Links to make you Think

1. Is Nobody Safe? Foreign Policy article questions sainthood for Mohammed Yunus and Hernando de Soto. 2. Nobody is trying too hard to promote circumcision for heterosexual AIDS prevention in Africa, but we'll do universal circumcision in the US, which doesn't have much heterosexual AIDS

3. Right-wingers for foreign aid

4. Radical priest harshly criticizes patronizing American volunteers in Mexico -- in 1969.

5. Trying to find Chris Blattman a mattress in New York as good as the $10 foam model he bought in Uganda

6. Lord Skidelsky says nasty things about Transdniestria (via Mark Thoma at Economist's View).

I am much more sympathetic to it after the national newspaper headlined my co-authored path-breaking research on "squiggliness" as the basis for Transdniestrian independence.

1,3, and 4 suggested by Adam Graham-Silverman.

Institutions are the secret to development, if only we knew what they were

Here’s an example of a simple rule. But is it as simple as it seems? A literal reading of the rule would ban a woman wearing a dress and sandals from entering the store, while it would allow either gender to wear a shirt, shoes, and nothing else. In a Northern beach town in the winter, this rule would be irrelevant. In the same beach town during the summer, if it were particularly carefree, the rule might be ignored.

This example gives a private rule, but it’s a good metaphor for official legal rules. All rules (such as those that make up a legal system) interact with non-rule factors, in this case the population’s clothing habits, the climate, an understanding of the intent of the rule-makers, and the degree of compliance by the population. So when we measure an “institutional” variable such as “rule of law,” we are really measuring some complicated mix of the legal and non-legal. An econometric finding that “rule of law” causes higher per capita income (a) gives little confidence that we have identified a clear relationship between the legal system and development, and (b) gives no guidance on how to modify the legal system to make development more likely.

If I want to understand law and development, maybe I should get a good lawyer. Fortunately, I have one at NYU’s law school, Kevin Davis. He inspired all the thoughts above in a paper that mocks the “rule of law” concept used by economists (available in a preliminary ungated version here). You can also hear Kevin give a fantastic lecture on law and development on the occasion of his getting the high honor of being named the Beller Family Professor of Business Law.

Kevin points out that two current measures of “rule of law” used by economists in “institutions cause development” econometric research are by their own description a mixture of some characteristics of the legal system with a long list of non-legalistic factors such as “popular observance of the law,” “a very high crime rate or if the law is routinely ignored without effective sanction (for example, widespread illegal strikes),” “losses and costs of crime,” “corruption in banking,” “crime,” “theft and crime,” “crime and theft as obstacles to business,” “extent of tax evasion,” “costs of organized crime for business” and “kidnapping of foreigners.” Showing that this mishmash is correlated with achieving development tells you what exactly? Hire bodyguards for foreigners?

What if “institutions” are yet another item in the long list of panaceas offered by development economists that don’t actually help anyone develop?

Back to constructive thoughts on the next blog post!

How to Make an Advocacy Video about Africa, Take II

Dear Readers, Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Reasonable people may argue that if Emmanuelle Chriqui sucking on a Popsicle is what it takes to make some people care that there is a country called the Democratic Republic of Congo, then, well, that’s a good thing. And if Nicole Ritchie babbling nonsense about mothers eating their babies increases attention to Darfur, that’s a good thing too. I’m not so sure.

When these videos “educate” Americans that Africa is a boiling mess of rape, starvation, and war, we get people who believe that Africans are only able to survive thanks to OUR aid, so we must “save” them. As we’ve debated on this blog before, this can lead to the support of wrong-headed policies that could have a real impact (a bad one) on real people’s lives.

And when we reassure people that they are “making a difference” by performing the most mundane, irrelevant of tasks (like buying a coffee, clicking a link, or sending a text) we squander the finite time people have for learning about people they will never meet in places they will never visit. We absolve them of the responsibility and hard work it takes to educate themselves about the world around them and do something constructive (like be an Aid Watcher!).

As for real suggestions: Don’t let my inability to come up with the miraculous recipe for the perfect advocacy video serve as an excuse to stop criticizing what is blatantly bad right now. As we keep saying on this blog, stopping something that is harmful is still positive change. Figuring out how to educate disaffected or uninformed people and get them to act is a difficult problem, and it needs a lot more than a blog post’s worth of time to solve.

So while I don’t claim to have the definitive list, I will venture a few preliminary suggestions. Honestly, these strike me as a little thin and in some cases fairly obvious, but again the examples of bad practices I cited in the original post would suggest otherwise. Please do draw on your expertise to add thoughts and other suggestions in the comments (as well as any examples you think are praiseworthy) and maybe we can come up with some workable principles.

1. It’s okay to assume that people know nothing about your cause. But it’s not okay to use this as an excuse to pander to the lowest common denominator, like sex or celebrity worship.

2. Don’t exaggerate numbers to attract more attention. This throws any claim of credibility and objectivity you might have into question. Do use accurate numbers to convey the scale and importance of your cause. Be as specific as possible in the limited time about exactly where, why, and when the crisis is occurring. Simplistic and extreme portrayals generate simplistic and extreme policies.

3. If you are using celebrity spokespeople, make sure they are well-informed about your cause and respectful of the people in the video. Though not the perfect example, I think the videos and slideshows here (see the second video from the bottom, for example) avoid sensationalism, do a good job of being specific about what is going on, and make good use of an informed celebrity spokesperson.

4. If you are going to use images of Africans, don’t engage in blatant stereotyping, and be respectful of your subjects. The Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog has some good posts on the use of photography in aid marketing; similar principles could apply to videos.

5. Be transparent about what you will do with donations and proceeds from merchandise sales.

6. Be honest about the impact that the action you are requesting will have on the cause you are supporting.

How to Make an Advocacy Video about Africa

Photo credit

1. Assume that the people watching your video know nothing about your cause.* In fact, as far as you are concerned, their brains are completely devoid of content and unable to grasp any complexity.

2. When it comes to death, violence, and sickness, use the biggest, most impressive figures you can find, whether or not they are true. As long as the figure was once cited by someone, somewhere, you’re in the clear.

3. If possible, make a T-shirt (or baseball cap, or we just can't quite get over this one, a thong) and plug it in your video.

4. Do include celebrities. There are a few eloquent and well-informed celebrity spokespeople who conscientiously educate people about important causes. But that’s boring, so get the ones who spout incoherent nonsense,** and/or use really inappropriate props.

5. Most of these go without saying: include: yourself, as a savior/hero; poker** ; and Africans who are simultaneously needy and threatening (undernourished, emaciated, toting AK-47s).

6. Emotion: good. Loud music: Good. MTV-style editing: good. Good vs. evil: good. Nuance: bad. Eschew nuance.

7. Don’t waste any scarce video-seconds on how the actions you are inspiring will have an impact on the people for whom you are raising consciousness. Just go ahead and leave it out. Too complicated. Or, maybe there is no impact. There’s no time to figure it out.

*Actually, this is a real suggestion I found on an online guide to making advocacy videos.

**Favorite vacuous celebrity quote from this video, courtesy of Save Darfur Accountability Project: “We are not as ignorant as people think we are, we simply don’t know, and it’s not our fault!”

***Thanks to astute reader Andy Hall for sending us this one.

Click here for the follow-up post, How to Make an Advocacy Video about Africa, Take II.

Five simple principles for scaling up in aid

There is a lot of discussion in aid on scaling up small-scale successes in aid to reach many more potential beneficiaries. But what things can be scaled up? Here are some principles so simple that they would be embarrassing except that they are routinely violated in aid. (1) Scale up success not failure

The only reason for mentioning this is that the aid business has a strange habit of trying to scale up again things that have already failed. PROGRESA is the great success story of scaling up something after you had determined it was successful.

(2) Don’t scale up what you think is most important, scale up what you do best

There are lots of important issues, so why not choose the one that you do best? And let the people who are good at the other issues work on the other issues? Yet both official agencies and NGOs are often pulled away from what they do best by well-meaning politicians and funders who are focused only on final goals.

(3) You can scale up only what requires cheap, abundant inputs; you cannot scale up something that depends on expensive, scarce inputs

This is one of my problems with the Millennium Villages – they at least partly depend on world-class experts flying in to solve idiosyncratic problems of each village. World-class experts are a scarce resource that you can’t scale up.

(4) Things that you make routine are among the easiest to scale up

It worked for Henry Ford, McDonald’s, and WalMart, why not in aid? One of the secrets to success of the large vaccination campaigns that reduced child mortality was that relatively unskilled medical workers (in abundant supply) could give vaccinations as a routine activity. Of course, not everything can be made routine. For a more complex discussion about social service delivery in general, see the great paper by Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock.

(5) Evaluate whether you are still successful after scaling up

Scaling up often changes the nature of what you are doing, so evaluate whether the scaled-up version works as well as the original version.

I'm sure readers have other principles to suggest -- please do so!

Better life, liberty, and lager

Global infant mortality has halved since 1960. The poorest countries are steadily catching up to the richest on other critical measures of the quality of life: life expectancy, literacy, political and civil rights – not to mention beer production per capita. This blog tries to remind us all periodically that there ARE successes in development. Charles Kenny has a great book in the works that will shoulder THAT load from now on. Kenny is a clear-eyed and honest observer of development that I have admired for a long time. He summarizes his forthcoming book on his website, from which I got the statements in the first paragraph.

(He also points out that per capita income growth in poor countries has not lived up to expectations and we don’t have a clue why – another theme of this blog also – but I think he is too negative about this growth, which is respectable even if not matching development economists’ expectations. Anyway, he argues that other quality of life indicators are disconnected from GDP growth.)

Kenny argues that the rapid spread of technology and ideas have led to the happy trends he identifies. Technology and ideas have made, for example, good health, cheaper and easier. (Cheap technology: soap. Spreading idea: wash your hands.) I have previously noted that aid should get part of the credit for improving health, and aid could do even better on these improving things in the future as Kenny argues. Kenny summarizes his work:

Realistic optimism is the right attitude with which to face the issue of development… a recognition of the challenges still facing the world – significant progress to be made, limits to the likely speed of that progress…. But we should also acknowledge that the rapid and unprecedented improvement in global quality of life over the past fifty years provides some significant grounds for hope about the future.

Hillary illustrates perils of fuzzy human rights concepts

There is an interview with Hillary Clinton in today’s Wall Street Journal. Matthew Kaminski of the Journal asked her:

Why push human rights and democracy so hard in Africa, and not in Russia or China? Some see a double standard.

Excellent question! Hillary answers:

First I think it is important to stress that human rights remain a central driving force of our foreign policy. But I also think that it's important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It's a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.

Uh oh. Is Hillary saying:

Don’t emphasize so much the traditional human rights where you can actually hold someone like Chinese and Russian rulers accountable – like the right for dissidents not to be tortured, jailed, and killed –

Because we are going to add fuzzy human rights where you can’t hold anyone accountable—rights to jobs, shelter, education, health?

Rights to basic needs have enormous moral appeal, but do they work? Progress on the first kind of human rights has happened because you could hold somebody accountable, while there is little evidence that second kind of human rights has pragmatically contributed anything to better employment, shelter, education and health (as this blog previously argued). So shifting emphasis from the first to the second slows down progress on the first, while doing little on the second.

And if the second acts as an excuse to not speak out on the first kind of traditional human rights,as Hillary seems to say...NOT good.

How it helps NGOs to treat them as selfish

Let me respond to one major strand of comments on my recent post, Are we allowed to talk about the self-interest of NGO officials? Is it just too cynical to talk about NGO self-interest? Among the kinder comments received were that I don’t “trust anything or anyone not explicitly out to make as much money as possible.” Or that yours truly “says that no one is straightforward about their motives, so I wonder what his truly are.”

Well, political economy analysis actually leads to a MORE sympathetic view of an organization leader – like an NGO official – than a Sunday School world where he/she is personally either altruistic or selfish. Political economy recognizes organizational and political constraints that could leave an official almost no choice on how to behave. For example, NGOs can’t do their work without funds. And fund-raising may require that you (as NGO-leader) take an over-simplistic approach to the problem, over-promise, or (as in the example of my original post) overstate the importance of YOUR issue relative to all other issues. All of these practices may undermine your effectiveness, or hurt the effectiveness of other NGOs. But the alternative could be that your NGO disappears altogether, which could be even worse for the poor, and which few people would accept easily.

Political economy analysis identifies the crucial incentives and constraints, and looks for ways to modify them and improve the outcome. For example, an individual NGO would have a hard time subjecting themselves to independent evaluation if no other NGOs did so. They might get a critical review that wrecks their funding while the other NGOs keep spreading puff pieces about themselves. We can beat up an NGO for not wanting to know if their aid works, (and we do, because it’s still bad!) but it is also important to advocate a “Code of Good NGO Practice” for ALL NGOs, which would include independent evaluation.

Sex, Aid, and Rock & Roll: An August Lite Post

We’ve complained a lot about celebrity aid campaigns here on Aid Watch, but somebody must like them since they keep happening over and over. Who is the target audience?

The celebrity aid campaign of the past few years has exactly three components:

1. Angelina Jolie

2. Music by U2

3. Picture of African mother and baby

So who is the audience that likes to gaze upon Angelina, enjoys 1980s Rock, and wants to save helpless African women and children? The answer is now obvious: chauvinistic middle-aged white males! (Speaking as an expert middle-aged white male)

A more serious analysis might note the irony of using Hollywood women as sex objects and seeing African women as the passive recipients of aid chivalry, when one of the objectives of aid is gender equality…but let’s not go there.

And it’s easy to understand why the campaigns target chauvinistic middle-aged white males, since they have the deepest pockets.

Political economy is a lot more fun than you thought...

CHINDIAFRICA

Chris Blattman asked me to respond to his big picture piece on China, India, and Africa, which draws on TN Srinivasan’s lecture on China and India at a China development conference. I agree with all the explanations of the China, India, and Africa growth rates – except for the part about explaining growth rates. As I’ve previously argued on this blog, economists have no scientific evidence base for explaining or predicting year to year or even decade to decade variations in growth rates. Probably the best we can do is expect regression to the mean – the fastest growers will slow down, and the slowest growers will speed up.

Despite that obnoxious bit of scientific honesty, I still liked TN’s story of China and India, and Chris’ story of Africa. Maybe storytelling could be useful even without a firm evidence base. The success story of my steak fajitas with sweet corn salsa, despite my inability to follow a recipe or any other reproducible culinary procedure, might contain some useful inspirational lessons for you, even if not ones you could verify with a Randomized Trial.

TN’s story is plausible that China and India had a large CHANGE in per capita income in response to a large CHANGE towards better economic policies. This is also how I usually answer the ubiquitous China Question after every public talk (while still confessing that economists can’t rigorously explain or predict short-to-medium run growth rates).

Chris’ point is also plausible, that Africa’s long-term lag in state formation and technology (exacerbated by the slave trade and colonialism) played a role in its difficult development path. There are enough academic papers on this that I now have a whole section on it in my African Development class. The evidence on the long run is actually better than on short-run growth variations, because the Law of Large Numbers makes it easier to explain the very long run rather than the short run.

And then we can tell another CHANGE on CHANGE story (not rigorous), that Africa’s movement towards better macro and micro policy may be paying off with better growth in the new millennium. Along with tolerating a few inspirational stories, this also jibes with the longer run evidence in LEVELS that respectable economics goes with respectable development.

So perhaps the main takeaway, at a time of general gloom, and after the readers of this blog demanded more positive takeaways, is just that China, India, and (more modestly, new millennium, pre-crisis) Africa have been growth success stories. China and India have achieved an unprecedented mass escape from poverty. Africa has grown faster than ever before in its history. Even though Africa's growth is not as high as China and India, it may be even more impressive since Africa may finally be overcoming the long odds of a technological and state-buiding lag measured in centuries.

And storytelling (even though hard evidence may never be available) seems to confirm that these three successes had something to do with a movement towards good economics.

Are we allowed to talk about the self-interest of NGO officials?

Public officials might occasionally have other motives besides the altruistic pursuit of the public interest. In recent years, one of the boom fields in economics has been political economy (building upon a prior and related field called public choice). Both fields suggest that if we have a fuller picture of what drives public officials, which might include the desire to stay in power or personal gain, we would have a more realistic view of political outcomes. Of course, public officials also care about the public interest, and may be self-selected to be more altruistic than most. It’s too cynical to say they ONLY care about personal gain and power, and it’s too naïve to say they ONLY care about the public welfare. And, in recent years, we have started to view managers of official aid agencies with the same realism.

So why are we so reluctant to have the same realism about NGO officials? Many condemn any discussion of their motives being anything besides selfless devotion to the poor as hopeless cynicism. But why can’t we do political economy on NGOs?

One example is the way that aid has been increasingly fragmented into tiny pieces in recent years because there are increasingly many NGOs advocating different causes. Most of these causes are good ones, but the NGOs don’t take into account the negative effect of promoting THEIR cause on the OTHER causes. The political economy result is that, after feeling all the pressure, many aid agencies are trying to do many things at once to be effective.

I saw one recent example of shameless lobbying for one cause. A group known as Children’s Rights Information Network (CRIN) has a mission to put “children’s rights at the top of the global agenda.” CRIN began a campaign recently to lobby for appointments over 2010-2012 to more than 11 positions in international organizations (including the UN Secretary General) to be limited to those who have “the appropriate commitment, skills and experience to work effectively for children’s rights.”

Well, the World Bank lists “children and youth” as just one of 34 “major topic areas.” Moreover, the interpretation and practical value of “Children’s Rights” is still controversial – the World Bank did not even mention the concept in its exhaustive 2007 World Development Report on “Development and the Next Generation.”

Who is CRIN? It started as an alliance between Save the Children (particularly UK and Sweden branches) and UNICEF in 1991, and that’s pretty much what it remains today. Were the leaders of Save the Children completely indifferent to the large expansion that Save the Children would enjoy if Children’s Rights moved to the “top of the global agenda,” thanks to choosing the right people for 11 major positions? I think Save the Children really does care about poor children, but they could conceivably have less pristine motives. That’s not cynicism, that’s political economy.

The Idiot’s Guide to Answering Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth famously asked why economists did not predict the crisis. I wanted to add to the large chorus of responses, partly to save the reputation of mainstream economics as something still very useful to development, and partly to have a chance to reproduce this photo from my favorite Hollywood comedy The Naked Gun.

I can offer an Idiot’s Guide to answering the Queen because the subject is so far outside my area of specialization within economics, yet even an ignorant outsider like me knows the answer.

First, Your Majesty, economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it. The most important part of the much-maligned Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) is that nobody can systematically beat the stock market. Which implies nobody can predict a market crash, because if you could, then you would obviously beat the market. This applies also to other asset markets like housing prices. If you think it is useless to be told you cannot predict the market, then you should change your Palace investment advisor. This knowledge will protect you from a lot of investment scams like Mr. Madoff’s and will also provoke a serious discussion of how to protect your Royal Wealth against risk in an uncertain world.

Second, economists did just fine pointing to fundamentals that were creating large risks of a financial crisis. Even an outsider like me heard long before the crisis hit about the dangers of opaque instruments like derivatives, excessive mortgage lending and leverage, and the bubble in housing prices. Economists have contributed a lot to understanding bubbles, but we can’t time exactly when they will burst (see EMH above).

So unlike some of my more venerable economist colleagues who are falling all over themselves apologizing to Your Majesty for OTHER economists (see for example your knighted subject Robert Skidelsky yesterday in the FT), I see nothing for which to apologize.

So please tell your subjects in poor countries to keep studying basic mainstream economics. This economics not only survived the crisis, it also is the proven set of ideas that get countries out of poverty.

Hillary offers trade opportunities to Africa – unless we don’t feel like it

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had good news for Africa in the Nairobi forum yesterday on the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). AGOA offers breaks from quotas and duties on African exports to the US. First enacted under Bush, AGOA is at least a partial success story, with exemplars like textile exports in Lesotho and Madagascar. Secretary Clinton yesterday endorsed new efforts to “maximize the promise of AGOA.” She declared “we are committed to trade policies that support prosperity and stability.” Except when we aren’t. AGOA privileges can be revoked for political reasons, like if the President and the US Trade Representative (USTR) decide a country does not have sufficient “rule of law.”

Which is exactly what is threatened now with that success story of textiles in Madagascar. Ever since a political crisis and change in government in Madagascar last spring, the USTR has been threatening to revoke Malagasy eligibility for AGOA, which would effectively destroy the Malagasy textile industry (worth between 6.5 and 8 percent of GDP and accounting for 50,000 jobs).

We had a previous blog post on this, which had a dramatically nonexistent effect on USTR actions.

Of course, the USTR implementing AGOA has good intentions – to promote good governance. There are two problems with this: (1) we don’t have a clue how to do this in Madagascar, and (2) why try to do it by punishing private individuals instead of the government?

On (1), Malagasy politics are not really that hard to understand, as long as you have a Ph.D. in Malagasy history, political science, sociology, economics, and familiarity with the byzantine maneuvers of the FOUR way-far-from-perfect quarreling rivals for power. All the US government asks in exchange for continuing AGOA is that these four guys who hate each other come to an instantaneous consensus on early, free, and fair elections. USTR officials confirmed to us on background yesterday that these efforts continue.

It’s not totally clear why USTR is being so insistent, when “rule of law” is so vague as to allow the eligibility of DRC, Guinea, and Guinea Bissau (as we ineffectively pointed out last time). (This arbitrariness is what justifies the snarky title of this post.)

On (2), all I have to say to elaborate on “why punish private individuals”, is – why punish private individuals?

Time is running out for Madagascar, as incentives to invest and produce for advance US orders are disappearing further the longer the USTR dithers. Political risk comes not from the Malagasy or other African governments, but from the US government’s failure to follow any consistent rule of law on how to apply the AGOA rule of law provision. This arbitrariness weakens the AGOA incentives for ALL African countries.

Please USTR, try to make Secretary of State Clinton’s promising words come true, don’t throw away one of our all-too-scarce development policy successes.

Survey Results Are In: A Dialogue with Our Supporters and Critics

Our Sally Field moment: (Most of) you (mostly) like us! 83 percent of you gave us a 5 (26 percent) or 4 (57 percent) out of 5 overall. About 15 percent of you gave us an “eh, you’re all right,” 2 percent of you gave us a 2 out of 5, and one person gave us a 1 (you really hate us!) Also on the plus side, three-quarters describe the blog as both “informative,” and “constructively skeptical,” 58 percent as “encouraging of constructive dialogue and debate” and 53 percent as “entertaining.” Only 1 percent of you think that we are “harming global efforts to help the poor.” In the improvements-to-be-made category, 33 percent of you find us “too predictably negative,” and 17 percent said we are “too confrontational.”

You want more of everything.

All topics had an excess of those who want more on that topic over those who want less. The largest margins were for 1) analysis of aid policies and approaches, 2) analysis of how to achieve economic development, and 3) critical evaluation of specific aid programs or agencies.

You want more positive stories on “what works.”

Another big theme to what you want more of, and what you would change about Aid Watch is—as one of you put it—more “analysis of aid programs that are actually working (there are some, right??)” Well, we hear you, and our response to that is two-fold:

First, the pushback. We wish it weren’t true, but good people in the aid industry do some dumb (ineffective, non-transparent, wasteful, arrogant) things! To identify dumb things to STOP doing is still positive change. When we run positive stories, you correctly sense that we are perhaps a little too arbitrary in our choices of “what works.” We’re trying hard, but the problem here is one of the central points of this blog—there is not enough transparency, evaluation, and accountability to know what’s working.

Second, the concession. We will seek out the positive stories in aid even harder, and we will profile more specific programs (or components of large programs) that have the demonstrated potential to improve the lives of the poor.

Sometimes we’re a little too snarky.

As we have said on this blog before, satire is the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. We deploy it often because the aid establishment is so impervious to change and so resistant to a course correction, no matter how reasonable the case for change is. Satire and sharp words are also a reaction to the bureaucratic buzzwords and evasive language that sometimes passes for real debate on this subject.

Having said this, it is a challenge to find the right balance—to calibrate our tone—and we take your point to be respectful of those we criticize. Although we are dissidents from a mainstream aid establishment, that’s NOT equivalent to thinking that we alone have the exactly correct view – another of our central points is that NONE of us know as much as we think we do. But we do pledge a better effort finding the positive (see above), being humble, even-handed, and giving the targets of our criticism a fair chance to explain themselves.

We could use a makeover.

Some of you commented on our less-than-bleeding-edge design and web functionality. Help is on the way: stay tuned for a redesign of the blog (and our parent page, NYU’s Development Research Institute) coming in early fall.

You don’t like being put in boxes.

Apologies to those of you who bristled at the narrow categories we provided for the ‘describe yourself’ question. We are pleased to discover our readership is even more diverse than we had guessed. In addition to a healthy percentage of students, economists, NGO workers, aid practitioners and consultants, your fellow readers also include entrepreneurs, aid recipients, congressional staffers, journalists, attorneys, technology consultants, bankers, missionaries and “interested bystanders.” Some categories we did not foresee: “Easterly groupie,” “Mets fan,” “hack bureaucrat,” and “Canadian.”

In closing, a sincere thanks to all of you who participated for your feedback and many helpful suggestions.

Salvation is Not Ours to Bestow: A Review of Michaela Wrong’s new book

Michaela Wrong’s gripping latest book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, is the antidote for anyone who knows the weariness of wading through the jargon of implementation plans and institutional treatises on governance and anticorruption. It’s the anti-boredom serum, the potion that brings you the real consequences of what happens when those plans are ignored.

On one level, the book is the story of one John Githongo, the eponymous whistleblower. A former journalist and pro-transparency activist, Githongo was handpicked in the euphoria following the 2002 Kenyan election to serve as the new president’s special anti-corruption advisor. “The era of ‘anything goes’ is gone forever,” declared Kibaki in his acceptance speech, “Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya.”

But when life very quickly began imitating that old Who song (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,”) Githongo fled the country, fearing for his life, with the tapes and documents that would blatantly incriminate government officials—up to the highest rungs—in a $500 million corruption scandal.

On a different level, Wrong’s book is also the story of an international movement. Githongo was up against the looters and thugs who threatened to silence him. But he also found himself on the wrong side of the fence from much of the donor community, which wanted Kenya’s new president to be part of a generation of democratic leaders paving the way for a new and prosperous Africa.

As Githongo gasped for air, Tony Blair was boosting DfID's aid commitments to Africa and launching the Year of Africa:

Playing to the industrialized world’s guilt complex, the Make Poverty History Campaign, Africa Commission and Gleneagles summit all shared one characteristic: the emphasis was on Western, rather than African action. Top-down, statist, these initiatives were all about donor obligations, pledges, and behaviour. What they definitely weren’t about…was highlighting the shortcomings of African governments set to benefit from future Western largesse.

It’s Our Turn to Eat is an unblinking look at the roots and the consequences of sleaze (the violence during Kenya’s recent elections, a referendum on the corrupt leaders’ failure to spread the wealth, was the worst Kenya had seen since independence). It is also a condemnation of “the Western tendency to turn a blind eye to blatant graft and routine human rights abuse in the eagerness to save ‘the poorest of the poor’.”

Despite Nairobi booksellers’ reluctance to stock the book, Kenyans are buying the book off street corners, reading it aloud on the radio, and debating it in church groups. Still, some of the best advice Wrong has to offer is for her Western readers.

Worried Westerners, who so often seem to fall prey to a benign form of megalomania when it comes to Africa, would do well to accept that salvation is simply not theirs to bestow. They should be more modest, more knowing, and less naïve.

Aid Watch goes Lite for August

Since many of you downshift for August and we do also, Aid Watch will be posting shorter, less frequent blog posts this month, perhaps some with more entertainment value than substance. You can participate by submitting entries in a category we will have this month: Weirdest Aid Stories Ever. Please send them to Laura.Freschi@NYU.edu.

Meanwhile, you still have a chance to participate in our Reader Survey, if you have not already, to give us feedback on how we can make Aid Watch better. The survey closes at 5pm today, Eastern Daylight Time. We will post the results soon.

Make Aid Watch Better

That Aid Watch blog — you must be thinking — always insisting on accountability and responsiveness from others. When are we going to see a little accountability and responsiveness from them? Well . . . how about now?

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USAID funding Iraqi insurgents? Well, on the plus side, they finally answered one of our emails

USA Today ran a story this week on a $644 million program in Iraq suspended by USAID four months short of its end date. The program was launched three years ago to create jobs and infrastructure in cities throughout Iraq. The Community Stabilization Program, said one hopeful report from 2006, “will provide safe and productive alternatives to insurgent activities while reinforcing democratic values and processes.”

Baghdad billboard for CSP job skills program Source: USAID/Iraq

So why was CSP suspended? According to a USAID statement, an external review begun in February discovered “inconsistencies” in the implementation of the project in one of the target cities. This deadpan response from USAID leaves aside just a few other reasons to be concerned about the project, namely a 2008 audit that found evidence of fraud, phantom workers, and money being diverted to insurgents through trash collection contracts.

The audit also found “short-term employment generated by the program was inadequately substantiated.”

Surely any reasonable understanding of transparent and honest reporting practices would require USAID to indicate in some way on their website that there were questions being raised about the transparency and efficacy of the CSP program.

We brought this to the attention of the USAID press officer in an email on Monday:

Dear Mr. Edwards,

Here at Aid Watch we read USA Today's article … we noticed that the text currently available on the USAID website (among the press releases or on the Iraq page) gives no information about investigations into the CSP projects or the decision to suspend the program.

The CSP accomplishments page still lists: "Almost 45,000 long-term jobs created; Nearly $80 million in grants approved for almost 10,700 businesses; More than 40,200 Iraqis graduated from vocational training courses; More than 9,900 apprenticeships awarded; About 316,000 young people reached through sports and arts program" as highlights of the CSP.

In light of the March 2008 audit and subsequent investigations, reported by USA Today in today's paper, is USAID planning to modify the claims on its website?

Many thanks,

Laura

USAID responded promptly:

Ms. Freschi,

This is the response from USAID as to your questions.

1) USAID suspended payments and new commitments under CSP to allow the IG to conduct and complete an investigation of allegations uncovered in the course of a USAID evaluation of the program. At the time, CSP was only operating in two cities and was on a path towards being phased out entirely as the program was nearing its end.

2) The accomplishments listed on the USAID website are from completed projects that were previously audited by the IG. We implemented all of the recommendations of the IG to their satisfaction, including doing a data quality assurance exercise.

Please contact me if you have more questions.

Thanks

Harry

Harry Edwards

USAID Senior Press Officer

R2P: A Priest, A Linguist, and an Economist Walk into the General Assembly…

Miguel D'Escoto, GA president

What kind of issue would cause a left-wing priest, a radical linguist, and a free market economist to take the same side? The answer: opposition to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) at the United Nations. The priest is the nutty General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, the linguist is the flaming radical Noam Chomsky, and the economist is the sensible young academic Christopher Coyne.

R2P is the principle that the international community should intervene to protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity if their own governments fail to do so. It has been official UN doctrine since 2005, and the UN General Assembly debated its renewal last week.

Most of the discussion about R2P is normative: should we rescue people from genocide and war crimes? Of course we should. How can anyone familiar with Auschwitz, Cambodia, and Rwanda feel otherwise?

What D’Escoto, Chomsky, and Coyne all do is shift the debate from normative (how should people behave?) to positive (how do people actually behave?) They ask, who is the “we” in the normative statement above going to be, and how will they behave? D’Escoto started the General Assembly debate by asking the positive questions:

(1) Is it more likely that the principle would be applied only by the strong against the weak?

(2) Will adoption of the R2P principle in the practice of collective security more likely enhance or undermine respect for international law?

(3) Does it guarantee that states will intervene to prevent another Rwanda?

(4) Do we have the capacity to enforce accountability upon those who might abuse the right that R2P would give nation-states to resort to the use of force against other states?

Chomsky and D’Escoto both conclude that, in practice, R2P is just Great Power imperialism in disguise. Although a lot of other statements by these two are nuts, this conclusion is not completely crazy. After all, any intervention has to be approved by the Great Powers that sit on the UN Security Council.

Christopher Coyne, who wasn't actually present at the UN R2P debate last week, and does not share the leftist paranoia of Chomsky and D’Escoto, does arrive at similar positive conclusions. He wrote a paper about the “Nirvana fallacy,” the assumption of a perfect intervener. So in the R2P case, Nirvana is a neutral, benevolent, all-knowing, powerful, rapid, humanitarian force that will identify and rescue those at risk. A positive analysis would conclude that no such Nirvana exists or ever will exist, and that the likely answers to D’Escoto’s questions are (1) Yes, (2) Don’t Know, so Be Careful (3) No, and (4) No.

There is plenty of space between “Never Again” and “Never Intervene.” There are probably some situations where some Power can rescue innocents from war crimes, and we personally would move Heaven and Earth to support them. But the advocates of R2P as a general principle have a long way to go to explain how they will turn the normative into the positive.

From the "aid agency" that nobody knew existed

We received this response to today's post on the Global Forum for Health Research, from Susan Jupp: Dear Professor Easterly,

It's not surprising that we are not known as an aid agency because we're

not one!

The report of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank to which you refer is not yet available on the Bank's website so you probably saw an advance copy, perhaps still in draft. That could explain the lack of clarity in some points of your opening statement. For example, the survey of 400 "key researchers" was carried out in 2006 by a totally different evaluation team to the one that produced the IEG report. The Global Forum has since moved on.

We are actually an advocacy organization. The IEG report quotes from the Disease Control Priorities Project report (Jamison et al 2006), stating that the Global Forum for Health Research "took the most effective advocacy position" on the importance of research on developing country health problems and found that the arguments of the Global Forum and its predecessors have "galvanized global recognition that more research funding should be devoted to improving the health of the 85% of the world's population who lives in developing countries."

So researchers are only one of the stakeholder groups we work with. We work with policy-makers, civil society, the private sector, the media. And we would welcome suggestions from those reading this blog on how to be more effective.

In order to see at first hand how we work and who we work with, why not join our Forum 2009, to be held in Havana, Cuba, from 16 to 20 November? American citizens are fully able to participate. You can find details on the programme and registration on our website

Meanwhile thank you for helping build awareness of the work of the Global Forum for Health Research.

Susan Jupp

Head, External Relations

Global Forum for Health Research