Obama v Kofi Annan: Who has the best model for agriculture in Mozambique?

This guest post from Joseph Hanlon (right) was also published today on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog

Mozambique is a development paradox. Rural poverty is increasing despite high growth rates and billions of dollars in aid. Now the country has been targeted by two contrasting models of agricultural development. The Obama model was backed by the G8 in Washington in May, while the Annan model was proposed by the Africa Progress Panel (APP). Which works better for the poor?

The APP is heavyweight and conservative, chaired by Kofi Annan and with members including a former IMF head and a former US Treasury Secretary. It says one of the biggest dangers in Africa is the growing inequality between rich and poor, which is creating a threat of social instability. In sub-Saharan Africa “the current pattern of trickle-down growth is leaving too many people in poverty.” And the panel warns that Mozambique is one of the more unequal countries in Africa. The APP points out that Mozambique is a net importer of staple foods, despite having huge agricultural potential.

The APP report calls for “fundamental change” in both donor and African government policies. “Raising the productivity of smallholder farmers is critical. Smallholder agriculture must be placed at the centre of a green revolution in Africa.” This will require more government action and more support for small farmers.

Let’s call this the Annan model.

The second agricultural model for Mozambique was agreed in Washington in May, when G8 leaders adopted a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition proposed by President Barack Obama and USAID. The idea is to use giant agribusiness to end hunger in Mozambique and five other countries. The first project in Mozambique will be to support Cargill, the giant grain trader and largest private company in the world, to take 40,000 hectares of farmland. US officials say this will include some small-holder contract farming, which means Cargill will not make enough profit from the investment, so the giant transnational grain trader must be subsidised from G8 aid.

Let’s call this the Obama model.

The two models are incompatible. The Africa Progress Panel report points specifically to the very large land concessions in Mozambique,

and warns that “for Africans, the benefits of large-scale land acquisitions are questionable.”

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently issued its Africa Human Development Report 2012 which points to “the recent international scramble for land in sub-Saharan Africa” and urges caution on big foreign investors.” Much agricultural technology for producing crops is scale-invariant (it is as efficient on small farms as on large), so large farms should not be expected to be inherently more efficient.” The report warns that “private investors naturally prioritize their own objectives, not the well-being of the poor and vulnerable.”

To be fair, Mozambique’s experience with large investors has not been all bad. Indeed, a single US multinational has probably done more to reduce poverty in Mozambique than any donor action – and without subsidy and without grabbing any land. Universal Leaf Tobacco has agreements with 150,000 peasant families, and their earnings from tobacco have lifted thousands of families out of poverty. How ironic that the antidote to poverty should be a poison, tobacco.

But Universal’s success is due to a different model to that of Obama – out-grower or contract farming. The company provides seeds, fertiliser and other inputs as well as extension services, and guarantees to buy the crop. In return, the farmer must sell her tobacco to Universal. This package works because of two factors: first, risk is shared, so if a drought or cyclone destroys the crop then farmers do not have to pay Universal for the seeds and fertilisers they received. Second, the market is guaranteed; if a farmer grows tobacco, she can be sure to sell it.

Elsewhere, Mozambique has the lowest agricultural technology levels in southern Africa, because under the present free market policies, peasants are expected to carry all the risk – of weather, pests and a lack of market. Mozambican farmers are very poor – the average rural cash income is $31 per person per year. That is less than the price of a bag of fertiliser. Very few peasant farmers are willing to risk their whole year’s income on fertiliser, or better seed, or a different crop. The problem for Mozambican peasants is that foreign companies will only share the risk with tobacco and cotton, and are not interested in other crops. And under the present free market system pushed so hard by the international community, the state is not allowed to share the risk for maize and other domestic food crops.

Nearly all Mozambican farmers still use only a hoe, and do not have a tractor or oxen to plough, so they can only farm 1.5 hectares. Now, international investors are noticing that this leaves vast tracts of underused land. The difference between the Annan and Obama models is how that land is to be used. The Obama model is that giant northern agribusinesses like Cargill with G8 help should take that land and end poverty through what the APP calls “the current pattern of trickle-down growth”. The Annan model would upgrade million of peasant farms to up to 5 hectares each, using most of the available land, but providing initial support with mechanical ploughing, inputs and assured markets.

Will the Annan or Obama model lead to the biggest reduction of poverty and the best use of Mozambique’s land?

Joseph Hanlon is visiting senior fellow at the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics and honorary research fellow in the School of Environment and Development of the University of Manchester. He has been writing about Mozambique since 1978,

African art; UK v Rwanda (et tu ODI?); please vandalize economics textbooks; ferocious oaths; microfinance heretics; Olympic Falklands: links I liked

Contemporary African fashion, music and art (like this ‘street’ art from Western Sahara) [h/t Global Voices]

UK blocks aid to Rwanda in protest at its actions in Congo. How will ODI’s Kagame praise singers respond?

Kate Raworth on why it’s time to start vandalizing economics textbooks 

‘I will answer only the truth, in accordance with what I have personally seen, heard, know, and remember. If I answer falsely on any issue, may all the guardian angels, forest guardians and powerful sacred spirits destroy me, may my material possessions be destroyed, and may I die a miserable and violent death.’ Wronging rights is impressed by the ferocity of Cambodian oath-swearing 

‘Almost all of the growth miracles of the last 60 years were based on rapid industrialization. Today, technological changes and global competition are fostering rapid de-industrialization (in terms of employment shares) almost everywhere.  This makes me wonder whether the kind of rapid growth experienced by countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and China will ever become possible elsewhere.’ Dani Rodrik examines the data on industrialization and reaches some surprising conclusions, including ‘Manufacturing productivity converges even if you are in a remote country with lousy policies and institutions.’

CGD’s David Roodman brilliantly reviews ‘Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic’ and the author, Hugh Sinclair responds

Argentina’s office of the presidency tries to tweak the tail of the mangy British bulldog by linking the Falklands/Malvinas dispute to the London Olympics in this sub-Rocky video (the athlete doesn’t look like he’s going to win too many medals though)

Welcome (sort of) to the London Olympics

Update: skip to the bottom for some conclusions on an epic and weird opening ceremony

OK, it’s been another heavy duty week on the blog, so some light relief for Friday. Especially for the 70% of you who don’t live in the UK, here’s the unofficial welcome video, featuring London’s studiedly eccentric Mayor Boris Johnson (yes, we elected this guy) [h/t Ian Sullivan]. And the New York Times wonders just what is wrong with us Brits [h/t Jon Slater]. Fingers crossed for an excruciatingly weird and naff opening ceremony tonight (and please share your own favourite – and suitably off message – takes and links. And no patriotism please, we’re British…….)

Update: I’ve spent the weekend pondering the mysteries of the opening ceremony (and watching Britons fail to win medals). Headline conclusions – some mine, some stolen:
1. The magnificent underlying arrogance: First, we are going to have a conversation with ourselves about our national identity, loaded with lots of really obscure references. We’ll chuck you a couple of globally intelligible Britishisms (James Bond, Mr Bean), but if you don’t follow the rest, tough. Second, only a really superior nation can take the piss out of itself to that degree.
2. Danny Boyle is a tactical genius. He introduced all the liberal politics and social commentary before 1948, and then switched to culture and technology. The Tory press swallowed it, and I think Boyle may have single-handedly framed a new (politically) liberal consensus on British history. Wow.
3. The opening ceremony was so brilliant that it really doesn’t matter if we win any medals (fortunately)
4. Paul McCartney can’t sing, and his drummer needs to be locked up. An appropriately naff end to a great evening.

Finally, whoever kidnapped Boris Johnson for the evening deserves a (gold) medal.

Holding out for the super-voucher: Kevin Watkins responds to Justin Sandefur on private v public education

Kevin Watkins (right), senior visiting research fellow at the Brookings Institution, responds to yesterday’s guest post by Justin Sandefur

After reciting the familiar evidence on the learning achievement problems in poor countries, Justin Sandefur offers an even more familiar ‘one-stop’ solution – a market-based fix, with low-fee private schools, vouchers, and the apparently talismanic Pearson corporation leading the way to a better, smarter future. It seems that only for-profit school providers and corporate entrepreneurs know the secret of raising education standards of marginalized kids in poor countries, and that public provision is part of the problem rather than part of a potential solution.

Nothing in the research cited by Justin makes the case for his prescriptions. Let’s start by being clear about our differences.

I admire Justin’s work. I also share many of his concerns.  The learning crisis is one of the great development challenges of our day. And like Justin I want to see some bold new experiments in education – a sector paralyzed by the conservatism of aid donors, government indifference, and weak leadership from the UN and the World Bank.

In the event, Justin’s idea of a bold experiment turns out to be a rehash of voucher-scheme proposals first advocated by Milton Friedman over half a century ago, mixed US-style Charter Schools, and Swedish free school reform models.

I have no interest in defending the indefensible quality of public education provided in many of the poorest countries. But when public education systems are broken they need fixing, not bypassing or franchising out to the private sector. And if we care about equity, there is no credible alternative to a public system that offers opportunity for all rather than choice for some.

The twin crisis in education
Justin’s take on the 2015 education progress report suffers from an excess of charitable spirit. On his account poor countries get something like a B+ on access and an F on learning. The F is justified. The B+ is not.

There are currently around 61 million primary school age children out of school. Since 2005 progress towards universal primary education has slowed globally and stalled in sub-Saharan Africa, where out-of-school numbers are rising. Meanwhile, millions of children enter school only to drop out before completing a full primary school cycle.

The reason for the slow down, as highlighted in the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, is governments’ failure to tackle the inequalities based on wealth, gender and location that are keeping marginalized children out of school. The former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has called on Africa’s governments to address these disparities by adopting targets for greater equity in education.

There is no escaping the extent of the learning achievement deficit. If anything, Justin understates the scale of the problem by focusing only on children who are in school.

Consider the case of Malawi. Just 41 per cent of Standard 6 children were able to achieve basic competency level for reading in the last regional learning assessment. The really bad news: over half of the school intake has dropped out by this stage.

Of the 126 million primary school age children in sub-Saharan Africa, around two-thirds are likely to enter adolescence unable to read, write or do basic numeracy, irrespective of whether or not they complete primary school. Research by Jishnu Das in India and Pakistan suggests that close to one half of the children in these countries face the same prospect. 

The implications of the learning crisis have not been taken on board by the development community. Quality education can break the cycle of poverty, narrow social inequalities and provide a foundation for dynamic, inclusive growth. But what passes for education now is a travesty. And in an increasingly inter-connected and knowledge-based global economy, low levels of learning achievement are a prescription for slow growth, youth unemployment, and more inequality across and within nations.

What is driving the crisis in learning? The causes are complex and vary across countries? Many of the children entering public education systems over the past decade arrived carrying huge handicaps, including household poverty, parental illiteracy and pre-school malnutrition – an affliction for around 175 million children. These are disadvantages that impact heavily on learning.

The school environment is another concern. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, the pupil-teacher ratio exceeds 40:1 and there is less than one book for every three children. Overcrowding is typically worst in the early grades where children from non-literate homes need most support.

The quality of teachers and teaching is one of the most critical school-based determinants of learning.  Unfortunately, teacher absenteeism is rife. Many teachers lack subject knowledge. Trained to deliver teaching by rote, they are ill-equipped to deliver active learning. In-service support is lacking. To make matters worse, public education systems typically skew resources and the best teachers towards the most advantaged pupils, best-performing schools, and most prosperous regions.

The private sector rescue act
Justin builds his case for private sector solutions by attacking what he describes as myths, some of which bear a striking resemblance to straw men. He also offers a few myths of his own.

Take his claim that low-fee private schools are readily affordable to the poor. In fact, there is no shortage of research documenting the struggles of poor households to pay ‘low-fee’ providers. One village-level survey in rural western Uttar Pradesh, India, has found that low-fee schools are unaffordable to the poorest two quintiles, and that the growth of private provision has reinforced education inequalities linked to wealth, caste and gender.  When asked, many of the parents paying for low-fee private school say that they would prefer the option of sending their children to a public school that offered decent education – a revealed preference that Justin ignores.

Evidence from urban informal settlements is equally compelling. In Lagos it costs the equivalent of around 10 per cent of the minimum wage to send one child to an approved low-fee private school. This is in a country where one third of households with children who have dropped out of school cite education costs as the reason for their non-attendance. In Kenya, Moses Oketch and others have highlighted the lack of access to public education for low-income households in informal urban settlements, leaving them with no choice other than to attend private schools. The resulting cost barriers are restricting progress towards universal primary education. The bigger question is this: why should we tolerate a state failure that leaves some of the world’s poorest households facing prohibitive user-fees to secure their children’s right to education?

What about ‘the myth’ that private schools perform no better than public schools. As far as I am aware, no credible commentator has ever questioned that there is a private-public school performance gap. The question is whether that gap disappears with the introduction of appropriate controls for differences in the school environment, student characteristics and the household environment.

Some of the evidence Justin presents on this is borderline slapstick. His Bridge school graph is taken from the company’s advertising pamphlet. The data, apparently drawn from ‘the early days’ of a study, has no controls for socio-economic status. Read the pamphlet though. It includes the following insightful observation from a Bridge School parent:

“My kids understand everything [at Bridge International] so well.  It makes sense to them.  They used to be confused.  Now Danny knows all the answers; he loves to study”

And all for just US$4 a month!

To be fair to Justin, he does cite credible research. It’s just that the research evidence does not support his sweeping reform prescriptions. The important study by Jishnu Das and others on Pakistan documents significant public-private school performance gaps. But the authors explicitly caution against assuming that the private sector can be scaled-up with no impacts on quality. 

Justin’s co-authored paper on Kenya hardly lends weight to his preferred market-based policy option. The data provided measure the test score premium of all private schools (including high-cost schools serving the elite) over public schools up to 2005 in the Kenyan primary school leaving exam. Interestingly, the premium fell as the private school share in enrolment rose from 2003, suggesting that private providers struggled to maintain quality as they absorbed more children from poorer households. The wider point is that the surge in enrolment that followed the elimination of user-fees in 2003 brought over a million of the country’s most disadvantaged children into public schools, while those exiting to private schools came predominantly from less disadvantaged households.

Simple comparisons of private school fees and public school costs can also obscure another source of private advantage – namely, higher levels of per pupil spending. Recent survey data for 11 countries shows per capita spending on children going to private schools averaging six times the level for their public school counterparts. 

Justin ends his blog with a sweeping appeal for more voucher schemes, US-style charter schools and Swedish-style free schools. This will be music to the ears of enthusiasts for Michael Gove’s vision for education in the United Kingdom. Here, too, though Justin’s reverence for the private sector gets in the way of evidence-based argument.

Vouchers have been a near universal prescription for increased inequality in education, even in countries with a strong capacity for regulation. The best overview of the evidence is available here.  There is no credible evidence that charter schools are raising standards or reducing education disparities in the United States. In fact, the only national-scale study, conducted by Stanford University, reported that only 17 per cent of charter schools out-perform matched neighborhood public schools.  And the Swedish model that he apparently sees as the preferred market option has been criticized for increasing inequalities and lowering standards, with an influential business-funded pro-market think tank joining the critics.

There is an alternative
We could, of course, spend another blog post swapping evidence on the relative performance of public and private schools. But I doubt that Duncan will let us. And anyway it would be beside the point.

Perhaps we need to start out by admitting that there are no quick fixes. Private schools clearly have a role to play in achieving the education for all goals – and far more should be done to ensure that education strategies include a proper regulatory framework for private providers. Ultimately, though, governments need to take responsibility for fixing school systems that are failing

We know the strategies that can lead countries out of the low learning trap. This McKinsey report has some powerful examples.  Reform of teacher recruitment, training and support, the development of national learning assessment systems to identify failing schools and pupils, a stronger focus on pre-school provision and early grade teaching which are amongst the most important determinants of learning and future well-being, and more equitable public financing all have a role to play. As Barbara Bruns of the World Bank has documented, this is the public education reform path that Brazil has followed – and the country is now one of the world’s fastest climbers in the international learning assessment league table.

Now that’s what I call bold experimentation – and it has delivered results.

Waiting for Superman in Lahore: do poor people need private schools? Guest post by Justin Sandefur

Public v Private provision of education is a hot and divisive topic. So let’s get started. Today, CGD’s Justin Sandefur (right) puts the case for private. Tomorrow Kevin Watkins of the Brookings Institution responds. Be warned, their posts are pretty long and very passionate. Fasten seatbelts please:

While traveling in Pakistan a couple weeks ago, I took advantage of a brief flicker of electricity to check my twitter feed, and found this from Duncan.

 
 
After years of watching broken public school systems fail to educate their children, parents in Pakistan and many other parts of the developing have taken matters into their own hands.   Low-cost private schools are growing by leaps and bounds, especially in rural areas.    The number of private schools grew by nearly ten-fold in Pakistan from 1983 to 2000, reaching about 35% of public enrollment,  doubled in India from 1993 to 2003, and tripled their enrollment share in Kenya from 1997 to 2006 — at the same time fees were abolished in Kenyan public schools! 
 
Pearson’s plan is to invest in these low-cost private schools springing up across Africa and Asia, starting with a chain of schools in Ghana and Kenya.  Perhaps not coincidentally, Pearson’s Chief Education Advisor, Michael Barber, is also the architect of DFID’s support for a government voucher program in Pakistan that enables poor children to attend low-cost private schools.
 
The development industry is reflexively resistant to such private sector initiatives, as illustrated by the #dumbideas hash-tag and the quotes in the Guardian piece.  Here are three reasons to overcome that reflex.
 
Three myths about education in poor countries
 
Myth #1. The push for universal primary education (UPE) has been pretty successful. 
 
If success is defined as herding kids into classrooms, then yes, maybe.  By one count, over half of countries were on track to meet the MDG for primary education as of 2011.  But going to school is not an end in and of itself.  And the push for universal primary school enrollment has been an abject failure in terms of what really matters — learning. 
 
Kenya is a good example, where enrollment and learning diverge.  Behold the following challenging reading passage from Kenya’s public school curriculum.  
 
According to a national survey by Uwezo Kenya, only half of children in grade 3 can read this type of paragraph, although it’s on the grade 2 syllabus.  So while it’s great that only 3 to 4% of primary-school aged children in Kenya are not in school, it’d be nice if they could also read.
 
But the real scandal here, as highlighted by my CGD colleague Lant Pritchett and co-author Amanda Beatty, is not that half of third-graders effectively can’t read, it’s that staying in school doesn’t help much.  This is what Pritchett and Beatty call the ‘flatness of the learning curve’.  Of Kenyan children who couldn’t read the paragraph above in grade 3, only a third will learn to do so in grade 4 — in India, Pakistan, and Tanzania only 1 in 5 will learn to read with an additional year or schooling, and in Uganda only 1 in 12.  Even after 8 years of schooling in India, almost 1 in 3 pupils still won’t be able to read a simple paragraph like this.
 
Kids are going to school; they’re just not learning anything.
 
Myth #2. There is “very little evidence that private schools provide a better service than the public sector.”  
 
The Guardian attributed this view to Kevin Watkins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  While I have enormous respect for Mr. Watkin’s work on UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report –it’s worth a read — this statement is increasingly out of date.
 
For places including India, Pakistan, and Kenya, there are at least two types of evidence that private schools offer much better service.  Call them the direct approach and the indirect approach.
 
The direct approach simply compares test scores between public and private schools.  The figure below shows learning achievement among students at the Bridge International Academies in Kenya — one of the schools Pearson will support –relative to their neighbors.  By grade 3 they’re scoring roughly 90% higher on reading fluency and 45% higher on comprehension. 

The obvious follow-up question is whether this is just “garbage in, garbage out”, whereby private schools pick the best pupils and produce the best scores.  To test this hypothesis, my colleagues Tessa Bold (Goethe University), Mwangi Kimenyi (Brookings), GermanoMwabu (U of Nairobi) and I did some relatively simple analysis of the gap in test scores between public and private schools.  We find a performance gap between public and private schools of roughly one full standard deviation, which is more than seven-times larger than the impact of the best-documented, successful interventions to improve public schools in Kenya, which find an effect of about 0.14 standard deviations. More importantly, this gap does not appear to due to selection of smart kids into private schools.  When private enrollment goes up in a district, overall test performance rises as well — a phenomenon that can’t be explained merely by sorting of good pupils into good schools.
 
In a similar study of test scores in India, Alex Tabarrok from George Mason University finds not only that private primary schools vastly out-perform public schools,  but again, that this result is mostly not due to “cream skimming” of the best pupils.  As more and more students flock to private schools — exceeding 70% of all pupils in some districts — the public-private gap doesn’t narrow.
 
The direct approach clearly signals huge gains from private schooling.  How but the indirect approach?  
 
By economists’ logic of ‘revealed preference’, the stampede of pupils from the public to the private sector would seem to be a strong indication of what parents think of the quality of public schools.  A study by Michael Kremer of Harvard and Karthik Muralidharan of UCSD found that over 80% of government-school teachers in India send their own children to a private school.     
 
As Muralidharan summarized for a New York Times reporter, “What does it say about the quality of your product that you can’t even give it away for free?”
 
Myth #3.  Private schools are too expensive for the poor.
 
Particularly for readers in the UK, the association between private schools and class snobbery is, I suspect, pretty hard to overcome.  But the explosion of new, low-cost private schools since the 1990s in South Asia and parts of Africa has very different class dynamics. 
 
Research by TahrirAndrabi (Pomona College), Jishnu Das (World Bank), and AsimKhwaja (Harvard) shows that the average fee of a rural private school in Pakistan is less than a dime a day (Rs.6).  They also find that villages where private schools emerge have a significantly smaller gender gap in enrollment.   In Kenya, my colleagues and I examined fees paid by parents, and calculated that two-thirds of private schools cost less to operate than the median public school.
 
In India, the previous study by Kremer and Muralidharan finds that provinces and districts with lower per capita incomes have higher rates of private schooling.  Rather than being driven by wealth and privilege, they find that demand for private schooling is associated with the failure of public school systems. Private schools are significantly more likely to emerge in villages where public school teachers are frequently absent, or frequently not teaching when they show up. (See the graph.) 

 
 
There is nothing egalitarian about consigning the poor to shoddy public schools where teachers are chronically absent, classrooms are overcrowded, the school day is short, and very little learning takes place.
 
The elephant in the room
 
There’s a risk of overselling the case for private schools.  After all, they do charge fees.
 
Separating the provision of education (by private schools) and its financing (by government), requires initiatives like voucher programs and charter schools.  That’s a whole separate post, but the challenges of designing a good voucher or charter school program are not trivial.  Countries as diverse as Sweden and Colombia have introduced vouchers in a way that improves overall quality without compromising equal access.  Chile got things wrong — after introducing vouchers, Chile saw a massive exodus to the private sector, and increased socio-economic stratification between schools, arguably because Chile allowed schools receiving vouchers to conduct selective admissions and charge top-up fees, encouraging schools to compete on who they could attract, not what they taught. 

The real frontier in research is not about whether private schools work, but how we can support this market so it ends up looking more like Sweden’s rather than Chile’s.

From Lahore to rural Balochistan, and Nairobi to the farthest reaches of the Rift Valley, parents are no longer waiting for superman.  They have accepted that neither the public sector nor the aid industry is going to sweep in and save their children from broken schools, so they’re taking matters into their own hands.  Hats off to DFID and Pearson for trying to figure out a way to help them.

And tomorrow Kevin Watkins fights back. Which one is Superman? Which one is Lex Luthor? Think we may have to have a vote once the dust has settled.

Should poverty be defined by a single international poverty line, or country by country? (and what difference does it make?)

This guest post comes from ubercrunchers Ugo Gentilini (World Food Programme), left and Andy Sumner (Institute of Development Studies), right

International poverty lines are calculated by the World Bank: $1.25 per day per person is said to represent the ‘absolute poverty line’, below which a person can hardly survive.

This is calculated from the mean of the national poverty lines for the poorest 15 countries. A slightly higher line, set at $2 per day per person, is the average of the national poverty lines for all developing countries.

To date, these lines have been accepted as the universal poverty metric, underpinning global goals such as the MDGs – at least MDG 1a – and discussions on how the world is doing in reducing poverty. But that is increasingly coming into question. One problem is that poor people increasingly live in middle-income countries (see here), and so are not represented as long as the extreme poverty calculation sticks with the poorest 15 countries (which are actually only home to about 10% of the world’s absolute poor).

Another problem is that while international poverty lines allow us to compare like with like in monetary terms, at national level, all countries define poverty for themselves, often using different approaches.

Poverty levels in OECD countries, for instance, are often defined relative to median income (e.g. below 60 percent of the median for the EU).  By contrast poverty lines in other countries are “absolute” – that is, the income required to meet basic needs (e.g. Afghanistan).

Unsurprisingly, given these issues, the recent update of global poverty estimates by $1.25 and $2 poverty measures (see here) has had a few critiques (see here), while alternative multidimensional poverty measures are also – rightly – attracting attention as they gather speed and are taken up.

So what difference does it make if instead, we look at how many poor people there are in the world, based on how poverty is defined in the countries where those people live (rather than by international poverty lines)?

To answer this, we added up all the country-level poverty data based on national poverty definitions to produce a new and different perspective on global poverty, based on national measures from 160 countries.
 
What did we find? Three things:
 
First, there are 1.5 billion people living in nationally-defined poverty, a billion of whom are in middle-income countries (MICs). This corroborates the view that global poverty has increasingly become a middle-income country phenomenon, although much of this is down to just five countries – the PINCIs – Pakistan, India, Nigeria, China, and Indonesia (see here and here and here).

Second, when poverty is defined nationally, one in ten (170m) of the world’s poor live in high-income countries. (Of course one could question comparability- absolute and relative poverty – so when we present the global poverty data we do so with and without high-income countries). By its own definition, the US has 45m poor people.

Third, while global totals are the same, the overall number conceals some big national variations in poverty numbers depending on whether national or international lines are used (see bar chart). In Mexico and Bolivia, for example, poverty rates according to national lines are more than 40 percentage points higher than those based on the international $1.25/day measure. In Africa, by contrast, for various countries (e.g. Uganda, Tanzania, Liberia, Burundi, Nigeria and Malawi) poverty rates resulting from international lines are much higher than from national measures (e.g. about 35 percentage points higher in Tanzania and 20% in Malawi). And in India 45m people are missing in national poverty estimates that would be counted by international poverty measures (see here).

Why might a focus on nationally-defined poverty be useful? Three reasons:
 
First, such a focus might fit better with the domestic task of forging national social contracts, as poverty increasingly becomes about national inequality (see here). National poverty measures tend to be what matters most to policy makers in-country. However, those domestic measures are moving closer to the international $1.25 line in some countries – for example in China (see here).

Second, expressing poverty in national terms implies a greater degree of involvement of national actors in defining “what is poverty?” in a given context.That has practical consequences: in a number of cases, countries are testing how to better connect national measures with eligibility for domestic social protection programs.
 
Third, the recognition that poverty (relative or absolute) exists everywhere entails a shift in poverty thinking – framing poverty as a universal issue relevant to all countries, rather than a ‘them and us’ question.

As the discussion on poverty measurement and classification evolves, it might be interesting to broaden the range of countries, so that highly-populated MICs, or at least the 10-20 countries where most of the poor live, become the basis for the calculation of international standards for absolute poverty.

This could entail establishing global lines (e.g. current $1.25/day) not on the average of lines of the poorest countries, but on the average of the countries with the highest numbers of poor people – 80% of the world’s poor live in just 10 countries and 90% in twenty populous countries (most of which are not currently part of the $1.25 calculation).

Such a process would perhaps better synchronize global measurement to the shifts in global poverty.

Tragic bears; religious migrants; programming in fog; mega capital flight and tax dodging; US drought -> food reserves & climate change; the latest on HIV/AIDs: links I liked

Lots of graphics and visuals today. First, am I alone in finding the arrested Greenpeace polar bear disturbingly tragicomic?

A fascinating interactive map breaks down migration flows from each country by religion (no idea how reliable the data are tho)

How can an aid agency programme when it doesn’t know what works? Examples from San Francisco and Somaliland

Great number crunching from the Tax Justice Network is reaping deserved headlines everywhere. An estimated $7.3tn-$9.3tn of secret offshore wealth is held by residents of developing countries – double their $4tn external debt. In Nigeria it’s $306.2bn – nearly 40 times the country’s total external debt of $7.9bn. Plus the Guardian’s turned it into a handy African capital flight infographic.

As the US heat wave drives up grain prices, and the US stockpile is bare, the always wise Sophia Murphy has a timely piece urging the G20 to get serious about the need for food reserves. Maybe the drought is also behind some big guns weighing in on climate change: Paul Krugman in the New York Times, and new World Bank President Jim Kim in his first big public speech

“I am trained as a scientist. I have to tell you that the data that I’m seeing about changes that are happening today that we didn’t think would happen until we got to two to three degrees, this is extremely disturbing to me. We have to put the science of climate change in front of all our member countries and I guarantee to do that.”

Lots of top analysis of the HIV/AIDS pandemic ahead of this week’s AIDS2012 conference in Washington. The Economist charts (slow) progress on AIDS deaths v access to ARVs [h/t @viewfromthecave] and Sarah Boseley summarizes the medical advances outlined in the new UNAIDS report. Plus a smart video from ONE campaign

Global Humanitarian Assistance 2012 – what are the emerging trends?

Ed Cairns (right), Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on humanitarian advocacy, reviews the new 2012 Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report, released yesterday 

Like all landmark reports, the GHA’s greatest value is not really in what it says about the year under review. It’s what it reveals about the longer-term trends facing the humanitarian world.

This is particularly true with GHA 2012, which would be horribly easy to misread – and hence celebrate 2011 as the year when humanitarian crises ‘returned to normal’ after the megadisasters of the previous year. To some extent, of course, that is true. 2011 saw no Haiti earthquake, and floods in Pakistan that were less severe and very much less reported. Partly as a result, the year’s UN appeals sought $2 billion less than in 2010.

But what’s most interesting is not what’s changing from one year to the next. It’s what’s changing in the medium-term as donors cut budgets – and in the long-term as needs continue, and probably increase.

Last month the 2012 DATA report on total aid spending (not just humanitarian) showed how the crisis in the Eurozone has driven cuts in aid. When it comes to humanitarian funds, it’s no surprise to find the biggest cuts in the countries at the heart of the crisis. GHA 2012 shows the largest reductions in humanitarian spending between 2008 and 2010 from, among others, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Greece and the EU’s own institutions.

Will those cuts deepen as the Eurozone struggles on? Who knows? But they sit uncomfortably beside the humanitarian needs we already face in semi-permanent crises, and – in the long-term – the rising number of people exposed to disasters. Late last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that, even without climate change, the risk from disasters will increase in many countries as more people are exposed to extreme weather. And Oxfam’s own research shows that, where records are available, reported weather-related disasters in developing countries have already increased by 233 per cent since 1980. At the same time, few of the top recipients of humanitarian aid – like Sudan and Afghanistan – seem to have very good prospects of sustainable peace.

GHA 2012 reminds us how difficult it is to assess the scale of even current crises. And any projections into the future are fraught with uncertainty. But as one of my colleagues in Oxfam put it a couple of years ago, when pondering the impact that climate change will continue to have, “it doesn’t look good”.

The answer is not just more humanitarian aid – though that is desperately needed. And GHA 2012’s most arresting statistic is that last year saw the biggest shortfall – 38 per cent – in UN appeals for a decade.

Any solution must include far more investment in resilience than today’s still small amounts, and in the capacity of states and civil society to prepare and respond to disasters.

A greater and greater proportion of humanitarian action is likely to come from within developing countries themselves. And if the report’s most telling statistic is that 38 per cent shortfall, its most telling comment is Judith Randel’s call in the Foreword for better data on that domestic assistance.

That must be a big priority for the future. The GHA reports are already an invaluable resource for everyone involved in humanitarian action. So far, their focus has inevitably been on international aid, rather than global or total humanitarian aid, and the difficulties of collecting data on national responses are obvious. But it would be wonderful to think that the GHA of, say, 2015 will be able to say much more about that domestic action.

Till then, GHA 2012 is a vital source of data, analysis and comment – a reminder of how much has been achieved, and, most importantly, a warning of how many needs are still unmet, and how much more work is still to be done.

Ed Cairns is Senior Policy Adviser at Oxfam GB and author of Oxfam’s latest overview of their humanitarian thinking, Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project

And here’s the top 20 humanitarian aid recipients, 2001-10 (click twice to expand)

How can INGOs improve their work in fragile and conflict states?

There’s nothing like the impending threat of giving a talk to make you mug up on an issue, usually the morning before. Today’s exercise in skating on thin ice (the secret? Keep moving. Fast as possible) was a recent talk to some Indiana University students studying the developmental role of the state while enjoying our splendid British summer (ahem).

I gave them the standard FP2P spiel on Active Citizens and Effective States (powerpoint here - just keep clicking), but then got into the different roles INGOs play in countries with different types of state. The big distinction is between stable and unstable states, but there are lots of subcategories (middle v low income; democratic v autocratic; willing (nice) v unwilling (nasty); centralized v decentralized; aid dependent or not). But my recent crash-and-burn experience of trying to come up with a typology was salutary, and I won’t try and repeat the exercise.

Stable states are in many ways the easy ones: we can help with civil society strengthening, some state-building at local level (especially in decentralized states), or play a convening role to help bring state, civil society and other non-state actors together to find solutions. Even in stable states, change is often a cycle of conflict and cooperation (see diagram), something we struggle to navigate. See this post for more findings from some interesting research on what works by John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee.

But the more substantial bit of my talk was on Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FRACAS – my best acronym in ages). These, if you believe the new numbers from the ODI, are where the majority of poor people will live in 15 years time and that’s a real headache for aid agencies and NGOs: without a well-functioning state, everything gets more difficult. For starters, you need to send your best, most politically astute staff there, but FRACAS are not always the most desirable place to live, raise a family etc, so recruitment can be a ‘challenge’.

As prep for my session, I read two recent Oxfam papers: Programming in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries: A Learning Companion (June 2011) and Within and Without the State (Research Report, February 2012). According to these, some of the key features of working in FRACAS are:

With a weak/absent state, more power lies in the hands of multiple non-state actors, including faith-based organizations, private sector (think money lenders in Somalia), traditional authorities, and (increasingly) well organized, educated and funded Diaspora networks. INGOs have to learn how to engage with all of these in rapidly mutating coalitions.

With the state not delivering, there is always a temptation to start building parallel systems to provide health, education etc. But in the long term these can actually get in the way of building a viable state (see my critique of Paul Collier’s Independent Service Authorities). The trick is to ensure that service delivery work also builds long-term state capacity.

Even in apparently dysfunctional states, there may be ‘pockets of functionality’ with which INGOs can engage, (the papers point to education in the DRC). This both delivers services now, and can act as a nucleus for longer term state-building.

In FRACAS, the situation is always likely to be complex, unpredictable and messy. As aid agencies increasingly concentrate their operations there, there is going to be a fascinating conflict with the rising demand for tangible, measurable and attributable impact.

And what of future directions for INGOs in FRACAS? Within and Without the State makes some tantalisingly general, but interesting suggestions. Some should be familiar to regular readers of this blog, e.g. learn to work better with non state actors such as faith groups, and to respond better to shocks. Others are less familiar:

Focus on building legitimacy/trust/social contract between citizens and state (accountability comes later). In FRACAS, the standard INGO repertoire of supporting demands for greater accountability may be premature: the state may simply lack the capacity to deliver, rather than the will, while citizens may have had such a negative previous experience of the state that all they want is to be left alone. So the first priority is to help build the social contract in terms of trust and supply (capacity), before moving on to demand.

Civil society organizations are often atomised and inexperienced in engaging outside their sector or locality. Helping to convene ‘local to national’ conversations for them with national players (both state and non state) is one possible niche for INGOs.

Promote ‘community conversations’: in the chaotic unpredictability of FRACAS, the usual pieties about not trying to impose blueprints are even truer than ever. There is no substitute for having ‘embedded’ conversations, without a prior agenda, with as many people as possible. Only that way will you detect new currents of power and thinking, and react promptly to such changes.

Any other advice to INGOers working in FRACAS?

Is there a global crackdown on civil society organization and if so, how should we respond?

I’ve got a nasty feeling that we could be heading towards a strategic train wreck on the role of civil society in development. Let me explain. Increasingly (and not just among NGOs), development is understood in terms of politics, power, and struggles to redistribute the latter. That has produced a shift in resources towards advocacy and influencing, as a complement to more direct programming and humanitarian work, and in the best cases, a fusion of the two.

That’s great (indeed it is the central argument of my book, From Poverty to Power), but it is predicated (in our case at least) on support for ‘active citizenship’ at local, national and international level. Yet a recent discussion with Netsanet Demissie Belay (right), the Policy and Research Director of CIVICUS, the international citizen action network, highlighted just how threatened ‘civil society space’ has become, particularly for the more political influencing work. I could do with some help in thinking through the implications of this.

First a summary of Netsanet’s presentation, based on a synthesis of various analysis and research carried out by CIVICUS including Bridging the Gaps and State of Civil Society 2011 (reviewed here), which draw in turn on the work of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which rigorously documents legislative processes around the world, and has just published the excellent ‘Defending Civil Society‘ report. Conclusion? Civil society organizations (CSOs) worldwide face an increasingly sophisticated and varied range of restrictive measures. These include (examples are from CIVICUS and ICNL):

Old fashioned repression: in the words of Russia’s Vladimir Putin: ‘March without permission and you will be hit on the head with batons. That’s all there is to it.’

Restrictions on international funding (pretty essential in the poorest countries): Under Bangladesh law the Oxfam office can’t bring a penny into the country without government sign-off on what partners we fund, what we/they use it for and where it is spent. Government is looking at reducing regulation slightly (for example, dropping the requirement that we notify them of every foreign-funded trip our staff make and why they are making it) but not the overall premise.

Funding restrictions particularly target advocacy work: in Ethiopia, advocacy organizations are not allowed to use foreign funding; Equatorial Guinea restricts NGOs from promoting, monitoring or engaging in any human rights activities.

Deterrent red tape: Uganda’s draft Public Order Management Bill 2011 includes a requirement to inform the police seven days in advance of holding public meetings

Vague and blanket regulatory powers for the state. In Tanzania, an international NGO must “refrain from doing any act which is likely to cause misunderstanding”. In Turkmenistan, having a goal that is ‘impossible to achieve’ is grounds for dissolution (wonder how that works for faith organizations, let alone Oxfam’s mission of ‘building a future free from the injustice of poverty’ ….)

Barriers to registration: In Turkmenistan (again) national-level associations can only be established with a minimum of 500 members; in Russia (again) a gay rights organization was denied registration on the grounds that its work “undermines the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation in view of the reduction of the population.”

The most recent addition is a crackdown on communications technology, epitomized by Ethiopia’s recent move to restrict the use of Skype and other forms of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) communications and the 18 year jail sentence handed down last week to blogger Eskinder Nega.

And in case you thought this was just a southern phenomenon, CIVICUS points to some pretty draconian legislation in Switzerland (up to $110,000 penalties for unauthorized demonstrations) and Canada (prior notice of any demonstration of more than 50 people).

The first question this prompts is ‘why now?’According to Doug Rutzen, who runs the ICNL, it’s actually been going on for a while – “between 2005 and 2010, over 50 countries considered or enacted restrictive measures constraining civil society.  The drivers of this crackdown include the Bush Administration’s “democracy promotion” agenda combined with the decline of US soft power after the Iraq war and the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib; the patina of political legitimacy provided by Putin and others; the sharing of “worst practices” by governments; both legitimate concerns over development effectiveness and even the unintentional support for constraints arising from the concept of “host country” ownership; and the “war on terror” paradigm, which was used to constrain civil society in the US and globally.”

To some extent, CSOs are also victims of their own success – the ‘colour revolutions’ in the countries of the former Soviet Union in the last decade, or the Arab Spring events of this one, both alerted governments to the threats posed by an active civil society. In addition, there may be a perception of impunity – governments like Ethiopia and Rwanda remain donor darlings despite their draconian attitude to any kind of opposition, because they deliver on growth and poverty reduction. That must send some kind of message. On similar lines, there is an increasingly widespread perception among developing country elites that the ‘western model’, both economic and political, is losing out to other development models, such as that of China, that entail a much more constricted role for civil society.

Finally, there is also the tricky question of whether some of the ‘crackdown’ is actually legitimate government oversight, both because of slow progress on transparency and accountability by CSOs and NGOs, but also because of the use of ‘soft force projection’ by the US and others to achieve foreign policy goals by selectively supporting protest movements.

The next question is ‘why are the INGOs so quiet?’ We shout about everything from land grabs to arms treaties, but often stay quiet when it comes to the ability of our preferred partners to go about their business (Netsanet himself was jailed for over two years in Ethiopia for his work as national coordinator of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP)). Some evidence-free guesses as to why that might be the case:

Fear of ejection from the countries in question (well-grounded fears too, in many cases)

Fears over the safety of staff (but our partners often run much greater risks)

Professionalization – maybe staff in country have come to see their role as more project administration than ‘speaking truth to power’?

Does campaigning for CSOs seem too much about process and the right to have meetings, and so too remote from the lives of poor people (and a tough sell as a campaign issue)?

Have we at some level bought into the ‘economistic’ understanding of development that sees growth as more important than human rights, portraying Rwanda’s Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia (both hostile to civil society space) as the heroes of African development?

There are some formal international processes we could plug into. The UN has Special Rapporteurs on ‘the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ (Frank Larue) and (since 2010) ‘the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association’ (Maina Kiai). Under the auspices of the Community of Democracies, a group of concerned governments has established a Working Group on “Enabling and Protecting Civil Society” to monitor and respond to developments concerning civil society legislation around the world. Also, 14 governments have jointly pledged financial support for the “Lifeline: Embattled NGO Assistance Fund” to help civil society activists confronting crackdowns.

So should the development community be doing more, and if so, what? Working at multilateral government, lobbying our home governments to make it a foreign policy priority, defending CSOs (and/or supporting those who defend them) on the ground? What is most effective in different situations? I’d be interested in your thoughts.