How have a series of global shocks changed the way we think about development?

This piece appears in today’s Ottawa Citizen

The past five years has been a period of extraordinary global turbulence.

The turmoil has struck as three “shocks” — the financial crisis, a breakdown in the world food system, and the Arab Spring — combined with a slow motion train wreck in the form of the seemingly inexorable onset of chaotic climate change. Together, these are having a profound impact on our understanding of how the world works.

Just how much has changed was one of the overriding impressions from updating my book From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, first published in 2008.

The global financial crisis was a watershed event. It triggered historic geopolitical change in the rise of the emerging powers such as China and India. It also drew attention to the risks of an excessively “financialized” global economy; but it failed to lead to a reining in of the excessive size and volatility of “hot money,” condemning us to future financial crises, possibly starting with Europe in the coming months.

Simultaneous with the financial crisis, the world witnessed a food price spike. In many countries this traumatized the lives of poor people to a much greater extent than the shenanigans on Wall Street, and reversed decades of low and falling prices, threatening long-term progress on hunger and nutrition. That has led to renewed attention to the basic issues of food and hunger, and some unfortunate side effects such as “land grabs” across the developing world by investors from rich countries.

The Arab Spring confirmed the importance of active citizens in driving social and political change, and made us think much harder about the role of women (who were very active) in majority-Muslim societies.

Taken together, these events have made us much more aware of the impact of volatility, risk and vulnerability on the lives of poor people. That leads both to a focus on trying to prevent shocks from occurring in the first place and to dampen their impacts when they occur. “Shock absorbers,” from social protection to food reserves, to help for poor farmers to adapt to climate change, have become a much more central part of development thinking.

Inequality and redistribution have become mainstream debates, with even the International Monetary Fund weighing in on how high levels of inequality imperil both growth and stability. And the levels are breathtaking. I recently calculated that the amount the world’s richest 100 people added to their wealth in 2012 ($240 billion) would be enough to end extreme poverty for the 1.4 billion people living below the international $1.25 a day poverty line ($66 billion according to the Brookings Institution), four times over! With that focus has come renewed interest in how tax systems and reforms can reduce or exacerbate inequality, both at the national level, and through the international system of tax havens.

Finally, these changes are feeding into a deeper questioning of the nature of poverty itself. As the World Bank’s path-breaking and unsurpassed “Voices of the Poor” study in the 1990s showed, to be poor is as much about anxiety, vulnerability and shame as about income levels. And that anxiety has only been heightened by the turmoil of recent years.

In response, governments around the world increasingly acknowledge the limitations of income or GDP per capita as a measure of well-being, and are developing much more sophisticated metrics — aid agencies are rather lagging behind national governments in this regard.

This more subjective, people-based understanding of well and ill-being may be one explanation for a greatly increased focus on issues of power and agency in development, often linked to issues of the basic rights that are (or are not) enjoyed by poor people. The spread of “rights thinking” on areas such as gender, disability, ethnicity and sexuality appears to be a global phenomenon, bringing significant changes in national legislation and practice in many countries. The challenge for aid agencies is to ensure that their plans and methods, including the pressure to demonstrate “results” and “value for money” reflect this more human understanding of the nature of poverty and power. As the title of my book makes clear, we need to move “from poverty to power” in both our thinking and our practice.

Are we successfully completing an “age of development” or seeing the prize slip from humanity’s hands in an economic and climatic meltdown? It is hard to recall a period when developmental optimism and pessimism co-existed to such a high degree.

The stakes could not be higher. The coming decades will show whether poverty enters the history books, joining slavery and the fight for women’s suffrage, or whether an age of chaos and scarcity starts to reverse the wonderful progress of the last 70 years.

Duncan Green is the author of the book From Poverty to Power and Oxfam GB’s senior strategic adviser. He is launching his book and giving a public lecture at the University of Ottawa on Friday May 10. The event is sold-out, but a recording of the event will be made available soon on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/CCICable.

Robert Chambers – why don’t all development organizations do immersions?

Following on my review of Robert Chambers’ new(ish) book, ‘Provocations for Development’, I’m posting a couple of edited-down excerpts that caught my eye. Today, immersions –  written in 2007 and a nice illustration of how Robert combines both the politics and practicalities of aid work.

Immersions can take many forms, but an almost universal feature is staying in a poor community, as a person, living with a host family, helping with tasks and sharing in their life. The overnight stay is vital for relationships, experience, and relaxed conversations after dark and talking into the night. There may be activities like working with and helping the family, listening and dialogue, learning a life history, keeping a reflective diary or trying to explain your work and its relevance, but the essence is to be open much of the time to the unplanned and unexpected, to live and be and relate as a person. The unplanned incident is so often the most striking, moving and significant. Much is experienced and learnt, but what that will be is hard to predict.
 
Agreement seems universal that immersions give insights and experiences that are not otherwise accessible. Those who participate learn in a personal way about people’s lives, livelihoods and cultures and the conditions they experience. The world can be seen the other way round, from the perspective of people living in poverty.
 
Quite often there are stark and startling insights and impacts. Ravi Kanbur had an immersion with SEWA in India as part of the preparation for the World Development Report 2000/2001 for which he was Task Manager. He spent three days in a remote village, Mohadi. Parents were keen for their children to learn to read and write but the schoolmaster only came once a month. But he turned up on the second day when he had heard there were visitors. He launched into a litany of the difficulties of teaching the village children whom he described as ‘junglee’(from the jungle). This “Master of Mohadi” incident, Kanbur wrote, ‘encapsulated for me the gap between macro-level strategies and ground-level realities’.

All this is enough to justify immersions over and over again. If this were all, the case would already be overwhelming. But people repeatedly say they gained much more than just useful insights and knowledge. They stress, and often give more importance to, the experiential learning, the personal and emotional impact. Fred Nunes writes that [former World Bank President] Jim Wolfensohn “wanted managers who had heart as well as intellect”. The aim was to “rekindle the staff’s passion for poverty reduction”. For Taaka Awori:

“All of me was learning, not just my mind, as is usually the case. The immersion allowed me to stop analysing people living in poverty as objects of development, but rather just to be with them and allow the learning to emerge.”

Why did immersions not take off earlier?

If these experiences mean so much, and can make such a difference, why have they not spread more and been more widely adopted? They cost less than going to a workshop. They take little time – usually not more than a week. It is not as though most organisations lack money: training and capacity-building funds for professional development are frequently underspent.

Three clusters of forces stand out.

The first is personal. It is easy to make excuses, especially being too busy with important work. There is time for a workshop, within our comfort zones, but not for an immersion which is outside, unfamiliar, threatening. For myself, I am reluctant to give up what is known, cosy, and controllable for the unknown, perhaps uncomfortable and uncontrollable. I fear behaving badly and making a fool of myself. And here I and others must thank Ravi Kanbur for his “I don’t think I want to go to that temple any more”: he asked twice to visit an inviting-looking temple before realising that his host family were excluded from the temple because they were lower caste. This makes it easier for me to acknowledge my own shameful mistake, so hurtful to our host lady in Gujarat, of going to bed instead of meeting the people who had come across the desert to meet us. And then there are other arguments that can be mustered: ‘I know all about that. I grew up in a village (or slum). I don’t have anything to learn about that’.

The second cluster of forces is institutional. These are so many: values and incentives that reward writing good memoranda and reports and speaking well in meetings with important people; and the low value given to listening to the unimportant poor. There are senior staff who regard immersions as frivolous, useless or voyeurism, and/or feel personally threatened by them. There are normal pressures of work and other perceived priorities. Bureaucratic culture looks inwards and upwards, not downwards and outwards.

A third force is rhetoric about development relations. For staff of lender and donor agencies, there has been the convenient political correctness of government ownership. For international NGOs there has been increasing reliance on the insights of partners who are supposedly close to poverty. To seek direct personal experience through immersions could then be thought of as untrusting and interfering.

These personal, institutional and rhetorical forces combine. Any organisation or individuals who want excuses for not pressing for immersions have no difficulty finding them. It is not difficult, then, to understand why until recently effective demand for immersions has not been strong.

Why now?

The case is stronger now than ever for three reasons.

First, the conditions, awareness, priorities and aspirations of poor people are changing faster than ever before. There is a continuous and intensifying challenge to policy makers and practitioners to keep in touch and up to date.

More educational than a powerpoint?

Second, a new simplistic certainty has been infiltrating development thinking and practice. The downside of the Millennium Development Goals and of the inspiring movement to Make Poverty History, has been the belief that ‘we know what needs to be done’ (especially on the part of non-Africans about Africa) – and that the solution is more money. The issues are not so simple; nor in most cases are the solutions. Immersions provide one means of checking against the complex and diverse realities of poor people.

Third, the grip of the urban offices, capital traps and elite activities has tightened – for government, aid agency and NGO staff alike: more and more emails, meetings, negotiations, reports, often with fewer staff; participation in the pandemic of incestuous workshops, many of them about poverty; donors’ budget support, sector-wide programmes, and harmonisation on policy issues, all of this in what Koy Thomson calls our “self-referential universe.” Qazi Azmat Isa speaks for other agencies too when he notes that ‘increasingly World Bank staff are confined to government departments in capital and provincial cities, removed from the reality of poverty and from our ultimate clients – the poor of the country’.

Immersions are means to offset these biases and trends: to keep up to date; to be in touch; to escape the self-referential trap. It is fitting and fortunate that they are rising fast on the agenda. They are now better understood, more talked about and easier to arrange. More organisations – EDP, SEWA, ActionAid International, Praxis, Proshika – are providing them for others. More people and more organisations are setting them up for themselves. The increasing numbers of those who have experienced immersions and the conviction, commitment and authority with which they can speak, encourage others. We appear to be approaching a tipping point of a critical mass of stories, buzz, communications and enthusiasm.

What would those living in poverty want us to do? Would they, as Koy Thomson has asked ‘express their amazement that people who are experts in poverty don’t even bother to spend time with them’. As he observes ‘For a development organisation to see four days simply being with people living in poverty as a luxury is a sign of pathology’. The question is not whether the direct experiential learning of immersions and reality checks can be afforded. It is whether anyone in any organisation committed to the MDGs, social justice and reducing poverty, can justify not affording and making space for them.

Well that was written five years ago, and there doesn’t seem to have been an immersion tipping point since then. Any thoughts or personal/organizational experiences from readers?

Provocations for Development: Superb new collection of Robert Chambers’ Greatest Hits

This is not an impartial review – Robert Chambers is a hero of  mine, part development guru, part therapist to the aid community. His ideas and phrases litter the intellectual landscape. Or ought to: if you don’t recognize some of his major contributions to the development lexicon – ‘hand over the stick’, ‘uppers and lowers’, ‘whose reality counts?’, participatory research methods or seasonality, (there are dozens of others) you have seriously missed out, and Provocations for Development, a greatest hits collection of his speeches, writings, reflections and one pagers should definitely be on the top of your reading pile.

Chambers is also playful. ‘Fun is a human right’ he announces in the foreword, and the book duly starts with a beginner’s guide to bullshit bingo, that essential way to survive particularly mind-numbing meetings. He even provides handy photocopiable bingo tables for you.

His more serious intent in this first section is to highlight the power of words in development. Treacherous, slippery jargon that embodies and transmits certain views of the world, power relationships etc, often subliminally (think about the implied power relationships in the phrase ‘capacity building’). He sees words as being used to legitimize actions (‘partnership’), maintain dominance through obscure jargon (‘disintermediation’, ‘conditionalities’), camouflage realities (‘defence spending’; ‘donors’ rather than ‘lenders’) or sanitize, stereotype and stigmatize (‘freedom fighter’ v ‘terrorist’).

The book’s second section covers perhaps his most significant contribution to development thinking – participation. Robert’s work was central to developing methodologies such as Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) and Poverty Assessments (PPAs) and highlights the uncomfortable reality of the disparities in power within the aid industry. ‘Whose reality counts?’ Aid workers are in a position of power, but they can do something about it, starting by ‘handing over the stick’ to poor people (to point out things on a blackboard, not to beat each other). I have consciously had to tell myself to hand over the stick on numerous occasions (and I’m still rubbish at it – handing over the powerpoint is even harder).

One of his major contributions was through his involvement in the ‘Voices of the Poor’ study, a watershed piece of World Bank research in the mid 90s, led by Deepa Narayan, which interviewed thousands of people in dozens of countries to try and grasp the complex multidimensional nature of poverty as experienced by poor people themselves (rather than defined by outside ‘experts’) (see diagram – compare that to the empty precision of $1.25 a day).

Chambers’ work has certain recurring themes, in addition to the power of language. Turning the tables (as in the subtitle of one of his most influential books, ‘Putting the Last First’); a complete absence of cynicism (even his bullshit bingo is somehow turned into a positive learning experience); an unquenchable curiosity about the lives of poor people; the use of visuals, diagrams, do it yourself methods with stones and sticks to reflect those lives; an honest appraisal of the lives, work and career paths of development professionals – he’s one of the few to address how people actually feel when they are ‘doing development’. And he is relentlessly quirky – the one part of his work that I really struggle with is his fondness for dashing off some pretty dire rhymes about the aid business.

Chambers’ abiding interest in excrement, for example (graphic accounts of his first disastrous encounter with a high tech Japanese toilet – he pressed all the buttons) has found its outlet (sorry) in his most recent enthusiasm, the Community-Led Total Sanitation movement. It’s a brilliant participatory, human, low tech response to the all the high tech magic bullets that hog the headlines.

Given all this, Chambers could be forgiven for being a bit pompous, but he isn’t. Not even slightly. He’s great company, a mischievous zen master to the aid community. I could go on. And I will – I’ll post on a couple of particularly resonant chapters in the next few days.

August wonkwar 3: Martin Ravallion v Ricardo Fuentes on inequality

August was wonkwar month here on the blog, with an epic exchange on private v public provision of education, featuring Kevin Watkins v Justin Sandefur. Then I got all cranky about a new paper on NGOs and development. And now a third, and final, exchange (much the most polite) as World Bank poverty guru Martin Ravallion (right) responds to Ricardo Fuentes’ recent post on inequality (and Ricardo responds to his response). First, Martin’s piece:

Equity and development: Oxfam versus the World Bank? Maybe not
I was pleased to read that Ricardo Fuentes, the new head of research at Oxfam, views equity as important for better development outcomes. Ricardo contrasts his views with those of the World Bank, and singles me out as a key protagonist. But Ricardo over-simplifies and even misrepresents my views, and the debate more broadly.

Ricardo characterizes what he sees as the old view that inequality is unimportant. He rejects the view that “income inequality is not relevant as long as the poor benefit.” My own work on pro-poor growth is cited as an example of this view.

It is true that I think that concerns about poverty–broadly defined–trump inequality as a characterization of overall development goals. But that does not mean that inequality is unimportant. As I have said often, along with other researchers, how much growth reduces poverty–how pro-poor it is–depends crucially on the initial inequality and what happens to inequality during the growth process. See, for example, this paper of mine from 12 years ago. As I wrote in the title of one paper, “Inequality is Bad for the Poor” (paraphrasing the title of a paper that Ricardo refers to, “Growth is Good for the Poor,” by colleagues in the Bank’s research department; believe it or not, debate is commonplace within the World Bank). In fact this idea goes back to my research in the 1990s.

To say, as Ricardo does, that “one of the major drawbacks of the early-2000s pro-poor growth approach of the World Bank was that they completely neglected the issue of fairness” is simply ludicrous. Since the 1990s it has been recognized that inequality– “fairness” if you wish–is highly relevant to progress against poverty.

Ricardo sees a change in attitudes to equity since 2000 or so, toward an emphasis on equity. According to him, “Even the World Bank, with its World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, dramatically changed its position.” This is begrudging praise of sorts. But wait: the WDR was also making an instrumental case for equity, as a means of promoting better development outcomes, including more inclusive growth and (hence) poverty reduction. So the WDR might equally well be represented as saying that inequality is only relevant if it is good for development. Maybe Ricardo’s praise is unwarranted.

I readily grant that, prior to the 2006 WDR, the Bank (along with virtually the entire community of development economists) had not given nearly enough emphasis to the costs of inequality. Actually, that is still true. The 2006 WDR marked an important change, based on prior research, though there is more work to do. But it remains true that the WDR was also about the instrumental value of equity.

More recent evidence has re-affirmed that certain kinds of inequality are particularly harmful to pro-poor growth–both in generating less growth and in making that growth less poverty-reducing. My paper “Why Don’t we See Poverty Convergence?” argues that poverty itself may well be the key aspect of initial inequality that impedes poverty reduction. Thus we are now starting to understand how poverty can self-perpetuate, even with seemingly sound economic policies. 

In the end, I really don’t think there is that much disagreement. Maybe we should move the discussion toward how we can actually attain our shared goals of a world free of poverty. Sustainably promoting relevant dimensions of equity will be crucial, as will efficiency-enhancing reforms. More on both please from Oxfam’s well-intentioned new head of research.

Response from Ricardo Fuentes (left)
I am very pleased to read Martin Ravallion’s response to my blog post on inequality. Martin has of course been a key player in many intellectual debates on poverty, growth inequality and numerous other issues.

But his work, important as it is, is not the focus of my post. True, I cited his (and S Chen’s) definition of pro-poor growth [“By definition, “pro-poor growth” is growth that reduces poverty (Ravallion and Chen, 2003)”], because it has been very influential within and outside the World Bank. But the point I was making in citing their definition is the following: between 2009 and 2010 the richest 1 % in the US captured 93% of additional income. Let’s assume that the other 7 % was evenly distributed among the rest of the population (so that the poor also experienced a small increase in incomes and income poverty falls). This situation would be considered pro-poor under the above definition – but it also seems clearly unfair. This is where the definition is lacking. This dynamic is becoming unacceptable – as we can see from the Occupy movement and other public demonstrations as well as from higher echelons of power (for instance, in some of President Obama’s speeches.)

I agree that our disagreement is not major. If I should point to one difference, it is that I think that issues related to inequality are important in themselves, not only for their impact on poverty reduction. That’s where fairness comes in – we need more research on the direct effects of inequality on well being. Moreover, contrary to what Martin implies, I think that the WDR 2006 and the recent work of the World Bank on inequality of opportunity indeed deserve unqualified praise. It is true that the WDR 2006 didn’t develop the arguments about the intrinsic value of equity but they clearly raised them in page 7 of the Overview.

The World Bank will be an important voice when we try to answer the question “inequality of what?” It is great to see the World Bank working more on these topics. We shall doubtless engage in more discussions about this in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more than just a number

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

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

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

How is poverty research changing? Reflections from some clever people

Last year DFID convened some leading UK-based researchers to brainstorm on the lessons, challenges and frontiers for poverty research. The resulting is an interesting blogpost from the ODI’s Andrew Norton (right) and a paper, ‘Understanding Poverty and Wellbeing’.

In his post, Andy explains that ‘the key problem the paper addresses is the mismatch between the complex nature of poverty and the reductionist nature of measures used to track it’. He devotes his post to exploring ‘the significance of [three] big changes in the global context, and what they mean for poverty analysis and research.’

First ‘the shifting geographies of both growth and poverty.  An increasing number of developing countries are comfortably outstripping the growth rates of the developed countries – and sustaining that performance over a substantial period of time. It’s no longer just about the dynamism of ‘BRICs’, ‘CIVETs’, Asian tigers or African ‘cheetahs’– there is a clear economic convergence happening on a global scale.  If you take out countries with significant systemic problems, poor countries are growing faster than rich ones, and inter-country inequality is therefore declining. As a result of these changes, the bulk of the world’s poor are now in middle-income, rather than low-income countries. This means that poverty reduction increasingly requires progress on policies which reduce inequality within countries, and which turn growth into jobs. 

Is urban poverty different?

Second, the impact of increasing levels of urbanisation on a global scale.  Simple ‘money-metric’ measures of poverty struggle to cope with the difference between urban and rural contexts. Does water have to be paid for?  Can rural families gather fuel? Do household members have to pay for transport?  How does the differing environment affect health and the quality of life? Does living in a deprived community right next to a wealthy suburb bring stigma and discrimination? 

A final shift in optics in the past decade concerns our increasing consciousness of risk, shocks and uncertainty and the importance of understanding the factors which give poor people and communities resilience in the face of growing risks from an increasingly volatile climate, from rapid changes in the prices of key commodities (particularly food), and from socio-political change.”

The paper, published by the group as a whole, concludes by proposing areas of focus for poverty research and analysis, namely thinking differently about the ‘what’ of poverty research and about the ‘how’.

First the what:

“Politics, including that of rising middle classes and their preferences for redistribution; the politics of high levels of inequality & related pathologies e.g. conflict; the consequences of elites detached from context for local, national or global social contracts. The securitisation or retreat of the State in many parts of the world and the power of private sector interests in preventing equalising policies. And the contrast with the politics of successful poverty reduction, including the role of democracy, social movements, new communication and information-sharing modalities, and threats to instability.

Poverty measurement, focusing on how the current interest in, and new methodologies for, measuring multidimensional poverty can be honed; how participatory processes can influence poverty measures; how to identify the multidimensional poverty traps that keep people in chronic poverty, and the sequences by which people move out of multidimensional poverty; the relationship between income and other dimensions of poverty; how multidimensional measures can assess the impact of growth on poor people.”

Then the How:

“Longitudinal quantitative and qualitative research is an important new basis for improved poverty diagnostics. This implies improved and extended availability of panel data sets to enable the quantitative tracking of households over time – which has proved invaluable for policy analysis. In combination with this – or separately – longitudinal ethnographic studies provide a rich source of understanding of the factors which reduce or exacerbate poverty over time. Longitudinal studies enable ‘natural experiments’ to emerge from data – where comparisons can be made both between groups and over time which indicate the importance of particular poverty reduction interventions. Much of the early work which indicated the poverty-reducing significance of social protection interventions was of this kind.

In-country capacity building: stronger in-country networks including not only research institutes but research users, research analysts, statistical offices and citizens are needed.”

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

We measure relative poverty in rich countries; absolute poverty in poor ones – what if we combine them?

Martin Ravallion, the World Bank’s head of research, has been doing some interesting thinking on poverty lines. We currently have an odd divide between poor countries, where absolute measures are more often used (eg $1.25 a day, the current international poverty line) and rich countries, which tend to use measures of relative poverty. For example, in Western Europe (including the UK) the poverty line is set at a constant proportion (typically 60%) of median income. Ravallion calls this a “strongly relative line”.

Ravallion argues that both approaches make sense – an absolute line in establishing who is able to feed and clothe themselves, a relative line in determining whether people feel socially excluded or not. In very poor countries, absolute survival plays a bigger role, but as countries’ average wealth rises, so social inclusion, and thus relative poverty, becomes more salient.

However, Ravallion argues that social exclusion matters even in the poorest imaginable country. So a sensible poverty line cannot simply rise and fall proportionately to average income, as in the strongly relative poverty lines used in Europe. Look at Ravallion’s graph. The strongly relative line keeps falling toward zero. The strongly relative lines will be too low (below survival levels) in poor countries. Ravallion says we need “weakly relative lines” which incorporate an absolute minimum, as in the bold line in his graph.

In a paper with Shaohua Chen published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, he puts some numbers on this (and lots of equation which were way above my head, so thanks to Martin for helping me make sense of it to write this post……). Up to an average national consumption of $2 per day, he sticks with absolute measures – anyone under $1.25 is poor. But then he switches to a relative measure – above $2 a day, the poverty line slopes upwards, reflecting the importance of social inclusion (see graph). The graph slopes up with a gradient of a third – less than the 60% of the UK strongly relative poverty line. Chen and Ravallion use data on national poverty lines across countries to set this schedule—the same data they had used to select the $1.25 a day line.

What do they find?

‘The trend decline in the incidence of relative poverty has not been sufficient to reduce the number of poor by this measure, which rose from 2.3 billion to 2.6 billion over 1981 to 2005 (see table 1). The turning point is around 1987.’

This contrasts with the more standard measures of absolute poverty, which have the numbers of poor people falling both as a % and in absolute numbers to 1.4bn people by 2005.

Why the disparity between the two (a rising absolute number of relatively poor, and a falling number of absolute poor)? As the global economy grows, poverty lines start to rise to reflect the higher costs of social inclusion, which puts a brake on the pace of relative poverty reduction, despite falling absolute poverty.

More background in Martin’s World Bank blogpost.

Africans and food security: what do opinion polls tells us?

I don’t normally associate opinion polls with development (apart from the exhaustive UK and other market research conducted by our campaigners) but in recent weeks a couple of powerpoints have swum in front of my glazed eyes showing some interesting results from opinion polls in large numbers of poor countries, conducted by Gallup and Globescan, two polling companies.

Gallup does an annual ‘world poll’ in 100 countries and this year focussed on food security, especially in Sub Saharan Africa. Findings?

Sub-Saharan Africans perceive agriculture (20%) and jobs (19%) as the most important issues for their governments to address

–Two-thirds (66%) of sub-Saharan Africans say their government is not doing enough to help people get food

–Nearly 6 in 10 (59%) say there have been times in the last 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy the food that they or their family needed

–Over a third of sub-Saharan Africans say they or their families have gone without food in the last 12 months several times, many times or always

–Sub-Saharan Africans across 26 countries rank reducing poverty and reducing hunger as the top two most important goals

The full powerpoint is here. More from Gallup on how Africans rank the MDGs here

Meanwhile Globescan annually surveys 26,000 adults in 26 countries, and their latest round up finds the following:

A significant decline in enthusiasm for free market capitalism

NGOs remain the most trusted institutions – must be all that high quality research…. – followed by (in descending order), ‘people in general in this country’, the UN, large national companies, religious groups, global companies, the press/media and bottom of the heap, national governments.

The most serious global problem in the eyes of the public is extreme poverty, followed by corruption. Least important of those suggested are religious fundamentalism and international migration (so either the populist politicians, or the pollsters have got something seriously wrong….)

Concern has ebbed on many environmental issues, particularly climate change, but interestingly, has fallen quickest in the rich countries, so public concern over what’s happening to the planet is now greater outside the OECD than in the traditional home territory of the environmental movement.

I don’t set huge store by these attempts to take the global pulse, but they are thought-provoking if nothing else. They also offer a potential solution to INGOs’ poor track record in doing longitudinal surveys to track how poor people’s lives change over the long term – why don’t we sit the pollsters down in a room with some of the participatory research gurus and come up with a stripped down, periodic version of the World Bank’s epic, but very complex and expensive ‘Voices of the Poor’ exercise – any takers? [h/t Andrew Rzepa, Gallup and Doug Miller, Globescan]

What can poverty researchers in the UK learn from the South and vice versa?

[Sorry the comments button was switched off on Tuesday's post on the Economist food report. That's now been sorted so if you were a frustrated commenter, feel free to unburden yourself......]

The best ideas often come from bringing groups of thinkers together from disciplines that normally have nothing to do with each other. The Santa Fe Institute is perhaps the best-known example of this. Sadly, disciplinary siloes are alive and well in much of academia, with some notable exceptions such as the Oxford Martin School. IDS and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are trying to run an exercise along these lines, cross fertilizing between work on poverty and exclusion in the UK and in developing countries. Oxfam set up its UK Poverty Programme in 1996 precisely to explore these kinds of synergies.

A seminar in November (report here) discussed the degrees of overlap between poverty-related thinking in ‘North’ and ‘South’, and found it to be expanding rapidly (migration, food prices, financial crashes, climate change, gender justice etc etc), yet another demonstration that the distinction between North and South is becoming increasingly artificial, and a block to creative thinking. It produced this useful table on what areas of cross-learning look most promising (sorry some of the borders of the table have gone missing – no idea why). [h/t Kate Wareing]

any additions?