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.

The state of Africa – report from a 23 country road trip (and I’m in South Africa for a couple of weeks)

I’m in South Africa this week, speaking at various events, including a panel on the developmental state and inequality at Wits in Johannesburg (Tuesday 12^th), a book launch in Durban on Thursday 14^th, a panel on active citizenship and food justice at the Sustainability Institute in Cape Town on Monday 18^th and a lecture on ‘which matters more, poverty or inequality’ at the University of the Western Cape on Wednesday 20^th. In between, I’m definitely open to offers of beers, coffees etc in Joburg, Durban and Cape Town – often hard to fill the evenings on these trips, although I do have a box set of series 4 of The Wire…….

As I queued to get through immigration yesterday, I read the Economist’s recent special report on Africa by Oliver August. It’s a really nice piece of econo-wonk travel writing, travelling by land across 23 countries (see map) and mixing impressions with analysis. It’s very much an outsider looking in, but that can be interesting too.

It gets a bit close to a Panglossian ‘gee, look at the GDP, isn’t everything great’ tone at times, but overall, offers a readable, geographically-based commentary on some of the big issues – war and conflict (Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone); corruption and good governance (Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria); poverty and civil society activism (Niger, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Sudan); state v market(Ethiopia and Kenya); managing mineral wealth (Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana) and a separate section on South Africa. Some random snippets to give you a taste:

‘At the end of the cold war only three African countries (out of 53 at the time) had democracies; since then the number has risen to 25, of varying shades, and many more countries hold imperfect but worthwhile elections (22 in 2012 alone). Only four out of now 55 countries—Eritrea, Swaziland, Libya and Somalia—lack a multi-party constitution, and the last two will get one soon.’

‘The journey covered some 15,800 miles (25,400km) on rivers, railways and roads, almost all of them paved and open for business. Not once was your correspondent asked for a bribe along the way, though a few drivers may have given small gratuities to policemen. The trip took 112 days, and on all but nine of them e-mail by smartphone was available.’

In Nigeria, ‘The transformation of Lagos is worth trumpeting. Its economy is now bigger than the whole of Kenya’s. Tax revenue has increased from $4m to $97m a month in little more than a decade. Tax rates have stayed the same but the amounts being collected have risen dramatically thanks to the deployment of private tax “farmers” who get a commission.‘

‘Climate change is a further worry. No inhabited continent will be more affected by it than Africa. Deadly droughts, flash floods and falling water tables are recurring themes in conversations across the continent. South Africans are especially worried. “In 20 years this will all be desert,” says the owner of a vineyard near the Cape, standing among verdant vines.’

And his conclusion?

‘Africans rightly worry about unemployment, inequality and a host of other problems. But over the past decade winners have outnumbered losers, and the view from the road suggests they will go on doing so. Your correspondent reaches Cape Town in a hired car on a rainy afternoon, finding the waterfront alive with once-rare tourists from other African countries. “Soon our home will look like this,” says an Angolan father of three, pointing out a cluster of high-rise buildings to his teenage children. “I brought them here to see their future.”’

So, who’s on for a beer then?

What have we learned from 5 years of research on African power and politics?

The Africa Power and Politics Programme (APPP) is winding down as its five year funding from DFID comes to an end, and I’ve been wading through the 120 page synthesis report as well as the strictly-for-wimps Policy Brief. Both are entitled ‘Development as a collective action problem: Addressing the real challenges of African governance’.

Like previous APPP work, the papers are intriguing and frustrating in equal measure. David Booth from the ODI, the principal author, appears torn: his comfort zone is the abstruse conceptual landscape and language of political science. But his paymasters are practical men and women who insist on their ‘so whats’. ‘Researchers have a duty to provide more than negative messages and evidence of complexity. There needs to be a meeting point between researchers’ recognition of complexity and practitioners’ hunger for guidance.’ He does his best, and promises much, but it doesn’t come easy, with conclusions that often stop just as they get interesting (at least to prosaic practitioner types like me).

First comes the standard take-down: a comprehensive and persuasive rubbishing of mistaken approaches. Yes, the development world may have moved on from ‘magic bullet’ approaches, accepting the APPP’s core argument in favour of adopting ‘best fit’ approaches, ‘going with the grain’ of existing histories and institutions in any given place. But in practice ‘even the most reflective country activists and the best governance advisers have trouble imagining what to do differently.’

On current aid practices, the synthesis report is far more damning than the Policy Brief (perhaps in deference to DFID’s sensitivities). Booth lambasts the ‘per diem culture’ (or as my colleague Ben Phillips puts it, ‘carpe per diem’) that undermines genuine attempts to resolve local collective action problems, as well as

• ‘the distortions caused by the availability of donor money and organisational templates, now delivered to the remotest rural areas by local governments and NGOs, and
• mechanical application of donor-inspired policy guidelines by sector ministries in ways that not only contribute to policy incoherence but prevent local actors from coming together to provide their own solutions.

He’s particularly critical of direct funding to grassroots organizations, arguing that ‘in Pakistan and elsewhere, civic groups that get funding from development assistance end up with no members.’ But he then acknowledges that in Malawi ‘in fact, some of the promising experiences do involve NGOs as actors, and some involve the use of project funds’ although frustratingly, there are no further details.

APPP reckons a more profound conceptual shift is required, ditching the ‘straitjacket of principal-agent thinking’ on governance. It pours equal scorn on supply side governance (governments are keen to run the place better, they just need training) and the more recent switch to demand side (just help citizens’ groups who are dying to hold governments to account, and that will lead to development). ‘The conventional idea of supporting a pent-up ‘demand for good governance’ must be put aside.’ ‘Citizen pressure will normally lead to more effective clientelism, not better public policies.’ [ouch]

Instead ‘governance challenges are not fundamentally about one set of people getting another set of people to behave better. They are about both sets of people finding ways of being able to act collectively in their own best interests. They are about collective problem-solving in fragmented societies hampered by low levels of trust.’

How? First engage with states, but not all of them: learn how to spot more developmentalist bits, and where you find them, reject the ‘dominant view for the last 25 years that African governments cannot be trusted with interventionist policies.’

I’ve written before about David’s apparent love affair with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (left), but here he accepts that just wishing all African leaders were benevolent autocrats is not really good enough, not least because such ‘developmental patrimonialist’ regimes tend to emerge from major wars and national liberation struggles and/or major threats to national survival like the Rwandan genocide, which are unlikely to be repeated. Instead, he acknowledges ‘the most urgent policy questions relate to options for the modal type of contemporary African regime, where clientelism is competitive and operating under a formally democratic political constitution.’ Still, there is a lingering fondness for what the synthesis report terms ‘strong, visionary leaders’, combined with a rather old school notion of development as economic transformation first, and we’ll worry about all that fuzzy human rights, well-being and agency stuff later.

What of more specific so whats? There are tantalising glimpses here and there, never fleshed out fully. These include:

• New forms of power-sharing to deal with ethnic conflict
• Ring-fencing long term development priorities (eg infrastructure, smallholder agriculture) from party politics
• Pursue what APPP dubs ‘practical hybrids’, the result of ‘conscious efforts by elements of the modern state to adapt to local preferences and ways of doing things.’
• Learn from successful governance turnarounds in Latin America (Brazil, Bogotá), which ‘worked less by changing the formal rules of the political game, and more by bringing informal social norms and moral sentiments into line with the high ideals articulated in national constitutions, making creative use of mass media and the power of example.’
• ‘Official agencies should do more things ‘at arm’s length’, delegating assistance to organisations that have demonstrated an ability to work in the ways that are required to make a positive difference.’ Would that include ODI by any chance?

Stepping back, the underlying challenge identified by APPP seems to be how both governments and citizens can move to a less short-termist mindset and agree on the kind of institutional development that underpins long term development, finding ways to overcome the paralysis of collective action problems: ‘Where positive outcomes are achieved, the reasons are almost always that circumstances have permitted a collective action log-jam to be overcome, usually at several levels simultaneously and interactively.’

I think this analysis fits with some thinking we’re doing in Oxfam around the topic of ‘convening and brokering’. In certain circumstances, the best role for an outside player like us is not to build stuff, or dispense large amounts of cash, but to get disparate local players into a room and encourage them to find their own solutions. In Oxfam the iconic programme story is in Tajikistan, where we convened a bunch of ministries, private companies and civil society organizations to discuss water and sanitation. We don’t lobby for a particular agenda or institutional template, we just keep them talking – an afternoon every two months. Already the process has yielded an inter-ministerial coordinating committee on water, a new water law, and specific projects are now starting to emerge. The secret to success in this is often the human skills of the facilitator (in this case a rather charismatic water engineer who is now the Tajikistan country director) and acceptance by all parties of the credibility and independence of the convenor.

It also reminds me of Dani Rodrik’s work on growth diagnostics and bottlenecks: ‘development progress is about overcoming institutional blockages, usually underpinned by collective action problems. It is not, for the most part, about resource shortages or funding gaps.’

This seems to be heading towards some kind of ‘participatory institutional appraisal’ approach, where development actors specialize in convening discussions of local players to get over these logjams in ways that reflect and adapt local traditions and values. This runs up against the way aid agencies currently work: high staff turnover, massive pressure to dole out funds in large amounts, demands to show ‘value for money’ via an increasingly demanding and imposed system of governance, monitoring, evaluation etc etc

A suggestion: APPP should present this work to a group of practitioners (bilateral, NGOs etc), then brainstorm on examples where they are successfully pursuing this kind of approach. They should then write them up in plain English and use them to illustrate their arguments – I think I can guarantee a significant improvement in research take up and impact. Any takers?

Why don’t Africa’s politicians invest more in small farmers? The political economy of ag policy.

Interesting if rather impenetrable new(ish) paper from the Future Agricultures consortium on the political economy of Africanagricultural policy. It seeks to answer an important question – why hasn’t the spread of democracy produced more investment in the smallholder farmers that form the majority of the electorate in many countries? Here’s the summary:

“Theories of policy neglect of, or discrimination against, agriculture in Africa include urban bias and the narrow self-interest ofautonomous elites. Whilst structural adjustment removed much of the previous tax burden on African agriculture , the sector also saw declining investment from international development partners and through national budgets. Whilst there has been some recovery in public investment in agriculture over the past decade, signalled by the 2003 Maputo Declaration, investment in the infrastructural and institutional public goods needed to support smallholder-led agricultural growth remains disappointing. As a result, the contribution of the agricultural sector to growth and poverty reduction objectives in Africa is widely believed to have been below potential.

In theory, democratisation, which has proceeded unevenly across Africa during the past two decades, should encourage pro-poor agricultural policy, as the majority of voters in many countries remain rural and poor. This paper draws on case studies of recent policy change (attempted and actual) in eight African countries, plus an analysis of the political systems in these countries, to explore the evolving role of competitive electoral politics in agricultural policy making.

An important observation is that politicians are as likely to rely on ethnic allegiances and forms of social or political control to secure votes as they are to engage in policy competition. Moreover, the political incentives facing senior policy makers in the agricultural and rural development sphere may be inimical to the development of strong institutions to promote smallholder agricultural growth. Instead the paper finds that it is exogenous factors – macroeconomic dependence on agriculture and, most strikingly, sustained threats to regime survival – that create positive incentives for agricultural investment, even where social or political control is relied on to secure votes.”

So what I think Colin Poulton, the author, is saying is that since many African leaders don’t rely on having good policies to win elections, it doesn’t matter much whether those policies are popular with voters. As he later explains:

‘Critically, the argument that democratisation may strengthen political incentives for policy support to smallholder agriculture in Africa assumes that politicians primarily exchange policies for votes. Drawing on existing literature and the country case studies, the paper  argues that this assumption does not hold in most of Africa.’

In fact, they only start worrying about investing in agriculture where, as in Burkina, Malawi or Ethiopia, it is particularly vital to generate the foreign exchange they need to run the government (or buy a new Mercedes), or the whole government is under actual or potential military threat (Rwanda, Ethiopia). When those moments arrive, then political leaders are more likely to remember small farmers and listen to well-meaning technocrats, but at other times they will largely ignore them.

There are a few exceptions like Ghana, where policies do seem to matter more (some great policy debates going on in the current election campaign on issues such as healthcare).

Can civil society help fill the democratic deficit and generate the pressure for change? According to Poulton:

‘In Latin America mobilization of poor groups by diverse social movements (Vanden 2007) arguably began to exert an influence on electoral outcomes around 15 years after the return to democracy. However, there are various reasons why such mobilization might take much longer to achieve in much of Sub-Saharan Africa than in Latin America, including deeper levels of absolute poverty, lower education levels (although recent increases in school enrolment are a positive sign in this respect) and little prior history of awareness raising amongst the rural poor in Africa (some early cooperative development activity aside).’

Your thoughts?

African techno-euphoria and the origins of Kenyan mobile exceptionalism

I’m struck by one of those periodic waves of Africa techno-euphoria as I catch up on my post holiday reading (Google Reader, twitter, email, random subscriptions – is there no end to it?). The Guardian has pieces on how the web is changing Africa and 15 innovations that are transforming the continent. Meanwhile the Economist has a fascinating piece on mobile technologies in Kenya. Some highlights:

“In 2002 Kenya’s exports of technology-related services were a piffling $16m. By 2010 that had exploded to $360m. To its boosters, Nairobi is “Silicon Savannah”.

However, it differs from its silicon sisters in one crucial regard. From the start, its tech firms have designed their products for mobile phones rather than computers. Kenya is still a poor country; few of its people own laptops. But there are 74 mobile phones for every 100 Kenyans, well above the African average of 65. And nearly 99% of internet subscriptions in Kenya are on mobile phones.

Three factors helped Nairobi to become an African tech hub. The first is a supportive government. In 2005, when Bitange Ndemo was appointed as permanent secretary to the ministry of information and communications technology (ICT), Kenya was a technological backwater. Access to the internet was available only through satellite connections and was wallet-sappingly expensive. In 2009 Mr Ndemo brought the first of four undersea internet cables to the Kenyan coast. Prices plummeted and bandwidth exploded. Just under 12m of the country’s roughly 40m people now use the internet, a number that has trebled since 2009.

Second, Kenya has undergone a revolution since 2007, when M-PESA, a mobile-payments system operated by Safaricom, a phone company, was launched (see chart). Many start-ups use it as a base for their business. One team streamlined the payment of school fees through the service by helping institutions and parents keep track of upcoming and late deposits. Another offered an electronic version of Kenya’s popular informal savings groups. M-PESA has also inspired others. In May Google launched Beba, a pre-paid card for commuters using Nairobi’s local buses. Insiders say that this is a test run for a much larger cashless-payment system.

Third, since 2010 Nairobi has had a place, called the iHub, for local techies to get together and exchange ideas. The iHub has expanded to include a consulting arm, a research department and an incubation space called m:lab, which supports start-ups developing mobile applications.

Will Nairobi then compete with other emerging tech hubs such as Bangalore and Tel Aviv? Not at once, says Joe Mucheru, head of Google in Kenya. Nairobi has exported two notable innovations: M-PESA (which began life in London) and Ushahidi, a non-profit platform for crowdsourcing information during disasters. But most Kenyan tech firms are coming up with solutions to local problems. One team has built a service to help poultry farmers, who waste hours sitting around watching their chickens, keep track of their brood with text-message alerts. “We need to solve the nitty-gritty first and then we can invent new things,” says Mr Mucheru.

Yet this may ultimately be the key to Kenya’s success. “We have so many problems that can also be opportunities,” says Mr Ndemo. M-Farm, a service that gives farmers access to market prices for the cost of a text message and allows them to group together to buy and sell products, has won several supporters and awards. It is the sort of thing Kenya could export to other poor countries.”

Even taken with the necessary pinch of salt (tech fixes are seldom a pain-free substitute for sorting out inequality, injustice and exclusion), these are still fascinating developments. And I’m still waiting for a really convincing explanation of Kenyan exceptionalism: according to the accompanying editorial, Safaricom handles more than half the world’s mobile money transactions.

What can political economists tell us about Africa, aid and development?

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces, Deliberation’ governance blog

There’s a clutch of different research initiatives trying to understand Africa’s political economy and its impact on development and aid. Often, the tone of the political economists can be quite discouraging – Alex Duncan gives a tongue-in-cheek definition of a political economist as ‘someone coming to explain why your aid programme doesn’t work’. There are few practical ‘take aways’ either for large bilateral aid agencies, or NGOs other than ‘give up and become a researcher’.

And that’s pretty much the tone of a logotastic ‘joint statement’ from 5 research programmes based (loosely) in the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands (The Africa Power and Politics Programme, Developmental Leadership Programme, Elites, Production and Poverty: A Comparative Analysis, Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, Tracking Development). Here’s some highlights:

From the summary:

“African countries badly need to embark on processes of economic  transformation, not just growth, and they are not helped to do so by insistence on  prior achievement of Good Governance, meaning adoption of the institutional ‘best  practices’ that have emerged in much richer countries.”

From the full statement:

“Our single most important message is that development outcomes in poor countries depend fundamentally on the political incentives facing political elites and leaders….. Because of the way democratisation affects politicians’ incentives in poor developing countries, the introduction of competitive elections is a mixed blessing for achieving the economic transformation that Africa needs.”

“The reasons [a number of South-east Asian countries] achieved sustained, pro-poor growth [and Africa has not] over the 50 years since 1960 are mostly about policy differences. During the early decades of the period, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam invested heavily in rural development, driven by urgency, outreach and expediency. They did so under a variety of political regime types, none of which were free of major corruption. They made some progress towards democratisation only after achieving  substantial economic  transformation.”

The paper’s ‘big idea’ is that “What shapes the ability of policy to drive economic transformation is the extent to which mutual interests, cooperative relations and synergies emerge between three  large groups of actors. [see diagram] [Usually] the relationships are not mutual, cooperative and synergistic, but antagonistic, exploitative and perverse. [But the key to improving aid practice is] understanding exactly how and why exceptions occur.”

“Because politicians are typically constrained to generate and use rents to cement their alliances,  ‘good politics’  can  result in ‘bad economics’” Elites need cash to funnel to their supporters and so have to milk the state for short-term rents, rather than investing in the future, as the Southeast Asian elites did, (supporting pioneer firms, building roads, providing health and education etc). The trouble is that in such a system “the introduction of formal multi-party competition into such an environment does not alter the basic logic. Clientelism in Africa is to a greater or lesser extent competitive under both authoritarian and more democratic regimes…. Typically, multi-party elections formalise and sharpen this competition with often mixed results for development.”

The paper identifies two broad kinds of exceptions to the clientilist rule:

Big-picture exceptions: In a somewhat desperate search for developmental states in Africa, the paper comes up with “the early-independence regimes of Houphouët-Boigny (Côte  d’Ivoire), Kenyatta (Kenya) and  Banda (Malawi) [and today,] Ethiopia and Rwanda.”  These have all “achieved centralised rent-management [thus freeing them from the distractions of competitive clientilism] and this led to significant economic transformation and social advance for a period.” Ah, so the best way to improve on competitive clientilism is to eliminate the competition, not the clientilism.  Oh dear.

Small-picture exceptions: successes in Asia were in many instances the result of breakthroughs in particular sectors or commodity chains which only later became generalised… [African examples include] sugar in Mozambique and dairy in Uganda.”

What does all this mean for aid donors (the authors are basically talking to the big money donors, not relative minnows like Oxfam)?

“The central message that needs to be got across is that the conditions which keep the African masses in poverty are the result of decisions by politicians who are responding to incentives  that change slowly and are not in the  short  term very  favourable to development. More immediately, they stem from the inability of sector actors to overcome their collective action problems in the face of unsupportive if not predatory state behaviour. They cannot, therefore, be addressed by merely transferring economic resources from the global rich to the global poor. Indeed, such attempts can make matters worse, by further weakening those political incentives that work in favour of domestically driven economic transformation.

If this is true, aid needs to become far less supply-driven and more focused on supporting processes that show real promise, based on an informed assessment of the local situation and the lessons of history. In particular, there should be no implication that donors know best what institutions poor countries need.”

The political reality check is excellent, but the lack of genuine ‘so what’s’ (despite the paper’s protestations to the contrary) is a real problem. As is the casual abandonment of human rights, democracy, citizenship and social struggle. Citizens, social movements, the Arab Spring (see left) barely get a condescending mention in all this high level grown-up talk of governments, elites, donors and political settlements.

Still, for NGOs who usually prefer Gramsci’s ‘optimism of the will’ to his accompanying ‘pessimism of the intellect’ (this paper suffers from the opposite problem),  it should be at least food for thought that a cold-blooded look at Africa’s recent history persuades a group of serious academics that the best Africa can hope for is benign dictatorship, epitomised by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, which delivers “social provision under a centralised rent management regime [and] illustrates how a  powerful upward accountability of public service-providers and local administrations  to the national political leadership can remarkably improve service quality, more  than adequately substituting for the downward accountability to users that tends to  be stressed in donor rhetoric.”

What’s more, I think that a more progressive reading of this work is possible – outsiders must give up trying to impose blueprints, and concentrate on spotting and supporting positive developments as they emerge (with many of them coming from the very social movements that this group ignores or dismisses). But that will be of little comfort to the big official agencies, which are too big and too politically constrained to pursue that more entrepreneurial approach. They are left with what I’ve previously termed the ‘decent chap’approach – picking political winners by “focusing  particularly  on sectors  or areas  where  government  attitudes are positive for  political reasons and  sector  actors have  revealed a collective ambition to move ahead.” Shame Paul Kagame says he doesn’t really want more aid.

What does the UN’s first Africa Human Development Report say about food security?

A guest post from Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right), who is taking over from me as head of research at Oxfam in a couple of weeks, (I’m not leaving, just changing jobs within Oxfam – more on that later).

Over the past two years, I spent most of my time working on the first Africa Human Development Report (left), which was launched yesterday in Nairobi. It was about time for the first African HDR, especially given recent famine in the Horn and repeated threats of humanitarian food crises in the Sahel. The report focuses on food security – for a large number of Africans (some 220 million), hunger is a daily threat – and often one with permanent consequences.

The premise of the Africa HDR is simple: food security, through better nutrition, can improve education, health, productivity, and other important social and economic factors that allow people to have a good life (see figure).

In contrast, malnutrition can be a long lasting burden:

“The perverse dynamic between food insecurity and poor education, bad health and poverty can last generations. Hungry children with weakened immune systems die prematurely from communicable diseases such as dysentery, malaria and respiratory infections that are ordinarily preventable and treatable. They start school late, learn less and drop out early. Malnourished mothers are at greater risk of dying in childbirth and of delivering low-birthweight babies who fail to survive infancy. Undernourished babies who make it through infancy often suffer stunting that cripples and shortens their lives. As adults they are likely to give birth to another generation of low-birthweight babies, perpetuating the vicious cycle of low human development and destitution.”  

Recent evidence reveals a jarring paradox in Africa. Several countries have been progressing very rapidly in the last years – between 2004 and 2008, African economies grew on average 6.5% annually; child mortality is decreasing; school enrollment is improving; and the Human Development Index (a composite measure of health, education, and income) has risen faster than anywhere else since 2000. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa has not been able to turn improvements in human development into better nutrition indicators – especially compared to Asia’s progress in the last two decades. In sub-Saharan Africa the number of malnourished children increased by 55 million in the last 10 years. 

The stubborn persistence of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa is partly the result of a brutal neglect of the rural sector for decades, which led to widespread rural poverty, low agricultural yields, poor infrastructure, and limited basic services in rural areas:

- 93% of the arable land is rain-fed.
- African farmers use less than 20 kgs of fertilizer per hectare of arable land, compared to nearly 350 kgs in Asia.
- Since the early 1960s, production of cereals per capita has fallen 13% — the only region to suffer a decline. Today, cereal production in Africa is around 150 kgs per capita; in Latin America it is close to 300 kgs, and in Asia more than 350 kgs.
- Only 30% of Africa’s rural population lives within 2 kilometres of a road. In South Asia, 58% do.

This policy bias reinforced a vicious circle of high levels of inequality, skewed control over resources, and access to opportunities against certain groups – for instance, women have less ability to own and inherit land (figure). As the African Progress Panel Report (launched last week) mentions, the new wealth is not creating the necessary employment or reaching marginalized groups. Add to that the detrimental effects of some international practices – including the lingering effects of structural adjustment, lavish northern agricultural subsidies, the production of bio-fuels, and neglect of agriculture in official development assistance.

African governments face important policy decisions, mostly on how to transform the recent economic growth and advances in other development indicators into long-term opportunities. The report focuses on four areas of intervention: increase agricultural productivity, strengthen nutrition policies, build resilience, and empower marginalized groups. 

These are interventions that each African country will need to weigh against other national priorities. There is evidence that African people recognize the attempts that governments make to improve access to food. And they also notice when they don’t: about 60% of respondents on the 2009 Gallup World Poll special issue on food security in Africa disagreed with the statement: “The government of this country is doing enough to help people get food”.

Creating better institutions and investing more resources are part of the solution. But any real improvement in the food security situation of African societies will need to make sure that all groups participate actively in the decision-making process. Solving the food security conundrum in Africa requires strong public action. The role of the agricultural sector in development and poverty reduction has been explored at length. But the role of nutrition, social protection, and civic participation has not been duly recognized. Active citizens can play a critical role in ensuring that governments are held accountable and that any policy related to food is participatory and equitable (a very important issue given the recent spate of land grabs).

Too often in Africa (as well as other developing regions), governing elites do not reflect the public interest in their actions and policies. Issues of governance, agency, and democracy might seem unimportant for food security but, increasingly, we have learned that hunger and starvation are closely related to politics and political economy. This is why empowerment and resilience are important. Access to information, roads, and well-designed social programs allow people to make better decisions and better participate in markets and societies. The power structures that keep certain groups from accessing land or that bias public investment towards leaders’ constituencies must be clearly identified – and African governments, civil society, and other stakeholders will need to alter these power relations and give everyone a fair chance to avoid the perils of hunger and its negative consequences for human development.

And here’s the 6 minute launch video

Jobs, Justice and Equity: excellent new overview of Africa’s progress

Jobs, Justice and Equity is the title of a new report published today by the Africa Progress Panel, a high powered group of ten luminaries including Kofi Annan and Graca Machel. And Bob Geldof. The report does an excellent job of assessing the cup half empty v half full narratives on Africa, and has some great graphics – it should become a standard reference on the region. Here are some highlights:

“The extreme pessimism surrounding Africa a decade ago was unwarranted. So is the current wave of blinkered optimism. Real gains have been made and Africa has an unprecedented opportunity for sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and poverty reduction. However, governments are failing to convert increased wealth into opportunities and employment for their most marginalized citizens and there is a growing demand for justice and equity. Inequalities across Africa are not only ethically indefensible, they are economically inefficient and politically destabilizing.”

The report points to 5 global trends that are shaping the continent: the youth surge; agriculture and climate change; the rise of the emerging powers; science, tech and innovation and ‘the rising tide of citizen action’.

On growth: “Some of the fastest growing countries in the world are in Africa. From 2005-2009, Ethiopia recorded higher growth than China, and Uganda outperformed India. In 2011 Ghana had the highest rate of growth in the world.”

On the youth surge: “Africa’s growth has done little to alter the labour market. Agriculture still accounts for almost two thirds of all livelihoods. Even in fast-growing economies like Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, formal sector employment has failed to keep pace with the new entrants to the workforce. Africa’s youth population will rise from 133 million at the start of the century to 246 million by 2020, requiring another 74 million jobs over the next decade simply to prevent youth unemployment from rising.”

On poverty: “While rapid growth is creating an emerging middle class, only 4 per cent of Africans have an income in excess of $10 a day. Almost half of all Africans, 386 million people, still live below the $1.25 a day poverty line. Another 30 per cent – 246 million people – live in the poverty grey area, on between$1.25 and $2.50 a day. Nevertheless Africa has begun to turn a corner in terms of poverty. For the first time in over a generation, the number of people living in poverty has fallen. Fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday and more are getting into school. But while countries across Africa are becoming richer whole sections of society have been left behind. African wealth disparities are amongst the biggest in the world and unequal access to health, education, water and sanitation is reinforcing wider inequalities.”

On food security: “The risk of food insecurity is higher in Africa than any other region. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 million people are food insecure. Smallholder agriculture must be placed at the centre of a green revolution for Africa. Unlocking productivity will require new thinking, new approaches to public spending and strong political leadership. More needs to be done to stop speculators buying up large tracts of land. In the last decade Africa accounted for 948 acquisitions covering 134 million hectares – an area larger than France, Germany and the UK combined.”

On resource mobilization: “Between 2000 and 2008, ODA flows to sub-Saharan Africa increased from $12bn to $36bnper year. In contrast, the value of natural resource rents rose from $39.2bn to $240bn. If governments could increase the share of rents captured by extraction, they could reduce aid dependence and increase domestic resource mobilization dramatically. In 2011, for the first time ever aid decreased by 3 per cent to Sub-Saharan Africa. But aid continues to be a crucial tool for African development particularly in food aid, education and post-conflict areas.”

And here are two nice summary infographics – first the cup half full, then the cup half empty

Why sub-Saharan Africa needs Universal School Meals. Guest post from Swati Narayan

128 million children are enrolled in primary schools across Sub-Saharan Africa. But few of them get anything to eat while they’re in school. Many go to school hungry each morning without any breakfast. 13 year old Sylvester is one of them. He lives in Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, where children are amongst the least healthy in the country.

But Sylvester is one of the lucky few. At 12.40 p.m., his ears prick up at the sound of the school lunch bell. He looks forward to the steaming hot, freshly cooked porridge which could well be his only meal for the day.

As in any urban slum, there is no dearth of food on sale in small shops in Kibera. Though the price of the staple maize is far less than its peaks in 2008 and 2009, many families still do not have the money to buy enough food. Many people suffer from HIV/AIDS and are unable to find work in a country where the unemployment rate is as high as 40 percent.

But, school meals can motivate poor families to enroll and retain their children in school. An analysis of the World Food Programme’s (WFP) interventions across sub-Saharan Africa found that school feeding increased enrolment by 28 percent for girls and 22 percent for boys in the first year of initiation.

This is a double dividend for children. While the first two years of life are the most crucial to address malnutrition, school meals too have proven to enhance children’s diets in their growing years, and with it, their life chances in terms of achievement.

Growing Out of Poverty
But where does the food come from? This week, Sylvester’s school, which receives supplies from the WFP, is serving porridge cooked with fortified oil that has traveled all the way from Japan and bulgur wheat grown on mechanized farms in the United States.

This needs to change. If existing school meals were to purchase maize from smallholders within the country, it is estimated to increase the income of 175,000 Kenyan farmers by $50 each year. This could contribute substantially to invest in and revive agriculture.

Though the WFP makes a genuine effort to support local procurement across developing countries, it continues to receive substantial quantities of ‘in-kind’ food aid from rich countries. Its Purchase for Progress (P4P) and Home Grown School Feeding Initiative (HGSF) too have so far remained limited in scale. The Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture’s Njaa Marufuku (Eradicate Hunger) programme to link smallholder farmers to school meals also has yet to take root nationwide.

British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is also on a similar crusade to ensure that school meals are healthy and locally grown.

Money Matters
But the main challenge for countries in sub-Saharan Africa is to secure predictable, sustainable and inflation-indexed funding to finance local procurement of school meals.

On the other hand, most high and middle income countries have long-standing, politically popular, partially subsidized and near universal availability of school feeding. A comprehensive World Bank study, Rethinking School Feeding, reveals the importance of affordability — since there is a very sharp decrease in the relative costs of school feeding as GDP increases.

And wealthier countries also have the luxury to generate internal sources of revenue. El Salvador uses the interest generated from a trust fund established with the privatization of a national telecommunications company. India has an innovative ‘education cess’ (a 3 per cent addition to existing tax revenues) which finances meals for 130 million school children. But these large pots need to be ring-fenced and protected. Three years ago, for example, the Indian Education Ministry had to stave off severe pressure by private companies eager to replace the $ 1 billion ‘market’ for freshly cooked school meals with packaged biscuits.

Apart from national sources, low-income African countries can also explore bilateral and multi-lateral sources. The Dutch government, for example, supports a substantial portion of Ghana’s national school feeding programme. Existing mechanisms like the Education for All Fast-track Initiative funds school feeding in Madagascar and Guyana. The Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme could also prove to be an alternative.

And in the near future, could the stellar Robin Hood Tax also open up innovative revenue streams to end classroom hunger and enable African farmers to grow themselves out of poverty? 

Swati Narayan is an independent food policy specialist, based in Delhi

The Chinese in Africa – is there a backlash?

The debate in aid circles on China’s expanding role in Africa is often pretty crass – the demonisers v the rose-tinted spectacles. What has always struck me most in the past is how many Africans, both in government and elsewhere, prefer the businesslike approach of China to the finger-wagging of the ex-colonial powers. But China’s African honeymoon may be coming to an end, according to this week’s Economist, which has a thought-provoking 3 page briefing on signs of a backlash against ‘the Chinese in Africa’. Some highlights from the Economist article:

“Once feted as saviours in much of Africa, Chinese have come to be viewed with mixed feelings—especially in smaller countries where China’s weight is felt all the more. To blame, in part, are poor business practices imported alongside goods and services. Chinese construction work can be slapdash and buildings erected by mainland firms have on occasion fallen apart. A hospital in Luanda, the capital of Angola, was opened with great fanfare but cracks appeared in the walls within a few months and it soon closed. [Deborah Brautigam investigated the Luanda hospital story on her excellent China in Africa blog] The Chinese-built road from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, to Chirundu, 130km (81 miles) to the south-east, was quickly swept away by rains.

Chinese expatriates in Africa come from a rough-and-tumble, anything-goes business culture that cares little about rules and regulations. Local sensitivities are routinely ignored at home, and so abroad. Sinopec, an oil firm, has explored in a Gabonese national park. Another state oil company has created lakes of spilled crude in Sudan. Zimbabwe’s environment minister said Chinese multinationals were “operating like makorokoza miners”, a scornful term for illegal gold-panners.

Employees at times fare little better than the environment. At Chinese-run mines in Zambia’s copper belt they must work for two years before they get safety helmets. Ventilation below ground is poor and deadly accidents occur almost daily. To avoid censure, Chinese managers bribe union bosses and take them on “study tours” to massage parlours in China. Obstructionist shop stewards are sacked and workers who assemble in groups are violently dispersed. When cases end up in court, witnesses are intimidated.

Tensions came to a head last year when miners in Sinazongwe, a town in southern Zambia, protested against poor conditions. Two Chinese managers fired shotguns at a crowd, injuring at least a dozen. Some still have pellets under healed skin. Patson Mangunje, a local councillor, says, “People are angry like rabid dogs.”

The backlash is perhaps unsurprising. Africans say they feel under siege. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs from one of the most successful modern economies have fanned out across the continent. Sanou Mbaye, a former senior official at the African Development Bank, says more Chinese have come to Africa in the past ten years than Europeans in the past 400. First came Chinese from state-owned companies, but more and more arrive solo or stay behind after finishing contract work.

Many dream of a new life. Miners and builders see business opportunities in Africa, and greater freedom (to be their own bosses and speak their minds, but also to pollute). A Chinese government survey of 1,600 companies shows the growing use of Africa as an industrial base. Manufacturing’s share of total Chinese investment (22%) is catching up fast with mining (29%).

[on the plus side]
China has boosted employment in Africa and made basic goods like shoes and radios more affordable. Trade surpassed $120 billion last year (see chart 1). In the past two years China has given more loans to poor countries, mainly in Africa, than the World Bank.

Quite a bit of criticism of China is disguised protectionism. Established businesses try to maintain privileged positions—at the expense of consumers.

China’s interest in Africa is not limited to resources. It is building railways and bridges far from mines and oilfields, because it pays. China is not a conventional aid donor, but nor is it a colonialist interested only in looting the land. The government in Beijing is encouraging all sorts of activity in Africa. Construction is a favourite, accounting for three-quarters of recent private Chinese investment in Africa. The commerce ministry says Chinese companies are signing infrastructure deals worth more than $50 billion a year. For investment in African farming, China has earmarked $5 billion [hmmm, some of that definitely comes under ‘land grabs’]. Perhaps the most significant Chinese push has been in finance.

Most loans and payments are “tied”—ie, the recipient must spend the money with Chinese companies. (Japan, Spain and others followed a similar model until fairly recently.) But tied aid leads to shoddy work. With no competition, favoured firms get away with delivering bad roads and overpriced hospitals. Creditors and donors often set the wrong priorities. Worse, the Chinese government is anything but transparent about its money. Aid figures are treated as state secrets [although ].

[and how about the politics?]
For years China has been chummy with African despots who seem to be reliable partners. Publicly, China presents its support for odious incumbents as “non-interference” and tries to make a virtue of it. Africans are less and less convinced. Relations get especially tricky for the Chinese when strongmen fail to maintain stability.”

China is not standing still on this – the State Council has just released its first White Paper on China’s Aid to Foreign Countries, and it is making increasing efforts to rein in bad business practices. What all this seems to point to is that as the relationship between China and Africa (and our understanding of it) matures, we can move from simplistic questions of ‘is it good or bad?’ to trying to understand the detail as well as the overall tenor and impact (for good and ill) of China’s role as a consolidated and important actor in the region and how it is evolving. About time.