and writing about). Alas the laptop trips have been squeezing out the other kind in recent years, so it was great to have a few days on the road in Ethiopia last week (albeit on the back of an ‘expert group meeting on poverty eradication’ in the UN compound in Addis Ababa, with its echoing marble halls and four restaurants). I’ll mull over a few of the programme visits and other conversations over the next few days, but here are some random impressions to begin with.

First the beauty – the landscape after plentiful rains is extraordinary. I’ll spare you the purple travel-writing prose, but this is not the Ethiopia of TV stereotype. I may even follow Bill Easterly’s advice for once and book myself a hiking holiday here. And the Ethiopians are beautiful too, with a lovely intimate habit of promenading with hands on each others’ shoulders, or holding hands, or arm in arm.

Even though I’m a white ‘ferenji’, I mercifully didn’t attract all the attention. A lot of the stares were instead directed at the Oxfam driver Fikrte (see pic). One young boy simply shouted ‘why?’, while girls goggled at her (you could almost see the proto-feminist cogs turning). Luckily Fikrte seems to have inexhaustible reserves of good humour to put up with this kind of stuff, as well as weaving for hours on end between legions of goats, donkeys and cows, all of whom seem to regard the road as their own. She’s certainly the first woman driver I’ve ever seen working for Oxfam, and I was relieved to have a testosterone-free trip in a country with the world’s second highest rate of road deaths, according to a recent report.

Highlights on our hotel menu included ‘roasted lump’ and ‘beef burger holestain’. See if you can work them out (answers at the bottom)

The road out to the rift valley was dotted with numerous Chinese flags on large shiny metal billboards outside factories, construction projects and an enormous industrial park, contrasting with the weatherbeaten and rather battered versions of western governments and NGOs. I was even greeted with a ‘hey China!’ by one small boy – sign of the times.

Mobile phones are everywhere – all the coffee farmers in one meeting had them, although none of them had electricity or piped water. When I asked what difference they make, the answer was always the same. You can check in on your relatives, talk to the sick, or sort out a meeting without going in person. By skipping the landline stage and going straight from having to walk miles to see someone (public or private transport are rare, beyond mules and horses), without any certainty that they will be there, to calling them on the mobile, the communications technology has brought huge time savings.

And finally, the only wildlife I normally get to see is roadkill, but as I’m a bit of a nature freak, the three colobus monkeys reclining in a tree top, in full view of passing cars were unforgettable.

More traditional development fare follows once I get off the plane and start blogging.

Menu decode: Roast Lamb, and Holstein beef ……

How has campaigning changed since slavery was abolished?

Recently I discussed ‘public action and influencing change’ with a small group of NGO types at an aid conference in Edinburgh. We started off by reviewing the factors behind the victory of the abolitionists back in the early 19th Century, and what had changed (or stayed the same) since then.

Same: many of the tactics (petitions, boycotts, killer facts and images – see pic, testimonies, speaker tours), which the abolitionists in

modern campaigning is born

many cases invented, are still staples of today’s campaigners.

Different: Although then as now, campaigns linked up movements in the South and North, the anti-slavery campaign was more clearly about changes to rich country laws and practices in a more unipolar world. Today’s campaigners grapple with power that is increasingly dispersed between governments (both North and South), companies and global institutions.

The media has become a much more important intermediary between campaigners and decision-makers/the public. Branding, celebrities and stunts have become more important to try and win media space, but at what cost? Could social networking tools  narrow the gap that has opened up? On the other hand, don’t mass campaign-at-the-click-of-a-mouse innovations like Avaaz risk diluting campaigning into little more than a running opinion poll? When/how does such ‘thin’ campaigning deepen into something more significant?

Campaigners themselves have become professionalized, with salaries, career structures and bureaucracies – I think that increases their influence, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I? What is lost?

be very afraid.....

Then what about time poverty? Middle class women who might have signed up to campaign against slavery now have jobs and no servants. Students work harder these days, both in and out of college. Cue my usual rant about the ‘grey panthers‘ model – the-time rich sector of 60-somethings that campaigners usually overlook. These are older people, probably retired, who bring time, money, knowledge, experience, staying power and contacts to a campaign and are a huge untapped resource. But they have to be given a freer hand to use those assets and experience – they aren’t easy to boss around! Why aren’t we targeting them, e.g. getting together people who have worked in the extractive industry, or banking, or government and asking them to come up with influencing strategies around a particular campaign aim, then cutting them loose?

Then the conversation got increasingly cosmic, or at least global. What does ‘active global citizenship’, which is apparently taught in Scottish schools, actually mean? I went back to some of the stuff I’ve been reading recently on the rise of citizenship in Europe, which argued that it was a direct response to the spread of the state into every corner of national territories and increasing areas of life. This ‘caging’ of people by the state, in the words of Sidney Tarrow, prompted a violent response, as communities that had previously fought with their neighbours came together to resist and tame the state. For Tarrow, citizenship was born out of these conflicts.

Compare that to today’s global scene, where there may be elements of an emergent global state, but it remains far weaker than the national version, and far less present in people’s lives. The weakness of global institutions might explain why the global version of citizenship is so ‘nice’: the ‘caging’ is less evident and there is nothing obvious to burn down.

But others in the group saw a different kind of citizen action emerging through fair trade, or transition towns – acts of local citizenship with a global impact (I’m desperately avoiding the awful word ‘glocal’ here). They thought it was easier to come up with positive campaigns at that level, whereas global campaigns tend to be about stopping bad things, or protesting against stuff.

Meanwhile, an intriguing new book by John Gaventa and Rajesh Tandon, Globalizing Citizens, argues that the distinction between national and global citizenship is in any case a false dichotomy. An increasing number of national struggles are learning to build in an element of international mobilisation to support their work on the ground – good case studies from anti-Asbestos campaigns in South Africa and the Global Campaign for Education. Success depends in part on a new tier of heroic ‘hybrid mediators’, who manage to simultaneously stay rooted in community struggles, and navigate the international system, moving between them and speaking both their languages with equal facility. As for the point about the weakness of the global quasi-state, the book argues that this means that success requires winning the battle for ’soft power’ and political legitimacy, for example by winning acceptance for your version of ‘knowledge frames’ (if this is a bit vague, I am accurately reflecting the frustratingly elusive quality of the book!).

No conclusions, just an interesting discussion. Feel free to add to it.

How Change Happens: Campaigning on Early Marriage in Yemen

Here’s another interesting example of how to do advocacy where you might not expect it, in this case on women’s rights in Islamic contexts. If you are born a woman in Yemen you have a 50% chance of living in absolute poverty, a 70% chance of being illiterate and an 80% chance of never holding a paid job. You have a 1 in 19 chance of dying in childbirth. Half of all women marry before the age of 15, and three quarters before the age of 18. Early marriage is a significant contributor to high maternal and infant mortality.

Much of the resistance to ending early marriage stems from attitudes and beliefs. The beliefs underpinning early marriage include protecting chastity and family honour, lack of awareness of the negative impacts of teenage pregnancy, poverty and girls being viewed as an economic liability by some families.  

What campaigners did: Since 2005, working with the Shima network and the Women’s National Committee – a loose alliance of 17 organisations and one government body – Oxfam in Yemen has run a campaign on ‘safe marriage’, to reduce the tolerance and practice of early marriage by increasing public understanding of its significance as a cause and consequence of poverty, particularly in relation to the health, education and economic status of women.

The partners compiled hard evidence on the impact of the early marriage on health and education using statistics, real life stories from people and communicating them through radio, school plays, posters, focus groups and discussions in the mosques. They found allies among religious leaders, teachers, marriage contractors and other influential members of the communities.

Results: Some cases of delayed marriage have been reported, but there was significant resistance to the idea of setting a minimum legal age for marriage in the Parliament . This resistance was based on the beliefs that banning early marriage was contrary to the teachings of Islam and tradition and an unjustifiable restriction on parent’s individual freedoms.

However in 2009, following lobbying from women’s organisations, a bill was introduced to the Parliament making 17 years the minimum age of marriage. The law was challenged and called back by the conservative opposition and it is currently on hold. But the taboo on speaking about this was finally broken.

When religious leaders objected, the campaign took its foot off the pedal to allow time for dialogue and identifying allies within the mosques. It met with Imams and officials at the Ministry of Religious Guidance through the Training Centre for Imams, a crucial step in allaying the fears of religious conservatives and proof that this was not a western-imposed issue. The campaign also commissioned a study to look at the views of the different Islamic sects/lines of thinking on the age of marriage, and the laws on minimum age of marriage in the Arab Countries.

Learning Points:
· Language matters: focussing on health and education impacts and turning the campaign into one to promote a “safe age of marriage“ was a more acceptable concept that resonated with many men, women and children, religious and community leaders much better than the more normative language on women’s rights used earlier in the campaign..
· Be respectful of institutions, learn their language and understand their beliefs. Work within faiths, (quoting scripture, identifying allies etc) not against them
· Know when to go slow and when to push – it’s like catching a fish!

The Guardian goes global; development success stories; China v US on sustainable energy; Americans love the UN; stats made easy; emergency universities; what really happened in Copenhagen: Links I liked

Welcome to this blog’s 500th post…..

Check out the Guardian’s new Global Development website and its accompanying  ‘GD Blogosphere‘ portal 

The ODI has launched a new website on ‘development success‘, with some great case studies.

China overtakes the US on sustainable energy finance – who’s walking the walk on climate change?

How about this for a US opinion poll?
· 54% think the UN needs to be strengthened.
· 64% want a standing UN peacekeeping force.
· 67% want the US to participate in an international treaty on climate change.
· 70% favor American participation in the International Criminal Court.
· 68% want cooperation with China, against just 28% who favor containment.

Series of excellent brief guides to how to use and understand statistics, c/o the British House of Commons library

Are Universities an essential service that must continue operating during future emergencies like SARS? Singapore thinks so and is running a test, shutting down its National University for a week to force all its lecturers to deliver classes online. In the UK, most university professors still haven’t got their heads round powerpoint.  

What really happened in Copenhagen – a 40 minute documentary from IIED (make yourself a cup of tea while it’s downloading….)

Social Protection for Cows?

Cows, camels and goats are a crucial store of value in many countries. They provide meat, milk and clothing, they can be a quasi currency and can be passed on to children. In some countries, they are used as a kind of high interest revolving loan – you borrow a pair of breeding animals, look after them til they have young, then return the breeding stock and raise the calves yourself. The economic role is buttressed by cultural factors – owning livestock brings status and respect.

So livestock are valuable, multi-purpose assets (like money, only cash or bank accounts don’t provide you with milk) but, unlike other assets (houses, machinery, pots and pans, money), animals can die and lose their value overnight, especially during droughts or floods.

An interesting recent BBC piece on hunger in Niger mentioned in passing that the FAO is distributing animal feed for people’s cows as part of its anti-famine work. The FAO cattle-feeding programme will both keep the cows alive, and discourage people from distress-selling their assets at the rock bottom prices that characterize a crisis.

This got me thinking about the importance of smoothing the impact of shocks on livestock as well as more directly on people. Which prompts the thought, what else could be taken from our burgeoning interest in social protection (see recent post) and applied to livestock?

Possible: child benefits could become calf support grants. Cash transfers (presumably to humans, not cows) could be made conditional on having your livestock vaccinated. Any other candidates?

[Unlikely: cow pensions, unemployment benefit]

And if people do have to sell their cows, could governments, perhaps using aid money, buy them at decent prices and set the same price for restocking after the rains return?

Presumably lots of social protection-type stuff is happening already – over to the livestock community to fill us all in