How can development NGOs go urban?

Just spent a fascinating week in Nairobi, taking part in a review of our three-year- old urban programme there. Like many large development NGOs, Oxfam’s traditional remit is deeply rural – goats, irrigation, drought, that kind of thing – but the world has gone urban, and so in a few countries, we are dipping our organizational toes in the water. Some impressions on the challenges of urban work:

Perhaps most striking are the multiple centres of power and association compared to the rural world. Tier upon tier of government, dense networks of clubs, traditional and tribal structures and militia, social and community organizations, churches, ‘merry-go-round’ savings and loans groups, youth groups, sports clubs, cultural groups – the list is endless. Power is dispersed and often hard to map or even detect. How to chart a way through the forest of organizations and identify potential partners and targets for influence?

A lot of official aid goes to the ‘capacity building’ of officials and promotes legal reforms to improve the ‘enabling environment’ for business. The assumption is that the state wants to help, and just needs more support. But what if the disabling environment matters more? Street traders say that when you try to start a business, a previously absent state appears, and not in a good way: ‘suddenly, all the officials arrive, asking for bribes’. Every bylaw is an excuse for graft. ‘You need a lot of blessings to open a kiosk, our elders need to be smiled at’- Kenya is full of euphemisms for graft.

Once you set up your market stall, you face arrests, confiscations, fines and sexual harassment. The key seems to be organization, so Oxfam is funding an ‘access to justice’ programme that builds small trader associations, and works to improve relations between them and the local authorities and police. Experiments like ipaidabribe.com may also be worth trying, although no Kenyan activists I spoke to had heard of it.

There is a wider point here. When the authorities are seen as a threat ( ‘I can’t remember a time when they came and said ‘we want to help you’’) there is a temptation for donors, NGOs and community organizations to seek to build movements that bypass the state, emphasising self-regulation and ‘popular justice’. But that is probably short sighted – state-building will eventually have to take place, and there is a window of opportunity for that in Kenya right now. Following the appalling violence that took 1,500 lives after the 2007 elections, a new constitution was overwhelmingly approved in August 2010. According to one optimistic community organizer in the Mukuru slum this is a turning point ‘before it was all ‘once I’m elected, I’m the boss – I don’t have to listen to anyone’. Now that’s changing, knowledge of rights scares the people in power. The rule of law is getting better.’

But patronage is deeply rooted in Kenya, where every conversation rapidly morphs from challenges to policies to politics to personalities – who you know, who’s doing what to whom, who controls which fund. Gossip, scandal and politics are inseparable. More concretely, getting policies implemented, or changing them, is all about working connections and building alliances. Grassroots leaders rapidly enter that world if they want to deliver any progress for their supporters.

After 2007, few think overtly confrontational approaches such as street protests will bring anything but disaster, and any idea of building up an autonomous change movement outside this system seems very implausible, so how can the new constitution be used to create space for citizens (especially marginalized groups such as women and youth) to organize around collective issues? How far can they go before the system discerns a threat and cooption, corruption and repression ensue? These are legitimate worries, but for the moment, changing the system from within to build something approaching an effective state seems both more promising than a more outsider approach and less fraught with danger. So it seems likely that over the coming years, we will devote more of our limited resources to seizing the opportunities presented by the new constitution. If that fails, then I guess we’ll have to rethink.

Finally, people seem confident that the upcoming elections (scheduled for March 2012), won’t lead to a repeat of the post election violence (often referred to simply as PEV) that took place in 2007/8. They trust that a ‘never again’ sentiment and the optimism surrounding the new constitution will prevail. I hope they’re right. A kind of semi-spontaneous segregation has taken place in many slums, as people have chosen to move to areas where they feel more secure because their own tribe is in the majority. There has even been a revival in ethnic identity, as shown by the increased prominence of vernacular radio stations. People seem uncertain whether this makes conflict more or less likely – much will depend on whether the presidential candidates stoke up ethnic tensions to improve their prospects in the run up to the elections. The role of the media, which inflamed tensions last time around, is also important – maybe worth doing some advocacy, perhaps get them to sign up to a code of conduct in advance?

Several other country programmes in Oxfam are developing urban work. Based on this visit, the key to success seems to lie in developing an acute awareness of the multiple locations of power, political agility in seeing where and how to intervene, and a readiness to constantly re-examine our work in response to the constant political and social turbulence of the urban world. Exciting stuff.

A shorter version of this post also appears on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation blog

Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty: Book Review of ‘The Blind Spot’

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to read more books and fewer papers – books often push authors deeper, forcing them to identify and develop their underlying assumptions and ideas, whereas papers (whether single or in edited volumes pretending to be books) are often a rehash of their existing thinking, garnished with a dollop of new data. First up was William Byers, The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty, (Princeton, 2011).

I think this book is important, but appropriately, given the title, I’m not certain. It’s pretty deep, conceptual and full of subtle argument, and trying to summarize it on a blog is always likely to reduce it to a bunch of platitudes. It’s also full of maths, because the author is a maths and stats prof at Concordia University in Montreal, so lots of red meat for any mathematicians out there, but I won’t dwell on that out of compassion for the numerically challenged….

For Byers, the overarching theme of the ‘new science’ – which seems to mean anything since Einstein –  is ‘the emergence of limits’ – limits to reason, deductive systems, certainty, objectivity, in short, limits to what we can know. This is in part because the nature of science has changed from ‘being to becoming’; from structure to process – e.g. evolution, complexity theory etc.

At the heart of this evolution is ambiguity – multiple equally valid ways of understanding a particular phenomenon, epitomised by wave-particle duality in subatomic physics. But ambiguity is painful because ‘our culture remains in a ‘classical’ state, yet the frontiers of science have moved on.’ Even in scientists ambiguity induces a ‘state of vertigo’ and many opt instead for the lure, however illusory, of scientific certainty.

In contrast, Byers thinks that creativity in science and elsewhere lies in trying to live with ambiguity. ‘The whole book is about that ungraspable dynamism that generates the scientific world.’ He cites no less an authority than Leonard Cohen: ‘There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’

Although the book celebrates uncertainty, it acknowledges that ‘the islands of relative certainty science has carved out are of immense importance and the scientific method itself is one of humankind’s prime hopes for the future’. But it contrasts the science of certainty with the ‘science of wonder’ (great quotes from Einstein on the ‘cosmic religious feeling… that is the strongest and noblest reason for scientific research.’)

In Byers’ view ‘It is the science of certainty that is engaged in a battle to the death with the religion of certainty. The science of wonder is perfectly compatible with the religion of wonder, for ultimately they are the same thing.’

The book builds to an increasingly spiritual conclusion, captured in TS Eliot’s revelatory poem, Burnt Norton

‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’

The job of a thinker is to endure the tensions, frustrations and vertigo in order to gain the insights that come from trying to experience the ‘still point’.

The book’s only real disappointment is its rather weak conclusion, in which he fails to connect this thinking with the challenges faced by society in 21stC (despite the blurb’s claim that this is its intention – I suspect interfering editors looking for a more popular hook). He asserts (but doesn’t try to prove) that it is the retreat from ambiguity that is responsible for some (largely unspecified) modern malaise, including global warming and the ‘dream of technology as total control’ and embracing it that will solve the problem (s).

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, perhaps because I once studied physics, but what’s all this got to do with development? Well, science is seen as the aspirational goal of a lot of development thinking – solving problems, identifying cause and effect – along with all those subjects that call themselves ‘social sciences’. So understanding what is really going on in the activity known as ‘science’ may help us avoid mistakes built on a crude or simplistic picture of what scientists do. Byers (above) quotes Warren Buffett’s wonderful ‘All I can say is, beware of geeks bearing formulas’.

But since reading it , I’ve mainly been thinking about the book almost as a highbrow self-help text. As a development generalist, a lot of the time I’m linking – feeding in examples and insights from other bits of the development world, challenging what people are doing or thinking on a particular issue. Often, I’m not at all certain of where I’m going – the absolute opposite of a specialist endlessly laying down best practice on the same X or Y. The lesson I take from Byers is that being uncertain may be uncomfortable, but it can also be creative, so don’t immediately head for the nearest intellectual comfort zone – keep skating on the thin ice and something will turn up. Take comfort in the discomfort.

You can hear Byers talks about the book here.

Flying toilets, mobile banking and the stress-free mini hotel: Kibera in photos

Kibera is Africa’s most iconic slum, a warren of steeply sloping paths and tin shacks in the heart of Nairobi, home to anywhere between 250,000 (latest dodgy census) and a million (local estimates) people. It is a magnet for politicians (President Obama visited as a senator), celebs (Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen spent hours there the day before I went) and do-gooders like me. I was given the door by our partners there, Umande Trust, who are doing some fascinating work trying to sort out appalling sanitation ‘challenges’ (Kibera is infamous for its ‘flying toilets’) and helping small traders organize to defend themselves against arbitrary arrests, demands for bribes and the general hassle of trying to do business in Kenya. What the photos don’t capture is the buzz – Kibera is full to bursting, its informal economy full of tin shack cybercafés, car washes, hair salons and small shops. More invisibly, it’s full of organization – ‘merry-go-round’ savings and loans groups, Pentecostal churches and mosques, youth groups, formal politics, gangs. Anyway, over to the photos.

the train to Kampala

community-run 'biocentre' - public toilet that produces biogas and doubles as community centre

transparency at the biocentre

Mobile banking, Kibera style

The Oxfam guesthouse (not really)

Meetings with Remarkable Women

I’m in Kenya for a week, (posts to follow), and as always on such trips, find myself chatting to a range of Oxfam staff with mind-blowing stories – here’s a selection.

Shukri Gesod is an elegant and supremely confident young Somali (from Puntland) who moved to Oxfam from DFID a year ago. She originally wanted to be a barrister in the UK (where she partly grew up after moving from Somali to Tanzania as a baby), but got into development while studying at East Anglia (law) and SOAS (a globalization, governance and development Masters). Now she’s our governance adviser in Somaliland. She’s an arch networker, highly connected with the youth wing of the Somali Diaspora and for several years has focussed on getting their voice into the room in the endless international discussions on the fate of her country. She describes her identity is ‘fluid – when I’m in the UK I say I’m Somali; in Nairobi, I am Tanzanian; everywhere else I am British’. When the drought hit, she started working her Diaspora connections, setting up Global Somali Response and raising $400,000, as well as organizing aspiring Somali filmmakers to get the story out. Newly started at Oxfam, she took a week’s leave, managed to transfer the money she had raised, and organized truckloads of food and distribution networks to feed 85,000 people for 3 months (what did you do on your last week off?…..)

Xin (pronounced Shin – she asked me not to use her second (ex-husband’s) name) is an infectiously good-humoured Chinese woman who laughingly describes herself as ‘Oxfam’s Red Guard’. As a minister under Mao Tse-Tung, her father oversaw the development of China’s nuclear industry, including its bomb, and met Mao regularly. Xin was in the UK studying management when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place in 1989, after which all Chinese students were granted leave to remain. She got a job at Oxfam, where her financial skills are still in big demand. As an accountant and finance manager, she has worked in Eastern Europe, Latin America, the UK and Rwanda. She’s currently in drought-hit Wajir in Kenya for six months, but right now she’s been evacuated to Nairobi after attacks on aid workers around the Dadaab refugee camp. She bubbles with excitement about the recovery in Wajir, ‘the grass is growing green, animals are stronger – new life is returning after the recent rains, the best for years. People are coming home.’ Now she is planning to go back to China and do volunteer work on the environment. After a couple of marriages, she is free to go (although she admits she’ll miss her granddaughter): ‘Now my life is so free, burden free, I can do what I want, go where I want. The freedom is like enlightenment in Buddhism.’

Patricia Parsitau runs Oxfam’s urban work in Nairobi and is a dynamic former teacher. Now her dream is to stop ‘grumbling’ about the state of Kenyan politics and start doing – she’s standing for MP in the December elections in her home constituency of Narok (population 2/3 Maasai, as is she). She is working her connections, and hopes to capitalise on the new constitution’s requirement that a third of all elected positions should be women. But she’s up against some tough and well-connected female competition – the daughter of the current MP (who runs her father’s constituency fund and the local arts and sports committee) and a councillor who leads a prestigious NGO. Still, she gives herself a 50% chance of victory, reckoning that in personality-obsessed Kenya, people will warm to her ‘policies not personalities’ approach. But it’s hard being an MP in a patronage- based system – she keeps her phone off during work hours because every day brings dozens of calls from ‘my people’ – ‘how are you, why haven’t you called, can you help us with this fund raising drive or visit us for such an event, my daughter is sick can you help with the hospital fees?’ She reckons the notorious 1 million shillings (roughly £10,000 a month) paid to Kenya’s MPs won’t go far in the face of this onslaught. Of her work in the NGO sector, she says ‘the best thing is when you go back to a community five years later and they don’t say ‘you built this school’ but ‘you empowered us. People ask us to speak now, and they listen because we know our rights.’

Charities as businesses; morphing drug industries; unemployed overachievers; microfinance (for and against); limits to mobile activism; 2012’s wars; Paddy Ashdown on power: links I liked

Makarand Sahasrabuddhe gets irritated by being endlessly told that ‘charities should operate like businesses’ – they already do

The boundaries between Western and emerging market drug firms are starting to blur as they invade each other’s markets

Cover letter for unemployed overachievers applying for development jobs [h/t Chris Blattman]

The Guardian’s Claire Provost reviews the latest attempt to make sense of microfinance – panacea or horror story?

The admitting-and-learning-from-failure movement rolls on, and this time, it even applies to the previously untouchable field of mobile phone activism. The Maji Matone campaign in Tanzania aimed to put pressure on water authorities via mobiles. But the take-up was a tiny fraction of what was expected, so they’ve (ahem) pulled the plug. Hats off to them for transparency.  [h/t Paul Spray]

International Crisis Group’s cheery list of likely wars in 2012 [h/t Mike Bailey]

‘The lessons of history is that where power goes, governance must follow….. We’re reaching the end of 400 years of Western hegemony’. Ted Talks hails a ‘spell-binding Paddy Ashdown’ – not words that you often find in the same sentence, so judge for yourself as Lord Ashdown discusses the new power map of the world…..

Social Cohesion – there’s a lot more to it than the OECD version

Fuzzword alert: the term ’social cohesion’ seems to be popping up across the development landscape like toadstools in autumn. The G20 prefers to talk about social cohesion rather than inequality; the World Bank is using it to discuss jobs in its forthcoming World Development Report, and the OECD recently published Perspectives on Global Development 2012: Social Cohesion in a Shifting World. The Exec Sum is free online, but you have to pay for the full report (come on people, last time I looked, this was the 21st Century….)

So what are they talking about? Here’s the OECD’s attempt at a definition:

‘A cohesive society works towards the well-being of all its members, fights exclusion and marginalisation, creates a sense of belonging, promotes trust, and offers its members the opportunity of upward mobility. This report looks at social cohesion through three different, but equally important lenses: social inclusion, social capital and social mobility.’ [see graphic]

Makes sense at first glance, but look a bit harder and this definition is actually quite odd. The ‘cohesive society’ is portrayed as somehow separate from its members – presumably the report is addressed to decision makers then. But what goes on inside people’s heads (other than the elites) is central – attitudes and beliefs; how different generations and genders treat each other; animosities towards minority groups or geographical, cultural, religious, ethnic or sexual ‘others’ and so on. How can a report on social cohesion not tackle things like crime or violence (see pic of the UK last summer, below)?

Instead the report stays pretty firmly in its economic comfort zone, talking in particular about the threat to social cohesion created by fast growth in many developing countries.

“Economic and social transformations during a period of fast growth bring new stresses and strains with which governments have to cope. The challenges include rising income inequalities, structural transformation, and the need to meet citizens’ rising expectations of standards of living and access to opportunity.  As an emerging middle class increasingly compares itself with peers in advanced economies, its patterns of consumption and demands for quality services can be expected to change. Higher incomes, better health and improved education do not automatically translate into higher life satisfaction as the decline of life satisfaction in fast growing countries such as Thailand and Tunisia reveals.”

So what policy prescriptions follow from this treatment? Redistribution via progressive tax reform and increased and more pro-poor public spending: investment in education; protecting poor people against volatility via social protection and improved labour market institutions such as the minimum wage. The report raises the alarm on some recent developments:

‘Labour market institutions and social protection systems should be judged not only in terms of their efficiency, but also their ability to prevent or mitigate duality and segmentation. Recent innovations in social protection (the expansion of cash transfers, conditional or not, social pensions, and new forms of health coverage) have helped to reduce coverage gaps in social protection. However, they can often lead to dual systems where the poorest are covered by social assistance and the wealthy by either contribution-based or private alternatives. This leaves a significant gap, a “missing middle” of coverage amongst a large segment of informal middle-income workers. Institutions will need to evolve to better reflect labour markets’ realities if they are to produce fair outcomes with minimal strife. Universal entitlements de-link social protection from job status and offer the best prospects in terms of coverage levels and incentive structures for labour markets.’

Fair enough, but overall, I felt the OECD didn’t really do justice to the topic. Social cohesion is a complex cultural, psychological and social phenomenon, which demands a broad treatment. Whenever a new idea becomes popular like this, the danger is that instead of looking afresh at what it contributes to our understanding of development, we just recycle our existing set of ideas and say ‘because of complexity/ social cohesion/ climate change, you should do exactly what we’ve being saying all along’. I think the OECD is in danger of going down that road in this report – building social capital, supporting social mobility, and promoting social inclusion are fine, but they were standard demands long before anyone started talking about cohesion. The more interesting question is what we should be doing that’s additional or different because of a social cohesion ‘lens’, and I didn’t find that here. Anyone seen anything useful on this?

Delivering Development: Book Review of a study on ‘globalization’s shoreline’

In ‘Whose Reality Counts’, Robert Chambers caricatures a typical successful career path in development as ‘tying down, moving inwards and moving upwards’. ‘In rural development, professionals gain direct field experience only early in a career if at all’. After the year in an African village (PhD, living with the people etc), or volunteering in a local NGO, comes the life path of relationships, kids, a search for decent schools, more senior jobs etc. These involve moves first to the capital city, then back to Europe or North America and Development HQ. It’s a caricature, but it’s often horribly accurate.

One feature of that path is that the year-in-the-village shapes each person’s thinking for the rest of their careers, acquiring a special claim to truth, even if research and data suggests that in some areas, that experience may not be typical. Discussions often end up in ‘well, when I was living in Malawi….’ as though that is the final word on the matter.

I thought about Chambers as I read Ed Carr’s Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future. The first half of the book covers his time ‘in the field’ as an archaeologist-turned-geographer, with a fascinating and detailed study of the last two hundred years in two villages in Ghana on what he calls ‘globalization’s shoreline’. But it then extrapolates at vertiginous speed to a wide, and rather unsatisfying discussion of globalization, environmental limits, climate change and the future of development. I much preferred the first half.

The book’s strengths lie in its combination of sharp observation of present arrangements and painstaking reconstruction of the history of the villages. His overall conclusion is that his excavations and conversations show that this is no virgin ‘underdeveloped’ region awaiting the arrival of globalization in the shape of roads, mobile phones and trade: ‘the situation in [the villages] is not due to a lack of development. It is the outcome of nearly two centuries of colonial and development intervention in the global, Ghanaian and village economies and environments.’

His most interesting focus is on gender relations. He finds both that women farmers are two to three times more productive per hectare, and that men deliberately constrain their access to land in order to maintain economic control over the family, even if it costs the overall household in terms of foregone income.

It is this interplay between patriarchy and production that he believes explains his most intriguing finding –  the tides of globalization that flow into and out of the villages as commodity prices rise and fall, or roads are built and wash away, are not linked to household incomes in anything like the way the textbooks predict.  The ‘echo chamber’ (the name of his blog) of development thinking reinforces ideas that don’t describe what actually happens.

Carr was present when one such tide ‘came back in’. To the surprise of the villagers, an improved government-built road suddenly appeared in 2004 after a long period of abandonment, allowing him to observe and record its impact on the villages. He expected to see a cascade of benefits – improved incomes, cheaper transport, off-farm jobs (accompanied by a shift to low -labour products like tree crops as off-farm work increased). ‘As it turned out, I was wrong about nearly everything’. Two years after the road arrived, what he calls the ‘market households’ – the most integrated into the cash economy – were earning less than before the road came and were less engaged with nonfarm employment. Why? Women farmers initially responded as predicted to the new opportunities and rapidly increased their incomes, but this provoked a backlash from the men, who control land allocation and subsequently removed it from women’s hands, causing incomes to fall back. Female-headed households did indeed massively improve their incomes.

So the impact of globalization and economic integration can only be understood at a local level by seeing it as mediated by power and politics at national, community and household level.  Excellent, but there, I’m afraid, the book rather loses direction, with a tendency (despite caveats to the contrary) to extrapolate out from this two-village experience to generalized conclusions that globalization doesn’t leave the poor better off (‘things are not going to get substantially worse for most people living along the shoreline if globalization pulls back and development goes away’). It is also dotted with various straw men of the ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ type and takes pops at some traditional whipping boys, like the Millennium Villages Project and the World Bank’s PRSPs (I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, but they’re covered in exhaustive depth elsewhere). He misses the point that while development thinking struggles to explain what happens in a particular village, it may well be able to make valid broader generalizations about correlation and causation – just as an individual wave (or weather event) is unattributable, but a tide (or climate change) is not. The book correctly identifies the lack of realtime data on human impact as a big gap, but proposes a rather halfbaked open-source global community network to fill it.

Back to Chambers – there’s a danger both in ignoring what you learned during your year in the village, and in interpreting it as a universal truth. Delivering Development may err towards the latter, but the field work itself is fascinating, and well worth a read.

Here’s Ed Carr discussing the book

How can the UN get its act together on food and agriculture?

On Tuesday incoming FAO boss José Graziano da Silva (right) gave his first press conference, so I did one of those rabbit in the headlights interviews down the line for Al Jazeera on the role of the FAO (results below). Al Jazeera is rapidly becoming my favourite news channel – not just for its unrivalled coverage of the Arab Spring but for its wider development coverage. Which other major global news outlet would devote 20 minutes to how to sort out the multilateral food system?

Anyway, back to Graziano. He reiterated the five priorities he has set out for his leadership of the FAO: end hunger; move towards more sustainable systems of food production and consumption; achieve greater fairness in the global management of food; complete the FAO’s reform and decentralization; and expand South-South cooperation and other partnerships.

All good stuff (although the FAO also needs to do much more on gender, as I say in the interview), and everyone wants him to succeed – as we grapple with the ‘perfect storm’ of high/volatile food prices, resource constraints and climate change over the next few decades, we really need a fully functioning, effective, non-sclerotic FAO leading the way. One ground for optimism is that Graziano was in charge of implementing Brazil’s hugely impressive ‘zero hunger’ campaign, and at the press conference he stressed the importance of that kind of top level political backing to getting things done. He also emphasized the need for the FAO to get out of its bunker and talk to governments, civil society organizations, farmers and others. Fingers crossed.

More from Lawrence Haddad here. Or read Graziano setting out his stall in the HuffPo (where, to be fair, he tackles the gender issue much better).

China v US; an end to gendercide?; Yes we know it’s Christmas (stupid); China in Ethiopia; ipaidabribe.com in Kenya; educational polemics; good news on forests; top pics for 2011: links I liked

The Economist kicks off 2012 with a neat breakdown of the year in which China already has/will overtake the US on everything from steel consumption (1999) to car sales (2010) to defence spending (2037) – see chart (red means China is already in the lead). It also finds a glimmer of hope that India may be turning the corner on gendercide (selective abortion of girls). 
 
‘Yes we know it’s Christmas’: ‘Speaking at the launch of their song, the musicians praised Geldof’s relentless quest for an answer and said they hoped their collaboration would free the Irishman and his friends to start looking for solutions to new and more important questions. “Like Do they know about climate change in America? Or did Kim Jong-il have time to write down the abort codes for the nukes before he died? Or perhaps he can revert to the time-honoured classic – ‘Tell me why I don’t like Mondays.”’ Delightful riposte to Band Aid paternalism from South Africa’s answer to The Onion. [h/t Chris Blattman]

‘To the west, Ethiopia typically conjures up images of drought and starving children; we want to save Ethiopia. To the Chinese, Ethiopia, with a fast growing economy and 90 million consumers, looks like good business…… Ethiopia is clearly in charge in this engagement.’ China in Africa guru Deborah Brautigam explains.

An everyday story of petty corruption, the difference is it’s in public, as India’s Ipaidabribe.com spreads to Kenya: ‘After getting car jacked and the car being declared a write-off after a Police shootout, needed the Police Abstract. Kept making several trips to Parklands Police Station and each time being told abstract was not ready, awaited this signature and that. Each time the responsible for Abstracts kept asking for money shamelessly, directly and each time I refused & said get my work done first. I could not keep skipping work. I then asked a friend who had contacts to handle it and push it for me, but he too had to part with 2,000/= before I got the abstract released. I hate paying bribes and very much against it, but sadly you can’t get your own rights, what you are entitled to from these hungry thieves. Its as though I had committed an offence to get out of, rather than being a car-jack victim!’  [h/t Evan Lieberman]

Harvard’s Lant Pritchett at his polemical best/worst suggesting that the best way to improve education is to replace state teachers with private ones on a third of the wage, and scrap conditional cash transfers, which he characterizes as ‘threatening the mother’.

Some seasonal good news from the world’s tropical forests: overall, large-scale clearing appears to have dropped sharply since 2005, according to a new global database (there’s a graph, so it must be true….)

Top 50 pictures of 2011 from The Sifter photosite. Here are two contrast pics – Shanghai 1990 v 2010, and  the Mexican-US border [h/t Grandiloquent Bloviator]

Why don’t we just send aid money directly to poor people’s cellphones?

Just before Christmas I had a thought-provoking discussion on the BBC World Service with Paul Niehaus, who has set up GiveDirectly, a US-based startup NGO pioneering a new financing model based on cash transfers. The idea couldn’t be simpler:

1. People donate through GD’s webpage
2. GD locates poor households in Kenya (see below)
3. GD transfers your donation electronically (through the M-Pesa mobile payments system) to a recipient’s cell phone (they send each household $500 per year for two years)
4. The recipient collects the transfer

GD reckons that in this way, it can get 90 cents in every donated donor into the hands of poor people. Step 2 is interesting: ‘We do this in three steps.  We first select regions of Kenya with high poverty rates using census data.  We then identify villages with low-quality housing and access to an agent providing mobile-phone-based payment services. Finally, we identify the poorest households in these villages using simple, transparent criteria: we target all households living in homes made out of mud, wood, and grass. These criteria effectively identify relatively poor households and are generally perceived by the community as fair. We record eligible households’ phone numbers or, for those that do not have a phone, provide them with a SIM card. We follow up initial identification with a rigorous process of audits to prevent mistakes or fraud.’

What’s innovative about this is the coming together of cash transfers (CTs) and mobile payments systems to make the CT option available to individual donors, rather than (as previously) being exclusively a government, big aid donor or large NGO activity (Oxfam does lots of them – in fact it was our cash for coffins project that partly gave Paul the idea).

There was a high level of agreement in the BBC discussion (doubtless to the horror of the producer – arguments make much better radio). This kind of approach is exciting, but only relevant to part of the aid and development story – for example in the Horn of Africa, we are doing cash transfers, but also have to work to get market traders to re-establish supply chains in the worst-hit areas or there is nothing for people to spend the transferred money on.

While they help with short term consumption and investment, cash transfers don’t directly tackle the kinds of systemic problems that underpin poverty and inequality – dealing with those requires a more complex approach based on partnering with local civil society organizations, and all that brokering and convening stuff I write about on this blog. And what about gender – who owns the phones and gets access to the $500? It would be interesting to see if there’s a difference between how men and women phone-holders spend the money – I wonder if GD have included that in their monitoring and evaluation?

Finally the approach seems inherently individualistic – there is no obvious way to fund community organizations in this model. At least not yet. I talked to our fundraisers prior to the interview and they linked this to a generational shift. Younger people are less trusting of institutions than older ones, so the pressure for this kind of person-to-person ‘disintermediation’ (sorry) is only likely to grow. People only believe their money is doing good if they can see it drop into the hand (or cellphone) of a recipient. Oxfam has already responded to this with schemes like Projects Direct, and new initiatives like Kiva and now GiveDirectly are addressing the same disquiet.

An alternative approach is to do a better job in explaining why we need to use people’s donations to tackle the underlying structural causes of poverty, through a more complex (and expensive) engagement with the state, companies, civil society organizations etc.

But another might be to put the two together. If the new generation is both more activist (Occupy, Arab Spring etc) and more sceptical of institutions, how about adapting the GiveDirectly model to ‘sponsor an activist’? Your $10 a month would go straight to the cellphone of a named HIV activist, or a land rights organizer. In return you would get regular tweets, blogs or whatever so you can follow what they’ve been getting up to. Paul says he’s going to think about the idea, but is anyone already doing it? If so, how’s it going?

You can listen to the piece here, with Paul Niehaus of GiveDirectly, Mike Jennings of SOAS and me, (although it might have got a bit truncated at either end of the 7 minute piece).