What is the impact of women’s collective action? Evidence from 3 African countries

A day in the life of a woman agricultural policy adviser in West Africa

Sally Baden (left, in the white shirt), Oxfam’s former Senior Adviser on Agriculture and Women’s Livelihoods, summarizes the findings of a new Oxfam report and research project on women’s collective action in agriculture.

As an Oxfam policy adviser in West Africa (2001-8), I worked with many different kinds of farmer organization. These included cotton farmers, pastoralists and rice growers, grouped in informal enterprises as well as more formal associations and cooperatives.

On occasion, they were women-only groups – such as the organic Shea butter producers of Songtaaba in Burkina, one of a small but growing number of women-led collective businesses. But most farmer organizations were mixed sex – which in practice often meant male dominated, providing plentiful anecdotal evidence that led me to question whether, in fact, women benefit.

• In a meeting with national level producer leaders, the proposal from a (lone) women farmers’ leader that women members be targeted for literacy training led to one (male) farmer storming out of the room, such was his fury.
• When facilitating a planning workshop with leaders of pastoralist groups from different countries in the Sahel, it was clear that the few women present were reluctant to speak.  During the lunch break, one woman grabbed my arm and whispered in a panicked tone, ‘You must help us: If the men get better access to markets, they’ll use the money to buy more wives’.

• When interviewed separately during a funders’ visit to a cotton-farmer cooperative, a group four or five women, expressed their disenchantment with the coop. They felt they are used as free labour and to cook food for meetings and village festivities but have limited say in decisions and derive little benefit.  (Back in the room, the men, by contrast, said they favoured women’s involvement!)

These experiences, plus similar ones from other colleagues led us in 2009 to launch the ‘Researching Women’s Collective Action’ (RWCA)  project to understand which women participate in collective marketing groups – in Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania – how they benefit, and what NGOs and others are doing to support women’s engagement in markets. We first did an extensive literature review, organized stakeholder dialogues and conducted scoping research in 15 agricultural sectors. Then we carried out surveys of nearly 3000 women (members of marketing groups and non members with similar characteristics – as a control) focused on one subsector in each country, as well as in-depth case studies of 12 groups, via focus groups and interviews with key informants.

The RWCA’s results are published today in a new Oxfam research report.

Are the examples above an unfair caricature of patriarchal attitudes (especially coming from a European feminist)? Yes, up to a point: Oxfam’s RWCA research found that male leaders’ and husbands’ support has been vital to those women who have been able to actively participate in and benefit from collective action groups, including as leaders.  Whether to engage their support, or to mitigate their opposition, strategies to promote women’s empowerment ignore men at their peril.

In more detail, the findings included:

Women’s participation in collective action groups delivers significant economic benefits, but the choice of market is critical: High value products (vs.staples or traditional exports) which have local as well as national or international markets are likely to yield more benefits. This is true for producer organizations in general, but women in particular.  Women in groups gained high returns from the vegetables sector in Tanzania:  up to $340 per annum for women who joined groups compared to those not in groups.  The estimated monetary value of increased gains from sales was lower in Mali (Shea butter) and Ethiopia (honey) but still significant, at $12 and $35 a year respectively. Those sectors were also relatively easier for women to enter, as they do not require control over land.

Wealthier, higher status women are more likely to join groups, unless measures are taken to target the less well off: Group membership rules of ‘one member per household,’ requiring land ownership, or only admitting married members, indirectly discriminate against women or certain categories of women.  In Ethiopia, unmarried women were able to access groups because NGOs and government specifically targeted female heads of household. Married women’s participation dramatically increased after local lobbying for ‘dual membership’ per household led to changes in cooperative by-laws.

Participation in informal women’s groups increases the likelihood that women will join formal marketing groups and reinforces the benefits they derive: Building on traditional institutions such rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), burial societies (iddir – in Ethiopia) or labour-sharing groups, informal groups help women to develop confidence and leadership skills as well as accumulate savings, which facilitate marketing of their produce.   However, as the basis for collective marketing such groups have limitations: collective enterprises require different skills, strong networks, group investments and legal recognition.  Linking informal women’s groups with mixed marketing groups can be an effective hybrid strategy, as we found in Ethiopia.

Women rarely have equal say in or leadership of mixed groups, while women-only groups may face challenges with business viability: Women themselves recognize these tensions: when the Matumaini A group in Tanzania lost most of its male members due to ‘women’s dominance’, members recognized that this also meant losing valuable skills, resources and networks. In Mali, ostensibly women-only groups had one or two male members, deployed for tasks such as negotiating with village chiefs where women were prohibited from crossing the threshold. One such group was even named after their token man!

Participation in marketing groups leads to improved incomes, but weak effects on empowerment: In contrast to the economic benefits, we found limited evidence of a clear link between women’s empowerment and group participation.  To assess this, we adapted elements of the ‘Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index’, an innovative methodology called developed by the Oxford Human Poverty Institute (OPHI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – explanatory video here.

Graph comparing women group members control over different areas of decision making vs. non members (Mali)

Our research showed that empowerment was greater when women participate in informal as well as formal groups.

Control over credit was the one area where women’s decision making was enhanced by group membership across all three countries. Other dimensions of empowerment – such as mobility – were affected, though less consistently. Women reported increased control of incomes from the sale of Shea butter, honey or vegetables, but this didn’t seem to extend to wider household incomes, except in Ethiopia. And it was only in Mali that stronger women’s rights over land were linked to group membership.

Learning from such experiences, development actors  – including Oxfam – need to adopt flexible approaches to supporting collective action, taking the wider context into account, and supporting women’s own initiatives.  We also need to pay more attention to the policy environment, enshrining clear principles of equality in cooperative laws, setting explicit targets to address women’s participation and leadership, making membership rules and procedures more flexible, and protecting the space for informal association.

So: Does organizing groups of rural women producers contribute to rural women’s empowerment as well as increasing their incomes?  My answer is a qualified ‘yes’; it can be a step towards increased empowerment, for some women, under the right conditions.  But we are only just beginning to understand the relationships between markets, collective action, intra-household relations and ‘women’s empowerment’.  More innovation and more research are (of course) needed.

What can DFID learn from Chinese and Brazilian aid programmes?

IDS researcher Henry Tugendhat (right) wonders whether UK aid is following in the path of China and Brazil

Two weeks ago at the London Stock Exchange, Justine Greening announced her new policy of supporting UK businesses to invest in developing economies for the mutual benefit of both sides. According to the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development: “This is good for investors, who earn a financial return… [and] good for the poorest, who receive jobs and support”.

New as it may sound in UK development circles, this strategy sounds an awful lot like the “win-win” sound-bites we’re increasingly used to hearing from China among the other BRICS countries, who are meeting in Durban, South Africa this week. China and Brazil have both made efforts to leverage private sector investments as part of their aid/South-South Cooperation agendas, but problems have already arisen which the UK could usefully learn from.

Alignment of aid and investment efforts is a particular challenge. Business seeks profit, while aid is traditionally geared to humanitarian objectives, and they don’t always match up.

One example is the disconnect between the promotion of food security in Africa, and the agricultural interests of investors. The Chinese state has pushed for a serious engagement with food security issues affecting African countries. This is seen in everything from meetings in the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, to Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centres. Equally Brazil has committed to supporting agricultural mechanisation and technical support in a number of countries.

All such efforts are envisaged to link to private sector activity: to provide tractors, take over farms, or offer technical support. However, Chinese and Brazilian investors in Africa have predominantly invested in cash crops and large-scale farming, and even when smallholders are targeted, in many cases they have been those that are better off and already more commercially oriented.

New evidence from the Future Agricultures Consortium generated by research in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, shows that when Chinese companies do invest in local agriculture, it is predominantly in crops such as cotton and tobacco. Otherwise, additional investment has focused on surrounding infrastructure such as irrigation schemes and roads. Brazilian investments have predominantly focused on sugar-cane and ethanol production. However, when private sector investment has targeted food staples necessary for food security, there has been either little success, as in the Xai-Xai project in Mozambique; or only small-scale investments, as in the small farms in Ethiopia that supply local Chinese restaurants.

not the right model for Africa?

Adding to this disconnect between Chinese and Brazilian government statements and the behaviour of their companies, even Chinese state-owned enterprises at times flex their independence from state interests, as Lucy Corkin describes for Angola. But of course, Chinese companies in particular may be subject to more pressure than UK companies to invest in areas aligned with state interests abroad, as they are often supported by state policy and finance. Which begs the question: when financial returns are less obvious, what makes Justine Greening more able to leverage investment for development interests, where China and Brazil have failed?

The second issue is that many investments in Africa have led to harmful practices over the years, whatever the nationality of the investor. Even if investors are introduced based on the principle of “development assistance”, profits are still paramount. This can lead to unintended consequences. For example, Chinese and Brazilian companies have got mired in controversy in recent years, including accusations of ‘land grabbing’, even when such claims have been refuted.

One of the currently most contentious investments is the vast ProSavana project spearheaded by Brazil in a triangular agreement with Japan and

Mozambique. The aim is to bring about agricultural development in Mozambique’s Nacala corridor, transforming it into a bread-basket on the scale of Brazil’s Cerrado savannah region, the site of a “green revolution” transformation which began in the 1970s. Brazilian private investors are already, as well as Japan, and a ‘Nacala Fund’ expected to mobilise US$2 billion has been set up. Already described as an example of ‘Brazil’s neo-colonialism in Africa’ in the Mozambican press, the project has come under heavy fire from local civil society groups that criticise the secrecy surrounding the project and the risk of evictions of local smallholder farmers.

So will ‘land grabbing’ become an issue that UK businesses face if they follow Justine Greening’s recommendations? In her speech, she recognised this challenge, arguing that there is a need for transparency on investments, so as to expose “those who acquire land unfairly”.

As a final thought, we should also question whether this new policy could be a subtle re-introduction of tied aid practices, despite Justine Greening’s

strong assertions to the contrary. The political reality is that this would no doubt be an appealing means of defending the aid budget against current cuts, so it must be properly scrutinised to avoid to a return to inefficient aid practices.

Ultimately, overseas investment by private sector actors is open to many challenges and problems. As the UK adds this new facet to its aid programme,
lessons from Brazilian and Chinese experiences in Africa should definitely be heeded.

Strikes, Spookytown, and a traumatic exit from feudalism: Women on Farms in South Africa

Managed to squeeze at least one day away from offices and lecture theatres in South Africa last week. In this case a road trip with Women

credit: Rehana Dada

on Farms, an Oxfam partner led by the charismatic Colette Solomon (right), IDS PhD turned grassroots activist. In the Western Cape, scenic is an understatement: lush vineyards festooned with bougainvillea at the feet of colossal bare rock escarpments; dinky, opulent colonial towns – all church spires and verandahs and 4×4s. Perfectly asphalted roads, the infrastructure of modern ag – sprinklers, trucks, tourism (wine tasting, restaurants), a vision of plenty.

But where are the people? We go looking for them, and find women farmers living in the interstices of all this wealth. Crammed onto remaining pieces of ‘commonage land’, where they struggle with markets and theft; dumped in shacks in unlit, dangerous ‘Spookytown’ (left) on the edge of one of those nice colonial outposts (Rawsonville) after mass evictions from the commercial farms (too old, too rebellious, or just surplus to requirements). Black, coloured, marginal – at first it feels like apartheid  hasn’t gone away.

But it’s more messy than that. We end up in a lovely little cul de sac of coloured (mixed race) workers’ houses on Die Eike, a giant fruit farm supplying Tescos, among others. The houses are comfortable, with all mod cons, and gardens bursting with flowers. If the Spookytown inhabitants’ pre-eviction homes were anything like this, I feel their current pain. The Die Eike women took part in the first farmworkers’ strike in South Africa, an apparently spontaneous eruption last November, timed perfectly to hit the start of the harvest, earning them a big hike in the minimum wage (SAR 69 to 105) and global headlines. ‘It was like a bomb exploded, we said ‘we can do this’. Even though we’d known our rights all these years, we’d never had the guts.’

As they recount the story, their Afrikaans is peppered with English words – ‘labour rights’, ‘sisters’, ‘government’, ‘power’. Politics, it seems, is conducted in English. But paternalism is undoubtedly Afrikaans. Like their peers in Spookytown, these women are shocked at the change that has come
over the farmers (‘the boers’) since the strike. ‘Farmers don’t trust the workers like they did.’ Stories abound of threats of eviction, rent increases, swathes of new, unintelligible deductions wiping out the advances on their new pay cheques (the new wage came in at the beginning of March).

Much of the harassment feels like a petty war of attrition: ‘we’re not allowed to take fruit home any more; we can’t eat food on the job. They’ve cancelled the morning and afternoon breaks’. The kids are no longer allowed in the orchards. The estate drags its feet in repairs when things break in strike leaders’ homes.

What seems to be going on is a high speed transition away from a semi-feudal paternalist system in which many ‘boers’ paid over the minimum wage, and were happy to give advances on wages, or help out ‘loyal’ employees (we met one old woman living rent free in the middle of a commercial vineyard, growing vegetables – as a young domestic worker, she raised the present owner, and he didn’t hesitate to help her when she subsequently fell on hard times). No rights, but some consideration.

The strike seems to have triggered a shift away from that to purely monetary relationships, and workers (and probably farmers, but I didn’t talk tothem) are finding it traumatic. In one Spookytown shack devoid of electricity or running water, ‘Auntie Rosa’ (left) explains how she looks after her extended family of 10, relying largely on her monthly pension of SAR 1200. She pays out SAR 240 for the family funeral policy, SAR 210 for school fees for 3 kids and then SAR 540 for the washing machine. Eh? She takes us inside and shows us the power-less washing machine, fridge and sound system, all brought here on eviction from her nice farm house. She struggles to explain why she keeps up the payments at such personal cost, but I think it’s because they connect her to that better life back on the farm.

That farm-supplied housing leaves workers extremely vulnerable to harassment, and may well decline if the transition to monetarised relationships continues. But also missing are the institutions that can defend the workers in this new savage capitalist era. A strike can win a one-off victory, but how to defend against the war of attrition that follows? Farmworkers will need some institution to call when the harassment starts, but who? Trade unions exist but find it hard to organize, often in the face of massive farmer hostility (‘why should my workers need a union?’). And while a wonderful organization, Women on Farms is too small and under-resourced to play the necessary role.

I really hope someone is documenting this transition as it happens, and before it becomes the stuff of myth.

Brit aid rocks; economists’ letters; out of order; gods v condoms; what did dev pundits get wrong?; carbon taxes; land grabs + bent pols in Malaysia: links I liked

I generally tweet links these days (@fp2p if you want to follow), but for the untwittered, here are a few recent highlights:

A wonderful (and politically inexplicable) thing happened last week. Amid gloom and austerity, the UK government kept to its promises and increased aid to 0.7% of national income – the first G8 country to do so. It barely warranted a mention in the press coverage, but Owen Barder had a nice piece + graph showing the turnaround (right, from 1960 to present, turnaround is 1997).

Oxfam did its bit as part of the IF campaign, sending in 500 George Osbournes to spread the word, and persuading 100 economists to sign a letter supporting the move. Save the Children also got a pile of economists to sign up to a letter on why inequality should be at the centre of the post2015 debate. But be warned, these are economists – only a matter of time before they start charging.

A smart Australian campaign – slapping ‘out of order’ signs on vending machines of bad companies (here, Coca Cola. Allegedly).

Religious leaders are up to their old tricks in Kenya, getting TV to drop a USAID and UKAid-funded advert encouraging condom use. Sigh.

Alex Evans lists ten things development pundits like him missed/got wrong in the 2008/9 food/finance meltdown. Excellent corrective for anyone involved in the bla bla business.

The gulf between reason and politics is nowhere greater than on climate change. The Financial Times had a well-argued editorial making the case for carbon taxes. Anyone listening?

Some great investigative campaigning from Global Witness on corruption and land grabs in Sarawak (Malaysia). Got a mention in this week’s Economist too.

The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. Synthesis > novelty in a big new UN report.

Of the big reports that spew forth from the multilateral system, some break new ground in terms of research or narratives, while others usefully recap the latest thinking on a given issue. Last week’s 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, falls into the latter category, pulling together the evidence for a tectonic North-South shift in global economic and political affairs, summarizing new thinking on inequality, South in the North etc and asking what happens next. If you’re currently sunk in the depths of Europessimism or US political stalemate, you may find such an upbeat story refreshing (or even disturbing). You can read the exec sum online, but it doesn’t seem to allow you to cut and paste (v annoying for lazy bloggers like me).

Some useful numbers to demonstrate the extent of the shift: From 1980 to now, developing countries’ share of global GDP rose from 33% to 45%, their share of world goods trade from 25% to 45%, and South-South trade as a % of the world total rose from 8% to 26%.

How has this happened and so what? The HDR’s approach is to learn from the success of 18 of the more than 40 countries in the developing world that have done better than expected in human development terms in recent decades, with their progress accelerating markedly over the past ten years. Not just China and India, but countries like Turkey, Ghana and Mauritius. Again, nothing new there – the Growth Commission had a go at that five years back – but still infinitely preferable to maths-led regression-tastic nonsense that ignores history and politics.

Compared to the Growth Commission, the HDR’s conclusions are more interventionist, and more political. The Report identifies 3 main drivers shared across the success stories:

1. A proactive developmental state

2. Tapping into global markets

3. Determined social policy innovation

On the role of the state, successful countries ‘share some key characteristics. Most were proactive “developmental states” that sought to take strategic advantage of opportunities offered by world trade. They also invested heavily in human capital through health and education programs and other essential social services. More important than getting prices right, a developmental state must get policy priorities right. They should be people-centred, promoting opportunities while protecting against downside risks.’

In case you missed it, that’s a not-very-subtle two fingers to the Washington Consensus and its preference for ‘getting the prices right’.

Oops, wrong South

The report points to some downside risks that threaten this progress: ‘short-sighted austerity measures, failures to address persistent inequalities, and a lack of opportunities for meaningful civic participation.’ But overall, as the South rises, the focus will shift to ‘long-term challenges shared by industrialized countries of the North’ – both commonly shared issues like ageing and jobs, and collective action problems like climate change.

Its recommendations for continuing this amazing progress include

1. Developing countries need to move their focus from ‘growth first’ to human development

2. Enhanced South-South learning and integration

3. Greater representation for civil society and the South in the international system. Global institutions have not yet caught up with this historic change (the international system’s loss rather than the BRICS’). China, with the world’s second largest economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has but a 3.3 percent share in the World Bank, less than France’s 4.3 percent. India, which will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous country, does not have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And Africa, with a billion people in 54 sovereign nations, is under-represented in almost all international institutions.

And in a nice table-turning touch, the report ‘urges the convening of a new “South Commission” where developing countries can take the lead in suggesting constructive new approaches to effective global governance.’

Nothing earth-shattering, but a useful exercise in synthesizing the evolving understanding of development and repositioning the multilaterals within it. So what have I missed?

And here’s the rather frenetic animated version

Kevin Watkins on inequality – required reading

If you want an overview of the current debates on inequality, read Kevin Watkins’ magisterial Ryszard Kapuściński lecture. Kevin, who will shortly take over as the new head of the Overseas Development Institute, argues that ‘getting to zero’ on poverty means putting inequality at the heart of the development debate and the post2015 agreement (he doesn’t share my scepticism on that one). As a taster, here are two powerful graphs, showing how poverty will fall globally and in India, with predicted growth rates, in a low/high/current inequality variants. QED, really.

Brazil v South Africa: what can the BRICS tell us about overcoming inequality?

The blog’s inequality week here in South Africa continues with some thoughts on inequality and the BRICS. An edited version of this post appeared earlier this week on the FT’s Beyond BRICS blog

The acronym may have been cooked up in far-off New York, but the BRICS grouping of countries is starting to generate some interesting life of its own. Last week, I was in Durban, chairing a discussion between academics and activists from South Africa and Brazil ahead of the BRICS summit later this month. The topic? ‘Tackling inequality across BRICS’.

The starting point was Brazilian exceptionalism. Long held up as exhibit A in Latin America’s gross distortions of wealth, Brazil is now the only BRIC where inequality is falling (and fast – see chart). In the wider G20 group of leading economies, only 4 can boast falling inequality levels; three of them – Brazil, Argentina and Mexico – are Latin American.

The stats, captured in a new Oxfam briefing, published in conjunction with Rio’s BRICS Policy Center, are striking. Over the last decade, the incomes of the poorest Brazilians have risen more than five times faster than those of the richest (but both are rising – no zero sum games here). In the words of Brazilian poverty guru Ricardo Paes de Barros, “the incomes of individuals in the lowest decile of the income distribution is growing at Chinese rates, while the income of the richest decile grows at German rates”.

Even though GDP growth is sluggish, two weeks ago President Dilma Rousseff was able to announce the end of ‘registered extreme poverty’ – note her careful choice of words. Some Brazilian academics put this historic turnaround on a par with the New Deal in the US, or Britain’s post war creation of its welfare state.

The fine grain is just as encouraging: women’s incomes are rising faster than men’s; black people’s faster than whites’; the impoverished North-east faster than the rich South-east. Hunger is ‘largely dealt with’ according to Oxfam’s country director Simon Ticehurst, speaking in Durban, although food insecurity continues to plague communities in the northeast of Brazil. Near full employment is transforming lives, as people move from a day to day scrabble for survival into the better paid, more stable world of the formal economy. Brazil’s middle classes complain bitterly about having to pay more for maids, and even give them days off, as labour markets tighten.

Not that Brazil has become some kind of development nirvana: the quality of state education remains poor, large scale agriculture sucks up state subsidies on a far greater scale than those going to poor farmers; and despite the progress, the country is still in the world’s top 15 most unequal countries, twice as unequal as the OECD average.

Caveats aside, how did Brazil pull this off? Ticehurst and Adriana Erthal Abdenur of the BRICS Policy Center both stressed that such a transformation is complex and multi-tiered, involving all parts of state and society. This is most definitely not a magic bullet story of Brazil’s famous ‘Bolsa Familia’ social protection system, a programme of cash transfers to women in return for getting their kids vaccinated and keeping them in school, which has won admirers and imitators as far afield as New York City. UNDP estimates that such spending programmes account for under a fifth of the fall in inequality. Ticehurst argued that other critical factors include:

-          The transition from military rule to democracy, which bequeathed a constitution and political process attuned to the importance of basic rights, such as the right to food

-          The election of a centre-left government, led by Lula, committed to tackling poverty and inequality

-          Major increases in the minimum wage, the introduction of a universal pension (particularly important in deprived rural households)

-          An integrated and more effective public administration, working tightly across ministries and between the different levels of a federal, decentralized political system.

-          A high level of public participation, for example in holding 19 different ministries to account on Brazil’s ‘zero hunger’ effort to achieve universal access to food, through a virtuous circle of linking poor family farms to government procurement for school feeding programmes that in turn feed poor children.

-          Political and economic stability throughout the period of reforms.

In terms of economy and politics, Brazil is probably closer to South Africa than the other BRICS (commodity producer, democracy, transition from autocracy, centre left government) and the discussion inevitably centred on why South Africa has failed to emulate such successes. While there has been substantial progress since the end of Apartheid on access to health, education and housing, inequality remains obstinately high and rising.

The two elements of Brazil’s success that South Africa seems to be missing (by a mile) are full employment and more competent administration. Patronage and corruption exist in both countries, but their extent in South Africa is undermining the state’s ability to implement policies, however well designed. Brazil, with its more diversified economy and public investments, seems able to generate jobs in a way that remains a distant dream in South Africa, which remains dependent on agribusiness and mining, neither of which generate the employment the country needs. Substantial land redistribution seems essential to tackling the jobs crisis, yet has been systematically postponed by the government in the interests of stability. Even those who manage to navigate the dilapidated education system and emerge with a degree still find it difficult to find jobs. Alarm bells are ringing, with observers warning of anything from a slow meltdown of the ANC government to an Arab Spring style uprising led by educated, jobless youth.

While all sides stressed that merely trying to transfer policies from one country to another seldom works, this kind of South-South exchange holds huge potential for helping the BRICS develop their own solutions to some of the problems such as inequality that continue to plague the old guard of the G8.

And here’s a 25m video summary of the Durban event

On inequality, let’s do the Palma (because the Gini is so last century)

What better place than South Africa to run an inequality week on the blog? Today’s guest post from Alex Cobham (left) and Andy Sumner (right) summarizes their new paper on inequality – got a feeling this one might be quite important. Tomorrow, Brazil v South Africa.

There’s one measure of inequality that gets all the attention – the Gini index. The Gini was developed in the early 1900s – in fact about 100 years ago – by Italian Statistician, Corrado Gini (see pic, looks like a real party animal). A century later our paper argues that it may be time for a rethink on measuring inequality. Why?

it's no fun being a guru

The Gini reflects the difference between the actual cumulative distribution of income, or anything else in a population, and perfect equality (the yellow area in the graphic). A Gini value of zero would mean that the distribution is completely equal and a Gini value of one would mean that one person had all the income and everyone else nothing (i.e. all of the green area would be yellow).

Simple, eh? So, what’s the difference between a country A with a Gini of 0.4 and country B with a Gini of 0.45? We can say country B (0.45) is a bit less equal than country A (0.4). What we can’t is where that inequality exists. Is it a squeezed middle? Or is it at the poor’s end of the distribution?

So if you’re a policy maker working for an incoming president elected on a mandate to address inequality and increase the share of income to the poor, the Gini won’t be a great deal of help.

It’s also long been known thanks to inequality guru Tony Atkinson that the Gini is over-sensitive to changes in the middle of the distribution – and, as a consequence, insensitive to changes at the top and bottom. That’s a problem because we care most about what happens at the top and bottom in developing countries.

So, we’ve just put out a new paper, predictably titled ‘Putting the Gini back in the Bottle?’, exploring an alternative measure for policy, which is sensitive to exactly that. We’ve called it the ‘Palma’ as it is based on the research of Chilean economist, Gabriel Palma (below). When Palma started looking at the finer grain of inequality, rather than just the Gini, he made a startling observation (see Duncan’s take on it here).

He found that the ‘middle classes’ – more accurately the middle income groups between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ (defined as the five ‘middle’ deciles, 5 to 9) – tend to capture around half of GNI – Gross National Income wherever you live and whenever you look. The other half of national income is shared between the richest 10% and the poorest 40% but the share of those two groups varies considerably across countries.

Palma suggested distributional politics is largely about the battle between the rich and poor for the other half of national income, and who the middle classes side with.

So, we’ve given this idea a name – ‘the Palma’ (brilliant eh?) or the Palma Ratio. It’s defined as the ratio of the richest 10% of the population’s share of gross national income (GNI), divided by the poorest 40% of the population’s share. We think this might be a more policy-relevant indicator than the Gini, especially when it comes to poverty reduction.

In the paper, we do a few things. First, we confirm the robustness of Palma’s main results over time: the remarkable stability of the middle class capture across countries, coupled with much greater variation in the 10/40 ratio.

Second, we suggest that the Palma might be a better measure for policy makers to track as it is intuitively easier to understand for policy makers and citizens alike. For a given, high Palma value, it is clear what needs to change: to narrow the gap, by raising the share of national income of the poorest 40% and/or reducing the share of the top 10%.

Third, we also present some tentative but striking evidence of a link between countries’ Palma and their rates of progress on the major Millennium Development Goal (MDG) poverty targets. More work is needed, and there are all sorts of caveats, but the results indicate that countries that reduced their Palma exhibit mean rates of progress which, compared to countries with rising Palmas, are three times higher in reducing extreme poverty and hunger, twice as high in reducing the proportion of people lacking access to improved water sources, and a third higher in reducing under-five mortality. If that isn’t worth a closer look we don’t know what is.

Of course not everyone is going to like our paper – we sent it around the great and the good of the inequality world and really got a ‘marmite effect’ –people love or hate it (Andy’s New Bottom Billion paper on poverty in middle income countries got much the same initial response). Who likes it? Without naming names, here are the main love/hate responses – stylized – for a few salient groupings (those who commented on the paper shouldn’t get too hung up on this table).

We think there’s an important debate to be had on measuring inequality, especially if the post-2015 discussions take it into central account. So let’s start with a vote (see right), preferably after you’ve taken a look at our paper.

Andy Sumner is co-director of the newly established, International Development Institute at King’s College London, that is seeking to study development from a different angle. Alex Cobham is a research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Europe and a member of the advisory group of the UN consultation on inequalities in post-2015.

How to build local government accountability in South Africa? A conversation with partners

This is what a good day visiting an Oxfam programme looks like. I skim the interwebs (and this blog) to put together some thoughts on a given issue from our experience or what others are writing (‘the literature’). Then sit down with local Oxfamistas and partner organizations (who are usually closer to the grassroots than we are) to compare these bullet points with their reality. Last Friday it was ‘how can NGOs build the accountability of local government.’ My ten minutes covered:

• Supply (training officials) v demand (strengthening civil society) v building collective trust in fragmented societies
• The importance of identifying and working with insider champions within the state – no good shouting at the gates if no-one inside is willing to listen and work with you
• It can be risky – make sure staff and partners have support if the state officials lash out
• Often need to pursue deeper culture change on officials’ attitudes to excluded groups
• Need to choose between focussing on the broader ‘enabling environment’ of access to information, respect for the law, exposing corruption etc or more specific campaigns for housing, electricity, schools etc
• Some interesting examples of text-based complaints mechanisms (India) and name-and-shame league tables (Vietnam)

A lot of this resonated with the South African experience. Some thought-provoking additional points included:

The SA implementation gap between ‘first world norms and standards’ and an underfunded and often chaotic/corrupt corrupt administrative reality is so wide it may even be counterproductive (no point in acting because however hard you try, you can never comply). Local government is hobbled by lack of cash, capacity, and officials’ inability to understand ‘perfect’ guidelines and standards drawn up by distant consultants.

The political incentives are all wrong. Patronage is as big a problem as corruption – party hacks get parachuted into senior administrative jobs, lacking the capacity or interest to perform them properly. ‘People in positions feel very powerful’, and their power springs from playing the political game within the ANC, fighting the internal turf wars rather than doing right by the people.

Despite this, there are officials and politicians willing to do the right thing, either because they are politically progressive and committed (this is the ANC, after all), or because more self-interested political incentives are temporarily/accidentally aligned with those of the popular movement. A huge element of civil society advocacy is built around identifying and building relationships with such individuals. Finding backing for local insider champions (eg from higher tiers of government and politics, or international bodies) can make a real difference in strengthening the hand of the good guys within the state.

But that can be very exhausting: ‘you look at the giant that is Government and it’s so difficult to navigate. You never quite know where to push, (and nor do the officials!). You invest hugely in building intimate relationships only to find they’ve moved department and you have to start all over again.’

Civil society (including Oxfam) don’t always do themselves any favours: ‘CSOs go with the attitude ‘you’re paid to do this, and you drive a 4×4. Why should I congratulate you when you actually do your job?’ So they get nowhere.’

More optimistic times

Options include:

• Judicial activism, but there is little cash to support it, and it is very slow.
• Changing norms: At present ‘there’s no corruption, no shame’ among officials. CSOs could go for broad public awareness raising and pressure along the lines of ipaidabribe.com, ‘they work for us’ websites on the performance of politicians or civil servants, ‘slowest response of the year’ competitions etc. But those in the room thought this would be very risky indeed, given the ANC’s hostility to public criticism.
• Broaden alliances beyond networks of CSOs (which seems to be the default model), not least because civil society currently has access to political leaders (they were often in the anti-apartheid movement together), but little real traction. Partners thought the private sector offered more promise than faith-based organizations or traditional leaders.

We finished by asking everyone to suggest something new to try. Here’s what they came up with:

• Invest much more in ‘positive reinforcement’. Find champions, publicly support them. Build relationships.
• Do more long term awareness-raising  with communities about what the government ought to be doing for them
• Think about a South African ipaidabribe.com
• Budget tracking/ ‘follow the money’ watchdogs to ensure that money allocated arrives intact and is then actually spent (a scandalous amount of health and education money has to be returned to central government because local officials fail to spend it on time).

But in the end, several partners thought that only an increase in political competition, with the ANC facing a genuine chance of being voted out of municipal governments, would shift the behaviours of most officials. Given the state of the opposition, that doesn’t look likely, but I’ll speculate on that in a future post.

And if you happen to be in Cape Town today, why not come along to the Sustainability Institute at 12 to discuss ‘Creating a Just Food System through Active Citizenship‘? Some good panelists (and me).

When it comes to closing down Google Reader, I’m with Hitler

I start most days catching up on the news via Google Reader. Anything new from all my favourite wonk gurus, handily collected together, to be read for subsequent blogging and tweeting. So of course they’re shutting it down. Grrrrrrr. Let me know when the campaign begins [h/t Chris Blattman]