Can leaders sing?; IPad pie chart; ‘lazy Africans’?; Cairo gloom; the next World Bank president; Borgen rocks; the world according to Lant: links I liked

So Barack can do a mean Al Green, but can other world leaders sing? [h/t Rob Bailey]

Where does the price of your iPad go? Only 2% to Chinese workers

Here’s a lesson in how to increase your blog traffic. Call a post You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum! Then sit back and watch the comments roll in – 583 at the last count (at least it puts the swimming pool in perspective). And it’s beautifully written too (by Field Ruwe, a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author) [h/t Malcolm Spence]

“Things are getting worse rather than better for people who took part in Egypt’s revolution last January, and the new government doesn’t seem to be a stabilising force.” IDS researcher Mariz Tadros offers a gloomy view of the revolution’s first anniversary.

And they’re off! Follow all the gossip on the race to be next World Bank president on this dedicated website.

This week’s nothing-to-do-with-development slot: imagine a feminist West Wing set in continental Europe, with plenty of agonizing over foreign aid and human rights. Welcome to Borgen, the latest amazing Danish drama on BBC4 – female prime minister (and she’s not a bit like Meryl Streep) juggles the dictates of power and principles. Brilliant.

You can rely on Harvard’s Lant Pritchett to be provocative and thoughtful, (and pugnacious – see this exchange in the comments when I mildly criticized Harvard a couple of years ago) so worth watching this interview on the ‘Cambridge Nights’ channel. University nights are clearly more, um, cerebral in the US……

Sustainable Development Goals: easy win or slippery slope?

Making sense of UN communiqués is never easy at the best of times, but it’s particularly hard when you are not involved in the process and so can’t decode the bland summit speak – a mind-numbing array of frameworks for action, toolkits, partnerships, dialogues and the like. So it’s hardly surprising that reading the draft ‘zero draft outcome document’ (what language do these people speak? – sure ain’t Shakespeare) for the Rio+20 summit in June made my head hurt. As far as I can make out, it is almost entirely made of up a series of vacuous ‘best endeavours’ non-commitments, roughly adding up to ‘we will do our best to save the planet, but no promises’.

Politically, that may be the best approach, even though the climate change clock is ticking, and won’t wait for political conditions to become more propitious. With US elections due later this year, and every  Northern economy forced by austerity and fear of a double dip recession into a highly introspective and tight-fisted mood, no summit is likely to produce ambitious outcomes this year.

Which brings us to the proposed ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, discussed by Alex Evans in a new paper. The sudden rise to prominence of the SDG idea is partly down to energetic advocacy by the Colombian government – who first mooted the idea of SDGs – and also to negotiators’ desperate search for some kind of ‘announceable’ in Rio. At a recent ‘intersessional’ (UN speak again, sorry) everyone from Canada to Botswana weighed in to support the SDGs (although the BRICS and the US opted to remain silent (at least in the official proceedings). They also feature prominently in the zero draft outcome document, which proposes they be finalized by 2015, the date when most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) currently in place are due to expire.

At first sight, the SDGs seem an admirable idea. There is indeed a problem that the current MDGs neglected scarcity and sustainability and in general,- environmental solutions need to be equitable (e.g. secure access to natural resources for people in poverty; action by rich countries to cut their consumption footprint), so let’s bring sustainability and development together, right?

But Alex sees the SDG idea as fraught with political perils: to make sense they would have to apply to all countries, not just the developing ones (cue US veto); they might muddy the waters (and blur the poverty focus) as the UN tries to agree on the successors to the MDGs. At worst they could just add to the proliferation of meaningless sustainability language (see graph).

His conclusion? ‘While there are good reasons to explore a more comprehensive and integrated set of Goals beyond 2015, policymakers should use Rio+20 to focus on broad principles and on raising the level of ambition – not on attempting to rush into specifics without adequate preparation. This is a time to play a long game, not to go for quick wins that could all too easily backfire.’

In this case, kicking the can down the road might actually be the best approach.

Wrapping up the great Nairobi guesthouse pool debate

Wow. Hit a nerve there. I’m both gratified and slightly appalled by the level of interest generated by Wednesday’s post on the development-critical issue of whether Oxfam should keep the pool at its Nairobi guesthouse shut. For those people without the time or inclination to trawl through over 60 comments, here’s a summary.

First the voting – deeply unscientific, self selecting, but at least the software doesn’t let you vote more than once from the same machine. Of the 654 votes cast to date:

• ‘Open the pool, provided it operates at zero cost to Oxfam’ gets 59%

• ‘Open the pool right away’ gets 26%

• ‘What are you wasting space on the blog on such a trivial issue?’ gets 8%

• ‘Keep it shut’ gets 7%

Now for the comments: I read through everything up to number 60, and got the following approximate breakdown:

• Open the pool: 20

• Open the pool + lateral thinking (open it to the public, charge other NGOs, privatize it etc): 11

• Humorous (at least in intent): 9

• Completely random and hard to categorize: 9

• Keep it shut: 6

• Other stuff Oxfam does is much worse: 3

• Why not just go to a pool somewhere else? 2

The lateral suggestions are interesting and creative, but they are only worth considering if they fulfil one overriding criterion – Oxfam is in the middle of a major emergency, helping some 3 million people get through the drought in the Horn of Africa and Nairobi is the headquarters of that effort. So if anything distracts one iota of management attention from that effort, forget it, at least until the drought is over.

As for going elsewhere – in Nairobi  anywhere further than walking distance seems to require an hour in a taxi stuck in traffic.

And here are three of my favourite comments:

Calvin: ‘Use the pool but don’t enjoy it’

Ros: ‘How we all agonize that we are not Gandhi’

But by popular acclaim, the prize for best comment goes to Matt for this gem:

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

So what happens next? Errrmm nothing, necessarily. I’m just a humble head of research and for some reason the big cheeses tend not to manage Oxfam via online referenda, but I think this exercise will eventually have an influence. Right now, those in charge undoubtedly have better things to do, but I know they read the blog (far more often than they ever read my emails….) and this exchange has definitely made a few waves. I’ll keep you posted.

And by the way, yes, this was an interesting exchange on a genuine dilemma facing an INGO, but if you want to read about a rather more pressing dilemma, try why everyone (including us) was late in responding to the drought and what we can do about it.

Right, now I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks (and yes, there will be pools involved). I’ve set up a bunch of roboposts to keep wasting your time while I’m away and Richard King will manage the blog. Anything goes wrong, it’s his fault.

The realtime challenge: some cutting edge data-gathering from the UN (yep, you heard that right)

I’m still reeling from the overwhelming response to yesterday’s post (voting still open, by the way) and will respond in due course, but in the meantime, let’s get back to all that development stuff, shall we? One of the most striking aspects of exploring the human impact of the global financial crisis and food price spike was the absence of realtime data: a shock happens, and we hear about certain variables – GDP, prices, even unemployment in some countries – in real time. But other aspects – especially the impact on the way people live their lives – take months or often years to emerge. We had a go at doing some realtime monitoring of, for example, the gender impact of the financial crisis, and (with IDS) the community impact of the price spike. What we haven’t done yet is harness the spread of mobiles and the internet in that task.

Step forward the UN. Here’s a fascinating ten minute presentation of five ground-breaking data crunching experiments from the UN’s Global Pulse project, trying new ways to  follow realtime events. The first uses mobile phones to survey wellbeing around the world as a first step to inform the design of more exhaustive surveys. Next up is using prices of online food (e.g. on developing country supermarket websites) as a low-cost, realtime way to follow food prices. Third is tracking shifts in global opinion by tracking news coverage via key words and phrases and watching how they evolve over time. Fourth shows how monitoring online conversations (eg blogs, twitter) can help follow unemployment trends – in the US the language of anger (and cancelling vacations)  precedes job losses, whereas in Ireland it is talk of anxiety. Finally, the enthusiastic tweeters of Indonesia talk about food a lot, and the frequency pretty much matches food prices. Much more to come, with a focus on Indonesia and Uganda.

Please send links to your own favourite examples of this kind of exercise. [h/t Richard King]

The great Nairobi guesthouse swimming pool dilemma – cast your vote now……

Nairobi is a major NGO hub, currently the epicentre of the drought relief effort, and Oxfam’s regional office realized some years ago that we could save a pile of money if we ran our own guesthouse, rather than park the numerous visitors in over-priced hotels. It’s nothing fancy, definitely wouldn’t get many stars, but it’s much more relaxed than a hotel and a brilliant place to meet the kind of people I profiled recently. It’s really rather unique.

But there’s a problem. As a large converted house in a nice part of town, and like most such houses in Nairobi, it has a swimming pool. But the swimming pool is covered over and closed, even though it would be cheap to keep it open. Why? Reputational risk – back in the UK, where swimming pools are luxury items, Oxfam’s big cheeses saw a tabloid scandal in the making and closed it (see right, the blue of the pool is a protective tarpaulin, not water). It didn’t help when some bright spark decided to advertise for a swimming pool attendant on the Oxfam website……

On my recent stay at the guesthouse, I asked everyone I met there and whether African or mzungu, they all said  it makes sense to open the pool. Exhausted aid workers arrive hot and dusty from remote areas of East Africa for some R&R, but there’s no chance of a refreshing swim. I need my exercise so had to go running instead – the combination of altitude, hills and choking traffic fumes nearly killed me.

On the other hand there’s no denying that most of our supporters back in the UK, let alone the people we are working to help, are not likely to have access to a pool in their back yard, so why should aid workers get special treatment? (And I have to confess, when I interviewed the members of a sex workers’ collective in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago as they relaxed by their aid-funded organization’s pool, I was rather shocked myself.)

So what do you think? Should Oxfam open the pool and take any bad publicity on the chin, or should we stop whining? It would probably cost about $200-300 a month to keep the pool open – if we could find a way to do it without creating an accounting nightmare, we could probably raise that from contributions from guests, and even have money to spare to plough back into Oxfam programmes. Vote now (see right).

Vote choices: Open the pool; Open the pool but only on if it at least covers its own costs; Keep the pool closed; Don’t waste my time – use the blog for something more high-minded please (and you can choose more than one option).

Update: check out the comments – some hilarious suggestions and yes, I am a bit depressed that this is already the most popular poll ever on this blog………

Best blog awards; Dodd-Frank and Africa; India miscellany – high tech, low tech and anti-corruption; creme that egg: links I liked

Nominations for the ABBAs – Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards (how contorted an acronym is that?) are now open, asking for suggestions in about a dozen different categories – closing date is 27 Jan, so get stuck in. And while we are navel-gazing, here are last year’s ABBA winner Chris Blattman’s ten steps to better blogging – nothing revelatory, but useful

Todd Moss summarizes the good and bad bits for Africa of the US Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation

India miscellany: The Economist hails the efficiency of India’s ‘unique identity’ (UID) biometric scheme, which this month enrols its 200 millionth member, starting from zero a year ago. Interestingly, the selling point a more efficient (and less corrupt) welfare and benefits system, rather than security.

What’s happening to India’s anti-corruption movement? Not going well, says Milan Vaishnav. Priti Patnaik reckons social audits could be the answer.

“Women fled at the sight of me; people used to call me mental and wondered if I had weird diseases,” he recalls. “I was even suspected of being possessed by a bad spirit. No one used to come near me during full moons because of that. I had to meet what friends I had in secret.” It’s hard being an entrepreneur sometimes, especially if you’re an Indian man trying to invent a way to make low cost sanitary towels. But Arunachalam Muruganantham got there in the end (and his wife and mother even came home). At the other end of the tech spectrum, there’s Aakash – Indian IPads at £35 ($50) a pop. Now that’s frugal technology.

And this has nothing to do with development (unless you see it as a horribly apposite metaphor for much of our work…..), but check out Rube Goldberg’s Creme That Egg? New York Times piece about the artist (plus more videos) here. [h/t John Magrath]

What’s going on with global inequality? Let’s ask Andy Sumner……

When I was asking around about last week’s Oxfam paper on the G20 and inequality, ace number cruncher Andy Sumner emailed to say that in his opinion, talking about inequality in terms of the Gini index (a single number for overall inequality) is terribly old hat, and these days, everyone is trying out different indicators to get at the fine detail of different kinds of inequality. So I went back to his July summary of the latest research on within-country inequality on Global Dashboard, and I have to say, it is brilliant. Some highlights:

‘What’s happening to within-country inequality isn’t immediately clear.

The new Solt database of the main measure of inequality (known as the Gini after an Italian Sociologist who developed it) was analysed by Ortiz and Cummins at UNICEF who concluded the evidence showed:

Rising inequality in Asia, 1990-2008 but falling inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the same time period.

And inequality in Latin America rose slightly 1990-2008 but fell between 2000-2008 and inequality was static in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ortiz and Cummins list a long set of countries where inequality significantly fell between 2000-2008. For example, inequality fell by more than 3 points in Thailand, Malaysia; Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile; Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia, Burundi, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Nigeria, Gabon.

However, a new paper by Chilean Economist Gabriel Jose Gabriel Palma does a detailed study of within country inequality between 1985 vs 2005 suggesting the Gini hides as much as it reveals.

Instead we need to look at each 10% of the population and what they get.

He finds that there is now a surprising similar picture in most countries, noting:

1. The great majority of regions and countries have a relatively similar distribution of income inequality because countries with low inequality at the outset (1985) have got more unequal and countries with high-inequality have got slightly more equal.

2. The middle classes generally get half of the economic pie wherever you look and the middle classes are incredibly successful about protecting their half.

3. Politics is increasingly a fight for the remaining half between the richest 10% and poorest 40% meaning the other half of the distribution is increasingly ‘up for grabs’ between the very rich and the very poor and who can win over the middle classes.

This might begin to explain some of the recent declines in inequality in Latin America as suggested in a paper by Birdsall et al., who argue that ‘social democratic’ regimes (eg Brazil, Chile and Uruguay) are more likely to reduce inequality than ‘left populist’ (eg Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela) and both are more likely to reduce inequality that non-left regimes (eg Colombia, Costa Rica Mexico, Peru) and that this is largely due to more social spending and more progressive spending especially so in the social democratic regimes (eg spending on cash transfers targeted to the poorest and greater increases in spending on health and education and increases in spending on basic services – in particular in education, greater increases in spending on primary and secondary schooling rather than on public universities.

These social democrats have strong support in the middle classes and this throws up the question posed by Birdsall et al:

Might the growing middle classes in countries like Chile and Brazil help lock in leftist social democratic political regimes (whether because or despite its concentration in the top quintile of households)?  There is no evidence that a large middle class is necessary let alone sufficient to these regimes.  But a growing global middle class does seem likely to reinforce effective government that manages moderate redistribution while retaining investor confidence in the likelihood of continuing growth and price stability. Put another way: When is the middle class large enough to become politically salient in supporting or at least tolerating the kind of social and other distributive policies that are good for them but turn out to be good for the poor—for example universal public education?

Food for thought – the middle classes as the new revolutionaries?’

Great stuff. It set me thinking about one of the findings of our paper – that whereas inequality is falling in many low and lower middle income countries (see chart), it is rising in all but four of the G20 countries. Might that be because the middle class is more likely to ally with the elite in the G20 countries than elsewhere and why could that be? Perhaps because their economies are integrated, or more dominated by financial institutions? Just idle speculation of course  - feel free to add y0ur own.

As for organizations like Oxfam, it seems to provide empirical support for our focus on ‘convening and brokering’ – the latest jargon for getting people from different social and economic backgrounds into a room, and helping them build alliances. Any other thoughts?

Hunting for green growth in the G20…….

In the second of two guest posts on Oxfam’s new paper on the G20’s performance on inequality and sustainability, senior researcher Kate Raworth tackles the thorny issue of green growth

In 2010, the G20 promised to pursue equitable and sustainable  economic  growth. That’s a big commitment. Zooming in just on the sustainability part: have they been making their growth go green?

Assessing the G20’s record on green growth means getting clear on the concept of decoupling. Sounds tedious, I know, but it matters (if you want to understand income inequality, you need to know about Gini coefficients – likewise, if you want to understand sustainable growth, you need to know the difference between relative and absolute decoupling). It’s set out in Fig 1 below.

Fig 1: Relative and absolute decoupling: GDP and resource use

Here GDP is growing (from an indexed starting point of 100), against two different scenarios for resource use (let’s say it’s CO2 emissions for simplicity).

When GDP and CO2 emissions both grow, but GDP grows faster, that’s relative decoupling. It’s an important start towards sustainability, but not enough because CO2 emissions are still rising: you could call it greener growth. But given that global CO2 emissions have already overshot sustainable limits, what’s actually needed is absolute decoupling, and that’s only achieved when GDP grows while CO2 emissions fall absolutely. That has to be the standard for green growth – and it’s what high-income countries must achieve if they are to cut their CO2 emissions significantly below 1990 levels, to help stop dangerous climate change.

So how have the G20 been doing on decoupling? Here’s their GDP growth versus the CO2 emissions they produced to generate that growth, from 1991 to 2007 (Fig 2).

Figure 2: The G20’s record on GDP and CO2 emissions growth, 1991-2007

What’s going on in here? The diagonal line shows one-for-one growth, with no decoupling. Indonesia is on that line, with both GDP and CO2 emissions increasing around 100% over the period. In Zone 2, below that line, are all the relative decouplers: countries whose GDP grew faster than their emissions did. Among emerging economies, the top performers for relative decoupling were Mexico, where GDP grew four times faster than CO2 emissions (in part due to the rise of ‘light industry’ under NAFTA, eclipsing the importance of the oil sector), and China, whose GDP grew two and a half times faster than its emissions.  Along with them, many other G20 countries have been achieving greener growth. Good start – but not nearly enough.

The hunt for evidence of green (absolutely decoupled) growth has to focus in on the high-income G20 members, because they are the ones who should be making it happen. How have they done since 1992? Mostly, not very well. Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, and the US have all only relatively decoupled: their CO2 emissions are rising more slowly than GDP, but they are still rising.

The really interesting action – and the hope on which green growth is pinned – is below thehorizontal axis, in Zone 3, because that’s where GDP grows while CO2 emissions fall. Four countries made it down there. Russia is unfortunately a case of no growth rather than green growth over the period, so doesn’t count. But Germany, France and the UK all saw GDP rise while their CO2 emissions fell.

That’s absolute decoupling in action. Green-growth evidence in the bag – case closed?

Not at all: here come the caveats.

First, what about emissions embedded in a country’s imports? Sure enough, if you take account of

traded carbon, the UK rises back above the line significantly (the UK may be producing less carbon-heavy stuff, but is consuming more of it). So only France and Germany are left firmly below the line.

Second, relative to the rest of the G20, France and Germany grew pretty slowly over those two decades. Countries with high GDP growth rates would have to be making phenomenal gains in technical efficiency and behaviour change to cut their carbon emissions even faster. Is absolute decoupling only possible for slow-growers?…

Third, we’re talking carbon here, but sustainability obviously means much more than that: absolute decoupling in using other resources – like water, nitrogen and phosphorus – matters too, but is not under anything like the scrutiny that carbon is.

Still, well done France and Germany. How did they do it? Well, France gets around 80% of its energy from nuclear power – a thorny issue – but has also promoted feed-in renewable tariffs, fast trains, and efficient buildings. Germany’s emissions cuts are born of both hope and despair:  thanks to impressive legislation and investment promoting renewable energy (growth from 1% to 11% of Germany’s energy use, 1990-2011), but also thanks to industrial shut-down in East Germany in the early 1990s after reunification.

The vast majority of high-income countries in the G20 have so far provided no evidence that they can make economic growth environmentally sustainable. Of course, most have barely started to put in place the policies required to make it happen – but delay will only make it harder.

So what does the G20 evidence show? That absolute decoupling is possible (we’ve seen it!), at least for some of the countries, for some resources, for some of the time. But that’s a far cry from believing that environmentally sustainable GDP growth is possible everywhere, all the time, indefinitely.

Jury, please remain in court. We need more evidence – on both sides – before we can close the case on green growth. Anyone out there got the evidence to swing it?

How the G20 is failing on inequality

Another day, another Oxfam report. This time it’s a ‘practice what you preach’ survey of the G20 countries’ performance on inequality and the environment. According to this guest post from co-author Caroline Pearce, they don’t come out of it very well…….

G20 governments cannot afford to ignore inequality. An Oxfam report published today, Left Behind by the G20, examines G20 countries’ records on inequality and sustainability, and on the former shows an overall picture of rising income inequality: in almost all G20 countries, inequality is dangerously on the rise, despite the G20’s much vaunted commitment to promoting shared growth and narrowing the development gap. Crucially, what the report does not find is any link between particular stages of development and levels of or changes in inequality, casting doubt on those who argue that inequality is an inevitable stage along the way to development. Rather, inequality is a matter of political choices, and now the onus is on the G20 to make the right ones.

According to new data from the new Standardized World Income Inequality Database, just four G20 countries (Korea, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina) have reduced income inequality in the last 20 years (see chart), and some with only modest levels of growth. Even these are not unambiguous success stories: in three, initial inequality was so high that decades’ more progress would still be necessary to bring them to levels seen in, for example, Pakistan, let alone in a country like Sweden. The exception is Korea, which grew to high-income status while reducing already comparatively low levels of income inequality. The others, along with the rest of the G20 club, face serious challenges in living up to G20 promises about ‘inclusive growth’.

As well as highlighting this troubling trend, the report spells out why G20 governments should care. Inequality – of many different kinds, not simply income inequality – is linked to weaker and less accountable public institutions, social unrest, crime, and lower well-being. The ongoing Occupy protests are just one illustration of popular discontent with growing inequality, and particularly with the way that inequalities of wealth and power reinforce each other. Our report acknowledges these concerns, and focuses on the links between income inequality, poverty reduction, and growth.

Firstly, high and growing levels of inequality severely limit the impact of growth on poverty reduction. This is a simple matter of logic: when the benefits of growth go disproportionately to the wealthy, then the resources left over to reduce poverty are inevitably reduced. World Bank analysis found that 1 percentage point of economic growth in a low inequality country could reduce poverty by 4 percentage points – or not at all, in a high inequality country.

Our report uses models developed by economists from the World Bank and the UN University to illustrate the potential impact of inequality on poverty in three G20 countries: Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Using current IMF projections of economic and population growth, we show that continuing progress on inequality in Brazil would allow a million more people to exit from dollar-a-day poverty by 2020 than if inequality remains stagnant. Accelerating the fall in inequality in Mexico, taking 5 points off the gini by 2020, could reduce the number of people in absolute poverty by more than three quarters. Most worryingly, allowing inequality in South Africa to grow at the most recently observed rate could push well over a million extra people into extreme poverty, even as the economy grows. This is a powerful rebuttal of the assumption that a rising tide will lift all boats: on the contrary, without attention to inequality and distribution, the tide can rise but allow many millions of women, men and children to sink.

Moreover, a growing body of evidence demonstrates the pernicious impact of inequality on growth itself. Recent IMF research papers, for example, have illustrated the role of inequality in driving the 2008 financial crisis, and the fact that high levels of inequality shorten the average length of periods of economic growth. The overall message: without attention to inequality and distribution, the tide will slow or perhaps even stop rising.

The question of what should be done about this is harder, with different answers for different countries. Oxfam is undertaking a major research project to look at the impact of different policies on inequality and growth. But some obvious lessons stand out: progressive taxes and redistributive transfers make a huge difference; universal public services – particularly education and health – increase social mobility and reduce future inequality; a focus on gender inequality is not only necessary in its own right but crucial in reducing income and wealthy inequality; and redistribution of land can reduce poverty and prevent growing inequality.

Tomorrow, Kate Raworth discusses the G20’s record on sustainability

Why did help arrive so late? Evidence v Incentives in the Horn of Africa drought.

Oxfam and Save the Children have a new paper out today that worries away at the baffling fact that lots of organizations knew disaster was looming in the Horn of Africa (and said so), but the system was largely unable to respond until people actually started dying. From the exec sum of A Dangerous Delay: The cost of late response to early warnings in the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa:

“The 2011 crisis in the Horn of Africa has been the most severe emergency of its kind this century. More than 13 million people are still affected, with hundreds of thousands placed at risk of starvation. One estimate suggests that 50,000–100,000 people have died. This crisis unfolded despite having been predicted. Although brought on by drought, it was human factors which turned the crisis into a deadly emergency.

Tragically, the 2011 crisis is not an isolated case. The response to drought is invariably too little too late, representing a systemic failure of the international system – both ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’.

In the Horn of Africa, there were indications that a crisis was coming from as early as August 2010. In November 2010, these warnings were repeated and they became more strident in early 2011. Some actors did respond, but full scale-up only really happened after the rains had failed for a second successive time (see chart, below). By this time, in some places people were already dying. Many had lost their livelihoods, and many more – particularly women and children – were suffering extreme hardship. The scale of death and suffering, and the financial cost, could have been reduced if early warning systems had triggered an earlier, more substantial response. Why was the international system so slow in responding to accurate early warnings? One reason is that raising large sums for humanitarian response currently depends on getting significant media and public attention – which did not happen until the crisis point was reached.

Decision makers are often not comfortable with uncertainty and forecasts, requiring hard data before initiating a response. So, while many people ‘on the ground’ in the region – representatives of many agencies and institutions, and communities themselves – were aware of the impending crisis and trying to set alarm bells ringing in January and February 2011, they were not always able to get traction ‘further up the chain’ from those who needed to act to avert another crisis.”

The underlying problem is that the incentives (or lack of them) are preventing the system (both national governments and international aid agencies) from acting on the early warning system, which is working pretty well. Why is that?

• “fear of getting it wrong – with both financial and reputational risk at stake;
• fear of being too interventionist – undermining communities’ own capacities to cope;
• fatigue – ‘there are droughts every year’ – encouraging an attitude of resignation to the high levels of chronic malnutrition, and an inability to react to the crisis triggers.”

What could change that?

“The decision to respond is ultimately a political one. National governments often see an emergency declaration as a sign of weakness, especially if there is a drive for food self-sufficiency. This can make it difficult for humanitarian agencies to declare an emergency themselves. Early response is more likely when there are clear links with those directly affected by the food crisis – thus multi-party democracy and a free press are necessary, but not always sufficient for the politically marginalized. A strong, vibrant civil society voice is required to ensure that there is a political price for failure to respond. For the donors, their relationship with national governments is a key determinant of early response. Although humanitarian aid should be exempt from political conditionality, political differences can seriously delay the response, as in Somalia in 2011.”

In the end it all comes down to dealing with uncertainty (echoes of my recent reading….)

“Responding on the basis of forecasts instead of hard data requires a shift in dealing with uncertainty.42 Currently, uncertainty too often stifles action; one study in Kenya found that while forecasts allow for prepositioning of food stocks, national decision makers often do not rely on them for scaling up a response. Forecasts involve uncertainty: they are inevitably based on data which is not totally comprehensive and are tinged with judgement; the earlier the warning, the less accurate it is likely to be. Yet this uncertainty is not unquantifiable – standard risk management techniques allow us to convert this uncertainty into risk, which can then be managed and minimised. The figure shows a typical risk impact/probability chart, which plots the probability that a hazard will occur against its impact. Clearly, the most dangerous risks are those with high impact and high probability; these are the risks that should be prioritised for action, and require the closest attention.

Using this logic, it would have been clear from around January 2011 that the high probability of poor March–May rains in the Horn of Africa, magnified by the failure of the previous rains in late 2010, would constitute a critical risk that needed to be addressed immediately.

The principles of risk reduction and management are well accepted in other fields, such as insurance (where paying money upfront is regarded as a responsible approach to prevent high losses in the event of a crisis) and public vaccination campaigns (to prevent epidemics and reduce medical costs). These principles must be embedded in short-term emergency response, longer-term development work and government investment programmes.”

It’s on the front page of the Guardian, a top story on the BBC, and I’m on press duty – could be a busy day.