Take seriously the power of networks (or just look at some COOL maps)

A few days ago, I met a guy because he was my wife’s girlfriend’s boyfriend. He turned out to be a high ranking official who had some fascinating inside stories about aid and corruption in an African country (which I won’t name to protect his privacy). A local aid worker friend recommended an orthopedist to treat my wife’s badly injured ankle while we were in Addis Ababa. The orthopedist was able to give my wife relief (at full American prices, which went to his NGO) and then he asked if I knew that crazy aid criticizing NYU professor.

One of the best hiring decisions I ever made was to employ my friend’s wife’s neighbor’s daughter.

More and more people are discovering the power of social networks (consult the avalanche of popular books on connectedness and shrinking degrees of separation). Being well-connected to other people, who are in turn well-connected, is a powerful way to get information, to reduce search costs for employment or trade transactions, and to create strong incentives to behave well and protect your own reputation. Formal research in economics celebrates the economic payoff to social connectedness (aka social capital). Phenomena like the Hasidic diamond merchants of 47^th street in Manhattan show the power of business networks based on ethnicity and family. Ethnic networks are common in Africa, like the Hausa traders in West Africa, or Luo fish merchants in Kenya.

The scorn usually shown for Nepotism and the Old Boy Network is so 20^th century! The 21^st century view is to respect the value of social connections wherever they come from!

OK, I’m exaggerating. You need to balance the value of social connections against accountability mechanisms, merit-valuing incentives, and ethical rules, so I don’t just hire my good-for-nothing cousin with other people’s money. Also you need to worry about people who are frozen out of networks through no fault of their own. But that is OFF MESSAGE, so I am going to ignore all that today.

Venture capitalists rely heavily on social networks to assess reputation and to make new deals. And so do social entrepreneurs. Someone tipped me off to xigi.net, which is a fantastic web site for facilitating networks among social entrepreneurs:

xigi.net (pronounced 'ziggy' as in zeitgeist) is a space for making connections and gathering intelligence within the capital market that invests in good. It’s a social network, tool provider, and online platform for tracking the nature and amount of investment activity in this emerging market.

OK, I confess, what really got me to look at this site was the hyper-cool network maps that show connections between the social entrepreneurs. Check out the map for the deservedly well-connected Ashoka folks of Bill Drayton (this is a screen shot, but you have to visit the map on the xigi site to explore its cool functionality).

The point is that part of the effectiveness of Ashoka is because they are so well connected, and they make all their partners in turn more effective in turn by being connected to the well-connected Ashoka.

We could keep dreaming: social networks could be a powerful vehicle for spreading information and evaluations about existing aid projects and actors. The Internet makes this much more feasible that it used to be. GlobalGiving.org is one initiative that tries to implement this idea. Oh, and I happen to know about and trust GlobalGiving because I have known the two founders ever since we worked together on Russia in the early 90s.

I had never heard of xigi.net until a couple days ago. I heard about it from my wife’s girlfriend, the one who had the aid and corruption story-telling boyfriend.

The best way nobody’s talking about to help Haitians

The following post is by Michael Clemens, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, and an affiliated associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

The earthquake two weeks ago hit Haiti hard because Haiti is poor. The rich U.S. had similar earthquakes with far less carnage. So, what would do the most to lift Haitians out of poverty?

Start here: What has done the most, to date, to lift Haitians out of poverty? That answer is easy. Leaving Haiti brought more Haitians out of poverty than anything else that has ever been tried: any aid project in Haiti, or any trade preference for Haiti. See my note and video posted the day before Haiti’s catastrophe.

Of all the Haitians who live either in the United States or Haiti, and who live on more than $10 per day—at U.S. prices, adjusted for the fact that things are cheaper in Haiti—how many live in the U.S.? (That’s a barebones poverty standard, just one third of the U.S. “poverty line” for a single adult.)

82 Percent of Haitians above this poverty line are here in the United States. (I calculate this with Lant Pritchett here, ungated version here.) Only the top 1.4 percent of people in Haiti had that living standard even before the quake, and there is no evidence that Haitian emigrants come primarily from the extreme tip-top of the income distribution. So for most of Haitians who left, leaving Haiti was the cause of leaving poverty.

The Obama administration decided that for the next 18 months it will not deport any Haitian. But the U.S. has only been deporting about 1,000 Haitians per year recently. More importantly, the U.S. has forcibly stopped and repatriated about 5,000 Haitians per year for the past 20 years—people who never made it to the U.S. And this policy surely deterred thousands more each year from even trying. When Gallup asked people in Haiti last year if they would leave permanently if given the opportunity, 52 percent said yes. The U.S. is actively blocking the most effective poverty reduction strategy for Haitians.

When I talk about leaving Haiti as a development strategy for Haitians, some thoughtful people argue that this “can’t be the solution for Haiti.” Compared to what we all wish for in Haiti—rapid emergence from poverty for everyone there, in their homeland—leaving Haiti is a terrible solution. But compared to what is actually likely to happen in Haiti, continued poverty for decades at least, leaving Haiti is the principal solution to poverty. This is the right comparison, not the comparison to a prosperous Haiti that must remain a fantasy for now.

The best thing the United States could do for Haitians would be to let them in, either temporarily or permanently. We are now accepting about 21,000 permanent Haitian immigrants per year, and just a few hundred temporary workers per year. If we really wanted to raise Haitians out of destitution, we could absorb many times more than this. To say that we shouldn’t because it wouldn’t be the end-all solution is like saying that a lifeboat shouldn’t fill its ten empty seats just because there are 100 people in the water.

Bill Clinton for President...of Haiti?

The Economist leader on Haiti:

investment {should}  be targeted on infrastructure, basic services and combating soil erosion to make farmers more productive and the country less vulnerable to hurricanes.

The pressing question is who should do it and how. Haiti’s government is in no position to take charge, yet the country needs a strong government to put it to rights. Paul Collier, a development economist who worked on the plan, reckons that the answer is to set up a temporary development authority with wide powers to act.

Given the local vacuum of power, this is the best idea around. The authority should be set up under the auspices of the UN or of an ad hoc group (the United States, Canada, the European Union and Brazil, for example). It should be led by a suitable outsider (Bill Clinton, who is the UN’s special envoy for Haiti, would be ideal...

If this doesn't strike you as misguided on too many levels to count, then ... I give up.

Dr. Lancet discovers hitherto unsuspected need for aid criticism

The Lancet has issued a severe editorial blast against the aid agencies (both official and NGO) for Haiti aid efforts. (Link requires free registration.) Alanna Shaikh points out where the Lancet is off base.

The Lancet knowledge universe has the perception "the aid sector" has "largely escaped public scrutiny." Who ever heard of any those obscure *&^%$#@ criticisms of foreign aid? That "coming age of accountability" crap? Sigh.

But, forget all that, here's a belated welcome to the concept of aid criticism, Dr. Lancet! Here's what you have already accomplished.

First, you analyze the political economy incentives of aid agencies:

large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile.

Second, you note these political incentives could cause some needs to be neglected and others not, with the unhappy result:

when viewed through the distorted lens of politics, economics, religion, and history, some lives are judged more important than others

Third, no matter what  aid can do and/or cannot do, you note coordination between agencies is (actually will always be) a disaster:

relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grass-roots charities that may have have better networks in affected counties and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.

You're off to a promising start in so far having shown an impressive grasp of the obvious, Dr. Lancet! Welcome to the aid accountability movement!

Telethon: "We've seen the earth quake but the soul of the Haitian people it will never break."

You might expect a certain critic of celebrity-aid to make fun of the Haitian telethon last night. And there were indeed some cringe-inducing moments in this 4-minute video summary I just watched.

But it's a little-known dark secret that crotchety skeptics often have a sentimental streak.  So what's really wrong about some well-meaning gushy-anthem-belting megastars raising money for some currently very needy people?

I just hope that some day we will get to the point where there will also be an anthem about accountability. Here's some lyrics by an anonymous contributor, for which I take no responsibility:

So clear the fogs/Listen to the blogs/Don't just throw dollars out the door/Make sure them reaches the poor.

The coming age of accountability

There was such a great audience yesterday at the Brookings event on What Works in Development. (If you are a glutton for punishment, the full length audio of the event is available on the Brookings web site.) In the end, what struck me was the passion for just having SOME way to KNOW that aid is benefiting the poor, which dwarfed the smaller issue of Randomized Experiment methods vs. other methods.

And extreme dissatisfaction with aid agencies who ignore even the most obvious signs that some aid effort is not working. (Example cited in the Brookings book: a World Bank computer kiosk program in India celebrated as a "success" in its "Empowerment" sourcebook. Except that the computers sat in places without functioning electricty or Internet connections. Critics pointed that out, and yet officials still defended the program as contributing to "Empowerment." Abhijit Banerjee asked "empowered how ? through non-working computers?")

It is awfully hard to get an accountabilty movement going that would have enough political power to force changes on aid agencies, say, away from forever mumbling "empowerment," towards actually making computers light up.

Accountability is not something that anyone accepts voluntarily. It is forced on political actors by sheer political power from below. That's what democratic revolutions are all about. Can we hear a lot more from people in the poor countries protesting bad aid (thank you, Dambisa Moyo) and praising good aid (thank you, Mohammed Yunus)? Can we hear A LOT more from the intended beneficiaries themselves? Can their allies in rich countries help them gain more political leverage with rich country aid agencies?

I don't know yet. But there is a lot more awareness of the accountability problem then there was a decade ago. The dialogues of the blogs on making Haiti disaster aid work is one example.  The size, savvy, and enthusiasm of the audience yesterday was one more small hopeful sign.

Watch out, aid agencies, accountability is coming.

A multiple choice post on Haiti disaster

Which best describes Port-au-Prince? A) A hotbed of looting, machete-wielding gangs and violence.

“Downtown Port-au-Prince now feels like a war zone. Gangs with machetes rule the streets here.” – CBS News 1/14/2010

“Hundreds of people desperate for food and supplies swarmed downtown Haiti yesterday, climbing atop piles of broken rubble and shards of glass to get to canned goods, powdered milk, and batteries buried underneath. On the main boulevard, the Grand Rue, their desperation flared into violence at times as teenage boys and men scuffled over goods, and some sparred with sticks. Police fired warning shots into the air but were powerless to halt them.” – Boston Globe, 1/19/2010

B) Currently being saved by American and international rescue teams (with heroic assists from Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta).

“On Tuesday, the White House press office emailed out the YouTube clip below with a subject line, ‘AMAZING VIDEO: Crowd starts chanting USA, USA during L.A. County USAR rescue.’” – Huffington Post 1/19/2010

C) Full of relatively calm people trying to get by amidst overwhelming destruction.

“The mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches.” – New York Times 1/18/2010

“One saving grace is that in spite of reports of violence and outbreaks of looting, the overriding atmosphere across the capital is of patient resignation rather than a society on the brink of collapsing into anarchy. – Financial Times, 1/19/2010

D) ALL or NONE of the above.

This is not to diminish the extent of the devastation in Port-au-Prince, the poor state of governance and infrastructure even before the quake, or the degree to which many survivors must be thirsty, hungry, tired, weak and in shock. But I wonder if some media coverage of the earthquake’s aftermath leads to a distorted picture of Haitians as either crazed and violent on one hand, or completely helpless and awaiting our rescue on the other.

Earlier this week on his blog, Chris Blattman asked whether robbery was as widespread as some news reports and photographs seemed to imply. This perception mattered, he said, because “an aid and security policy designed for thieving, ungovernable, progress-resistant Haitians looks very different from one that views civil society institutions as shaken but fundamentally strong.”

How would an overblown perception of violence and insecurity in Port-au-Prince affect the delivery of disaster-relief aid?

Don’t cite global numbers unless you know they’re trustworthy (They usually aren’t)

Precisely 1.419 billion live in extreme poverty in our world today. Oh, and it’s equally plausible that precisely 0.874 billion live in extreme poverty. Or maybe it’s 1.7517 billion. Most development people confidently cite global statistics without knowing what they are based on. Sorry, that’s no longer allowed with today’s greater demands for transparency. Angus Deaton’s AEA Presidential Address just given at the AEA meetings will not let you ever trust the World Bank again on how many people in the world are in extreme poverty.Some nuggets:

1) “India has become poorer because India has become richer!”

The World Bank’s recent 40 percent upward revision of the global poverty number was based on an absurd procedure that led to the paradox in the quote.

To make a long story short, the World Bank decided to boot richer India out of the group of poorest countries used to determine the poverty line, which made the poverty line higher, which made Indian (and global) poverty higher – all because India was richer. This misguided revision of the poverty line, which accounted for virtually all of the upward revision, was not clear to virtually anyone until this new paper by Deaton.

Deaton doesn’t say this, but the World Bank behavior on calculation and publicity around this number was not exactly their finest hour.

2) Adjusting for purchasing power (how cheap the goods are) across countries is complex and probably impossible.

The details are as incredibly boring as they are hugely consequential.

As only one tiny example, the poverty count is sensitive to a mostly-made-up number that is incomparable across countries: the imputed rent to housing.

Then there is the “index number problem,” which only is of great fascination to 2 people, but unfortunately can change the ratio of US/Tajikstan incomes by a factor of 10. The trouble is that rich people and poor people consume very different things. For example, poor people may consume a lot of something that is cheap in the poor country, which is not consumed much and is expensive in the rich country. Similarly, rich people consume a lot of something else that is cheap in the rich country and expensive in the poor country.  If you use rich country prices, you exaggerate poor people’s consumption basket value (they are given a lot of credit for consuming a lot of something very expensive, but it isn’t that expensive in the poor country and if it were, they would consume a lot less of it). Conversely, if you use poor country prices, you exaggerate rich people’s consumption basket value. There are possible intermediate solutions but no complete solutions to this intractable problem.

Deaton muses: “perhaps we are aiming too high when we try to construct a real income scale on which every country in the world can be placed.”

3) Why don’t you just ask people if they think they are poor?

Gallup's World Poll does.

In contrast to the World Bank global poverty rate of 25 percent (around which there were those misguided revisions and many other uncertainties on the order of 40 percent of the original estimate):

33 percent worldwide say they don’t have money for food, 38 percent say their living standards are poor, and 39 percent say they are “in difficulty.”

So you are on safe ground saying, “there are lots of people in poverty.” But don’t insult our intelligence with an exact number.

4. Deaton offers consolation: you don’t really need a global poverty number.

In spite of the attention that they receive, global poverty … measures are arguably of limited interest. Within nations, the procedures for calculating poverty are routinely debated by the public, the press, legislators, academics, and expert committees, and this democratic discussion legitimizes the use of the counts in support of programs of transfers and redistribution. Between nations where there is no supranational authority, poverty counts have no direct redistributive role, and there is little democratic debate by citizens, with discussion largely left to international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank, and to non-governmental organizations that focus on international poverty. These organizations regularly use the global counts as arguments for foreign aid and for their own activities, and the data have often been effective in mobilizing giving for poverty alleviation…It is less clear that the counts have any direct relevance for those included in them.

Deaton is apparently not a big fan of the Millennium Development Goal approach of international accountability for precise reductions in global poverty numbers, which will be a tad difficult when you don't know what those numbers are.

Preview of coming attractions: other global numbers are also based on a firm foundation of wet sand. The people who claim to know the exact number of hungry people in the world … you might want to start issuing mucho disclaimers now.

Too much of a good thing? Making the most of your disaster donations

The global outpouring of support for people affected by the South Asia earthquake and tsunamis of 2004 added up to more than $14 billion. One notable fact about this $14 billion is that it represents the most generous international response to a natural disaster on record. Another is that it exceeded the total estimated cost of damages from the storm by some $4 billion, or about 30 percent.

What drove these record-breaking sums in the aftermath of the tsunami was not aid from governments, although that too was large. It was private individuals and companies who reached into their pockets and gave generously, to the Red Cross, to UNICEF and other UN agencies, and above all to what is estimated to be the largest proliferation of NGOs that had ever implemented relief efforts in a single disaster.

We don’t yet know how the Haiti response will compare. We do know that donor pledges to help those affected by last Tuesday’s earthquake in Port-au-Prince, pushed along by texting and twitter campaigns, have also been fast and plentiful (while no list seems totally comprehensive, there are tallies of pledges here , here and here).

And we know that some of the same conditions that made the response to the tsunami so generous are at play in Haiti as well. For one, the proximity to the Christmas season, when many Western donors are predisposed to be thinking about giving, and have holiday charity solicitations fresh in their minds. For another, the barrage of media coverage, especially (from Haiti) television stories featuring dramatic rescues that underscore the heroism of American-funded rescue teams.

Relief agencies having a lot of money to draw upon had many real, positive consequences for the survivors of the tsunami in South Asia. Quick-response relief efforts received praise from evaluators and local populations. But the unprecedented pledges in answer to post-tsunami fundraising appeals didn’t solve all problems, and in fact amplified some existing ones—like competition among NGOs, funding decisions based on media and political pressure rather than actual needs or capacities of affected countries, and weakening humanitarian impartiality.

The authors of one report by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition* found that generous funding “exceeded the absorption capacity of an overstretched humanitarian industry” and actually served as a disincentive for NGOs to work together and pool resources and information. It also caused inexperienced NGOs to proliferate, and encouraged even experienced actors to work outside their realm of expertise.

Some NGOs that found themselves with unexpected amounts of money to spend responded by extending the time horizons or scope of their programs. Only Médecins sans Frontières was quick to admit that they had enough donations for the tsunami and request that additional funds help people elsewhere, a move which initially drew criticism from other NGOs. (MSF posted a similar statement for Haiti last week).

Humanitarian aid is supposed to be allocated according to the principle of impartiality -- the idea that assistance should be offered according to need, not nationality, or political belief, or even how compelling a particular disaster may be to donors. This may be an impossible ideal, but consider that the $14 billion for survivors of the tsunami works out to about $7,000 per person, and compare that to the roughly $150 per person for Somalis affected by civil strife in 2005, or $3 per person for the 2004 floods in Bangladesh.

It may seem callous to suggest even by analogy that the flow of funds going immediately to Haiti be in any way stemmed or diverted. But the effects of big fundraising appeals are complex, and not as temporary we might assume: “The scale of the resources to be spent will distort agency programmes in favour of tsunami-affected areas for years to come,” found another report.

The solution is not to stop donations to organizations doing good work in Haiti. Haitians need international help to rebuild now. The point is rather to give money in such a way that mitigates the negative effects of this compassionate onslaught of giving, and encourages the international system to allocate funds effectively and fairly. Other, good blogs have already discussed some strategies; I give you three of them:

1. Don’t restrict (or earmark) your donations to be used only in Haiti, but rather allow your chosen NGO to spend the money you donate as they see fit. If you don’t trust them to allocate your funds effectively to where they are most needed, then why are you giving them money in the first place?
2. Take up the Philanthrocapitalism blog's advice to give an equal amount to "someone suffering just as much, but less dramatically, elsewhere in the world."
3. Space out your giving. Organizations with a history of working closely with Haitian communities will still be there in six months. They will probably be there in a year, and probably in five years too. They will need your money then as well, when the spotlight has shifted to the next disaster.

--

*ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance), is the repository of many useful documents from the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition. ALNAP has also produced lessons learned reports on Responding to Urban Disasters and Responding to Earthquakes 2008, among others.

Getting humanitarian relief right

The extent of the devastation in Port-au-Prince, the incapacity of the already weak Haitian government, and the degraded state of infrastructure throughout the country resist comparison to any disaster before this one. But post-recovery evaluations from the Asian tsunami, the Bam earthquake and other disasters suggest which practices allow relief efforts to work effectively and which result in waste and delays. My piece on Forbes.com puts the response to Haiti's earthquake in the context of previous disaster relief efforts. Read it here.

If Martin Luther King had been an aid official -- the Powerpoint version of I Have a Dream

If only Martin Luther King Jr. had been an aid agency official, he would have been able to use Powerpoint and aid terminology to get his main points across more effectively. Using advanced econometric methods, we were able to project the Powerpoint (via PDF) slides that would have resulted (open or save here).

Crazy academic research on disaster relief

Sigh, do U.S. strategic interests influence even disaster relief aid? (Ungated version.) Could humanitarian aid cause governments to under-invest in disaster prevention, causing natural disasters to have worse effects? If so, then past disaster relief could induce worst disaster outcomes now (And I thought MY ideas were unpopular)

The amount of news coverage of disasters is heavily influenced by the country's popularity with US tourists.

News coverage is also higher when there are no other big competing news stories. This variation in news coverage is unrelated to need, of course, but has a major effect on the amount of disaster relief aid.

How does this likely affect aid to Haiti for the earthquake? News coverage has been high from major media, and aid flows seem likely to be high.  (Although Haiti doesn't pass the much more severe test of making ongoing headlines in my hometown newspaper, the Bowling Green (OH) Sentinel-Tribune, where today's headline is about a new stoplight.) Still aid could have been even higher if Haiti were very central to US strategic interests (imagine an earthquake destroying Kabul) or a major US tourist destination (a Cancun earthquake that killed US tourists might even get covered in Bowling Green, triggering even larger relief aid).

Nobody wants your old shoes: How not to help in Haiti

The following post is by Alanna Shaikh. Alanna is a global health professional who blogs at UN Dispatch and Blood and Milk. Don’t donate goods. Donating stuff instead of money is a serious problem in emergency relief. Only the people on the ground know what’s actually necessary; those of us in the rest of the world can only guess. Some things, like summer clothes and expired medicines are going to be worthless in Haiti. Other stuff, like warm clothes and bottled water may be helpful to some people in some specific ways. Separating the useful from the useless takes manpower that can be doing more important work. It’s far better to give money so that organizations can buy the things they know they need.

Some people like to donate goods instead of cash because they worry that cash won’t be used in a way that helps the needy. If that’s you, I have two points. 1) Why are you donating to an organization you don’t trust? 2) What’s to stop them from selling your donated item and using the money for whatever they want?

After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Honduras was flooded with shipments of donated goods. They clogged ports, overwhelmed military transport, and made it nearly impossible for relief agencies to ship in the things they really needed. Those donations did harm, not good. Expired drugs had to be carefully disposed of. Inappropriate donations had to be transported away and discarded. All of this wasted time and money.

Don't go to Haiti. It’s close to the US, it’s a disaster area, and we all want to help. However, it’s dangerous right now and they don’t need “extra hands”. The people who are currently useful are people with training in medicine and emergency response. If all you can contribute is unskilled labor, stay home. There is no shortage of unskilled labor in Haiti, and Haitians will be a lot more committed than you are to the rebuilding process.

If you are a nurse or physician, especially with experience in trauma, and you want to volunteer, email Partners in Health – volunteer@pih.org – and offer your services. Or submit your details to International Medical Corps. They’ll take you if they can use you. Do not go to Haiti on your own, even if you are doctor. You’ll just add to the confusion, and you’ll be a burden to whoever ends up taking responsibility for your safety.

Don’t ignore rebuilding. The physical damage done to Port au Prince is going to take a long, long time to repair. The human consequences will have a similar slow recovery. Haiti will still need our help next year, and the years after that. It is going to take more than just a short-term infusion of relief money. Give your money to organizations that will be in Haiti for the long haul, and don't forget about Haiti once the media attention moves on.

NYT's David Brooks on "What Works in Development"

An editorial in the NYT by David Brooks discusses "What Works in Development" (see our previous posts on the book) in the context of explaining why aid has thus far failed to achieve growth in Haiti.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

(We should point out that the book has some positive messages to offer too, for example on how economists are reaching some consensus around using rigorous evaluation to study what does work.)

Read the whole op-ed here.

Also of interest in the article is Brooks' argument that Haiti's "progress-resistant" culture is largely to blame for the country's extreme poverty. This strikes me as overly reductive (although interesting recent economics research does point to the importance of values like trust in determining prosperity.)  Brooks' list of rejected explanations include slavery and colonial history, bad government and corruption, foreign invasions,  geography and climate. I wonder what others who have spent time studying, living or working in Haiti think of the relative weight of these explanatory variables.

Haiti's recent troubled past

Everyone knows that Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.And everyone knows that it’s an hour and thirty minutes from Miami, Florida. Or most people know that. So, how in the world can we let this happen?...

I do not think that foreign aid is the solution to the world’s problems. I think it can only do a limited amount, and it doesn’t do that very well. A lot of foreign aid goes into relief. They wait for the disaster, and then they put the money in...

Why did these hurricanes have this impact this time? It’s not like we don’t have a history of it, it’s not like we didn’t know it was going to happen again, some time. God forbid the day we get one that hits Port-au-Prince head-on, because it’s going to be really disastrous.

This is Anne Hasting, director of Fonkoze, alternative bank of the poor, in fall of 2008, speaking to reporter Ruxandra Guidi about the damage from the latest hurricanes to hit Haiti. That year, four hurricanes and tropical storms hit Haiti in quick succession, causing mudslides and floods that wiped out the coastal town of Gonaives, killing some 800 people and displacing millions.

Take a moment to watch the narrated slide show, produced by journalist Ruxandra Guidi with photographs by Roberto Guerra and a haunting soundtrack by Luis Guerra.

In these next few days, we turn from our initial horror at Haiti’s new catastrophe to the dizzying, widening view of a human disaster that will take years to recover from. This eerily prescient video is now an artifact of Haiti’s immediate past, when Port-au-Prince, with its houses and markets, slums and palaces, churches and hospitals, was still standing.

Thanks go to reader Luke Seidl for the tip.

Goat loans reach the end of their tether

The following post is written by Diane Bennett and Dennis E. Bennett. “Yes, but is it scalable?” is a question often asked of development interventions. Sure your life-saving malaria net program works in one village, but will it work throughout the whole country? Yes, cash transfers worked in Mexico but will they work in Sierra Leone?

Everyone knows that development interventions should be scalable. But sometimes… everyone is wrong. In our experience working in South Sudan, very short-term, totally unscalable solutions may be just the thing to address specific short-term problems and avoid perpetuating aid dependency.

In 2003, communities displaced from their homes by decades of conflict  were trying to re-establish themselves in Upper Nile, but local leaders found their energies consumed by the demands of growing grain to feed their families. To maximize their efforts on community development, we wanted to improve the food supply and infuse capital into villages, while respecting local mores. For Dennis, a banker who helps multi-billion dollar institutions manage their risk, the problem was an unfamiliar one: how to infuse capital into a cashless society?

Our research found tribes in the area bartering with grain, gold, goats, chickens and cattle. The small amount of circulating bills barely survives local termites, which can devour a pile of cash in just a few hours. Grain is commonly used, but attracts rats, which in turn draw poisonous snakes. In addition, grain needs seed and time for cultivation, depends on unpredictable rainfall, requires storage for excess supplies, and is more vulnerable in times of war. Searching for a better cash-less solution, we found goats. Goats are portable, require relatively little care, and since tribes in the region universally trade goats, this solution doesn't exclude anyone.

We made three loans of three locally-sourced breeding goats each (one male, two females), for a total investment of $300.  The loans were two years, and “repayment” was a reciprocal set of goats (from the progeny), so there was no interest or expense. The loans went to three community leaders, chosen by the communities. Our intention was to reinvest the “repaid” goats back into the village, making the program self-perpetuating. But the villagers had other plans.

Of the three loans, only one was repaid to us, an abject failure in finance terms. Instead, goats were contributed to other villagers to start herds, “paying it forward” rather than paying us back. Instead of continuing with our program, borrowers assumed responsibility and perpetuated the project not just to feed their own families, but to help the whole village.

Five years later, these villages no longer need external food assistance, this program no longer exists, and we can say the Yamachoma (grilled goat) is delicious.

Haiti earthquake: Help navigating complex terrain of disaster relief

Today our thoughts go out to those who are suffering from the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti yesterday, and to all those contributing to relief efforts there. An email we received this morning from Saundra Schimmelpfennig, who has experience coordinating tsunami relief in Thailand and writes the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough, highlights some of the problems that arise in responding to a large scale disaster such as this one:

Immediately after a disaster is prime fundraising time for NGOs. So they all rush in and put out immediate appeals before there's any clear idea of what or how much they can actually help. Only fund those that already have an office established in country because of the amount of time and money it takes to get anything more than just search and rescue up and running. If you want to move into anything such as temporary shelters, food distribution, those with an already established presence will know the people and systems better and be able to work more quickly and less expensively.

I prefer for people to try to support small, local CBOs [Community-based organizations] as they are already on the ground responding, and will be helping in the country for a long time.

Ideas for how to help and where to give:

• Philanthropy Action Advice for Donors to Haiti
• Good Intentions Are Not Enough on Suggestions for donors in choosing NGO's to donate to after a disaster and Donating medicine after disasters
• Tales from the Hood on What to Do: The Donor Edition- Emergency Response
• Idealist.org on Disaster Relief Volunteering
• Chris Blattman suggests Haiti Partners
• Tyler Cowen and many others recommend Paul Farmer's organization, Partners in Health
• GlobalGiving has a list of 20 organizations already working in Haiti and has set up a Relief Fund for Haiti Earthquake

Getting and sharing information:

• Ushahidi Crowd-sourcing Disaster Map, News, Photos, Live Reports
• For real-time news on Twitter: @NYTimes/haiti-earthquake; @BreakingNews/haiti-quake; @nprnews/haiti-earthquake; @latimes/haiti-quake
• New York Times Gleaning Information from Haiti Online
• Alertnet Haiti Earthquake Live blog

First-person accounts and in-depth coverage:

• Global Voices online
• The Daily Beast: Haiti in Crisis

Humanitarian response:

• NYT: Aid workers scramble amid Haiti's chaos
• Christian Science Monitor: Aid workers struggle to provide relief
• Alertnet Factbox: Aid to Haiti

Top 5 reasons why “failed state” is a failed concept

1) “State failure” is leading to confused policy making. For example, it is causing the military to attempt overly ambitious nation-building and development to approach counter-terrorism, under the unproven assumption that “failed states” produce terrorism.

2) “State failure” has failed to produce any useful academic research in economics.

You would expect a major concept to be the subject of research by economists (as well as by other fields, but I am using economics research as an indicator). While there has been research on state failure, it failed to generate any quality academic publications in economics. A search of the top economics journals¹ reveals that “state failure” (and all related variants like “failed states”) has been mentioned only once EVER. And this article mentions the concept only in passing.²

3) “State failure” has no coherent definition.

Different sources have included the following:

a) “Civil war” b) “infant mortality” c) “declining levels of GDP per capita” d) “inflation” ³ e) “unable to provide basic services” f) “state policies and institutions are weak” g) “corruption” h) “lack accountability” ⁴ i) “unwilling to adequately assure the provision of security and basic services to significant portions of their populations” ⁵ (wouldn’t this include the US?) j) “inability to collect taxes” k) “group-based inequality… and environmental decay.” ⁶ l) “wars and other disasters” m) “citizens vulnerable to a whole range of shocks” ⁷

Most of these concepts are clear enough in themselves, and often apply to a large number of countries. But is there any good reason to combine them with arbitrary weights to get some completely unclear concept for a smaller number of countries? “State failure” is like a destructive idea machine that turns individually clear concepts into an aggregate unclear concept.

4) The only possible meaningful definition adds nothing new to our understanding of state behavior, and is not really measurable.

A more narrow definition of “state failure” is: a loss of the monopoly of force, or the inability to control national territory. Unfortunately this is impossible to measure: how do you know when a state has control? The only data I have been able to find that might help comes from the Polity research project that classifies the history of states as democracies or autocracies. ⁸ It describes “interregnums” that sound like the narrow “state failure” idea:

A "-77" code for the Polity component variables indicates periods of periods of “interregnum,” during which there is a complete collapse of central political authority. This is most likely to occur during periods of internal war.

If interregnums are indeed a good measure, the data show that “state failure” is primarily just an indicator of war. As the data show, the rate of “state failure” in the 20th century spiked in the two World Wars, and then increased again (but not as much) after decolonization, again almost always associated with wars.

Even this measure does not really capture the narrow definition. Many countries were often created as “states” by colonial powers rather than following any natural state-building process in which states gain more and more control of territory. Almost all ex-colonies fail to control national territory after independence, and many still do not do so today – many more than the usual number of “failed states.” (Africa being the most striking example as exposited in the great book by Herbst, States and Power in Africa. ⁴)

Hence, if we use the measure described above, than state failure is just synonymous with war, and if we don’t (as we probably shouldn’t), then “state failure” is something more common and harder to measure than the current policy discussion recognizes.

5)  “State failure” appeared for political reasons.

The real genesis of the “state failure” concept was a CIA State Failure Task Force in the early 1990s. Their 1995 first report said state failure is “a new term for a type of serious political crisis exemplified by recent events in Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia, and Afghanistan.” All four involved civil war, confirming the above point that  “state failure” often just measures “war.” And we have just seen from the data (and common sense about decolonization) that either the claim of “newness” is false, or we are still not sure what “state failure” means.

Nevertheless, “state failure” became a hot idea in policy circles.  If we use the number of articles in Foreign Affairs mentioning “state failure” or variants, then it first appeared around the same time as the CIA task force, and then really took off after 9/11.

One can only speculate about the political motives for inventing an incoherent concept like “state failure.” It gave Western states (most notably the US superpower) much more flexibility to intervene where they wanted to (for other reasons): you don’t have to respect state sovereignty if there is no state. After the end of the Cold War, there was less hesitation to intervene because of the disappearance of the threat of Soviet retaliation. “State failure” was even more useful as justification for the US to operate with a free hand internationally in the “War on Terror” after 9/11.

These political motives are perfectly understandable, but they don’t justify shoddy analysis using such an undefinable concept.

It’s time to declare “failed state” a “failed concept.”

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[1] Kristie M. Engemann and Howard J. Wall, A Journal Ranking for the Ambitious Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, May/June 2009, 91(3), pp. 127-39. We included all 69 journals that they studied, which they said were their meant to capture all likely members of the top 50.

[2] Sujai J. Shivakumar, Towards a democratic civilization for the 21st century, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 57 (2005) 199–204.

[3] a through d: Robert I. Rotberg, Failed States in a World of Terror, Foreign Affairs. New York: Jul/Aug 2002. Vol. 81, Iss. 4; pg. 127.

[4] e through h:  World Bank

[5] USAID Fragile State Strategy, 2005

[6] j through k: Fund for Peace

[7] l through m: Overseas Development Institute

[8] Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Project: Dataset Users' Manual, George Mason University and Center for Systemic Peace, 2009.

[9] Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, Princeton University Press, 2000.

What we talk about when we talk about aid: A plea for accuracy

The following post is by Alanna Shaikh. Alanna is a global health professional who blogs at UN Dispatch and Blood and Milk. One thing that seems to get lost in debates over aid is the idea that “aid” is not a monolith. People talking about aid may mean church-to-church shipments of used clothes, World Bank loans to build dams, money transfers from donor governments, or expatriate-run projects that aim to provide services or improve the ability of the host government to govern. This is sloppy, careless language. It gets in the way of actually talking about aid.

We’re never going to have a useful conversation about aid effectiveness if we’re not even talking about the same things. When you ask if aid “works” – are you asking if financial transfers from donor governments to poorer governments actually reduce poverty? Are you asking if specific international development projects can achieve defined goals like reducing child mortality? Are you asking if aid gets used for its intended purpose instead of being diverted into graft?

If we’re going to talk about work as important – and expensive – as international aid, the least we can do is use accurate language. So, here’s my suggestion. Let’s stop using the word “aid”. Just drop it from our vocabularies because it is making our discourse worse. If you’re talking about development projects, then say so. Use those exact words: international development project. If you’re talking about budget support to poor governments, say so. Church gifts? That would be charity.

Sure, it sounds crazy. But it sure wouldn’t make things worse, and it might make our discussions a little clearer. We have plenty of ways to talk about this that don't require a vague and unhelpful collective noun. Let’s use them.

The best and worst in aid from the past year is…what our readers say it is

Dear Aid Watchers, A year ago this month we launched this blog as one small contribution to the effort to make aid more accountable. Our ambition: to add to the growing chorus of voices demanding that our development assistance money be spent according to what we know about best practices in aid so that it might actually reach the poor. And to provide a forum for aid professionals, academics, students, and citizens to talk openly and frankly about what is working and what isn’t.

With our first birthday around the corner, now is a good time to declare from our lofty academic perch what was the best and worst in aid over the past year. And we proclaim that it was…well, we’re waiting to hear that from you. With this post, we declare our totally unscientific, user-driven, open-ended, end-of-year competition for the best and worst in aid open to your submissions.

You tell us: what was the best thing to happen to aid in the last year? Was it an idea that will someday revolutionize how medicines are delivered? A randomized trial that finally allowed us to generalize to what works?  A brilliant article, or a piece of legislation, or a new technology? A change in practitioner behavior? Share with us your account of an aid success story. Of course, being Aid Watch, we also want to hear the worst: in any of the above categories, or others you can dream up, we want to hear about the horror stories, the delays, the waste, the opportunities squandered, the outright theft, and the pointless failures.

Lest this contest be seen as a veiled opportunity for more snark, or to promote or refute certain narrow positions, we plan to take as seriously as possible the “Best of” part of the competition. For those of you who think Aid Watch can be too dismissive of aid’s real accomplishments, here’s your chance to convince us how much good work was achieved in aid this year. Go ahead and make the case for your favorite NGO, a great project, an overlooked innovation—we’re ready to be persuaded.

A few more points to guide your submissions:

1) Even if you want to remain anonymous on the blog, you still have to reveal yourselves to us. We will protect your anonymity to the public (or to your boss) but we need to know who you are so that we can, to the degree possible, independently verify your submission. Note also that anonymity is fine as long as it doesn’t make your submission so generic that it loses all interest (“In an aid agency we can’t name, working in a country we can’t mention, on a project that we’ll call….” Snooze.)

2) No submitting Aid Watch. We’re disqualifying ourselves from the running to make it clear that we’re not asking anyone to nominate us for the best thing to happen to aid last year (or then again is it to ensure you don’t say we’re the worst….?)

3) We will of course need you to provide evidence to back up your nomination, in whatever form you believe will be most convincing, be it an RCT, a case study, or a well-documented anecdote. In this initial submission, though, it’s okay to send in a short description and simply identify what evidence you have at your disposal. You may be contacted and asked for more details later.

4) Email your submissions to aidwatch@nyu.edu. The submissions will be reviewed, corroborating evidence requested, and the results announced at our annual conference (more details on that to come). Criteria for selection will include general interest to the aid community, and the strength of evidence and documentation provided.

5) A final note: we mean this to be a serious contest but we would not be true to ourselves if we did not allow some entertainment value to creep in…

May the best (and worst) win!